: American Agriculture Almost Ruined My Little English Farm. Now I’m Trying to Save It #WorldNEWS For much of my early life America meant progress, the bright shining farming future. I was a kid on

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American Agriculture Almost Ruined My Little English Farm. Now I’m Trying to Save It #WorldNEWS
For much of my early life America meant progress, the bright shining farming future.
I was a kid on an old-fashioned farm in the North of England, and we were way off the pace of change. We had tractors and small machinery, of course, but horse tack still hung from the beams in the barn, gathering dust, and all of my grandfather’s stories were about working horses. Ours was a mixed farm of different animals and crops, the kind of farm that existed everywhere until a few decades ago. It was all crooked little fields, no two looking the same, and every kind of farm animal and crop that would grow on it, all swirling round in a dance of rotation that only my grandfather seemed to understand.
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My uncle and auntie farmed dairy cows a few miles away from us on better ground, and they were way more modern and way bigger than we were. A big, by the standards of then, specialised British dairy farm. They would take holidays to America and Canada and come back raving about the size, speed and power of the tractors and the amazing productivity of the dairy cows. They were some of the early importers of North American Holstein genetics—that revolutionised British dairy farming and doubled yields since the 1990s. They also brought back baseball caps and Hersey bars. It all seemed very cool.
To see the future of farming, and perhaps of life in general, we looked to America. Landscapes of giant perfect weedless fields, with the work done with giant new tractors and other machines. Farming we’d probably only ever dreamt of, with all the ancient field battles won. It seemed to me that was the future, and we were getting to it way too late.
The buzzwords were efficiency and productivity and the means were specialisation in to one or two crops, or one kind of livestock, and to get bigger for economies of scale. Fields getting bigger meant getting all the old hedges and walls out of our landscapes to create a scale it had never had. Scaling up cattle meant giant steel and concrete sheds and making silage with artificial fertiliser instead of hay from barn muck in the old system. Scaling up sheep meant keeping more and feeding them in winter on bought in concentrate feeds. And we had to strip away all the other stuff that just couldn’t compete anymore, the turkeys to sell at Christmas, the pigs in the sties, the small milk herds, and all those old cute craft skills like hedge-laying, or growing our own vegetables or harvesting fruit from the hedgerows. Through my twenties and thirties that old world stuff vanished, and we binned it in our memories as nostalgia. We hardened our hearts to them killing off a lot of things we knew and loved because it was progress and the future, and who could fight that?
For many years we accepted the inevitability of this American future as if it was a fact of life, handed down by God.

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