No wonder crops are rotting in the fields... we’ve lost our love for hard graft

ILEFT London in the early 1970s to get back to the land, setting up an organic farm producing a range of foods from carrots to cheese in a beautiful part of west Wales. In that time, there have been many joyous moments. But my most memorable relate to simple pleasures such as milking our cows or weeding in a field of carrots.

This sort of manual labour, and the relationship with food and farming that it brings, are part of our cultural history, even our sense of national identity. Yet today millions of us have a deep prejudice against any kind of physical work, let alone agricultural labour.

Farm work, rarely promoted by career advisers, is portrayed as something to avoid, somehow beneath us. Undignified even. No wonder then that even in recessionbound Britain, we find it almost impossible to replace the fruit and vegetable pickers who used to come here from Eastern Europe.

And no wonder that, scandalously, thousands of tons of crops have been left rotting in the fields at a time when some people don’t have enough to eat.

More than half of all UK farmers have seen a decline in the amount they can harvest this year, according to a National Farming Union survey which estimated that almost £60million worth of British-grown produce went to waste by the end of the summer.

The total will be even greater now that the harvest is mostly done.

Last week the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural

Affairs, Therese Coffey, made a major speech insisting that sustainable food production can go hand in hand with protections for our natural heritage. I agree. But without people willing to work the land, it’s hard to see quite how.

It is frequently said that we’re short of migrant labour since Brexit. That may be true, plus there are other reasons – which include growing economic opportunities for Eastern Europeans in their own countries, and the pound’s weakness, making salaries less attractive to foreign workers.

It is undeniable that we no longer have access to limitless cheap imported labour. But the fact is that, over the years, repeated entreaties have been made to persuade local people to do the work. And those attempts have repeatedly failed.

Why? Admittedly, we have to work long hours and it can be exhausting. It can also involve unsociably early starts and, as I know well, it often means working in rough weather. But I believe that at the heart of this is the way we, as a society, have denigrated hard, physical work.

One exasperated Cornish farmer offered up to £30 an hour to pick broccoli on his farm outside Hayle. More than 250 people applied for the job – which pays the equivalent of about £60,000-a-year – but, after a phone interview, only 37 showed up for the induction. After seven weeks, just one worker remained.

It is the same around the country – and applies to dairy just as much as arable farming.

Right now we are trying to find someone to milk our cows. We’ve just said a tearful goodbye to one of our milkers, Evan, who at 84 and after more than 60 years of milking cows is taking a welldeserved retirement.

It means getting up early in all weather, so I know it will be a struggle to find a replacement. It’s essential that I do so. But I don’t know where to look – and I know any family-run dairy farm will tell you a similar story.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised when so many people believe their future career – shaped at school and reinforced by the education system – must involve a degree, followed by an office-based job, perhaps in financial services.

This seems to represent the pinnacle of achievement.

To end up doing work on the land would be seen as a symptom of abject failure. And therein lies the heart of the problem.

We have become accustomed to minimising any tough demands on our body. Except, that is, in the gym or on the sports field. What a strange disconnect.

We adulate the fitness of our sports heroes or pride ourselves on having worked out in the gym or running miles on the treadmill. Yet real fitness used to derive from work on the land, from which we have ‘escaped’ – in order to sit in offices in front of a computer.

It seems supremely ironic to me that we condition young people to have such a deep prejudice against exactly the kind of work that has been recharging my batteries, and making me feel connected with the land I have farmed for more than 50 years.

A great friend of mine, David Wilson, who used to work as farm manager at Highgrove for Prince Charles, as he then was, once pointed out that doing meaningful physical work is an increasingly rare privilege. Charles, now our King, understands this better than most. In winter, he likes nothing better than to go hedge-laying in the fields, because it reconnects him with the land. And how right he is!

As someone who never attended university, I’m actually really proud to have acquired through farming a whole range of practical skills. Some of my best thoughts have arisen while mucking out. It’s

There’s a deep prejudice against any physical work, let alone farm labour

Do we really want our meals gathered in by robots …is that the utopian dream we are striving for?

A generation of children has no idea where their food comes from

a bit like swimming in cold water – a delight that is freely available yet rarely sampled.

Sadly, our reluctance to countenance a career based on the land is now deeply embedded in the British psyche. We convinced ourselves we had been liberated from the tyranny of work in the fields by outsourcing food production to other nations in the British Empire.

Well, that might have worked for quite a while, but not any more!

It is now beyond obvious that our food supply chains are dangerously stretched. And that we are dependent on an economic underclass, without whom we are unable to harvest and process the food that we eat every day.

In any future discussion about how we grow and harvest our food, a human dimension is essential.

Do we really want our meals to have been produced in industrial monocultures and gathered in by robots? Is that the utopian dream that we are striving for?

Today, we face a series of existential crises – of climate, nature, health and food insecurity, all of which could yet be averted.

We need to build a new food culture, starting in our schools. We have an entire generation of children who no longer know where their food comes from.

Let’s offer farming as a career option – and make work experience on farms, as well as internships and apprenticeships, more widely available. A national voluntary service on farms couldn’t hurt.

But first we need a wholesale change of attitude. We should embrace physical labour, particularly on the land.

We should toughen up. And we should accept that the disaster overtaking our farms – with food rotting in the ground – is a national scandal. We’re barely talking about it, let alone tackling it.

We have, in a word, gone soft.