Paul, a vegetable farmer who provides me with a weekly box of beautiful organic produce, has had to stop deliveries as, for the first time in history, his fields in Abergavenny have completely flooded and all his brassicas have gone.

While ailing brassicas are a typically British source of mirth, for me this offers a chilling taste of things to come when, with the onset of flooding, the Netherlands will no longer want to export food as they will need everything for their home market. We in Britain will have to swiftly bring our focus back to food production as we did in the war.

Architect Carolyn Steel’s recent book Sitopia makes an interesting read on all this. Communities across Britain are establishing community farms and local food production supply chains with little help from government which has until recently focused on Big Agra and its cousin Big Pharma. There are some hopeful signs in the 2020 Agriculture Act that things are changing towards smaller, more local production.

…