Prince Charles: Agribusiness Personified
Prince Charles in the Country
Wikipedia has a short, clear article on agribusiness. It contrasts two meanings.
1) Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as a convenient portmanteau of agriculture and business, referring to the range of activities and disciplines encompassed by modern food production.
2) Among critics of large-scale, industrialized, vertically integrated food production, the term agribusiness is used negatively, synonymous with corporate farming. As such, it is often contrasted with smaller family-owned farms.
In both senses, British farming has been agribusiness at least since the enclosures of the eighteenth century, and in many many parts of the country long before that.
In 1900, 1% of the population owned 80% of the land of Britain, according to the fine historian Chris Bayly, I don’t know the current figures but my strong suspicion is that this hasn’t changed much. Maybe you could find out here.
The 1% who owned the land neither farmed it nor managed it. As royalty, aristocrats, Oxbridge colleges, or the Church of England, they might have a “home farm” of perhaps a thousand acres, run by a salaried manager. There they kept their horses, developed specialty breeds of horses, cattle, and dogs, and admired nice vistas to be seen from their country house.
Approach to Highgrove, Prince Charles’s country house
The estate agent managed the thousands of acres that made up the rest of the estate. These were let to tenants who paid rents. The estate agents played a key role in the industrial revolution which was largely funded (as it had to be) by the large landowners. Men like Thomas Davis, agent to the Marquess of Bath at Longleat, was up to his neck in schemes to find exploitable mineral resources (coal), build canals, put in hydraulic schemes (water meadows, land drainage) to improve land productivity, use steam engines for agricultural tasks, etc etc.
The tenant farmers worked large farms (1000 acres or more) and (until after World War II) employed large numbers of farm workers. I know a good bit about this because my father’s family have been tenants on the Pembroke estate for a hundred years (perhaps longer but things get murky around World War I). They negotiated their leases every five, ten or twenty years with the estate agent. Provided they paid their rent, these farmers chose how they farmed. To raise enough money to pay their rent and make a profit besides, they were highly entrepreneurial, introducing new machinery, new breeds, and all kinds of innovation. It was a business.
Now I am quite happy to see farming as a business. I am quite happy to see the long term commitment necessary to good land management.
But many people take a dim view of agribusiness, want to get rid of corporations, want small farms farmed by the owner, want see this as a way to social justice, want to proudly call a hundred acres or even a single acre a farm.
By these standards, the long tradition of agribusiness in Britain cannot be contemplated with equanimity. It’s quite at odds with the small family farm tradition (real or not) so cherished in American political thought.
Above all, those who distrust agribusiness should be wary of one of the largest magnates of all, Prince Charles. Prince Charles inherited 135,000 acres, much of it excellent land in the south and west of England. His manager farms the Home Farm, 1000 acres where he in time-honored tradition raises rare breeds. That’s the part that is organic.
The other 134,000 acres are farmed by tenants. They are not required to farm organically. Without doubt, they use as much of the latest agricultural technology as they can afford. They accept farm subsidies. The estate agent Smiths Gore collects the rents and handle the accounts.
In 2008, rents from tenant farmers (and presumably from sources such as The Oval cricket ground and holiday rentals in the Scilly Isles) provided him and his family with an income of $26.4 million.
Like corporate agribusiness, Prince Charles has integrated vertically by producing a line of food products, Duchy Products, including biscuits (cookies). These he sells through the large grocery chain, Waitrose. They pay some royalties into his charity, but that is in trouble at the moment, having to bail out some land investments made by the Prince. He advertises these industrially-produced foodstuffs by appeal to tradition (a technique pioneered by big wine in late nineteenth-century France).
Cookies produced for the estate of the Prince of Wales and sold in Waitrose
So when I read rave reviews of Prince Charles at the Future of Food conference going on in Washington, D.C., I have to wonder.
Is Prince Charles’ decision to farm 1/135th of his land organically really so compelling? How can his admirers, most of whom I suspect, distrust agribusiness overlook the scale of his operation?
Because of a sneaking deference to royalty? Because he claims as his own, standard British agricultural practice, such as dung spreading?
Whatever the reason, I find the deference amazing. Prince Charles is, in my view, agribusiness personified.
Prince Charles–Not Your Typical Radical – National Geographic Magazine. Worth reading.
I remember reading somewhere that the royal family has vast agribusiness holdings throughout the planet. From what I recollect, the piece made the claim that the British royals had controlling interests in over 50% (if not more) of the world’s major food production concerns. I am not sure how one might verify such a claim, but there it is nonetheless.
It wouldn’t surprise me. Though interestingly when I googled this I found a slew of conspiracy theory blogs about the Royal family. What one might expect, I suppose.
Gee I wish this could see a wider audience. It makes me nuts when entitled twerps like Charles begin making pronouncements about how others should live when you damn well know that they have no intention of following their own advice.
Well Bob, You won’t get any disagreement from me.
Fascinating! Oh how image can obscure reality.