Country life

Out of date

Patrick Marn ham

Travelling across England in 1943 Edmund Blunden, MC, by then too old for action, nonetheless did his bit.

The scythesman and the thatcher are not dead, Orelse their ghosts are walking with a will; Old England's farms are shrewdly husbanded.

And up from all the hamlets jumps old skill; I doubt not we shall have the land we love And its ancestral faith and annual round Flourishing by tried craftsmanship inwove With modern science in one purpose bound.

Perhaps in 1943, when every scientifically neglected acre had to be put to use, up from every hamlet did jump old Skill — and out from every hedgerow too if the brawny Land Army was half as delicious as it sounds. But even then to the more sober e ye of Blunden's friend H J Massingham the true state of agriculture was horribly apparent. His journey across England in 1944 led him, as he wrote in his excellent book The Wisdom of the Fields, to 'the Doubting Castle of Giant Despair'. Massingham hoped that there was still a choice to be made between continuing in the same mechanistic fashion and tempering modern research with old principles. H's beliefs survive today in the withered form of the organic self-sufficiency movement, but as for influencing the main body of agriculture he might as well have saved his ink. The voice of the prophet who is honoured can be clearly heard by those who wake early on Radio 4's farming programme. There was a great moment some months ago when listeners were treated to the shocked tonesOf the programme's Common Market correspondent who had returned from Greece with the information that the donkey was still being put to use as a beast of burden• That sort of thing is certainly not allowed in the Community, and more recently it was announced in Brussels that when Greece, Spain and Portugal join up massive sums Will be despatched to the Mediterranean, Britalt1 contributing£190m out of a total of £134Orn• But it would be a mistake to suppose that this money is to go to the impoverished new members. It is actually going to southern France and to Italy to enable these two countries to compete on more equal terms with their underdeveloped partners. So here is another paradox of Common Market agriculture at least as ludicrous as the infamous mountains of surplus butter, milk powder, beef, cereals and sugar. When three 9f the poorest countries in Europe are taken in and promised a share in the wealth of the developed community, it is in the expec"

tation that they will produce such a profusion of excellent food and wine, so cheaply, that their mechanised competitors need £750 million each if they are not to be driven out of the market.

• .The symbol of Greek agricultural inefficiency might be the Lassithi Plateau in Central Crete which is recommended to tourists as a picturesque survival from classical Arcadia. Here, on land which was sufficiently fertile to provide grain for much of the Roman empire, an intricate system of irrigation powered by thousands of small windmills delights the visitor and incidentally produces a great weight of corn, Wheat, maize, olives, apricots, apples, artichokes, beans, tomatoes, onions, Potatoes, cabbages and much, much more; all higgledy piggledy from plots the size of allotments that seem to cover the entire surface of the plateau. There are no tractors to be seen but the abundance of mules and donkeys would distress the man from Radio 4 to the point of embarrassment. Worse, senior citizens who should clearly be in some f°nli of institution are to be seen scything the

Wheat by hand, and then thrashing it by a Process which involves them in standing on a Wooden sledge which is drawn in a circle by a Pair of cows. They are apparently forced to

earrY out this procedure in the full blaze of the sun frequently bursting into laughter or

!ong until they retire to the café in the even

ing where they eat an unnaturally rich diet Washed down with an inadvisable quantity of absinthe. It is hell out there. On Sundays a number of them even worship at a chapel dedicated to St Pan.

But help is at hand. The man from Brussels Wineth, his way has been made plain by the man from Radio 4. The people of Lassithi Will be unchained from their sledges, their Productivity (measured in tons of food per head of peasant) will rise, their debts will Multiply, their children will be trained for clerical work as loan sharks or insurance

tnnts, and the ancient crafts of marketing

and processing will be introduced. The surPlus of produce which has traditionally fed the towns of Crete and of the Greek main

land will continue to do so, but at an uicreased price and in an incontinent volume Which will be added to the central mountains of surplus. And then the oil-burning, chernically-fertilised brigands of the Languedoc and the Mezzogiorno will at last feel confident of a fair fight. It would be mere romanticism to regret any of this, and who but Colonel Blimp would suggest that it boiled down to a crude Process whereby a number of influential food monopolists were enpowered to fiddle

around with something that works perfectly well for no better reason than that they were thereby enabled to make a vast deal of Money from it. And if the people of Lassithi need any further encouragement two more

items of information are available. In Beverley, Yorkshire, the local council has destroyed crops of barley and peas a few weeks

because they were ready to be harvested oecause they were growing on the verge and so 'encroached on the highway'. And in London the authorities state that the 7000 tons of horsemeat we exported last year included a quantity of asses meat. Farmers of Lassithi, welcome to the Promised Land! Here corn is cultivated and then junked, and donkeys are a delicacy.