Wheat Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture

Farming in Britain in the 20th century underwent a total transformation.

The agricultural revolution was as far-reaching

as the revolution in industry had been in the 19th century.

No area of farming was left untouched.

And at the forefront of those changes was the way farmers grew and sold wheat.

Wheat is iconic.

A field of wheat rippling in the breeze sums up agriculture

and the bread that we make from it symbolises human food.

In just three generations, wheat farmers replaced horse power with machine power.

Scientists shrank the size of the plant and yet more than doubled the yield.

And Britain moved from being dependent on imported wheat for bread

to becoming almost self-sufficient.

The transformation in the way farmers produced wheat was remarkable,

but what's also unique is the way that the people who led the changes documented them.

Their home movies offer us a unique insight into the wheat revolution -

how and why it happened, and its consequences.

Draw a line down the United Kingdom

and on the flatter lands of the East you will find acres of wheat.

In the 1930s, most it was produced on small-scale farms by a large labour force of men and horses.

The wheat was used largely for animal feed or for biscuits and cakes.

Nearly all of the wheat needed for making bread had to be imported from North America.

By the end of the century, wheat production had been utterly transformed.

The horses and most of the men had been replaced by complex machinery

on increasingly large-scale farms.

Crop yields had doubled and Britain was almost self-sufficient in the wheat needed to make bread.

This programme tells the story of how these astonishing changes took place

through the lives of three farming families in the east of England.

The Cresswells in Northumberland.

The world is now looking for our wheat in a way that it hasn't for a very long time.

The Coopers in Suffolk.

You are taking risk decisions every day of the year.

And the Lathams on the borders of Essex and Cambridgeshire.

The business of farming has changed enormously.

Most people wouldn't recognise me as a farmer...

my job as a farmer.

That's because I'm not so hands-on as I used to be

but I still see myself very much as a farmer.

John Latham's family have been farmers for generations.

And they've been filming their lives since the 1930s.

This film of John's granddad, waving at the camera from the back of his reaper-binder, is from 1938.

From the 1930s, the family has lived and chronicled the wheat revolution on their farms.

In 1992, John Latham took over from his father, another John,

and nowadays he also manages his uncle Simon's farm.

In the '60s, Simon would be farming 400 acres

with, what, three chaps on the farm?

-Four.

-Four in the '60s.

And we're doing 4,000 acres, well, nearly five next year,

and we've got two full-time chaps doing all that with some part-time labour and some help at harvest.

That's how the technology has... just transformed the scale.

It's a transformation that has also seen wheat yields rise sharply

in John's father's lifetime.

We're getting nearly double now to what we got 30 years ago.

And that is plant breeding and...technology.

Yeah. Absolutely fantastic.

For cereal farmers, the harvest has always been the most significant time of the year -

a collective gathering and celebration.

This is John aged five.

The whole family decamped to the fields and helped get the wheat in.

We spent the whole of the summer holidays either doing the combining

or the potato picking or anything like that. No-one thought about health and safety in those days.

Ignorance was bliss.

And this is John's mother,

talking to Freddie Salmon, who worked for the Lathams for 35 years.

We used to come down that hill on a four-wheeled trailer

-and it used to go so fast that the trailer used to...

-Wobble.

-..go Z-shaped down the hill.

We used to be thinking that was great fun. We didn't realise how damn dangerous it was!

And then we used to sit in the bottom of the trailer while the combine used to unload

and we ended up up to our chests in wheat sitting down.

Dust, everything. Ladybirds, earwigs, you name it, they were all in there.

Plus us dirty kids!

For generations, the Lathams have farmed in Lancashire.

Then, at the start of the 20th century, a branch of the family

moved south to Essex, where land was less expensive.

In 1933, newly-weds Thomas Latham and wife Anne came here, to Lucas Farm near Chelmsford.

From their honeymoon, Thomas wrote to thank his farm workers for their wedding present.

I feel I cannot let this evening pass without leaving a message to you all.

I have finished the lonely furrow and I have found a team-mate to run with me in double harness.

I wish you all good health and happiness and that slice of luck so essential to us all.

As a son of the land, I join hands with you this evening in friendship of Auld Lang Syne.

Now, isn't that lovely?

The description of a team-mate in double harness is apt.

In the film shot on the 60-acre farm before the war, horses are still a prominent feature.

