This farmer refuses to sit on the fence

MOST people in Britain no longer understand the countryside, says Grant Burton. We are a nation of urbanites who fail to cherish the differences between town and country. "We have turned the villages into something resembling urban areas. Even people with friends and relatives who live in the villages don't understand what the rural life is like," he says.

That ignorance is reflected in the Government. "They are completely out of touch with rural matters and, indeed, with small businesses," the farmer adds.

"The Government is made up of lawyers or teachers or full-time councillors who have never actually organised the proverbial party in a brewery."

He is warming to the theme. "It seems to be their concept of sorting things out to launch yet another inquiry, rather than acknowledge what's really going on.

"We have 11 inquiries into foot and mouth. The inquiry into the BSE crisis cost £30 million, took three years and didn't tell us anything we didn't already know."

Trenchant views. And Evening Press readers are to be treated to more of Grant's forthright opinions in the coming weeks.

Bryan Marlowe has vacated the Tuesday column after two-and-a-half years to move on to pastures new. Readers will miss Bryan's distinctive outlook on a changing world, always expressed with warmth, wit and wisdom.

In his place, Grant is bringing a breath of country air to Tuesdays. A battle is underway to preserve Britain's rural way of life, and he will pen his column from the front line.

Few can claim to be more immersed in rural affairs. With his brother Mark, Grant runs the 280-acre Manor House Farm at Wilberfoss. They have a herd of 370 sows and also grow sugar beet, potatoes and cereal.

Mum and dad John and Marjorie are still very much involved in the business. John is often to be found ploughing, even though he's 83 next birthday.

The Burton farming lineage can be traced back 100 years to when Grant's great grandfather left his butcher's shop in Lawrence Street, York, and bought part of the land that is now Manor House Farm.

Grant, 50, has happy memories of growing up on the farm. "We had no worries about traffic, no worries about security or safety. We were able to go out and play on the farm and ride about in a way you probably wouldn't allow children to do these days."

Grant is not married and has no children, while Mark and wife Moira have two, John, 13, and 11-year-old Sarah. Whether they go into the family business is up to them.

Neither Grant nor Mark went straight into farming. After leaving school, Mark joined the Army, training at Sandhurst.

Grant, meanwhile, graduated in economics at Nottingham University before joining the truck and bus division of British Leyland, in Leyland, Lancashire, as an accountant.

Back then, in the early Seventies, Leyland employed 14,000. But soon it was in trouble and, fed up of the "music hall" of Leyland management, he came closer to home with a job doing the books for a Yorkshire farmers' co-operative.

At this time, Grant was becoming increasingly attracted to the idea of farming as a career. When he left the co-op in 1984, he decided to take the plunge. If he gave it five years and it didn't work out, he would still be under 40. Seventeen years later he is still farming.

He does not regret the many years he spent in other businesses. "It gives you a better perspective on the problems you are going to meet. You find that farmers are not uniquely badly off, although they think they are sometimes. When I tell them they are not, they don't like it, but there you are."

The main changes in agriculture in his lifetime are that "farms are bigger and there aren't as many people on them". They are safer, but lonelier, places to work. Some farmers now do the whole job alone.

"That's one of the reasons in my view that farmer suicides are higher than the national average. You don't get much companionship. It is a solitary activity."

The Burtons employ two men on their farm "much to the bank's annoyance". Economically, life at Manor House Farm "isn't very good. Pigs are better than they were: we shall make a bit of money out of pigs but nothing to get excited about".

But prices for arable crops are on the floor: feed barley has dropped from £100 to £65 a ton; potatoes are now £70 a ton whereas they were £80 and more. How do farmers cope?

"You just tighten your belt. What people tend to do is try to increase yields to compensate. It's perverse.

"Most industries when they're losing money at something would stop doing it. Farmers tend to do more to try to get back to where they were."

Europe's notorious Common Agricultural Policy is "a bureaucratic monstrosity," says Grant.

"It's organised in a way, it seems to me, to give the maximum number of jobs to the maximum number of civil servants."

The policy needs an overhaul, but should not be scrapped unless America abandons its huge agricultural subsidies, Grant adds.

In recent years, Britain's farmers have been hit by a series of blows: the continuing strength of the pound, BSE, swine fever and now foot and mouth disease. Grant, former county chairman of the National Farmers' Union, believes foot and mouth is continuing to cause havoc because "we didn't tackle it with enough vigour early on".

The Government also failed to learn lessons from the investigation into the 1967 outbreak, which underlines his point about the value of public inquiries.

He has mixed feelings about the chairman of Northern Foods who has been appointed Tony Blair's rural recovery co-ordinator.

"Lord Haskins is a very amusing character," he says, with a sardonic smile. "We get this message that we should be more like the French and sell produce at the little markets - a view I don't disagree with. I go to farmers' markets very regularly - but he's chairman of the company that has forced farmers into industrialised production methods more than almost any other."

Grant's concerns are by no means restricted to farming. He fears for the future of rural communities unless long-term decline is reversed. Shops and schools are disappearing from the countryside fast, and the sense of community is being weakened.

"Because people work out of the villages they tend to have their recreation out of the villages," he said.

With so much to say, Grant is looking forward to being a weekly Evening Press columnist.

He awaits your reaction with interest - and a little trepidation.

"I've a friend who does a certain amount of radio and television work in Northumberland.

"He regularly gets told by farmers that he's wrong, and by the public that he's wrong.

"Perhaps I will get the same response!"

- Grant Burton's column will appear in the Evening Press every Tuesday

Updated: 14:13 Friday, August 31, 2001