Independent UK: Meet the city dwellers going back to the land

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Meet the city dwellers going back to the land
Working the land is as hard today as it has ever been. So why does a new generation of disaffected urban professionals want to get back to nature? Five converts tell their stories

Saturday, 18 July 2009


"Of all occupations," observed the Roman philosopher Cicero, "there is none better than agriculture, nothing more productive, nothing sweeter, nothing more worthy of a free man." It is a sentiment that still holds true in the popular imagination – despite the many well-documented travails suffered by British farmers in recent years. For while the 20th century saw the rapid decline in the importance of agriculture in all its forms – today it accounts for just 0.5 per cent of our GDP and employs barely 500,000 people – the yearning to own or work a patch of land remains as strong as ever and is felt, it seems, most keenly among urban professionals for whom the ultimate lifestyle choice takes them straight back to nature.

Interest in food and food production is higher than ever. The new farming generation has embraced diversification, bringing fresh ideas and energy to the countryside, raising, processing and marketing their own products with increasing success. Growers and even farmers are now flirting with celebrity status. In the cities and towns people flock to emulate them – waiting lists for allotments run into months, even years, while long-forgotten hobbies such as keeping chickens, growing vegetables and making honey are firmly back in vogue.

Agricultural land has proved a wily hedge against plunging stock and property markets, having doubled in value over the past five years. An average acre will now set you back £4,200 while a smallholding with sufficient land and buildings on which to grow enough to feed your family – with a little left over to barter – can be exchanged for no more than a three-bedroom terrace in one of the less salubrious London suburbs.

Today's new farming recruits bear little resemblance to the barley barons and broiler kings who dominated the large-scale agricultural enterprises encouraged by successive governments chasing the post-war dream of cheap food. Not for them the never-ending prairies of green concrete and vast sheds stuffed with ragged poultry. Their goal is neither money nor mechanised efficiency. Today, one-quarter of all farms make no profit at all, while half of them produce incomes of less than £10,000 a year. The work is hard and at times dangerous. As a previous generation in the 1970s was inspired by the writings of self-sufficiency guru John Seymour, today's new farmers are more likely to quote Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. For them it is a case of small is beautiful. Their farms are places designed to reconnect them with nature, where blogs about composting hold more fascination than the intricacies of Brussels' bureaucracy and where a man or woman can, as Cicero said, feel free again. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/meet-the-city-dwellers-going-back-to-the-land-1748092.html