60 acres wasn't a big farm by Essex standards, even in those days, but it was good soil.

Very productive, some of the best wheat-growing land in the country.

And so it was a start but it was all jolly hard work.

In 1933, this farmhouse was fairly...derelict.

My father and mother spent 1934 putting a new roof on the place.

John was born here in 1938.

This is him as a baby with his father and grandparents.

There were about six men on this farm

and a lot of them were of the Crouchman family

and there was Freddy Crouchman, who was the old boy,

and his son Johnny Crouchman are the two that I can just about remember here.

There in the cart, there's my two elder sisters and they're sitting by Johnny Crouchman, who's driving it,

and I'm sitting on the knee of Freddy Crouchman, his father.

These home movies paint an idyllic picture,

yet in the 1930s arable farming in East Anglia was in a crisis.

My grandfather worked really hard.

He died at the age of 78 and he was absolutely worn out.

The '30s were desperate times and my grandfather and father found it very difficult to make ends meet.

They really were quite... almost insolvent and the banks

wanted to call the money in on the farms and put us out of business.

In 1929...

..the world crisis leads to a collapse in all commodity prices

and, particularly in Britain, the price of cereals.

The import of wheat from North America

really severely damaged British farming.

Wheat as a commodity, wheat as a TRADED commodity.

This means that particularly the small and medium-sized cereal-producing farmer

really did face substantial problems.

Many left the land but, like the Latham family, the Coopers from Suffolk managed to keep going.

Harold Cooper started his working life on his father's farm during the Depression.

# Happy birthday to you!

# Happy birthday, dear Harold... #

Today he's celebrating his 90th birthday.

APPLAUSE

Like the Lathams, there are several generations of Coopers farming in Suffolk.

Harold's son Ashley now runs his farm.

Done much harvest yet?

Oh, yes. We're going well. Done about half, have we, Ashley?

And Oliver, Harold's nephew, manages a farm near Ipswich.

You were 14 in 1932.

The global depression hit really hard and it hit two industries harder than most -

general manufacturing in the North and farming in East Anglia.

You just couldn't GIVE land away

and by 1934 wheat prices reached their all-time low in real economic terms.

They got down to under £5 a ton, and it didn't pay farmers to thrash the stuff,

there was no market for it.

Very tough times.

In the early '30s, things were very, very depressed.

The word that was quite commonly used in our house was, "We've got to economise."

That was one of my mother's phrases.

"We've got to economise. We've got to cut down on this and that."

For 300 years, the Coopers had been tenant farmers in Cheshire

but in 1906 Harold's mother inherited enough money

to enable them to move south to Suffolk and buy Manor Farm.

Harold began work there in 1932.

Just before my 14th birthday, I left school and came back to help on the farm. I had two brothers.

We employed...

two men to start with, where there had been 13 or 14.

That was one of the sad things really but that's what happened.

We had to work hard, we worked long hours.

At that time, getting in the harvest was a laborious business,

as this 1934 film shows.

First the wheat had to be cut, often by a horse-drawn binder.

Then arranged in stooks, so it could dry.

Sometimes, particularly in northern Britain,

some was kept in thatched stacks until the time came for thrashing -

the process by which the ear, or grain, was separated from the stalk.

The grain then had to be stored in sacks.

These traditional techniques were expensive and labour intensive,

so Harold's innovative father decided to take a huge risk with some new technology.

'34 was the year when the Royal Show,

Royal Agricultural Show, came to Ipswich

and at the Royal Show there were all the most modern American equipment.

American combine harvesters, things we'd only dreamt of seeing, we were able to see and touch.

And I think we'd learnt as much there as the normal person would learn in years!

As the name implies,

the combine brought together the cutting and thrashing process.

It reduced time and labour significantly

and left the farmer with grain that could be sold immediately.

There was only 50-something in the country altogether

and they were generally in the hands of large estates...

where the...

No, I don't want to be too critical, but the owners were more like playboys.

And finally in 1936 we purchased the Case combine,

which was for us a great step forward.

The American company that we bought it from, Case,

they sent a representative, who stayed with us for several days,

and he made sure that we could use the machine correctly.

We were lucky that the first one or two years were dry years, lovely summers, everything was dry.

It was just like working on the prairies in Canada or somewhere,

but the general opinion was...er...

