Caving into romanticised notions of the ancient farmers’ ways of old won’t give us the modern, climate-friendly agriculture we so desperately need, writes Lucy Kenningham

It’s a hard graft. In an age where slick marketing execs quibble about the number of days they are permitted to work from home, working on a farm – where you might have to do six days a week, rising at 5am to shovel cow dung – doesn’t tempt many. No wonder the agricultural profession is ageing: a third of farm managers are now over 65.

“There is no other profession that suffers such a mental load,” says head of the French farmers union, Philippe Bardy, and it is a horrifying fact that French farmers faced a steep uptick in suicide rates following the global financial crisis.

Worse, farmers are feeling under attack from net zero policies due to their industry being amongst the biggest polluters of both land and air. In the European Union, farming amounts to 14 per cent of the bloc’s emissions overall.

So it is an existential question for governments: how to sustain the hand that feeds us whilst penalising high-carbon industries. More, the EU has been enamoured........

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