Mending a broken farm

Reflections on nearly 9 years of being on this farm — and thinking with Gargi Bhattacharyya's exploration of being heartbroken — and what that means for my own positionality as a writer and researcher

Last week I spent some time mending fences. And I’m not talking about the literal fencing that I did with a friend, I’m speaking figuratively about mending my own relationship with our own farm. I realise I don’t talk about that on here and it might be useful to acknowledge, what is called in social research literature, ‘positionality’. According to the Social Research Association, it is, ‘our understanding of ourselves, of who we are and what we bring to our research.’

Gargi Bhattacharyya has a short book called, ‘We, The Heartbroken’ and it’s from this perspective that I want to write about — as this is the place I come from in my research and work more broadly. For me, it’s one of the reasons why I can both empathise and sympathise with farmers as someone who has tried and failed. As someone who came into farming with a lot of hubris and high ideas — and was pretty quickly humbled. The reality for me is that farming pushed me way beyond what I could handle and the stress of it pushed me right to the very edge and broke me in multiple ways.

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We used to run a small, calf-at-foot style microdairy, along with grass-fed beef, pigs and free range hens. For a bunch of reasons it didn’t work out and in no small part down to biting off more than we could chew. I can look back and lament bad decisions of which there were plenty enough, but also a dose of bad luck and circumstances beyond our control. Adapting to the workload of being parents was hard enough, but throw in a pandemic, then losing all childcare support and me getting sick with Long Covid for a few years, and very quickly any dream of making the farm work evaporated.

There was a brief moment actually with our sales ramping up thanks to the rebound to local shopping that occurred in the countryside during 2020, but then every other dairy farm put in a vending machine, and soon the novelty of a trip out visiting the local farm shop wore off for most. But worse than this, just a few months after switching to deliveries, the cost of living crisis really kicked off along with the government allowing utility companies to price gouge their customers. Our electricity bill shot up and for a while we were paying £1000 a month, which wasn’t sustainable. The cost of living crisis meant people understandably didn’t want to pay more for their basics like they were with us and they stopped buying the little extras we used to sell like local sourdough and croissants and the like. It was a harsh but necessary lesson in cold economics and business under capitalism. This is why a materialist theory like Marxism made so much sense to me.

This is a very quick recap of a story that was at times excruciating, but these days I don’t feel the need to put everything on the internet, so I’ll cut some of the details and you’ll just have to take my word that the stress kept me up at night. To put it mildly, I learned that farming was very hard and I still feel heartbroken that it didn’t work out for us.

That brings us back to Bhattacharyya. They have some incredible lines in the first chapter to the book. They say:

‘I don't believe we can build a different, better world without being heartbroken […] Almost nowhere do we say to each other, we must travel with our sadness because every dream of a new world requires us to understand we have been broken by the old […] Because it is only we, the heartbroken, who can truly battle and long for a world where no-one ever feels like this again.’

As soon as I read that it just hit the right place. Of course we don’t want to recognise the ways we’re heartbroken, it’s painful and there is supposed to be meaning and order. But sometimes shit happens and we are forced to react. And if there’s an afterwards we get a chance to take that forward in some way, which I guess does salvage meaning for ourselves at least. They suggest that it is only in our collective heartbrokenness that we can come together. Summed up when they talk about how ‘brokenheartedness thins our skins so we become open to others’.

These lines also bring to mind some words in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which have stuck with me, where Shevek says, against the idea that love is what connects us, ‘It is our suffering that brings us together.’ And on the flipside, our rejection of common suffering is what drives us apart. The last five years have confirmed this idea for me.

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Since we stopped milking 18 months ago (personally not milked a cow in like 3 years now), after about 6 years of doing so, I’ve found myself avoiding wanting to walk around the farm at all. Of course, we’re lucky we’re still here, and didn’t have to sell up. Many times over the last couple of years I’ve wanted to sell up, but fought through those feelings.

When you walk around you see that the old Dutch barn, the one in the image above, where we had our wedding party, has now blown down in successive big storms. A continual source of sadness and shame when I look at it, so I try not to, but then I also need to get it sorted ASAP.

You see the cold line of steel milking clusters, still splashed in shit, swinging from their hanging spot after the final milking. The pit where you stood is still unclean. The door to the tank room has been blown off its hinges by the wind. There are still a few steel milk churns standing outside in the elements, abandoned from the last day of deliveries. An old rotted bale of hay is stood decaying in the feed passage. The double doors to the old farm shop also blew off in a gale, so that too has been left exposed to the seasons, with the ‘shop’ becoming a place where items are left and forgotten about. The back room, where originally we used to bottle milk, has been absolutely trashed — one night a sow broke out and ended up in there overnight. There are gates half broken, fences falling apart, and piles of farm rubbish to take to the tip.

The reason I have avoided wandering the farm for the last 18 months is partly the reminder of how much work there is sorting the place out but mostly that I can’t bear to be reminded of the failure. I walk around and I see no future, only the broken past of unfulfilled desire.

So those lines of Bhattacharyya, they don’t fix the fences or tidy the farm, but they do help me understand how I feel and why I am doing what I do — both in the sense of avoiding the farm but also in the work I am now doing. Both are trying to mend a broken heart in different ways. It’s for these reasons I can empathise and sympathise with farmers, even if, as you might see from my writing, I try not to romanticise farming nor suggest it’s about returning to mythical past better times. We can only move forwards, but only if we have the stomach for it. And sometimes we can only handle so much at once and retreat is also an important part of being able to later, eventually, progress. For a long time I pressed ahead on the farm, when what was needed was more time to reflect and reconsider. As they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

And until last week and doing the fencing with a mate, I’m not sure I had the stomach for it. There was still no future of this farm for me. Funnily enough, the night before I thought about whether we should get rid of some of our fields, because whilst we are still managing it — we still have 20 cattle and 3 ponies — I hate not seeing it being farmed as well as it should be. I have this belief that farms should be farmed — there’s too many that have been stripped of that heritage and reduced to tourist enclaves or left in ruins. When we moved here our intention was always to make our living from food production. That didn’t work out, but I am learning that farming can still continue here.

This is the position I write from. I will never know what it’s like to have the weight of past generations weighing down on you like so many do who take on the family farm. The burden of that is real — I’ve seen it too in those whose parents had to give it up, and how that sense of responsibility never leaves them. It can be paralysing and suffocating for them, from the little I see on the outside.

And really my positionality, beyond this heartbroken sense of wanting to help play a small role in healing a deeply broken world, is one of being a insider-outsider. I’ve experienced a fraction of it from the inside, but I am and will always be an outsider too. What I no longer wish to be is a stranger on our own farm at least. I realise the privilege of such a position, a reason why I focus a good chunk of my work on land reform and the position of farm workers. But I would like to no longer feel an outsider here, and that will mean having a sense of the future again. As I carry out visits to farms as part of my research interviewing farmers, I am realising now that I am maybe trying to rekindle that fire I had when I first came into farming 10 years ago.

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If you don’t want to read the whole book, this article by Bhattacharyya is a good encapsulation of it: https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/we-the-heartbroken/