Give us each day our daily bread

Why the political parties cannot understand farming.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A man stands looking baleful next to a row of red tractors

Jeremy Clarkson re-considering the farming life.

Amazon Studios.

Go to the Labour Party’s ten election pledges. Search for the word ‘farm’. I’ll wait.

You’re not going to do that, are you? Fair enough. Let me tell you happens when you do. Nothing. You won’t find the word ‘farm’. That absence is revealing.

Or is it? Am I just being parochial? I’m not a farmer, but the son of a farmer and raised on a dairy farm in Somerset. It was a relief to my parents that I didn’t want to follow them – and every other Cary throughout history – into the family business, as the good years were clearly coming to an end. My parents sold their herd of cows a few years before Mad Cow Disease. They bought sheep for a variety of slightly perverse incentives. After a few years they discovered sheep are the worst, since they find all kinds of imaginative ways to die. The only bit of luck they had on the sheep was selling them before the Foot and Mouth epidemic hit.

Farmers in the UK have gotten used to being ignored by politicians, even though 70 per cent of the UK’s land is farmed. So what’s the plan for how over two-thirds of the country is going to be managed, given that Labour are certain to win? It’s hard to tell.

I found a more detailed manifesto on the Labour Party website, based around five Labour policies called ‘Let’s get Britain’s future back’. Idiotic nonsensical slogans notwithstanding, I did find one mention of the word ‘farm’. But only once. And it was part of the word ‘windfarm’. Labour is more interested in the farming of wind than the farming of wheat, cattle or vegetables. That managed air might explain where their slogan came from.

It is no wonder that the rural communities don’t trust Labour. According to FarmersGuide.co.uk, only 28 per cent said “they believe Labour understands and respects rural communities and the rural way of life”. But it’s not all bad news for Labour. The Tories are trusted even less, having dropped down to only 25 per cent. In short, the people in the countryside have no confidence in politicians.

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom.

You need only to watch Clarkson’s Farm to understand why this is the case. Farmers have been subject to an enraging mixture of overregulation and political indifference. Some of this has been Brexit. Some has been bureaucratic incompetence.

But there is another more fundamental problem. I discovered it when reading The National Food Strategy. This was a document courageously commissioned by the Conservatives in the hope that someone else would come up with some coherent policies for the countryside. It runs for hundreds of pages plus footnotes and sources and is an impressive piece of work. It pulls together issues around land use, food security, climate change, food inequality and obesity.

These issues are all interconnected. In fact, they are interdependent. How can they not be? You have to consider them all together. But once you open these cans of worms you end up with all kinds of other questions about pesticides, genetic modification, food waste and the identity of the maniac canning worms in the first place.

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom. We understand crops on a molecular level. We can design gigantic machinery to efficiently administer the correct dosage of pesticides to individual plants. We can theorise about animal bedding until the cows come home. But we can’t make decisions. That requires wisdom.

Wisdom is discernment, choosing between two good things – or making a decision based on the lesser of two evils. We can’t do that, because we can’t decide what is very good, what is good, what is okay and what is evil. Everything is practical pragmatic politics. You do what works. Except how do you define ‘what works’? For whom? Based on what?

Because we can’t make decisions, we end up having to balance entirely valid concerns about climate, obesity, food inequality, subsidies and the life cycles of bees. But we can’t do it. It’s too complicated. It produces anomalies and perverse incentives. The result is middle-aged men taking their own lives because TB-ridden badgers have ended up with more legal protections than tenant farmers.

We would do well to look to our ancestors. They lacked our granular knowledge but they had wisdom which, according to the Bible, begins with ‘the fear of the Lord’. They ploughed the fields and scattered the good seed on the land. They understood that our food doesn’t come from our brains, our labs, our factories or our highly integrated just-in-time delivery systems. Our food comes from God. As the Psalmist writes:

He makes grass grow for the cattle,
     and plants for people to cultivate—
     bringing forth food from the earth:
wine that gladdens human hearts,
     oil to make their faces shine,
     and bread that sustains their hearts.

Psalm 104

That’s why our predecessors ask for God’s blessing on their tools on Plough Monday in early January. It explains ‘Rogation days’ in the spring when the entire congregation would wander round the fields asking for God’s blessing. There was Lammastide when the harvest was beginning to ripen in early August. And every Sunday, the congregations prayed this central line of the Lord’s prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’.

