In early March of 1811, at the height of the privations brought about by the Napoleonic War, a small group of highly skilled textile workers reached a tipping point. They objected primarily to the rising popularity amongst mill owners of the new automated weaving machines which meant lower skilled, lower paid workers were replacing them.
This was, of course, the Luddite movement and it spread like wildfire from its beginnings in Nottinghamshire to the whole country and its supporters conducted highly disciplined, almost military operations to smash and destroy the new machines they saw as replacing them and wiping out their livelihood. The government, solidly supported by the wealthy classes and mill owners, brought in the army to suppress the unrest and eventually crush the Luddite movement.
Today, we use the name as derogatory, a mild insult to anyone who baulks at innovation and technology, implying they are coarse, vulgar, unimaginative and perhaps a little stupid. Oh how the victor writes the story!
Obsolete Technologies
Throughout human history, technology has ground forward, sometimes by small iterations and at times by huge leaps or seismic shifts. I surmise the skilled flint knapper, a vital and revered member of a Neolithic community, faced immediate obsolescence when the trick of fashioning weapons from bronze was solved.
In New York in the late 19th century, transportation, haulage, policing and deliveries were almost entirely horse powered. There were an estimated 200,000 horses on the street at any one time and these animals supported a thriving network of farriers, blacksmiths, carriage makers, feed suppliers, saddle makers and the like. Then along came the motor car. By 1908, cars outnumbered horses on the city’s streets and within 40 years, the transformation from horse to car was complete across the whole country.
In more recent times, the launch of the Apple smartphone saw the almost immediate demise of the keypad phone as the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and Blackberry tumbled from the top of the tech mountain to oblivion.
Agriculture 4.0
Agriculture has seen technological advances since its invention some 12 to 15,000 years ago and there are held to be three significant revolutions.
The first was the beginnings of agriculture as the domestication of plants and animals and the retaining of seed for planting moved our species away from a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The second revolution, known as the British Agricultural Revolution, began in the 17th century as mechanisation and automation began to develop through the 19th century and led to the Industrial Revolution.
The third is referred to as the Green Revolution, kick-started in the early 20th century by the development of artificial fertilisers and pesticides which dramatically increased yields.
Now we stand on the cusp of the fourth agricultural revolution, Agriculture 4.0 as it is described, a combination of gene sequencing, robotic farming, GPS harvesting and precision spraying combined with more industrial processing of food and economies of scale brought about by absorption of farming further into the industrial space.
Obviously there is trepidation and a valid fear that these advances may well see the skills we currently rely on to produce our food becoming less important and the financial benefits of food production moving from the farmers more to the industrialists.
Tin-Foil Hats
Now, forgive me for slipping on my tin-foil hat for a moment, but it strikes me that there may be a more Machiavellian scheme in the background here.
Much is spoken on here and in the media generally about our current government’s disinterest in the countryside and of the decisions coming forward that seem to throw the farming sector to the (presumably rewilded) wolves. And this is also being played out across the world to a greater or lesser extent. Land is being purchased in massive acreages by wealthy industrialists, tech billionaires and asset management companies for a plethora of reasons from reforestation to carbon capture, rewilding to wind farms but seldom, it would seem, for producing food.
With the global population estimated to approach ten billion by 2050 and the global demand for protein set to double (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation 2024) enormous resources are being mobilised to meet this challenge and to provide alternatives to traditional food production, exposed as it is to the vagaries of the weather, exacerbated by a changing climate.
We are seeing great strides being made in the gene editing of stock animals and seeds to produce higher yields and more efficient conversion of land to calories as well as developments in the processing of the resultant food to increase the usable parts and decrease waste.
Dr Crispin Howitt, mission lead at Future Protein, a project by CSIRO in Australia to meet these challenges says “We’re looking at diverse ways to get more out of existing protein sources like meat, plants, and fish. We’re also seeking out new sources to complement them.” And it’s that last sentence that makes the old tin foil crinkle.
What does he mean by ‘new sources?’
I’m sure part of the plan is exploiting under-utilised or currently unsuitable species for example, the team are looking at engineering lupins to provide a more palatable seed whilst beef waste is being reduced by taking the low-value cuts and waste and creating soluble powders, low in flavour and high in protein, using it in everything from snack bars to drinks. But there is also, behind these remarkable developments, the rise and evolution of so-called synthetic foods.
Developed by NASA to sustain astronauts on long missions, this technology is starting to explode. We have probably all heard of the laboratory-grown meat and how it has gone from a $250,000-a-bite scientific curiosity to a real contender in the supermarket for lowest price burger in a little over a decade. Companies such as Mosa Meat, Believer Meats and Eat Just are utilising a variety of techniques to produce ranges of red meats, steaks, burgers and sausages as well as poultry to the market. And they have some pretty heavy-hitting investors and backers from individuals like Bill Gates and Richard Branson to corporates like Tyson Foods, Cargill, Merck and PHW Group. Around the world, genetically modified yeasts and bacteria are turning sugars in fermenter vessels into versions of cheese, milk and eggs.
Not all of these sugars are from plant-based sources either, they can be created from all manner of long-chain hydrocarbons, crude oil to recycled plastic. These synthetic foods can be imbued with medicinal benefits for example providing insulin, can be designed to be hypoallergenic and vitamin-enhanced.
This manufacturing process is also controllable, scalable and divorced from a reliance on the weather. It can be operated with a minimum of human input and its output can be specifically designed to meet the needs of the processors and the retailers. It can be quickly adapted to meet political requirements for health and wellbeing aims as well as being outsourced overseas to help achieve net zero targets and maintain and secure a continual supply of cheap food for the population.
It also devalues and therefore makes available, vast swathes of land currently put to food production, making it available to development, amenity, renewable energy production and carbon capture.
Morally, it solves at a sweep the issues around animal exploitation, ecological degradation and the perceived monoculture landscape of modern farming.
Synthetic Food anyone?
Industrial food production is still in its infancy, we have seen the much lauded but fundamentally flawed ‘vertical farms’ begin to run out of steam but there is a move afoot.
Are our leaders being swayed by their paymasters in the tech industry that synthetic food production is the future and that harvesting plants and animals grown in mud or pulled from the oceans is simply old fashioned and has had its time?
Is this why our government here in the UK seems ambivalent to the struggles of our farmers and indifferent to the meagre prices they can command for their produce whilst allowing great tracts of land to be bought up by overseas asset management businesses?
Is the promise of cheap, reliable, industrially produced synthetic food turning their heads and are we seeing the beginnings of the end of farming as an industry and a way of life?
We may well believe that British food, locally grown and produced is the best there is and we may well be right. We may well believe that the population will not accept synthetic foods, rejecting them as they misguidedly did GMOs. But the queues at the Drive-Thru give lie to the masses demanding healthy, nutritious food.
Just as almost nobody today buys hand-woven fabrics, in 30 to 40 years, will we all be buying synthetically produced food and using the term Farmer to suggest a stubborn refusal to embrace the future and one who’d prefer to wallow in filth than join us at the table of plenty?
I really hope not, but then again, so did the Luddites.
