H Hamilton £15.99 pp229

I never bother to ask a farmer for his opinion of a fellow farmer, because I have heard the same reply many times: “He’s not half the farmer his father was, and his father wasn’t half the farmer his father was.” In other words, farming is always in decline.

We shall never know how Richard Benson would have rated under such scrutiny, for he turned his back on the land in favour of journalism, and in this book has faithfully recorded the decline of his family’s farm in east Yorkshire. In writing it, he has done more for our understanding of how we lost the small-scale farms than he could ever have done from the inside of a tractor cab. Reading it, we learn what it has really been like on the land this past 20 years: not just the headline issues such as foot and mouth, mad cow and mad politics, but the day-to-day heartbreak played out over thousands of acres as farmers have gone to the wall. The small family farm is stuffed, and this is how it feels.

Benson’s family farm reared pigs and grew a few potatoes and his people had worked on the land for 200 years — which explains his father’s refined agricultural thinking that led him to buy a Volvo estate only because he knew it would carry precisely a ton of potatoes. It also explains the Benson family diet, which was based largely on pork from pigs which, for one reason or another, the butchery trade would reject — “ribs with sage, roast shoulders with apple sauce, chips fried in oil rendered down from the belly, brawn for Auntie Eileen, hearts cooked up for the dog”.

This is a recognisable farming frugality which stretches as far back as agriculture itself. But this life was not for Benson, who realised his hopelessness early in life — “I couldn’t even shoo a pig along without falling over or letting it run between my legs.” Thus he avoided the fate of many a farmer’s son who failed to get out in time.

In telling the often sad tale of the inevitable sale of the farm, Benson has managed to be a player in the story while maintaining his writer’s detachment. This enables him vividly to describe his brother, Guy, whose every sentence must contain a word beginning with “f”, but who can put his finger on the cruel paradox that family farms are folding daily, while the individual, hand-crafted produce they grow has never been in greater demand: “Everyone goes on about fresh food and free-range pork . . . but if they can get it f***ing cheaper . . .”

Within the detail of this demise are some broader truths: Benson, for instance, struggles to understand how a small-scale, mixed arable system of farming can have such wide approval from such a broad sector of right-thinking people, yet can be viewed by our political masters as “an eccentricity, a defiance”.

With pig prices falling and overdrafts swelling, the sale of the farm became inevitable. Benson’s mother first spotted that times were changing after a visit to Scarborough, when she declared, “It’s getting to be a very small world, and I don’t understand it . . . (I) saw a boat in the harbour with 400 tons of potatoes all for McCain’s. And what is wrong with our own spuds?”

What was wrong with anything a family farm had to offer? Nothing you could name, outside economics. Imported pig meat was cheaper than the pork the Bensons could produce, and no supermarket buyer was ever born with an ounce of sympathy and they are in charge these days. It is a familiar tale in recent farming: insufficient income to service a growing overdraft. It was the Bensons’ bank manager who spotted that the value of their farm was just ahead of their debts, and if they sold straight away at least they’d come out of it with a clean slate. They were lucky, in that sense. In 1939, Britain had half a million farms, mostly small mixed units of less than 50 acres. There are now hardly 200,000, and the vast majority of these are on a grander scale.

The Bensons were just one of many who in recent times have had to listen to the finality of the auctioneer’s hammer bringing their working lives to a close. On the day of the sale Benson wanted to tell the world that “something awful is happening here”, but looked out across the valley and wondered who would listen. And when the long, drawn-out process was over, “we sat in the kitchen, (dad) sitting silent, his cap on the table, his eyes staring unseeing at the skirting board, one hand cradling the other”. Benson’s mother finally wrapped her arms around the old man. “Then there were only sobs, and tiny pats of his tears falling on the muddly carpet at his feet.”

But Benson has refused to allow this to become a maudlin read, and, although his father succumbed to a period of depression, it was a display of fine farmer’s thinking that released him from its dark grip. He met a well-dressed young woman in a polished Land Rover who was prepared to pay through the nose for straw made into small bales to bed down pampered horses. Farmers, retired or not, always like a customer who is willing to part with more money than they need, and Benson’s father set himself up as a dealer in straw to the New Rurals. He and his wife never lost their pride, even when moving to a caravan within sight of their old farm which, inevitably, fell into the hands of developers.

It is a measure of the old man’s strength that he was able, without any sign of bitterness, to return to his old farm buildings after the builders and architects had transformed them beyond anything a pig might recognise. What was once genuinely rural has become expensively mock-rustic, complete with exposed chalk walls. “It’s fashionable,” his son explains. “I know it’s fashionable,” replies the father, “but to me it looks mucky.” You could almost cry for the old man.

DECLINE AND FALL

Traditional farmers have suffered devastating attacks on their way of life since the war. In 1939, 1.5m families made their living directly from farming; since then, three out of four jobs in agriculture have gone. Fifty years ago, farmers received 50p of every £1 spent on food in Britain; today it is just 7.5p.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £12.79 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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