..people would see my father and say to him, "Do you ever use that machine?"

The reaction was, "Well, that'll never work in this country!"

The Coopers were unusual -

most farmers relied on horse and manpower,

but by the mid-1930s the threat of war was changing everything.

It's clear that from...certainly 1935 the new Ministry of Agriculture

was thinking about the possibility of a future European war.

By 1936,

the ghost committees were all in place, ready to run agriculture, should the war begin.

-NEWSREEL:

-For the second time in 25 years, war forced us to take stock

of our agriculture and of the men who live by it.

For the second time, we have had to reclaim millions of derelict acres which we now need so badly.

Once war was declared,

they switched to the policy of 1917, with a payment of subsidies

to plough up land for the production of food,

but particularly the production of wheat and of oats.

Half the farmland which had been neglected hadn't been drained,

or the ditches hadn't been cleaned and that sort of thing,

so there was a tremendous demand for land drainage

and we were working all the winter of 1941...

er...well, almost every day.

It was a very, very cold winter, 1940 and '41.

Between 1939 and 1942, county war agricultural committees,

War Ags as they were known,

oversaw the ploughing up of three million extra acres.

To help this initiative, combine harvesters arrived on lease from America,

and in Essex one of the farms that benefited was the Lathams'.

At the Second World War, my father had bought this part farm at Thaxted

and he was still farming this farm

and he was also farming Longbarns Farm

and he applied to the War Ag for a combine

and agriculture was extremely important in the Second World War.

Our survival, with the U-boat threat, depended on our ability to feed ourselves,

so my father applied for this combine and he got one.

He got a wonderful Massey Harris 21,

which was a 12-foot self-propelled combine,

and it was a wonderful tool for its time.

Farmers were paid subsidies to grow more cereals

but, as the war ended, many, like Harold Cooper in Suffolk, became anxious that the policy

would be dismantled and they would return to the years of insecurity.

Most arable farmers were very fearful that things were going to go back where they had been before the war.

We always had that in the back of our mind, so we were laying plans

to go back and produce as cheap as ever possible again

to combat this... danger that we thought we saw.

Harold needn't have worried.

Despite the wartime plough-up campaign, wheat yields had hardly risen

and, after 1945, Britain was desperately short of food.

The country was effectively bankrupt

and could not afford to pay for imports, so the Government decided

to maximise home production by continuing the war-time subsidy policy.

In 1947, it passed what many believe to be the most significant piece of

farming legislation of the 20th century - the Agriculture Act.

I think the 1947 Agriculture Act underpins absolutely

what's gonna happen to farming for the next 50 to 60 years.

What it means is that arable farmers in particular are now protected against the vagaries of the market.

They can plan for the future.

They know that in five years' time they won't necessarily be making a fortune

but they certainly won't be making a loss in terms of the world prices of wheat.

This new policy of subsidies in the form of minimum guaranteed payments made a huge difference.

It gave farmers the confidence to invest.

Farmers like the Cresswells, who began farming in Northumberland shortly after the war.

-An epoch-making time for us...

-HE LAUGHS

..was when we bought our first self-propelled combine,

and it cost £880.

Terribly underpowered, and when you got into a 20-acre field

with that little six-foot cut, you thought you'd never get out of it.

It was 1954 and Charles had just completed his National Service.

He and his father, recently retired from the Navy

after a war spent protecting the transatlantic convoys,

decided to buy Spindlestone Farm near Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast.

Wheat has been grown in Northumberland since the Bronze Ages,

but yields had hardly risen for centuries.

If you had neighbours who told you in the '50s that they were growing

two tonnes to the acre of wheat, you practically for certain knew

that they were fibbers and, you know, they were looked upon as being great exaggerators.

Now, if you don't grow four tonnes of wheat to the acre, you know you're a duffer.

Increased food production was the aim of the 1947 Agriculture Act.

Bigger yields per acre was what was needed,

and the government saw science as one of the tools to help achieve it.

Science has the answer.

We know now what can be done.

Munitions factories must be changed over to make farm machinery.

Experts can say what kind of seeds should be sown, what kind of fertiliser should be used.

I went to a lecture given by a foremost...

agricultural scientist I think it was, Sir John Boyd Orr,

and he said that in a few years' time we would all be growing two tonnes of wheat per acre.

