Thoughts on “Rooted” by Sarah Langford
Recently, I have been discovering farming. Or, should I say, rediscovering farming. Ever since I was a small boy, I knew what a plough did and where eggs came from. But, of late, I have been going deeper, trying to understand what farming and farmers are all about.
It is deeply alarming.
Farming is part of the food business, which is a very big business indeed. Like all big businesses, the people who actually produce the product get very little respect. Think of the people working in Asia workshops to produce your shoes, clothes and mobile phones. Most food in the UK is sold through supermarkets, and the big chains are notoriously mean when it comes to paying their suppliers. Supermarkets pay less for milk than it costs to produce. Late delivery from farms is punished by non-payment. Vegetables that are not aesthetically pleasing are rejected and not paid-for obviously.
So, who on Earth would want to be a farmer? Sarah Langford, for one.
Langford grew up in a farming family, but like many young people from such a background, she decided to seek her fortune in the city. She became a criminal barrister and achieved her dream of being “clever, powerful and important”. But then the combination of a young family, her husband losing his job, and an unfinished house renovation pushed her back into the countryside, into a cottage near her farming in-laws. She ended up taking on the running of the farm, and Rooted is about her rediscovering her roots and encountering the realities of running a farm in the 21st century.
These realities are brutal. I have mentioned the supermarkets. Government bureaucracy means hours spent filling forms and learning rules. The qualifications for public money often require farmers to engage in nonsensical activities to receive much-needed payments. Climate change is disrupting the very seasonal stability on which farming depends. If a crop fails, because of unseasonal conditions or new pests benefiting from climate change, not only is the value of the crop lost, but also the investment in ploughing, seeds, fertilisers and time. All gone.
And yet, farming allows you to become part of the magic of the seasons, growth and harvest. The barren fields and hedgerows of winter give way to the first shoots and buds of spring. Then in summer, the land is truly transformed by leafy trees, vibrant hedgerows, abundant crops and nodding wildflowers. It is this alchemical transformation that fascinates Langford, and this is what drew her back to farming.
So she writes about the scent of hay, the majesty of a barn owl, and her sons learning to walk in a ploughed field. But she does not spare her reader the disappointments, the bone-chilling cold, the familiarity with death, or the frustration of “how it’s always been done” in the face of the overwhelming need for change.
The greatest strength of the book is the historical contextualisation of farming. For centuries, farmers worked with tried and tested methods. Over the generations, farmers had worked out how to use their land and also preserve its productivity. These were essential, hard-won skills. The Second World War disrupted all this. The government demanded that farmers feed the nation by producing as much as possible. This is not the best way to treat land, but understandable in the dire circumstances. After the war, new technologies became available that turned farms into intensive industries. But these technologies are expensive and farming has become financially precarious. Climate change and unstable government policy, especially post-Brexit have made matters worse.
Langford points out that in many ways, the answers to these contemporary problems lie in the past. To function effectively, the soil must be alive. The life of the soil makes it more resilient and more able to deal with climate change. Living soil produces more nutritious food. Today, we call this approach “regenerative”. To farmers of the past, it was simply farming.
Langford’s journey is from farm girl to barrister, to mother, to farmer, to advocate of newly recovered principles of farming. It’s an inspiring journey, because it shows that something as bound in tradition, perilous and economically dysfunctional as farming can be redeemed if its practitioners are willing to pause, listen, learn and change their ways.
Rooted is a beautifully written and researched book. It is also written with a great deal of love. Love for her family and the land. I stayed up reading it until the volume was slipping from my sleepy fingers because it is just so darn good.
