Home Grown

In the old days, nobody had to pay for water. It falls from the sky, God gives it to us. Taxation came as the population grew during the 20th century. Taxation paid for the water supply infrastructure which was a national asset owned by all the people. The Conservative government decided to privatise the water. Corporations using water as a product for financial gain. 

In those early days farmers were exempt from paying out of the understanding, their animals need water. The animals should not have to pay for water. Without farm, Everybody would starve. For animal welfare and common sense farmers were exempt from paying water tax.

A few years ago I visited the tiny rural farming village where I grew up. Billy Rhys’s farm house was more derelict than ever before. He had not been a successful farmer. Despite owning a few cows and an orchard gone wild, all his farming equipment was made of wood and rusty iron, rotting in dilapidated barns. 

Billy had not modernised during the 20th century as he had been unable to afford to. He farmed the traditional, old fashioned way, without machinery. He died of old age somewhere around 1990. 

During my trip down memory lane a local who moved to the village after I had left told me who had bought Billy’s house. A daughter of one of the farmers who still has his farm, albeit he is no longer working it as age has caught up with him. 

The neighbour living in a nice modern house built in what I remember as a cow field was amazed that Billy’s house had free water, there was no meter on the main supply line. 

Somehow Billy had managed to avoid the process of modernisation altogether, which included the process of being capitalised upon by the conservative governments policy of privatisation of our communal assets by for-profit private corporations. 

After BSE, foot and mouth, which the farming community at the time described as ‘strategically introduced diseases’ targeting farmers, the village no longer has any working farms. 

Farmers were concerned that “farming in. Britain is being dismantled” and about how the ‘danger keep out’ posters printed to warn people about the agricultural diseases were printed two months before the outbreaks, simultaneous to vials of the disease going missing from the laboratories storing it for study. *

A lot of such stories went around the panic-stricken farming community which existed back before so many of them took their own lives in the final days of the twentieth century as a direct response to the British governments policy on farming. 

We ate their food. This country had a sustainable infrastructure. People recognised a need to provide water for free for animals. 

Incrementally as our way of living has been dissolved along with our Rights and commonsense, peoples mentality has changed to the extent this bit of writing seems a far-fetched conspiracy-theory to those who were not there at the time to remember it. 

*In retrospect those diseases are identifiable as test-runners for the Covid-19 pandemic affecting global-scale human population. 

“We’ve had the golden age. What them’s calling progress, it’s backward.”  

Last generations of 19th and 20th century British Farmers almost universally stated words to this effect. 

You should not need a specialist cancer doctor to tell you to eat locally grown, pesticide free vegetables, ‘real food’, for health.