Some time ago I started to collect notes for a book to be called, provisionally, ‘The farmer's guide to ecology'. As the material accumulates, I begin to realise that, if the book is ever published, I may be forced to leave the country, hotly pursued by the strong-arm men of the National Farmers Union.
One of the possibilities outlined in the book is that farmers might be required to attain some standard of academic mastery of their practice before they are licensed to farm. After all, we can none of us jump into a profession without first demonstrating a grasp of its practical aspects and hazards. Why should farmers be exempt? Would any farmer be happy to know that a doctor whom he consults is in practice merely because his business has been inherited from the family, without having to study for qualification?
The point at issue is that things are complicated today by many hazards posed by chemicals, breeding techniques and heavy machinery. You cannot expect a farmer to appreciate the nature of fertilisers and pesticides merely from what an interested manufacturer tells him with the object of selling something. Some of the programmes recommended are highly suspect from the angle of natural ecology. We have seen the bovine spongiform encephalopathy scandal, where farmers were persuaded, in their ignorance, to feed offal to herbivores. Then there is the organophosphate scandal, where farmers were ordered, on pain of fines, to handle potent poisons whose nature they could not be expected to appreciate, and have suffered for years as a consequence. Agrochemical corporations have persuaded farmers to fling insecticides and fungicides almost indiscriminately over the countryside, relying on their ignorance of possible repercussions.
This state of affairs is fair neither to farmers nor to their neighbours and customers. The ability to judge and discriminate must be illuminated by unbiased knowledge of the background to nature. What better place to learn discrimination than an academic institution? There are farming establishments, but no one is obliged to take any notice of them when it comes to ploughing, sowing, reaping and rearing to produce safe food for society.