At Hay Festival: Meet Simon Fairlie....

Where else could you get a head to head debate on the future of British farming? Well worth the meagre £5 entrance fee, this debate should have been heard and I hope will be pod casted to the people in government who need to hear it. Simon Fairlie, editor of The Land magazing, co editor of the 'The Ecologist' and an ambassador for the community farm. The land magazine, much like the 'Small Farmers Journal' recognises the average mans right to land and therefore the ability to feed themselves. The reliance of landowners and then and therefore Supermarkets, the dependence on the super chain are something that stirs the soul of Simon. Its quite a debate, because with the dependence on large food producers comes, lost traceability, GM crops, the horse meat scandal, a generation lost without any touch or notion where it's daily meal actually came from.

Its quite a debate, because as Conor Colgan from the National Farming Union bravely points out, now the public are where they are, so removed from farming and food production that they hardly care anymore if they eat a horse or a cow. Public complacency stands hand in hand with failed education in rural affairs, disinterest in food, wrecked health of the nation, and an economy that drives what we eat. Whilst Conor as a major food producer himself worries about feeding the millions. Simon worries about educating people to feed them selves. There is a happy medium in these two people. A dialogue that has to be heard, because both of them agree about the publics disinterest and how that is playing into the hands of the supermarkets and the middle man. Change this, and the public drive the market not the market driving the people and the farmers. X