Yorkshire food has never been so trendy, so let's value harvesters - Sarah Todd

Saturday Essay.
Pic: James Hardisty.Pic: James Hardisty.
Pic: James Hardisty.

THERE is a saying in our house that it’s either ‘feast or famine’ in the fridge and food cupboards.

At the moment provisions have fallen into the latter category and there has been plenty of digging around in the back of the freezer and tin opening.

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It’s The Son who has eaten us out of house and home; he’s working for a local farmer and takes enough sandwiches to feed a village hall full of vicars.

This correspondent’s bread and butter is writing for the farming press so there’s a solid understanding about the seasons and food production; but it’s still always a shock the hours that go into harvest.

As a girl growing up on a farm, the combine stopped as soon as there was a chill in the air at night.

Now, with modern high-tech corn drying systems, they keep going much later into the night.

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Straw is barely baled before the stubble fields are being cultivated.

Back in the day they seemed to lay empty long after the nights had drawn in.

I’m getting nostalgic now for galloping ponies up stubble fields and while the rose-tinted spectacles are on, gathering for the harvest festival.

It’s a sad testament to churches post-pandemic that many people don’t know if they are even open – let alone putting on a rendition of We Plough the Fields and Scatter.

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Harvest festival was always such a key part of the year; auctions of produce in village halls after the church service and mountains of homebaking for supper afterwards.

Back then, before the second homeowners, holiday cottages and move to the country brigade, villages had a beating rural heart.

I took a trip the other week to Northumberland to write a feature about a 1,300 acre upland farm.

The farmer made some good points about modern agricultural policy being all for reducing livestock numbers.

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He reminisced about the first summer when all his cows had been culled because of foot and mouth.

“Because there were no cows there were no cow pats and because of that there were no insects and then we noticed no swallows,” he recalled.

There is a lot of talk in the agricultural sector about rewilding (they’re even doing it on Radio 4’s The Archers) but this farmer was fearful that livestock is the glue that holds

the landscape and ecosystems together.

A proper mixture of different animals – one eating what the other turns its nose up at – does a much better job than somebody with shiny shoes and a clipboard peering into the undergrowth can ever hope to.

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There are different types of harvest of course, rather than just the arable one that The Son has been involved in.

It was sad to see this week that an asparagus and fruit farm in North Yorkshire had made the decision not to harvest its raspberries this year; the shortage of labour since the double whammy of Brexit and the pandemic making it unviable.

Rather than letting it rot on the canes the farmers have kindly invited local people in to help themselves.

Demand turned out to be so high, with hundreds of cars turning up at Ronda and Richard Morritt’s farm at Sand Hutton near York on Wednesday, that they had to appeal to people to stop coming and return another day.

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Mrs Morritt said they had not wanted the fruit to go to waste, adding: “We just thought we’d have 20 or 30 cars – but there were between 200 and 300 cars pulling in. It was absolute bedlam.”

She said they had totted up the costs of having European workers at the beginning of the pandemic last year and decided to try and hire locals instead.

While they had had enough workers wanting to pick asparagus in May, they had drawn a blank with raspberries – despite it being a job that would suit older people and offering part-time shifts.

“We only had four or five people interested,” she said. “People were saying today: ‘If I’d known I’d be offering a day’– it’s too late now.”

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There is a sad irony that while food has never been more trendy – sure this isn’t the right word and labels its writer as an old fogey – there is still such a disconnect between beautifully presented food on the shelf and further down the chain at the actual growing, picking and packing end.

Scrummy clean fruit and vegetables, perhaps displayed in a vintage wooden box with a string of bunting above in an upmarket farm shop or supermarket, have had to be picked.

A light needs to be shone on the huge void in understanding between farmers, growers and consumers.

Packets of flour or delicatessen-standard pastries have involved a hungry lad leading the tractor and trailer of corn and then, in a few weeks, ploughing the land for the seed and starting all over again.

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The “absolutely amazing” beef burgers from a food festival or farmers’ market have involved years of breeding, feeding, death and disaster – there’s always deadstock wherever there’s livestock – and so much more.

It’s nothing new, but there is still a feeling that manual farm work is somehow a poor career choice.

Several mothers have looked down their noses when it’s come out in conversation – perhaps in a food aisle of the supermarket – about our youngest’s summer job.

Yes, the world needs brain surgeons and computer experts but let’s start and put more value as a society on those who work with their hands; the harvesters. Not just farmers, but all the trades.

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The world has too many people on flexi-time tapping computer keys and never answering their telephones.

Now, back to finding some bread to make those sandwiches …

Sarah Todd is a former editor of Yorkshire Life magazine. She is a farmer’s daughter, mother and journalist who specialises in country life.