Aggro over agriculture

The mortal decline of farming in Britain has been rehearsed a few times since the end of peasant subsistence when agricultural "improvement" created Goldsmith's socially devastated countryside "where wealth accumulates and men decay".

Repeal of the Corn Laws in the mid-19th century brought a flood of imported grain and refrigerated meat and butter - the basis of the Cheap Food Policy. Whole areas of arable Britain became scrub deserts and thousands of farmers and their workers left the land. The two world wars of the 20th century set off frenzies of home production, but bracketed 20 years of collapse and dilapidation - the worst slump, as Andrew O'Hagan notes, until the present one.

As he proclaims the end of British farming "in any of its traditional forms", one begins to wonder when, exactly, conditions were stable for long enough to shape traditions, or sufficiently free of manipulation to correspond with any durable reality.

Yet some convincing image must have held farming "at the centre of who British people think they are" - that is, of course, the native, monocultural Britons reared on Christmas cards of Constable's hay-wains, and the rest of what O'Hagan agrees is "all rot, of course, but lovely rot..."

His book is slim, tiny, truly pocket-sized and perfect for carrying around for arguments in pubs. It could, indeed, have been flourished to effect in the closing days of the British election campaign, when O'Hagan's barbed quote from Cobbett would have taken on a certain aptness: "The system of managing the affairs of the nation has made all flashy and false, and has put all things out of their place ..."

The essay appeared initially in the London Review of Books, a more predictable context for one of Britain's most interesting young writers. By one of those chances which can overtake journalism and make it something more, he had already spent eight months travelling the UK, talking to farmers, when foot-and-mouth and its mountains of burning livestock cast the whole farming scene in a new and lurid light.

The pages of the book that must endure are his brief narrative of a farm cull in Lockerbie in Scotland, at which he was present, disguised as a labourer. The inherent horror is heightened by the dialogue of the killer gang, transformed by their necessary rituals into brutish and foul-mouthed mercenaries.

O'Hagan has nothing very new to offer in long-term explanation of the plunge in Britain's farming fortunes, but he draws the threads together in a convincing narrative that even unsympathetic urbanites may be prepared to absorb. Its modern chapter begins in the fever of wartime productivity, continued at unsustainable cost - not least to the landscape and wildlife of the British countryside.

It ends with farmers heading into an almost feudal subservience to the supermarket chains and the GM patents of transnational corporations. Their frequent sense of failure, so sensitively charted here, isolates much of what was special in farming as a way of life: the precious illusion of choice.

Could it happen here? Not only could, but will, as globalised and processed food heads the way of T-shirts and trainers - made where costs are lowest. Spared Britain's mesmerising traumas of BSE and FMD, Ireland's farmers have a space in which to try to take hold of their future. This little fistful of a book may help in thinking over things to do differently.

Michael Viney is an author and an Irish Times columnist