Inspired by the Levellers (not the band) Ed Hamer's radical vision of farming involves a commitment to making the land work for the people. And it helps to have a big horse
Chagford is about as lovely a village as you could ever hope to find. It's almost absurdly picturesque with its ancient stone buildings and village green bounded by fields and streams and the wild, dark hills of Dartmoor looming overhead. It's hard to imagine how it could be any lovelier. And then Samson comes clip-clopping down the road pulling a cart loaded with freshly picked organic produce.
Honestly. It's so ridiculously bucolic that I expect Miss Marple to come flying around the corner on a bicycle. What's more, walking down the road, at Samson's side, with his owner, Ed Hamer, I have a small taste of what life must be like as a supermodel. People slow down. They smile. They wave. They seem genuinely delighted to see me, or at least Samson. Everybody loves Samson, a handsome four-year-old Welsh cob cross Dartmoor pony. Ed grew up in Chagford and so although the route from his field to our destination is only a mile, we have to stop for half a dozen conversations and for Samson to have his nose repeatedly petted.
"Samson is our secret weapon," says Hamer. "When we first started out two years ago, we only had 10 subscribers, but that doubled overnight the first time we took him on the delivery run. Everybody just wanted to know what we were doing."
What Hamer and his fellow farmer, Chinnie Kingsbury, are doing is a "Community Supported Agriculture" project called Chagfood. It's a vegetable box scheme that aims to grow and deliver seasonal food within the community, for the community. Members pay �290 a year, upfront, to become shareholders, which equates to one box of veg a week. The idea is that, by paying upfront, they share in both the rewards and the risks of farming: if there's a glut of carrots one week, there will be extra in the box. And if they can't get anything out of the ground because of a hard frost, as has happened for the last two winters, there may not be anything at all unless they come down to help. As well as Chagford, Ed has customers in nearby Lustleigh and Drewsteignton.
On a Thursday morning, box-packing day, there's a collection of volunteers cutting chard, and weighing salad leaves and heaping flowers into rustic bunches, a vision of natural bounty that's merely underlined by the small babies crawling around (one of them Ed and Yssy's six-month-old, Jude). Some of the volunteers are shareholders and some just come "because it's a lovely place to hang out". After tea and cake, the produce is packed into handmade wooden boxes and loaded on to the cart. Samson is haltered, and I set off with Ed to the drop-off point in the village from where the subscribers will come to collect them.
My suspicion was that Samson's real purpose was to give the project a rural cute factor, but this was before I met Ed and realised that this isn't some whimsical hobby, it's part of a greater philosophical framework. He's a boyish 29 years old, and might not look like much of a revolutionary, hanging out, growing cabbage and onions in a field in Devon, but he's a proper ideologue. On the one hand, Chagfood is about providing local, sustainable, seasonable produce, but it's also part of his wider mission: extending land rights for all.
As well as the market garden in Chagford, which he set up with his wife Yssy, and Chinnie, he's also the co-editor of the Land, "An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights" founded by the veteran land campaigner Simon Fairlie. It's a handsome publication, with specially commissioned woodcuts in place of photos.
"Rome fell; the Soviet Empire collapsed; the stars and stripes are fading in the west," reads the manifesto. "Nothing is forever in history, except geography. Capitalism is a confidence trick, a dazzling edifice built on paper promises. It may stand longer than some of us anticipate, but when it crumbles, the land will remain."
The magazine and the movement behind it are explicitly inspired by the Levellers and the Diggers, the 17th-century rural rebels who led the fight against Enclosure, and it's not a coincidence that Land is a print rather than a digital publication ? Luddism also looms large ? and is "written by and for people who believe that the roots of justice, freedom, social security and democracy lie not so much in access to money, or to the ballot box, as in access to land and its resources."
If this sounds slightly dry, the reality is anything but. Hamer grew up in Chagford "and I wanted to remain in the area but there's no way I could afford to buy here". His parents are teachers, who were lured to Devon in the 70s after graduating from art school in London, and he worked on farms as a teenager learning hedge laying and coppicing and everything else. But in Devon, as elsewhere, smallholdings are now so expensive they're bought by downsizing bankers rather than young would-be farmers (Chagford even boasts its own celebrity residents: Jennifer Saunders and Adrian Edmondson) and what this means is that the likes of Ed and his classmates are struggling to find a way to stay in the place they grew up in.