We were growing then about maybe a tonne, perhaps a tonne and a half,

and he said, "In a few years' time you'll all be growing two tonnes or even over

"and I foresee in the future that you'll be able to grow perhaps four tonnes an acre."

Well, we... I shall never forget this lecture because...

hardly anyone believed him!

Farmers had benefited from science before the war, but it was often rudimentary.

This film shot in 1934 on a neighbouring farm to Charles Cresswell

shows just how makeshift the approach was.

Well, this will be some extraordinary weedkiller, this.

I think they're going to...

we're going to see one of the first crop sprayers,

copper sulphate, incredibly poisonous stuff now.

We used to use it for treating sheep's feet

and that would be breaking about 102 Health and Safety at Work regulations now.

And there it goes, down to the field.

I rather think that it could be my friend as a child sitting in the back.

There it is, spraying away. Brilliant!

The chap is working the handle from left to right furiously to keep the pressure up.

-HE LAUGHS

-And that will kill some broad-leafed weeds.

But that's a very early film of spraying, quite extraordinary.

There's a whole lot of technology and chemistry which has been out there... really some of it since the 1920s,

which nobody has touched, and gradually this technology,

this chemistry, starts to be introduced across the arable sector.

The 1947 Act had created the perfect environment for the chemical companies.

The government policy of financial support for farmers signalled to companies like ICI

that there was now a growing market for their products.

Pesticides, herbicides and, above all, new artificial fertilisers.

These fertilisers contained the major nutrients for plant growth.

Nitrogen, potassium and potash.

And, with their use, farmers could plant a wheat crop on the same land each year.

Originally in this area, and I was brought up in that way,

we had quite a lot of what we call fallow land, that is, land with nothing on.

Well, with the coming of the... very good scientific approach

and the use of chemicals, we were able to grow a good crop every year.

We were able to crop every year.

There was clear evidence that the new chemicals could increase yields,

but little awareness of their potentially toxic effects.

By 1958, Harold Cooper's nephew, Oliver, was helping out on Manor Farm in Suffolk.

This is him aged 13, driving the tractor to collect grain from his father's combine.

One of my memories as a child was a chemical called DNOC

which was a very yellow liquid.

I'm sure it got very high toxicity levels.

We all had in the industry a sort of pretty cavalier attitude

to health and safety and self-protection,

but many of the products we used were quite nasty by today's standards.

You know, working with agrochemicals like that in my father's generation,

they've probably been the most exposed generation of all

in terms of actual physical contamination of the products they used,

direct physical contamination on their hands, on their skin, in their eyes.

Dad would smell of some products when he came in that were being used as herbicides in those days.

By the late 1960s more than 200 pesticides were in common use,

but there was also growing evidence about their damaging effects on wildlife and the environment.

The most notorious was the synthetic insecticide DDT.

The ecologists were pointing out that DDT

and chlorinated hydrocarbons like that

produced thin shells in the...

in the eggs of the birds at the top of the food chain,

the raptors, things like peregrine falcons and that kind of thing,

and so a question began to arise.

Are these pesticides actually always a good thing?

The answer was actually, no, they're not.

DDT was banned in Britain in 1984

and two years later government legislation to regulate the use of pesticides generally was introduced.

At Harold Cooper's farm in Suffolk, his son Ashley still relies on

a cocktail of chemicals to maintain crop yields.

But, unlike in his father's day, the law requires him to follow a strict spraying regime.

What we're looking for is a forecast where we've got wind speeds that are moderately low.

We need it to be dry.

There are certain times of the year when we can't spray if we have a frost

and there are other times of the year when we can't spray if it's too hot.

So the window you get can sometimes be very small.

One of the things that irks me about the Archers is that you never hear any of the characters

unable to get to a function because the wind has dropped

and they've been waiting for two or three days for the wind to drop and at last they are able to go spraying!

If we hadn't sprayed, then you might be seeing...

mildew,

you could on some varieties be seeing yellow rust,

which...the Romans used to sacrifice wild dogs to protect themselves against yellow rust,

and they also knew about mildew

and they would sow at different times of the lunar cycle to protect themselves from mildew.

Some of the field didn't get sprayed and we have this black grass growing here as a consequence.

Unchecked, you would eventually have a field on which it was almost impossible to grow a winter cereal,

because it would... despite the thinness of the stem, it has the ability

to drain all the goodness out of the land around the wheat, and to effectively strangle the wheat.

