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    Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain
    Unavailable
    Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain
    Unavailable
    Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain
    Ebook252 pages5 hours

    Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain

    By Charlie Pye-Smith

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Golden fields, ripening apples, lowing cattle: our idea of the landscape has been shaped by agriculture, as has the land itself. But in a fast-changing world, how does the great British countryside continue to provide the food we eat?Most people living in Britain today must go back several generations before they find an ancestor who worked on the land. How much do we really know about those who are supplying us with the most essential things in life: our daily bread and butter, meat and fish, fruit and vegetables?

    In Land of Plenty Charlie Pye-Smith travels the length and breadth of these isles to explore the little-understood world of British agriculture. From ultramodern indoor dairy units producing millions of litres of milk a year to small, old-fashioned farms making cheese with twenty or thirty cows, and from landowners whose families have farmed the same fields for centuries to tenants who have just joined the industry, Pye-Smith investigates the timeless connection between land and people in the twenty-first century.

    Revealing the dairy industry in Somerset and Gloucestershire; beef in the Scottish Borders; sheep in North Yorkshire; pigs and poultry in East Anglia and Hampshire; vegetables in Norfolk; and fruit in Essex and the West Country, Land of Plenty is a colourful and rewarding travelogue that gets to the very heart of modern British life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElliott & Thompson
    Release dateJul 27, 2017
    ISBN9781783963065
    Unavailable
    Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain
    Author

    Charlie Pye-Smith

    Charlie Pye-Smith is a writer and broadcaster who has contributed to the BBC, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and New Scientist, among others. He has written numerous books, including The Facts of Rural Life, The Other Nile, Travels in Nepal, Rebels and Outcasts, In Search of Wild India, Trees for Life and The Subsidy Scandal and he co-authored Working the Land and The Wealth of Communities. He is based in London and reports regularly on global farming and environmental issues for international research and development agencies.

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    Reviews for Land of Plenty

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Very interesting account of modern farming. Pye-Smith is aware of all the protests against modern farming methods and looks into them in the course of this book in which he travels around farms in a wide area of the British Isles enjoying the hospitality of his farming hosts. He has reported on farming for years and studied it academically. He finds animal welfare is not a simple story, modern systems are at least comfortable, if rather monotonous for the animals. By contrast intensive cereal growing gets clear condemnation. Its all replete with statistics and graced with attractive descriptions of the countryside.
    • 3/5
      When people think of farming though they tend to have a rose-tinted image of farmers and those that till the soil, seeing the fields of corn waving in the breeze and the farmer leaning over the gate looking at a field of cows. Most of us would need to go back several generations to find family members who worked as farm labourers, so our disconnect from the land that feeds us is more or less complete. And yet we have shaped the very landscape around us for the past five thousand years and one of the primary reasons behind this was to provide food for people to eat. These days though we have a split population; the majority have no clue where their foods originate from as they obtain all of it in packets from the supermarket and there is a minority who are fully aware of the source of their Sunday roast and may even know what its name was…

      Charlie Pye-Smith took a year travelling around the country in a motorhome to take the pulse of British farming. He meets with producers large and small, those who have farmed that patch for generations, new people who are driven by an ideal to produce better food and talks with the owners of some of the largest farms in the UK. The way that some of these people produce our cupboard staples, milk, bread, meats and drinks are all examined under his careful gaze. There is a critique of the system, that is allegedly driven by the consumer, but is actually controlled by the supermarket giants and how farmers are having to diversify just to keep their heads above water financially.

      We are supposedly nine meals from a breakdown in society, so we all have a critical interest in the way that our food is produced. Pye-Smith’s book does pass a sympathetic but critical eye over the process and actually meet the people who herd the sheep, make cider, grow hundreds of tonnes of potatoes and milk the cows. There are discussions about the Common Agricultural Policy that has provided subsidies and in some cases financial lifelines to farmers. He does touch briefly on the sustainability of the industry, but there was very little on the environmental havoc the industrial style of farming has wreaked in the pursuit of the lowest price and greatest profit. This is still a book that deserves a wider audience because of the subject matter, partly as people are far more interested in what they put in their mouths nowadays. It should also be used to open the debate about the food industry especially with the growing uncertainty in a post-Brexit Britain and all that entails.