The End of British Farming 
Andrew O’Hagan
This last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would continue on my way to Devon, passing through other places waking up in the middle of the worst agricultural nightmare in seventy years. My boots are without guilt, but in all the walking here and there, in the asking and listening, I came to feel that British farming was already dying, that the new epidemic was but an unexpected acceleration of a certain decline.
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Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, has been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Journey in the South · Andrew O’Hagan travels to New Orleans
Good Fibs · Truman Capote
At the Design Museum · Peter Saville
Still Reeling from My Loss · Lulu & Co
Blame it on the boogie · In Pursuit of Michael Jackson
The God Squad · Andrew O’Hagan in Bushland
Everything Must Go! · American Beauties
The Things We Throw Away · The Garbage of England
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