Ashley is visiting the annual Cereals Event.

Conventions like this showcase the hundreds of products still available

to both control pests and diseases and maintain soil fertility.

It's a multi-million-pound industry.

Farmers like Harold Cooper could have little imagined how it would grow from such modest beginnings.

..integral storage compartment and the bare logic workstation which enables the operator to use

all the sprayer's control functions with ease.

The Cereals Event is the biggest in the arable farmer's year.

On display, alongside farm equipment and agrochemicals,

are the demonstration plots of new crop varieties.

They bear witness to another major development of the last century,

plant breeding.

For many years, scientists had known that if they could engineer

the internal genetic structure of the plant itself

they could do much more to improve crop yields.

But that was problematic because wheat is a synthesis of three different species.

Its DNA is more complex than that of a human being.

The state paid for research,

and the government-funded Plant Breeding Institute near Cambridge was formally opened in 1955.

And in 1977 scientists at the Institute pioneered a new, dwarf variety of wheat

which would transform the fortunes of farmers like Oliver Cooper.

What we're looking at here, in, say, a variety like this,

is the sort of height of wheat that existed in the sort of '60s period and before

and the Plant Breeding Institute identified dwarf genes

that allowed them to breed the length of this crop down,

which gave a stiffer, stronger straw,

and you haven't got to be very bright to realise that

this is going to be less likely to fall over in high wind than this.

This is carrying bigger ears than this variety,

and so this is one of the things plant breeding did for us.

It gave us varieties that would stand up and produce big yields.

I loved that time.

For me, being a young farmer,

my A-levels were in chemistry and, erm, botany,

so I understood much of what was going on here

and suddenly I'd got an industry around me that I could become very interested and part of.

It was a golden era.

It was a wonderful time.

Today plant breeding is largely in the hands of commercial companies.

The Plant Breeding Institute was disbanded in 1987.

Bill Angus began his career there and now works for one of Europe's largest seed-development companies.

What plant breeders have done is they've changed the design of wheat,

so that instead of being rather tall,

and having ears that are less fertile, that have got less seed in,

we've now got plants which are shorter

and have got these very fertile ears above them

and what used to go into the stem is now going into the grain.

Today, Bill's team are harvesting samples of grain from his test crops.

This programme I've been involved with for 20 years

and therefore you become very attached to it and it does become...these are your babies,

this is your family, if you like, and like all children some disappoint you and some excite you.

Every row in this field, and there's in the region of 200,000 of them,

is genetically different from its adjacent row.

This awned type has found favour in dry land situations,

in more droughted situations, and this type of variety

would tend to build up a micro-climate of dampness around the ear, whereas these tend not to,

so if we keep damp, wet summers

we'd be better off to keep these because these will dry out quicker

and you won't get secondary diseases coming in.

If we were to move to a dry situation then these would become more the predominant type.

So it really is a perfect example of how plant breeders have adapted varieties

to meet the environments that they're going to be grown in.

Plant breeding was not without its critics.

Together with chemicals and increasing mechanisation,

it had led to an ever more intensive way of farming.

Wheat yields had doubled in just one generation, but by the 1960s

this success was putting pressure on government finances.

The '47 Act worked very well, but it wasn't completely uncontroversial.

Taxpayers, for example, looked at the money that was being spent on it

and accused farmers of being what they called feather-bedded.

On the other hand, farmers felt that they weren't always being paid

as much as they needed to be paid, bearing in mind that they were making expensive investments,

so they were putting a lot of inputs in every year and these things cost money.

When a Labour government came to power in 1964, pressure grew

to reduce the subsidies to wheat farmers like John Latham.

In true '60s style, he joined a National Farmers Union demonstration to take their case to parliament.

We had what was known as the Fair Deal Campaign in 1965.

The then Minister of Agriculture, Fred Peart, said that we'd had a very fair deal

in the price review and we didn't think we had, so we had a demonstration in London,

where six convoys of Land Rovers, six in each convoy, went to Parliament Square to protest.

We were nearly all arrested because it's against the law

to demonstrate in Parliament Square when Parliament is sitting,

also in a royal park, which is something else we didn't know.

We decorated our combines in various posters

and these are the boxes that contain the posters.

