MARY COLWELL

Faith on the farm

Higher yields and profits from intensive farming have come at a huge cost to flora and fauna of the countryside. But in one corner of England the Catholicism of one son of the soil is inspiring him to buck the trend

ictor Barrys handmade noticeboard invites passers-by to come and learn about heritage farming. It also says they are welcome to join him in 7 a.m. prayer meetings in his ramshackle office in a tumbledown courtyard full of old farm machinery, windsurfer sailboards, milk churns and bicycles. Mr Barry (aged 73 or 74, hes not sure which, but somewhere there) is a rare breed: an evangelical Catholic. He often talks of the time he was born again and of his Baptism with full immersion in the freezing waters of the Carrick Roads waterway near Falmouth, one November morning 14 years ago. Not many sentences pass without some mention of the Lord guiding him. He is a striking figure tall, wiry, always dressed in blue overalls and always with a gentle and friendly smile. I met him while out on an early morning run down a small track on Cornwalls Roseland peninsula, intrigued by the display outside his office and the invitation to prayer. It is not only his evangelical leanings that mark Mr Barry out from the average farmer.

Victor Barry takes a break at the gate to his farm on Cornwalls Roseland peninsula He also has a burning passion for small-scale, organic, low-carbon-footprint, old-fashioned farming. He says he has been a farmer since he was seven and has never wanted to do any-

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thing else. His parents sent him to the Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst, a great gift and I shall forever be grateful to them, and then to agricultural college in Lancashire. After farming in the modern, intensive way until the 1970s he underwent a change of heart that has endured to this day. For a man who sees farming as a way of being close to God through contact with nature real nature, raw nature you might say it is not surprising that he found the 1970s hard to stomach; it was the height of intensification in British farming, encouraged by government incentives. Britain had embarked upon a campaign for self-sufficiency, driven by a desire never again to be held hostage over food supplies, as we had been during the Second World War. We had technology, we had land, we had oil: everything we needed to be a nation that could stock its own larder. Wheat yields in Scotland increased by 201 per cent during the period 19671999. The use of fertilisers throughout Britain nearly doubled during the second half of the twentieth century. Field sizes increased everywhere, especially in the eastern part of the United Kingdom, to accommodate new, large-scale machinery with the resultant loss of extensive areas of hedgerow and field boundaries, which are invaluable habitats for wildlife. We are still not self-sufficient only 60 per cent of food we eat is home-grown but we are now living with the legacy of those changes. Farmland birds have declined dramatically since the 1970s, some species by more than 90 per cent (tree sparrow); corn bunting (more than 80 per cent); reed bunting, linnet and yellow hammer (50 per cent). Insects, small mammals, wild flowers and reptiles have also suffered serious, and in some cases catastrophic, decline. It is these developments that Mr Barry could not square with his personal beliefs. It was getting more and more out of hand and when it got to the Seventies I couldnt believe what was happening, he told me. I didnt want to be part of it and it was immoral, never mind just short-sighted from a financial point of view. Mr Barrys answer is to rekindle old farming values that now lie smothered under the contemporary mindset. He wants to see a return to the 1930s and 1940s, where he believes communities were fed by local, organic, labourintensive, low-carbon-footprint farming. He wants to see food production that uses modern

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technology combined with horses instead of petrol engines. All of this is in sympathy with the signs of the times documented in the colour supplements: people are growing their own, using allotments and re-finding a passion for gardening. And they are increasingly supporting movements such as the growing Transition Towns initiative, which encourages communities to work together to mitigate the effects of climate change by becoming localised and low-carbon (www.transitiontowns.org). There is certainly a desire to return to a more simple, self-sufficient way of life that uses personal talents and labour in a creative way rather than relying on searching for the best supermarket offers. But it has been labelled as middle class, and only for those who can afford to try the good life, rather than an approach that can feed the world. The United Nations target of increasing food production by 70 per cent by 2050 looks very optimistic, but it is based on an assessment of needing to meet the demands of a population that will by then have reached 9 billion. So is intensification the only way to meet this demand? Or can we really meet it by returning to local, low-carbon production? These are the questions we face, and they have moral, social and political dimensions. nd how does faith fit in? The worlds religions are mobilising their faithful to be more aware of environmental issues. Creating a sustainable way of life that allows us to hand on a healthy and productive planet to the next generation is seen as a spiritual and moral issue. Many faith communities are committed to changing their environmental impact, and the food they eat is a fundamental part of that process. Olav Kjorven, director of the Bureau for Development Policy at the UN Development Programme, has described the involvement of the religions in the environmental agenda as the biggest civil society movement in history. In November this year a major event is being held at Windsor Castle, hosted by Prince Philip, Ban Ki-moon and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), to celebrate the commitment of the faiths to sustainability. But it comes at a cost. Simple living that is in harmony with the natural world is quintessentially Christian, but it will inevitably mean fewer mangos and more apples, fewer mini-sweetcorn and more swedes. It will means times of feast and times of frugality. It will mean submission to seasons and a less diverse fridge. Are we ready for this? I wonder whether we can make the change of heart. Perhaps one day I will see ponies ploughing the fields around Bristol, and if I do I shall think of Mr Barry, his sincere Catholicism and his vision for a future that combines Christian living with caring for the earth. I Mary Colwell is a writer and broadcaster on the environment. For a longer version of Mary Colwells interview with Victor Barry, go to www.youtube.com/user/MaryColwell

