Country Mouse Giles Wood

Weep for Ukraine – and my endangered Cornish pasty

giles wood

While other men are becoming addicted to rolling news of Russia’s advances and setbacks in Ukraine, I have been scanning the footage for background signs of agricultural activity.

Any tractor action? Cultivators? Crop-sprayers? Unless the fields are sown with spring corn soon, there will be no harvest this year.

Although we can see tractors towing abandoned Russian tanks out of the fields, there has been no sign of them ploughing or scattering the good seed on Ukrainian land.

Once I would have been unable to point to the position of Ukraine on the map. Now I am a font of knowledge on Black Sea ports, and their strategic importance to Vladimir Putin. As for Odessa, it’s clear to anyone’s naked eye that it is vital for the Ukrainians to retain it for the global export of their wheat.

And I’m already wailing over the cultural importance of that port, with its unique architectural heritage and its artistic, allegedly bohemian ‘community’. All of this in spite of my never having been there. But at least it looks as though I can put worries about the potential gentrification of Odessa on the back boiler.

Thanks to last night’s World Service, this armchair agronomist knows for the first time that Africa relies just as heavily on Ukraine’s wheat exports as we do. I hadn’t given much thought to the subject of African diets, but now am reminded that the Arab Spring started with food riots triggered by shortages of staple crops. Will shortages from the breadbasket of the world lead to a global relapse into barbarism?

It’s not just wheat. Oil seeds are an equally important export for Ukraine. Most of our sunflower seeds come from there, as did – until Brexit – most of our seasonal agricultural workers. At a charity pop concert in aid of the humanitarian effort in the war zone, images of vast and enviable swathes of Ukrainian sunflowers were projected behind the stage.

From the top of the downs above my cottage, I can look down on a view not so very different from what a typical Ukrainian wheat prairie must resemble.

The fact I have chosen to live in fields once cultivated by the first Neolithic farmers on these isles gives me a feeling of solidarity with the arable land workers of Ukraine, although also a sense of shame induced by their evident superiority to their English counterparts – particularly in the form of me. They are certainly slimmer, physically stronger and more resilient, patriotic and godly.

My doom-mongering spiral leads me to recall that the turning point when man advanced to civilisation was the moment that he learned to control his food supply.

Bone-and-antler sickles with flint teeth showing the silica gloss acquired through cutting cereal grasses have been found on a mesolithic site in Palestine dating from about 8,000 BC. Within the next two thousand years, the cultivation of grasses and the domestication of animals became well established in the Middle East. These practices spread from there during the Neolithic phases of culture, reaching Britain in about 3500 BC. The change from a nomadic and hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming has underpinned all civilisations.

Neolithic farming methods served humans for millennia – but then came the profit motive, which meant mechanisation, artificial fertilisers and pesticides.

No doubt Ukraine is as guilty as every other country. Why should it not be? Those fertile plains are unlikely to be presided over by the organic Ukrainian equivalents of Lady Bamford, the Prince of Wales or Henry Dimbleby.

Meanwhile, back on the Wiltshire prairies, the fertiliser, spread with abandon and resembling dishwasher salt, is ammonium nitrate. According to Farmer Clarkson, the commodity price has gone from £264 a tonne a year ago to £1,000 in recent weeks. It is manufactured by mixing nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from natural gas.

The war means the gas they need to make this fertiliser, loathed by environmentalists, is in short supply. Could this be a good thing? An opportunity disguised as a crisis?

Regenesis by George Monbiot, now hitting the bookshelves, aims to show the world that the end need not necessarily be nigh – as long as we switch from oil-based farming to a sustainable, regenerative method. Rather than farming at the expense of nature, we should take nature with us. Perhaps the one positive of this war will be to force this issue.

Look on the bright side. An absence of bread in the short term may not be a bad thing. Many Britons have already gone wheat-free owing to real or imagined gluten intolerance. I must confess the wife and I never looked or felt better than when we shunned wheat and dairy on the advice of a Swedish nutritionist.

Yes, bread was once the staff of life, but bread produced by modern farming methods is a very different kettle of fish to the bread available in Biblical times.

Nevertheless, it is a hard habit to break and I must head to our local bakery, Marshalls in Pewsey, for one of their famed Cornish pasties before the flour runs out.

‘Funny, really – I never imagined Tarzan getting old’