“Britain needs one million farmers" say campaigners

Britain's dwindling farm workforce is driving the UK towards monoculture farming and destroying our biodiversity, say campaigners. A report last year, ‘New Blood’, from the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) said the industry needed 60,000 new farmers over the next decade. However, organisers of the Oxford Real Farming Conference, set up earlier this year to challenge conventional thinking on farming, say this figure is inadequate. 'The current thinking is that farming needs to be cheap and monocultured and therefore as simple as possible,' said conference co-organiser Colin Tudge. 'We now have a situation where fewer than one per cent of the population works on the land: that's a precarious position.‘

Read the full article in The Ecologist