Open Farm Sunday was a huge success, with around 3,000 people visiting the farm for a day of education and enjoying local, home-made (additive free) produce from all our Love Local Trust Local family producers. The farmers helping us all went home with a smile, feeling supported by everyone who came. Telling our story and helping people understand how their food is made is so important, and I believe we all did this very well on 8th June. Local MP Simon Hoare joined us – a big thank you to him for his support. It is vital we can educate government and councils about the importance of food education and growing more at home.
The only thing that overshadowed the event was the BBC’s warning about Cryptosporidium. Health and safety is always taken seriously on the farm. But it’s a shame more news doesn’t cover the constant problems farmers face with disease outbreaks like foot and mouth, bluetongue, avian flu and bovine TB.
We’re not the terrorists
On 14th June I was invited to the Bridport Food Festival to join a discussion panel on ultra-processed food. The panel included a doctor, a nutritionist, a teacher and me, as a farmer and food label campaigner. One of my questions was whether local food can be produced intensively. The purpose of intensive farming is high production at low cost, which is what consumers want (cheap food). Regenerative farming works with natural systems, but doesn’t produce enough food quickly or cheaply enough. We desperately need to find a balance between local food production and caring for our environment.
It’s scary when you turn on the television and see what’s happening in the world. Food security has to be a priority. Oil prices have already gone up and we need food on our tables to survive.
I was so sad that day in Bridport to feel the general mood in the room: that farmers are somehow to blame for ultra-processed food.
I explained that when our meat leaves our farm, it’s been well cared for, well fed, it has no additives. It’s totally traceable, inot only local but fresh, with lots of flavour. It’s good quality, healthy food.
Peak District farmer Lorna Critchlow went viral in June with a despondent Facenook post which struck a chord with lots of farmers, me included: ‘I try to pinpoint when the narrative shifted from farmers being celebrated as saviours of domestic food supply to being demonised as productivity-obsessed, environmental terrorists.
‘And I wonder how the connection between the food we all need to eat to survive and the farmers producing it has disintegrated.’
Somewhere along the line something has gone drastically wrong. My dear Mum and Dad lived through ration books: my mother was a land girl. Food security, surely, has got to be the biggest priority, especially with what is going on in the world. All our imported food has to pass through the Red Sea. There has to be an impact, and costs will rise again. With such global uncertainty, we need our farmers more than ever.
