Small is beautiful

Many aspects of farming are expanding-and not always in a good way. Jason Goodwin argues that it needs re-balancing, with a return to multiple small family farms, neighbourly cooperation and a bolstering of the local community

- Jason Goodwin

A DEBATE at this year's Oxford Farming Conference considered the motion that 'the demise of the family farm has been greatly exaggerated. After the stats and stories, the house-comprising many of the industry's movers and shakers, of all ages—voted the motion down by 2 to 1. The family farm, they believed, was dying on its feet. However, neither the people who thought it was dying, nor the people who thought it was still flourishing, considered the death of the small family farm to be a good thing at all.

It isn't hard to see why family farms might be in crisis. With property prices sky high and many tax advantages for people with money to invest in farmland, it has made sense for a lot of small farmers to flog their land, sell off the farmhouse and retire, dividing the proceeds between their children. The farmer who stays in the game adds that land to his, but looks for economies of scale, relying on contractors. Behind him or her, a barrage of agronomists, salespeople, seed merchants, vets, scientists and retail barons helps to ensure that a bare 7p of every £l of produce returns to the farmer who created it. The farmer is always running to stay still.

Farming's creeping tendency toward bigness is baked into our way of running policy. It is in the nature of big governmental bureaucracies to engage with other big organisations to formulate big policies that cover large areas of life and the land. The result is a country bereft of people, from where giant farms truck produce to join huge and complex supply chains, heading to big supermarkets, as their field margins are managed for eco-subsidy.