The Killing Of The Countryside

Graham Harvey

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The Killing Of The Countryside

Kate Edwards rated it it was amazing Jul 18, Paul rated it really liked it Nov 20, Lucy Wheeler rated it liked it May 01, Lesley Arrowsmith rated it really liked it Feb 09, Dwc added it Mar 06, Emma added it Jul 27, Nicholas marked it as to-read Mar 11, Jeremy Burr added it Sep 02, Elizabeth Hills marked it as to-read Feb 18, Robert marked it as to-read Nov 26, Rachelle Ternier marked it as to-read Dec 14, Andra Varzaru marked it as to-read Nov 27, Maria Gabriella marked it as to-read Jan 15, Sophie marked it as to-read Nov 16, John marked it as to-read Feb 26, Steph marked it as to-read Mar 17, Joanne marked it as to-read Apr 19, Sherri Hart marked it as to-read Jun 01, Sooz marked it as to-read Jul 03, Daniel Etherington marked it as to-read Oct 01, As the scare over Irish pork shows, claims that industrial farming produces cheap, safe food are utterly untrustworthy.

Oil-dependent production of cereal crops could be replaced by a traditional method of farming that is cheaper, greener and safer, says Graham Harvey.

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Unless we address the problem of declining soil quality, we, and most other life forms on the planet, are in big trouble. We can slow climate change not by eating less meat, but by feeding our livestock on grass, not grain.

Whatever the merits of Prince Charles' invective against GM crops, intensive agriculture is to blame for the food crisis. Vertical farms may be the hot story, but a network of good old-fashioned kitchen gardens would produce better food.

Is Tesco's plan for cut-price chickens helping budget-conscious families or treating them with contempt? The supermarkets want us to back UK-reared veal, but they would be better off cleaning up our struggling dairy industry. If it wasn't for decades of poor agricultural practice, there would be no export of live calves today. In a market where four companies have a stranglehold on food retailing, how can the Competition Commission say we're getting a good deal? Britain needs land reform to stop City dealers from inflating land and food prices and creating a new landed gentry in the countryside.

He looked after his own field boundaries, layering the hedges and mending the stone dykes, and when I told him one evening that the blackthorn was flowering already down by the river, he exclaimed: Sap will be rising. Now a semi-skilled worker gives the hedges an army haircut with a mower that lacerates every branch and twig, leaves the hedge like a block of bristles and spits out fragments of wood all over the paths and roads.

Small fields near here, half-surrounded by woods still full of buzzards, finches and deer, were bought recently by a businessman and resown with a single variety of grass — more blank green, not a flower except sorrel at the very edges, from which we make soup. Last summer I was up there at dusk.

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Heavy motors snorted as though a convoy was coming and headlights blazed. The contract silage cutters had arrived to polish off yet another field of which they had no knowledge. Harvey, an experienced farming journalist and agricultural script-editor on The Archers , is inspired by the knowledge that farming can be humane, economically viable and respectful of the wildlife that shares our civilised countryside.

He is deeply angered by the postwar system which makes food expensive, farming hugely profitable for agribusiness, and the moors and hills, meadows and hedges, rivers and marshes a monotony bereft of the swarming species many of us can remember.

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