The source of these conflicts between government and farmers

was the increasing cost of subsidies to the taxpayer.

But in 1973, when Britain joined the Common Market, the whole system changed.

Joining the Common Market changed the way that agricultural prices were supported.

The whole point about the Common Market was that it set up a tariff barrier

that went round all the countries of the Common Market

and kept low-priced world wheat out.

The impact on wheat farmers was huge.

Not only did it give them a massive guaranteed market, it also opened up demand for

the type of wheat traditionally grown only in small quantities in Britain, bread-making wheat.

Before the 1960s,

Britain imported most of the wheat that it used for bread.

It was Canadian hard wheat, so-called,

which basically means that it's got a high protein content,

and that was the wheat that we were used to using in traditional baking processes.

Protein content is important in bread making because it enables the bread to rise.

High protein wheat is difficult to grow in the damp British climate,

so food producers had relied on Canadian and American wheat.

But, faced with the higher prices imposed by the Common Market,

they turned their attention instead to British wheat.

And by the late 1970s, a high-speed mixing technique known as the Chorleywood Process

had made it possible for millers to use substantial amounts of British wheat in the standard white loaf.

The success of this development added to the demand for home-grown wheat, and output soared.

Suddenly, in the space of a few years,

we had gone from not having enough to having mountains of the stuff.

And the early '80s began to see this term grain mountain, butter mountain, wine lake being used

because all of these technologies in those industries were conspiring to

allow us to produce much higher yields than anybody could have envisaged 10, 15 years earlier.

Latest figures confirm Britain, like Europe,

has a food mountain out of control.

The food Europe doesn't want goes on piling up, and space...

By 1988, more than five million tonnes of surplus European wheat

was being held in storage.

These surpluses focused the debate once again on the high price

that Britain was paying to produce this unwanted food,

a price that was increasingly measured in the cost to the environment.

If you've got a big combine harvester, you don't want a two-acre field to put it in.

So farmers tended to get rid of a lot of their hedgerows.

Likewise, if you can get paid a lot of money for producing wheat

and you've got a boggy bit of land then you want to drain it.

Now, the fact that that boggy bit of land was good for nesting birds,

or good for amphibians,

is not something...you're not gonna get paid for that as a farmer.

The post-war drive to produce ever more food had left its mark on the landscape.

Hedges disappeared as fields became increasingly huge.

The number of farms fell by more than half

and those that remained were bigger and ever more specialised

and the cost of maintaining this system soared.

By the beginning of the 1990s,

the Common Agricultural Policy absorbed over 60% of the total EU budget.

The time for reform had come.

In 1992, a fundamental shift in policy arrived in the shape of set-aside.

We were paid, if you like, to take land out of production

and that system, it can be argued, worked very well

because it meant when we became short of food

we put this land back into production

and it was a good way of the government ensuring

that land was in a fit state to farm but could be taken out.

It was a way of regulating a certain amount of supply and demand.

Set-aside symbolised the idea that the days of simply increasing output were over.

What you have to do is to... see the countryside as something that can produce

lots and lots of different things, and food is just one of them.

By the mid-1990s, the fortunes of wheat farmers were beginning to change.

Under pressure from food processors, the European Union had begun to

reduce the tariffs on imported wheat.

The protection that wheat farmers had had from global markets from the late 1930s had vanished.

Once again, they were at the mercy of market speculation.

128. Between 128 and 130.

It's a global market we're trading in

and the UK farmer is part of that global market.

What happens in the US, what happens in Australia,

these will have influences directly on the price the UK farmer gets paid.

This is a wheat trading room in Lincolnshire.

If you go back...30, 40 years,

a lot of trading would have been done at corn exchanges around the country.

Erm...so...what you see here is a national business.

In those days you almost had a merchant in every town, and every town had a corn exchange

and merchants would meet with buyers

and they would trade face-to-face parcels of grain that they had to market.

This is how Charles Cresswell remembers selling his wheat.

Every Saturday during the autumn and winter we would go to the corn exchange in Berwick-on-Tweed

and you took a sample in a little special envelope of your packet of grain.

Then the merchant, or his representative, would look at this

and, highly scientific, would bite it occasionally in half

because if it bit very white and floury that was meant to be good.

If it bit steely and blue, then that was very bad news and everybody shuffled about.

Then you went round these people and eventually found one who would bid you a satisfactory price.

