Penned in: family farms are facing an existential threat

Coming from a generation of farmers, Richard Benson has seen the battles those in agriculture face as he fears the tractor tax’ will irrevocably damage the British countryside

The first time I brought a girl home to meet my family, the occasion was derailed by a piglet that tumbled out of the Aga oven and stood wobbling and blinking on the kitchen carpet.

“Why is there a pig in your kitchen, Mrs Benson?” She asked my mother, not unreasonably.

“Because he’s not very well,” said my mother. “None of them are.”

“Them?”

My mother pushed the bottom oven door wider open to reveal two more pale pink piglets wrapped in old tea towels and sleeping in a battered baking tray. Runts and recklings born prematurely, and brought in my dad’s big coat pockets from the farmyard outside to get warm. The Aga was old and didn’t work properly, but its oven was functioning enough to warm a sick animal, and so, like everything else in our house, it was co-opted for the farm. No one minded. My mother got a patterned brown nylon carpet, so it didn’t show the muck.

We cared very much about the animals, but it wasn’t just sentiment. My dad and mum’s farm was small, the sheds were old and draughty, and pigs didn’t make a lot of money so you couldn’t afford to lose them. It was learned from hard experience; all 14 farms in our village were the same, the households doing the same thing as far back as anyone remembered, their homes, families, communities and money all aspects of the same thing – work. It was hard and worrisome because you always felt at the mercy of supermarkets and the weather, but it had rewards: it was nice to sometimes sell our potatoes to local fruit and fish and chip shops, and even if it was a pain pulling cars out of snowdrifts with your tractor, it felt good to feel useful.

Plus of course, you did get to work in the Yorkshire countryside which, as Yorkshire people know, is the greatest of all.