February 25
There’s a song ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’. It’s not accurate. Take Hannah Hauxwell for example: she single handedly managed her family hill-farm in the North Yorkshire Pennines from the death of her parents when she was 35 to her retirement, at the age of 62. She had no husband, and said she never wanted one. Made famous by a number of TV documentaries, highlighting the extremely hard life she endured – tending her cattle through bitter winters, without electricity or running water – she was invited as Guest of Honour to a ‘Woman of the Year’ Gala in London and met the Duchess of Gloucester.
Subsequently she travelled throughout Europe and the USA as a ‘celebrity’ due to the popular perception of her life as a woman farmer. Of course, worldwide – particularly in less urbanised countries – women are often the owners and operators of family farms, but western cityfolk always assumed women haven’t the strength for being farmers. That’s wrong! Not only have mechanisation and technological advances reduced the need for the type of strength viewed as the characteristic of men, but women tend to have greater stamina: the kind of endurance and persistence Hannah Hauxwell exemplified.
Without a family to take over her farm, Hannah sold up when she retired. The continuity of farming needs mothers, and it’s especially true in animal husbandry. Whether it’s cattle, pigs or sheep, the herds and flocks are made up of female animals without requirement for bulls, boars and rams to start the breeding process. Indeed, male animals themselves ae often redundant due to the availability of artificial insemination.
Last month it became something of an issue when a Gloucestershire County Councillor suggested people should drink oat milk instead of dairy milk in their tea and coffee. Justifiably dairy farmers pointed out that they ought to be able to rely upon the support of local representatives – the farmer who spoke on the BBC TV news was a woman, and that shouldn’t be a surprise, since from 2014 to 2018 Minette Batters was deputy President of the National Farmers’ Union, then became President, and was re-elected for two further two-year terms until last year when she was appointed to a life peerage in the House of Lords. Baroness Batters is a tenant farmer, with a 300 acre mixed farm in Downton, Wiltshire, and is a crossbencher in the Lords. She has been Deputy Lieutenant in Wiltshire, appointed in 2021, and has been prominent in criticising the likely outcome of the current government’s intention to impose inheritance tax on the heirs of family farms.
There’s been a tendency for the popular image of farmers to reflect the old system of feudal land ownership. Although ‘gentleman farmers’ still own about 30% of the 60 million acres estimated to be in UK agricultural use, according to Farmers’ Weekly research published two years ago, corporations and tycoons own over 35%. There are private investors too, from Denmark’s richest man, Anders Holch Povisen, to the ruling Sheikh of Dubal and industrialists from the USA and other multinational organisations, who may be the potential buyers of any land sold by the heirs of family farms, forced to sell to pay inheritance tax. Perhaps we’ll face a similar situation to that we’ve already seen with utilities and transport companies.
Where’s farming going? We must place our hope in the trend we see in the rapid growth of women’s new blood entering agriculture. Already women students of agricultural sciences outnumber males. They can do the job, and they seem far more ready to do so than our young men.
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