In a moment of crisis for the industry, Heather Wildman tours the country helping farmers face up to the toughest of questions – not just about the future of their business, but about their family, their identity and even their mortality.
First published as a Guardian Long Read on 9th Jan 2024
I was asked to take some photographs for an exhibition on the theme of diversity for the January 2024 Oxford Farming Conference – ‘diversity’ meaning both social diversity, and diversity of farming enterprise. It was a treat of a job, an excuse to wander the length of Britain talking to and photographing extraordinary people. What began as a continuation of the images I’d already taken while researching Field Work billowed out into something closer to a record of farming now. Here’s a few.
At the Three Counties Show, the shearing competition is in full swing. Tucked into one corner of the vast showground in Malvern, Worcestershire, is a stage into which are fitted six little booths like the starting gates on a racecourse. Each one has a number, a chalked-up name and an electrical point into which the competitors fit their shears. Six men line up and on the signal each one opens the gate, extracts a sheep, flips it on to its back, wedges its head between their thighs, bends over and starts shearing, belly first. The ewes do not seem quite as happy with this arrangement as the audience does.
Each shearer is trying to remove the fleece as quick and clean as pulling off a jersey, no nicks or cuts, and no more than three minutes per sheep (the current British record stands at 30 seconds).
If the bureaucrats and the incomers saw this place horizontally then Bert saw it vertically. Down through the soil and deep through the generations. He saw the boundaries between his land and the next with the same us-and-them finality a Londoner might see the hidden borders of gang territories. This field here, this tree, this beast, was as intimate to him as family, but that field there belonging to his neighbour, that was foreign land, as far from him as the Arctic. This was home, that was away. For him, Rise wasn’t an income or a classification or a family or a business or a job. It was everything.
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