There was a time when the estate of Pilsdon Manor stretched right across Marshwood Vale, one thousand verdant acres of it. Many labourers and their families must have been dependent on their work upon this land, farming, keeping livestock, managing woodland. Their lives would have been intimately linked with the seasons and the weather. When Percy and Gaynor Smith bought Pilsdon Manor in 1958 for five thousand pounds and formed the Pilsdon community, its land extended to no more than ten acres, its former possessions now a patchwork of sprawling farms and tiny hamlets.
Having been immersed in the world of software for the last fourteen years whilst living in the centre of the largest city in Europe, it’s fair to say that land, both the working of it and the ownership of it, has not been foremost on my mind. The closest I got to farming was attempting to grow a sunflower on my balcony. I have never even owned a house let alone a smallholding; had I ever got round to buying a London property the chances are it would be leasehold so the land it sat on would not be mine, and given enough time would revert back to the landowner anyway. Land for me was open spaces, mountains and wildernesses, breathtaking in their splendour and diversity. Places to trek through but never to remain in.
Since leaving London I have been learning to reconnect with land. To see it not just as something to be admired for its beauty but also as the means by which we all carry on living. It provides us with all our nourishment and gives us the materials we use to build our homes and factories. All technological advances whether medical, industrial or hi-tech have depended upon some raw element that the earth provided.
Particularly in developed countries the vast majority of us have, over the last few centuries, left the land. In the UK only 1.52% of our workforce is in agriculture. Across the world agribusinesses, heavily dependent on fossil fuels to power the machinery, are providing us with most of our food. They rely on artificial fertilisers and pesticides which produce high yield crops but are draining the soil of its innate nutrients and are themselves the products of oil-reliant technological processes. In many places in the world agribusinesses are depleting aquifers and water tables at an unsustainable rate. Water itself is becoming a precious commodity. It doesn’t require a large stretch of the imagination to see nations coming into conflict over water to protect their food security.
For those wishing to cut out these environmentally-damaging middle men and simply grow their own food, finding some land to grow it on is the problem. In Britain land prices are rising rapidly as canny investors switch from volatile shares to the relative safety of a parcel of land, thus shutting out most of us who can no longer afford it. Even those who do manage to do so, perhaps by clubbing together, are prevented from living on it by our strict planning regulations. There is one bunch of people in Wales called Lammas who have, after a couple of exhausting years of applications, appeals and court cases, managed to get temporary permission to build some low impact dwellings on their land, but can only keep them if they can prove within five years they can make 75% of their income from their plots. And this in a county (Pembrokeshire) which, alone amongst all British counties, actually has a comprehensive “Low Impact Development” policy.
The cheesemaker at Monkton Wyld, Simon Fairlie, who we at Pilsdon have been supplying milk in return for cheese, is better known as the country’s leading expert in land rights. His organisation, Chapter 7, lobbies for changes to the law to allow people to live on and work their land in a low-impact way. He is also the editor of an excellent magazine called The Land which highlights many issues about land ownership. I’ve recently become aware of a European-wide group called Reclaim the Fields (the UK branch is here), linked with the global Via Campesina movement, seeking alternatives to the corporate control of agricultural land and seeds.
A quick update on baby River to wrap up. He has had his first taste of real food (some banana) and a tooth is beginning to appear on his lower gum. He has also begun to enliven our breakfasts with singing, which takes the form of a series of piercing shouts.
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