By the 1970s, corn exchanges had become a thing of the past.

When Charles' son, John, took over in 1992, the price that he was paid

for his wheat was firmly in the hands of the global marketplace.

He decided to scale back on conventional production

and instead take advantage of government subsidies to convert to organic wheat.

The decision to put some of our land into organic, it was an economic one, that from the late '90s

into the early years of this century, our...

break-even price of wheat was probably around £70 to £80 a tonne.

And for much of that time we were being paid less than that.

It was clearly uneconomic, we were going backwards.

And this seemed to be a solution.

I think it coincided with a time when the government appeared to be

increasingly losing interest in agriculture

-and so it was also a sensible thing to do to kind of put the farm semi to sleep.

-Yes.

And to...tier down the whole activity on the thing

until government policy changed, which we're still looking forward to in keen anticipation.

In Essex, the Latham family took a different route.

The young John Latham had grown up in the era of subsidies.

From an early age it was clear that he would be involved in farming.

When I was 12 our combine driver went off sick with glandular fever

and so I was put on the combine as a 12-year-old and I did the whole harvest.

And I was just in heaven, cos that's what I enjoyed doing.

Once John had taken charge in the 1990s, he had to find a way to survive.

The fact that wheat is a global commodity

means that we always have to have an eye on the global market, what's happening in the global market,

when it comes to marketing grain

but probably more importantly we have to be aware that we're competing in that marketplace

and so, if there are other parts of the world that can produce wheat

more cheaply than we are, we have to adapt to that.

We have to be competitive.

His strategy was strength in numbers, so he joined forces with other farmers to try to cut costs.

What we've managed to do is to bring five or six farming businesses together

and, while they're still trading as individual businesses,

the actual farms are run as if it's one big farm.

He also became Chairman of Camgrain, the UK's largest farmer's grain store co-operative.

And, in 2007, John and his Camgrain partners struck a historic deal with a supermarket group

to directly supply all the wheat for its in-store bakeries.

It was the first time that a supply deal like this had been attempted

between UK wheat farmers and a supermarket.

Mid-August 2008.

With the supermarket deal in place, the Cresswells' first organic crop in the ground

and Ashley making some last-minute adjustments to his combine,

all is set for the harvest to begin.

It's the busiest and most crucial time of the year for the wheat farmer.

John's come out with his father and uncle to watch the new combine in action.

It's being driven by one of the farming partners, Andrew Tetlow.

The weather at harvest time is absolutely critical.

Too much rain means that the wheat can't be cut

and, the longer it stands in the field, the less chance it has of being suitable for bread.

John Latham's supermarket deal relies on their having a good harvest.

Without it, the financial consequences could be severe.

This is a bread-making variety so we're very keen to get it in

before the quality deteriorates and it'll be downgraded to a feed grain.

And this year we're looking at the difference between a £30 premium over the feed price and not.

When you have catchy weather like this, it's very important

that we go out and get the quality, and we've got contracts to fill.

For Ashley Cooper, harvest is almost spiritual.

Harvest has an aura about it that pulls you in and consumes you

because it's on harvest that the whole of human civilisation is built.

For about 330 days of the year I feel very insignificant and very small

but when we start harvest I actually feel I'm the most important person in the world. I really do.

For the rest of the year I feel that my knees shake if I say boo to a goose. That's how you feel!

In the South, the weather is holding

and Ashley Cooper and John Latham are making a start,

but for the Cresswells in Northumberland it's a different story.

Rain has begun to delay the harvest and has damaged the combine.

Do you see that wear plate underneath?

We've been running quite well for the last four days but we got about

half an inch yesterday afternoon and another shower this morning,

so we won't be going for a wee while.

The Cresswells' organic wheat is like the Latham's, a bread-making variety,

and every day of wet weather during the harvest increases the risk that it will be ruined.

The rain has spread south.

August 2008 is turning out to be one of the wettest on record.

Even the supermarket combine on the Latham farm in Essex has ground to a halt.

John's partner, Andrew Tetlow, is powerless.

You can see that the weather has beaten us. We have great machinery and all the technology

that you could actually want but if it's raining we have to stop.

Er...this stuff is what we're trying to put through the combine

and when it's wet it just will not go.

You know, the straw is absolutely sodden. It will not cut.

