At a recent farm open day, a farmer was explaining how he reduces the need for pesticides. He said:
“Our method nurtures both the good and the bad, to bring it all back into balance.”
I do not suppose this man thinks of himself as a holy man. Perhaps he does not yet realise that, in his own way, he is one.
He was describing the relationship between the predators and prey that live among the crops. His method is not simply to destroy every beetle, wasp or other creature that appears troublesome. It is to preserve the whole living system and allow its natural relationships to reassert themselves.
Remove the predators and the crop-destroying pests multiply unchecked. Eradicate the pests completely and the predators lose their food and disappear. By sustaining both, the farmer restores a balance that protects the crop without relying entirely upon artificial chemicals.
Is this not the wisdom of a holy man? The etymology of the term holy means: to heal. A healer. Can his kind of words be used to heal our nation?
I tried - probably rather uselessly - to explain that what he had said struck me as something close to a prayer or parable. He was not persuaded.
His words stayed with me though.
The Holy Spirit - or, for those who are not religious, whatever it is within us that recognises and acts upon the good, is not confined to churches or doctrines. I'm not religious myself, but I find the following is a compelling thought.
There is a spark of the original source within all of us. Religion is not necessarily required to bring it forward; sometimes, like the farmer, careful observation of life is enough. What matters is whether we bring forward what is best within us. What remains buried or denied may eventually become destructive.
This is not an argument for or against religion. Religion, like political power or knowledge itself, becomes what human beings make of it. And what are we making of political power as citizens of Britain today?
There is much about farmers and farming that Britain has neglected. Farming remains unusually close to the fundamental sources of life: soil, water, weather, birth, growth, death and renewal. Farmers do not merely occupy the land. At their best, they nurture it and hold it in trust for those who will follow.
A farmer must think beyond the immediate moment. The fertility of the soil must survive this year’s harvest. Resources must remain available for the next generation. Sudden changes in weather, disease and markets must be anticipated. The farm must endure after its present custodian is gone.
That gives farming a perspective increasingly absent from a society preoccupied with immediate consumption and individual gratification. While much of modern life teaches us to ask, “What can I take now?”, farming repeatedly asks, “What must I preserve for those who come next?”
I call this modern pathology - indigenous decadence. The forgetting of where we come from and where we are going, in exchange for cosy selfish satisfactions. Not just in wealth terms, but with our heritage and who we are as a nation.
For me, farming is a useful exposition of the story of our national heritage and our ancient spiritual character. Farmers are among the people closest to the sources of who we are: the land that sustains us, the inheritance handed down to us and future generations for whom we are responsible and will be held accountable by.
Yet since the war, successive governments have too often treated farming as something to be managed from above rather than an inheritance to be defended and renewed. Farmers have been burdened by unstable policy, distant bureaucracy and decisions made by people with little understanding of the land or of the long timescales upon which farming depends.
We have neglected the people who have proven historically they practise stewardship while in our great cities we increasingly worship at the altar of the self and cult ideologies.
So what is my political point?
Farmers, farming families and the wider rural communities around them constitute an important and badly neglected part of the electorate. But this is about more than securing a voting bloc. A country that cannot protect its food production, care for its land or enable one generation to pass a viable farm to the next has lost sight of its own survival in ways beyond the boundaries of a farm.
I intend to put the condition of British farming at the forefront of policymaking within the party and at the heart of the campaign to restore this nations heritage and spiritual foundation.
The ambition should not merely be to prevent the further decline of British farming. It should be to release farmers from policies that obstruct what they do best: producing food, caring for the countryside, building resilient businesses and preserving the land for generations to come.
For farming is the primary production process - without it, nothing else can be made. So we should not regard our farmers as a declining remnant of the past. They will be among the architects of Britain’s future.