6 minute read
explains why regenerative farming could also solve a mental health crisis
Regenerative farming restores people, not just land
Above: Farmers are facing a mental health crisis. Headshot credit Richard Allenby-Pratt
SARAH LANGFORD
Author and former barrister
In 1971, a Pennsylvania hospital began a radical trial. Patients undertaking the same routine operation were randomly allocated two different types of rooms in which to recover. One had views of deciduous trees; the other a brick wall. Ten years later the researchers concluded something extraordinary. The patients who looked out onto trees recovered faster, needed fewer painkillers and suffered fewer complications. Nature, the study concluded, heals, even if you are looking at it through a window.
Farmers spend much of the year surrounded by the natural world. But this power of nature to heal is at odds with the chilling statistic that approximately one farmer a week dies by suicide, double the national average. A 2022 study by the Farm Safety Foundation found that 92 per cent of UK farmers under 40 cited poor mental health as the biggest problem they faced. It seems increasingly clear that the price of modern industrial farming has not just been ecological. A human cost has been paid too.
It was this human cost I began to hear about when I moved out of London with my young family to Suffolk and took on the running of my husband’s small family farm. I found farming in a very different place than it had been when my grandfather was tasked with feeding a nation made hungry by war. Now, farmers faced accusations of ecological mismanagement from an overwhelming urban population, while UK food had become the third cheapest in the world, with households spending less than a tenth of their annual income upon it. A huge proportion of all food produced was either lost or wasted, and farmers received a fraction of the price at which their food was sold, which reflected neither the ecological cost, nor the human cost, of making it.
Many of the farmers I met had decided they could not go on as they were. This was not just because soaring input prices, chemical resistance and the removal of public subsidies following Brexit meant high yields no longer led to high profits. It was also because they had witnessed what this way of farming could do to a family, a community and a farmer’s mental health.
This was the cost borne by the dairy farmer who told me what it felt like to shoot a Holstein bull calf, which would otherwise have sold at market for less than the cost to get it there. The intensive pig farmers broken by a decade worth of disease, animal death and debt. The council farmer who had found cow carcasses rotting under
hedgerows because the previous tenant could not afford the cost of the knackerman. The arable farmer whose older brother had taken his own life because of the trap the farm now represented.
These farmers were part of a new generation looking for change through a transition to regenerative farming. As I heard their stories and saw their farms, I began to understand something unexpected. This way of farming did not just mean regenerating the soil, hedgerows and trees, or the number and variety of creatures that lived above and below the ground. It did not just mean ecological resilience through growing a diversity of crops, keeping living roots in the ground, and minimising disturbance of the soil. It did not just offer them financial resilience through minimising inputs. This way of farming also regenerated the farmers’ relationship with the land, the food they produced upon it and the community around them too. It did not just restore the farm. It restored the farmer.
We, as consumers, increasingly understand that our choices affect the land our food is grown on. But they affect the people who make it, too. Regenerative farming might be able to do more than provide nutritionally dense food that benefits, rather than depletes, the land. I have come to believe it might also be able to heal an agricultural mental health crisis, too.
Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution by Sarah Langford (£16.99, Penguin) is out now.
The human side of farmers can be forgotten
GARETH WYN JONES
Welsh hill farmer and author
Farming isn’t a job, it’s a way of life. We’re parents, we’re partners, and we’ve all got emotions. I think that human side is forgotten when environmentalists and journalists say that farmers are to blame for climate change.
I get frustrated and even defensive because they make us look like the big bad wolf. I feel like they simply don’t understand the difficult job we’ve got on our hands. We have to wear a lot of hats: feeding the nation in an affordable and environmentally friendly way, all while trying to make a living for ourselves.
Just remember that many of us have no idea what our product will be worth when it’s sold, because the supermarkets decide. Add to this the weather constraints; imagine what it would be like to have your success determined by the whims of the elements.
People may tell us what to do, but I doubt they’ve ever tried to put themselves in our shoes. It’s a hell of a job to do.
We do feel the pressure and we struggle mentally with the criticism. It can be a very lonely existence with nowhere to turn and no one to talk to, because you’re working by yourself. The honest truth is you’ve got all the equipment; practically speaking, you could take your own life.
If you’re struggling with mental health, it can be a tough job to be in. Luckily, there are many great charities specifically working to help farmers. Above: Producing food can be a lonely job.
Sometimes, I ask myself: is this the right lifestyle for me? That’s why it’s important to fight our cause and talk about our mental health. As a rule, we farmers are not well known for being open, but we shouldn’t be scared of showing our emotions when we’re upset.
I had never really spoken about my feelings before I wrote my book, The Hill Farmer, in 2014. I just kept them inside. But when I did, it was a real release and made me feel so much lighter. Talking about and sharing our problems are very important parts of what we’re doing.
We need to show the human side of farming. We should let people into our world and allow them to see that farmers are part of the solution, not the problem.
While social media can be divisive, and we’ve certainly seen that with George Monbiot’s latest book, it’s been a game changer for farmers. It’s our new way of sharing what we do every day, and people can get involved from afar and learn about the realities of farming life.
I firmly believe that the supermarkets have kept us away from the customer so they can keep the power to themselves. The more they can keep the disconnect, the better it is for business. That’s why we need different ways of communicating with the people who eat our food, whether it’s via social media or getting them out onto the farm, to develop some much-needed empathy.