It gets very difficult to actually rub the grain out when it's wet,

so we can't get a very good sample.

It will just absolutely crucify the machine.

It's been wet all day and wet for the last two weeks nearly

and day by day the crops are beginning their natural process

of germinating and eventually falling onto the ground

and, every day that goes by, you're losing the potential for a maximum harvest.

So you need to grab every opportunity that you can get.

It's not dissimilar to something like being the Battle Of Britain,

when you get an opportunity you have to go for it.

But when the rain holds off the farmers are out day and night.

Everything is sacrificed to get the crop harvested.

All John Latham's wheat goes to the huge silos of the grain store co-operative.

Here the wheat will be tested, dried and stored.

Do you know where you're going, Dick? Do you know where you're going?

Camgrain Managing Director Philip Darke has the complex task of co-ordinating the grain deliveries.

Harvest is late, everyone got stopped with the wet weather, so they're all going together.

We've got to get this quality crop in

so they've just got the throttles open on these big combines.

Right, you want to go to Thomas Banks...

to Manor Farm...

This is where all the Camgrain farmers are. Haverhill, Cambridge, we're down to Ipswich, and really

we're picking up from almost the whole membership all on the same day. MOBILE RINGS

Philip Darke.

Yeah, we can sort him, no problem.

As each lorry arrives, a probe burrows down to take a sample from the load.

Then the grain goes to the laboratory for a battery of tests.

Elasticity, moisture and protein levels are all crucial,

key to the wheat being accepted as the more profitable bread wheat,

or being downgraded to the less profitable animal feed wheat.

Moisture 19.16, protein 12.96, hardness 49.8, 76.4, weight.

This is a testing time for the Camgrain farmers.

The deal with the supermarket depends on their wheat being

of the right quality for the instore bakeries.

The longer the harvest takes, the greater the chance that the wheat won't make the grade.

We want to get the job done. We had 60,000 tonnes in until yesterday.

We're going to take in over 200,000.

So you can see there's a long way to go yet.

The more days we have like this, sooner it's finished.

In the end, the fortunes of the three farmers in the 2008 harvest varied.

In Suffolk, the weather held and Ashley Cooper was able to harvest a good crop.

Farming has to be one of the most gambling-orientated jobs that you can do.

Everything from deciding whether to come out and combine

to the day when you sell your corn, which may fluctuate in price by 50% to 60%, and this year even more,

you are taking risk decisions every day of the year.

In these tougher economic times, the government's environmental schemes

have been a welcome addition to Ashley's farm.

In total we have about 10% of our arable acreage

now in environmental schemes of one sort or another.

What this means is that we have six-metre margins, planted with a variety of grasses,

and in some cases wild flowers, around each field.

I've been able to replant the wood that my father removed.

I'm very lucky, because I love it, and it has added a new dimension to the farm

and it's given a new injection of enthusiasm to part of my farming career.

For John Latham and his partners, the 2008 harvest was a success.

-Where's your bakery smell? You can't smell the bakery.

-No. You used to.

-What it does, it pipes through the front door.

-Oh, so it's all disappeared up that end.

Their wheat was good enough for the supermarket contract.

I think it's fantastic, you know.

It's two years of hard work to get Sainsbury's to have British farmers here,

extolling the virtue of British wheat and British flour.

It's a shame that it was taken when the wheat was still green.

It would probably have been better in August time.

But, no, it's... I'm quite happy with it!

In Northumberland, Charles Cresswell and his son John were not so lucky.

The weather played havoc with the harvest

and their organic wheat was not good enough for bread-making.

We had nearly six inches of rain in August, which is a crucial time for wheat quality.

Then in early September this was topped off

with nearly another six inches on a single weekend,

which really finished matters in terms of our harvest quality.

The wheat can go for feed.

It's very frustrating because that's not what you grew it for.

You've lost a sizable part of your income

but, as my little daughter said,

"If you can't take a joke, Daddy, you shouldn't be farming."

And she's right!

The last 80 years have seen these farming families adapt to change on an unprecedented scale.

New technologies and science, war,

political storms and economic upheavals,

but what of the future?

I find it terribly easy to look back but awful difficult to look forward!

Anybody who has to compete with the British weather has to,

I think, be sympathised with to some extent.

But nobody forced us to be farmers

and, er...we do it because we... we love it.

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