GABRIELLE CHAN Why You Should Give a F*ck About Farming. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
In this survey from the ground up, Gabrielle Chan argues we all have a stake in the future of farming.
Do you give a f*ck about farming? You’d perhaps be forgiven for a low-energy response to this brusque question. There’s a lot going on at the moment, and you might be running low on f*cks.
For Chan, a city journalist who married into an old farming family, this will not do. Most of us are not farmers ourselves, but we are all eaters. We have a personal stake in how food is produced, imported, exported and delivered to our supermarket shelves.
So, we need to give a f*ck because we don’t want to go hungry.
As I write, one of the situations Chan warns about is coming to pass, with empty supermarket shelves due to the disruptions of the pandemic. It’s only an inconvenience at this stage, but it’s a reminder of how quickly things can unravel.
But food security is not the only reason we should be paying attention. Farming is crucially connected to a range of other challenges, including environmental destruction, climate change and water scarcity. The never-ending drive for cheaper prices on supermarket shelves is also leading to the hollowing-out of rural communities as uneconomic family farms sell up to giant corporations.
To get a hold on what’s going on now, how we got here and where we might go in the future, Chan interviews people up and down the food chain: from farmers with tiny holdings filling specialised niches, to generational family farmers, to people managing vast holdings on behalf of giant corporations. She talks to Aboriginal people caring for country, to academics and policy wonks, to soil and water lovers, to former agriculture ministers. She listens carefully and gives everyone space in the discussion. But she is also building an argument: economic ‘productivity’ of the land is not the only game in town. We need a national agricultural strategy built on the needs of the environment, eaters and rural communities.
Chan reminds us of the time, not many decades ago, when close government attention and protection for agriculture was taken for granted. These were the days of government-sponsored agricultural research stations and officers in shorts and long socks giving talks about pesticides and fertilisers and soil conservation. The countryside was socially conservative but quite happy to enjoy a highly protected ‘agrarian socialism’, with organisations like the Wheat Board guaranteeing farmers’ livelihoods.
It was the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of the 1980s that began to change all that.
The system probably did need a shake-up. Chan’s interview with 1980s primary industries minister John Kerin reveals that when he first got the job, there were 72 agricultural marketing boards across Australia, including three for eggs in Queensland. There was a board for white onions and a separate one for brown onions. ‘Minister Kerin gave Australian farming an enema,’ notes Chan with her characteristic earthiness.
Exposed to the cold winds of international competition, Australian farming began to go the same way as manufacturing – offshore to cheaper labour. Just as we shut down the clothing factories and sent that work to China, we stopped growing things we used to grow. We settled on just a few export ‘winners’ and imported the rest.
I’ve watched the process here in Bathurst, where I now live. The proud old agricultural research station has closed down and the district no longer grows asparagus – once a staple of the old Edgells cannery (now Simplot). Asparagus is fiddly to harvest, the cost of labour now considered too high. The canned asparagus on the shelf in Bathurst’s supermarkets comes all the way from Peru, even though the familiar Edgells livery is still splashed across the tin.
So, we now have bigger farms and cheaper food. Is there really a problem with this?
According to Chan, the current model does not account for ‘externalities’ – the costs to the environment of doing it this way, the costs to eaters of living off the end of long supply chains, and the costs to the human communities associated with farming. Nature is being pushed out, the mainstream diet is narrow and industrialised, and human beings are becoming less connected with the land. Chan writes:
If the current 80,000 or so farm businesses become 800 mega farms, it will have implications for how our food is supplied and how up to 60 per cent of our land is managed. The larger a farm becomes, the more remote it becomes from oversight and, in a sense, from democracy.
If democracy requires citizens who know what’s going on, the Murray–Darling water trading scheme is certainly a problem. It’s difficult even for motivated people to get their heads around, and it would be safe to say that most Australian voters wouldn’t have a clue. But under cover of general ignorance, something vital is happening out there: the extraordinary transfer of water rights from small farmers and communities into the hands of Big Finance.
As Chan notes, the idea that this is all part of ‘deregulation’ is a misnomer. The system has not been deregulated; it has been reregulated in favour of a different – more powerful – group.
So how do we move in the direction of a system able to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century? In her research, Chan has discovered that just about all of the policy work has been done. Studies and reports languish on ministry shelves, not seeing the light of day. The changes required are – surprise surprise – too hard to make, politically.
But nature, upon which all farming and all human bodies depend, doesn’t care about politics. It is giving ‘full and frank’ feedback on our behaviour. Chan argues for a truce:
No more wars against nature from farmers. No more expectations from eaters that we can produce food for next to nothing. We need food systems that seek nature’s permission and work in conjunction with the natural world.
Gabrielle Chan Why You Should Give a F*ck About Farming Penguin 2021 PB 320pp $34.99
Tracy Sorensen lives in Bathurst, surrounded by farming country. She is the author of The Lucky Galah (Picador, 2018) and was the 2020 Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. She is currently a PhD candidate at Charles Sturt University.
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