Jesus was good at bread. He was so good, he didn’t even need wheat to make it. He could feed five thousand families from a handful of loaves. It’s interesting that avowedly atheist regimes – like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China – end up with mass starvation.

Our own society has turned its back on God. We have made ourselves gods. And after much consultation and two hundred pages of background and policy – plus foot notes - it turns out that food is a lot harder than we thought. Omniscience and omnipotence are really handy which it comes to a coherent plan for 70 per cent of the land in the UK. Rather than another National Food Strategy, let’s just have Psalm 104. Right now, our farmers are prepared to try anything.

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Death & life

29 October 2024

4 min read

There’s fear or fascination as cultures confront death

If Western society discussed death more openly, would Halloween’s appeal hold such sway?

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

Watching Christians jump and sing “death is defeated” was a strange experience.

As a new believer in Christianity from a Hindu background, I was struck by how Christians approached death. While I had seen reincarnation as a path to heaven, I couldn’t understand why the church either hesitated to talk about death or celebrated it so intensely. Why were Christians sometimes dancing and other times, silent about death?

During my early years in Christ if ever the topic of death arose from the fun times I was having with Christian friends it was almost always met with a dead silence - excuse the pun. On one occasion, the husband of a close friend in our small church community had passed away due to cancer. I was one of the first to make a call to his widowed wife. When my friends heard that I had done this the response was unusual, “well done Rahil!” “That’s so good Rahil.” Strange. I was sensitive over the phone, but it wasn’t that hard. Then I asked the others if they were going to make a call and the response was equally peculiar, “erm, I can’t” or “I just can’t do that... ” Puzzling.

Recently, I came across the GodPod podcast, which shed some light for me on this hesitation. In an interview with Dr Lydia Dugdale about her book The Lost Art of Dying, a surprising statistic caught my attention: “In the 18th century, one-third of church sermons were about death and eternity.” I had to play that line back multiple times. In contrast, today’s sermons often focus on personal purpose, calling, or spiritual gifts. All important, but are we missing a vital balance—one eye on eternity, the other on our present lives?

Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East?

This avoidance of death became even more apparent during the Covid pandemic. When the Delta strain hit India in 2021 it caused a massive widespread devastation and death. The funeral pyres were filling the sacred river banks up and down the country. At one point there was no more wood left to burn the bodies. It had run out! Urban crematoriums were overrun and so people left their deceased loved ones to simply float down the nearest river in the hope that the next life would be easier.

I followed the detailed footage of the funeral pyres and bodies choking various holy rivers. It was meticulously covered by the western media. Even PM Boris Johnson at the time cancelled his trip to India because the Covid death crisis was “out of control.” It’s Interesting how the western media flippantly assumed that death could be controlled. And then an eminent academic in India wrote a remarkable article for Project Syndicate. Brahma Chellaney’s opening paragraph was,

“When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.”

The author’s accurate observation demanded my attention. Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East? Although Chellaney uses the concept of ‘grieving’ for his argument, there really isn’t such a spiritual concept across Indic faiths as Christianity knows of it. Of course, there is sadness and loss but grieving in the deep spiritual sense, not really. Is that why the Western media found it easier to cover death in the East? Because the secular (although Christian) West knows of the concept of grief so well at home? Or is it because the West do actually want to confront death without hiding and when they see other cultures do it so openly (and a tad bit casually) they are drawn to it? As morbid as it sounds (and I’ll do the British thing and apologise here) there might actually be a healthy interest with the way certain cultures embrace death that the west is seeking to find an expression for.

Brahmar Mukherji chaired the Department of Biostatistics at Michigan University. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2021 she stated that India as a society sees death differently which is why the death toll along with so many other complex and practical issues was so high in that nation during Covid. They embrace it more easily. I am not promoting reckless behaviour around rules. One can’t play with a rattlesnake and then call it faith. My hope is that the reader finds hope when confronting death with a Christian lens. Why have themes of Euthanasia and Assisted Dying become such a big thing in the West and not in the East?

Which brings me to Halloween. It’s a leap, I know, but think about it: if Western societies and churches discussed death and eternity more openly, would Halloween’s macabre appeal hold such sway? Dressing up as a ghoul or a skeleton seems to be a playful, yet safe way to confront our fear of death—something we’re eager to do from behind a mask. That lighthearted, but jarring moment in the Barbie film comes to mind: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Maybe that’s the real question we should be asking ourselves. Not just on Halloween, but frequently. How do we truly confront death—with fear, with fascination, or with the hope of something beyond?