"As a teenager I was working for people who'd bought their farms in the 60s and 70s on a mortgage and then paid back the mortgage themselves through hard work and determination. Whereas in the last 10 to 15 years that's become completely out of our reach."
Even the smallest smallholding now fetches half a million pounds and not only does it prevent local people from staying in the area, it also means swaths of land now lie empty and unproductive. "One of the things that makes me angriest is people coming down here and buying the land and then sticking a couple of ponies on it. Farmland standing idle is one of the biggest crimes we've got when we're importing 40% of our food.
"There are so many things that local authorities could do. In France, neighbours get first refusal on the land. And you can't buy farmland unless you are going to farm it. Which to me is very easy to implement but it isn't, largely because the Conservative party have no interest in alienating the landowners who vote them in."
Which is where Chagfood comes in. It's just two rented fields: Samson lives on one, the other is ploughed and planted. And one of the purposes of it is to prove that it is possible to make a living from the land in a low-tech, sustainable way. "We've had to use our initiative because we've had no other choice, but we're trying to prove a three-acre plot can support two full-time farmers." Two years ago, a thinktank, the New Economics Foundation came to Chagford and organised a meeting with farmers and residents and the landless young like Ed, and "one of the things that came out of this was that people wanted locally grown produce so I put my hand up and took it on," says Ed. They managed to swing a grant from the lottery which started them off, and he and Chinnie are being paid for two and a half days a week "and working at least five" but they're hoping to be financially self-sufficient from next spring. "We need to get 60 subscribers and if we don't we'll still do it. We'll just be paid less."
And Samson is a key part of his philosophy. "We do 90% of the cultivation and tillage with the horse." It was while working as a journalist for the Ecologist magazine that Ed first got interested in horse farming: "I learned about peak oil, and how we are dependent on oil for our farming. And also about how traditional skills are dying out. If our generation doesn't learn them, then that's it, they're gone forever, so that was a key thing for me. And thirdly, using a horse improves the health of our soil."
Having established that he wanted to farm with horses, he persuaded one of the few horse farmers in Britain to take him on as an apprentice for a year, and then bought Samson and broke him in. But then Ed is nothing but dogged. There's a beautiful wooden gypsy caravan in the corner of the field that he built after he finished university in Bangor, where he studied agroforestry, and that he parked in his parents' garden and lived in with Yssy while doing his apprenticeship.
Although he speaks at speed about land rights, and sustainability, he not only talks the talk, but also walks the walk. He's one of the founders of an international movement called Reclaim the Fields which is attempting to organise young people across Europe to lobby for greater access to the land, and build a network of like-minded farmers across the continent (a recent meeting in London attracted 500 people). I'm determined to find some sort of label for him, though. Are you a neo-peasant, I ask him? A Nouveau Leveller?
"I'm a young farmer," he says. Doesn't that imply you spend your time getting pissed on cider at the hunt ball? "That's part of what we want to address: the stereotypes of young farmers being Tory boys only interested in fox hunting and chemical farming." But he does admit that if he's not precisely a neo-peasant, his lifestyle is certainly "peasant-like".
"In the sense that peasants get used to a low standard of living. It's possible to stay in the community you grew up in but you're going to have to spend less, go on holiday less, have less money. But it's an incredibly good quality of life. Look at all this!" and he waves his hand at the field full of produce and the hills beyond. "I would argue that the quality of life justifies earning less money. To be able to come here and work with my horse, that for me is worth much more than getting a job in a city and earning 30 or 40 grand."
And then he untethers Samson and takes him back to his field while I wander off to examine his gypsy caravan. I thought I'd continue the interview afterwards, but when I return, Ed is already down the far end of the field, digging mildewed onions out of the ground, doggedly walking the walk.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/14/farming-radical-dartmoor-levellers
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