CLIFFORD LONGLEY

Skys sports rights fade into insignificance compared with the box of mischief that is Fox
There is a one-word answer to James Murdoch: Fox. News Corporations chairman and chief executive in Europe and Asia, and more to the point, son and heir of Rupert Murdoch, delivered a scathing attack on the British broadcasting establishment in Edinburgh last week. He deplored the way broadcasting was regulated, the dominance of the BBC and the role of government; he was particularly miffed that the European Commission wants Sky, which is partly owned by News Corporation and which he used to run, to loosen its grip on the lucrative coverage of sport, football especially. But Skys ownership of the rights to televise sporting events, in need of regulatory correction though it no doubt is, fades into insignificance compared with the box of mischief that is Fox. Fox is the blatant and unashamed example of what happens when broadcasting is insufficiently regulated. Some of the people who appear regularly on it in the United States, not just guests but anchor-persons and presenters, are rabid, raucous, partisan and bigoted, happy to stir up any kind of rabble-rousing nonsense such as the idea that Barack Obama isnt really American but Kenyan and isnt really Christian but Muslim. Fox is a staunch supporter of the Republican Party, the populist Sarah Palin wing of it in particular, and is unlike British broadcasting stations Sky included that are not allowed by the British regulator, Ofcom, to indulge editorially in politics. This may be why Sky is head and shoulders superior to Fox as a news channel, sometimes gives the BBC a good run for its money and is, above all, trustworthy. Would anyone, even its admirers, trust Fox? For all its numerous faults, the BBC sets the gold standard for radio and television broadcasting in Britain and makes it the envy of the world. Its integrity and quality keep its competitors reaching for the best. Unlike Fox, it strives after impartiality and balance, sometimes almost to excess. The BBC symbolises not what is wrong with

the official regulation of the mass media but what is right with it. Mr Murdoch Jnr, like his father, would like to see it pulled down and torn to pieces in the name of the free market, and replaced by the anything goes approach to broadcasting in the United States. In his Edinburgh speech he admitted: When I say this I feel like a crazy relative whom everyone is a little embarrassed by and for sure is not to be taken too seriously. Yes indeed, except he is a very powerful crazy relative and therefore very dangerous. News International, part of News Corp., owns something like 40 per cent of the British national newspaper market, daily and Sunday, a dominance that cowardly governments of all colours have repeatedly refused to tackle. It is all too obvious that they have not dared risk earning the Murdoch displeasure, father or son, by breaking up this glaring example of a concentration of ownership that is against the public interest. Ironically, the case against News Internationals newspaper empire, and Skys predominance in sports coverage, is a classic free-market argument against monopoly. Monopolies, as Adam Smith noted, are conspiracies against the public. There is one scintilla of good sense in James Murdochs concerns, and that involves the BBCs expansion into running one of Britains major web portals, BBC online news. Rupert Murdoch has recently signalled that the days of free websites run by newspapers are coming to an end. They are expensive, but they raise very little money. So at some point soon, The Times will be available online only to subscribers. The fact that the BBC runs a rival free website will make little difference to the viability of The Times online at first, but if all papers followed the Murdoch path into subscription-only, continuing access to a free source of news could begin to undercut them. That is what Mr Murdoch Snr is fretting about. But the bigger question is whether this is what the licence fee is really for. The BBC is not a newspaper. Parliament has sanctioned a tax to pay for broadcasting, not for a news website. Its handy, but it isnt really necessary, nor is it obviously part of the BBCs remit. Nor, indeed, is it so good that competitors should fear it. The BBC should have a presence on the web, not least so that people can catch up with programmes they have missed. But it is no more logical to put BBC news on the web than to give The Times a TV channel even if it isnt called Fox. 5 September 2009
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