What has farming ever done for us?
The 'total' value of farming in the UK
Peter Carruthers
Farming and farmers are feeling under tremendous pressure just now.
Following a very disappointing harvest last year, the then new government announced radical changes in Agricultural Property Relief. This prompted a surge of anxiety and anger among many in the farming community, with some taking to the streets in protest.
The ‘climate-change agenda’ and the drive to achieve ‘net zero’ have also been creating much anxiety among farmers for some years. Last month, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the UK government’s ‘expert advisor on climate change’, released its ‘Seventh Carbon Budget’. If its advice is accepted by Parliament, it will mean that 9% of England’s farming land will need to converted to forest and wild habitats, and meat and dairy consumption will need to be reduced by 39%, by 2050. [I will post a separate article with more detail on this soon.)
In addition, as we noted in Seeds of Prayer last winter, “for years, farmers have struggled with changing regulations, price cuts, rising costs, as well as the usual pressures of weather, disease, volatile markets, long working hours and isolation.”
Yet, family farming offers the best way to secure food supplies for the nation in an increasingly volatile world.
Further, farming provides many benefits to society beyond those that are traded in the market or the value of which can be measured in monetary terms. Farming’s value to society far exceeds the value of its consumable output.
Back in 2012, the Oxford Farming Conference commissioned me to conduct research to address this question - to gauge UK ‘farming’s value to society’, concentrating on its non-monetary benefits. You can read the report here, and watch a video of a presentation of the research to the 2013 conference (by me and my colleague, Michael Winter, of the University of Exeter). Some of the key findings are summarised in this article.
The table below comes from the report and provides a synopsis of its findings. The different dimensions of value call for quite different ways of assessing their value. They are incommensurable, and attempting (somehow) to add them all up would be misleading and meaningless.
The data refer to about 12 years ago, and some of the numbers will be out of date. But the broad concept and findings remain as valid now as then, if not more so.
The Conference was not, of course, a Christian event. But as one commentator noted at the time, I managed to ‘bring God into it’. In a section on ethics (pp 56-58), I noted that the predominant ethic driving public policy is utilitarianism, but that there are alternatives. These, I argued, put “farming, society and land/environment in a shared moral space, characterised by consideration and responsibility, stewardship and service” and reflect a worldview that is essentially Christian.
“Several of these themes reflect the Christian roots of the values of UK society. The simple imperative to ‘love God and neighbour’ will be familiar. Biblical principles for land and farming may be less well known. In the biblical economy, land is neither just individual private property nor just a common possession, but an inheritance and a gift, ultimately from God, to be received with gratitude, farmed in accordance with principles of sharing, caring and restraint (which are especially focused in Sabbath and Jubilee), and passed on in ‘good heart’. For farmers, these principles find expression, for example, in the familiar virtues of husbandry and stewardship. For wider society, they mean that farmers are both worthy of honour and accountable - as keepers of the land and its produce, which are given to all.”1
NB . To read the table below in full, please go to the website version (the email version has only the first few rows).
See also: Carruthers, S P (2009). The land debate – ‘doing the right thing’: ethical approaches to land-use decision making. In: Winter, M & Lobley, M (Eds). What is land for? The food, fuel and climate change debate. London, Earthscan. Carruthers, S P (2002), Farming in crisis and the voice of silence. Ethics in science and environmental politics, 2002, 59-64.