As a newspaper editor, Rosie Boycott campaigned to decriminalise cannabis. Now she's more interested in farming her smallholding. She tells Michael Kellyabout sustainable living
There's a wonderful passage in Rosie Boycott's new book, Our Farm, in which she describes the return of swallows to nests in her area after their long migration. They are, she writes, "wonderfully cosmopolitan creatures that connect two continents and two entirely different ways of life".
That's a fitting description for the author, a self-described city girl who now divides her time between London and the tiny Somerset town of Ilminster, where she runs a smallholding with her husband, a barrister named Charles Howard. "I've been many things in my life," she writes. "Mother, wife, journalist, writer, magazine editor, newspaper editor, radio and TV presenter, feminist, hippy, divorcee, junkie, drunk and traveller - but pig-owner was never on the cards."
Boycott, a founder of the iconic feminist magazine Spare Rib, was the first female editor of the Independentand Independent on Sunday, where she earned the nickname Rizla Rosie by campaigning for the decriminalisation of cannabis. She edited the Daily Expressfrom 1998 until 2001, leaving after the newspaper was bought by Richard Desmond, who also owns OK!and at the time owned numerous top-shelf magazines.
Our Farm, her second book, is an account of her and her husband's attempts to make their new venture profitable. She describes their decision to rent the farm as "a baby-substitute project". "Charlie and I were both married before and have our own kids and our own lives, and since we can't have kids together it is important for us to have a way of life that is our own."
It's interesting that the couple opted for commercial smallholding over the easier option of kitchen-table self-sufficiency. As the book highlights, smallholding is a tough slog with meagre financial rewards. Boycott is brutally honest about what worked and what didn't. A local butcher was unimpressed with the quality of their first slaughtered pig, and they made a paltry £183 (€268) on their first day at a farmers' market. "We tried rearing rare-breed chickens, and that was an expensive failure. The geese and ducks weren't great either, and the pigs were hit and miss economically. We are only now getting to the stage where we have two animals going to market each month. We also completely underestimated the amount of vegetables we needed in the ground. It is tough going, especially the lean winter months."
Given that both she and her husband have alternative careers, is there a financial imperative to make it work? "We need it to stop being unviable," she replies. "It has to be sustainable. Otherwise, what's the point?"
Boycott describes their efforts against the backdrop of food globalisation and our appetite for cheap, unseasonal food. The villain of the piece is Tesco, which rolls into Ilminster with plans for a supermarket. A band of small producers and shopkeepers come together in a fight for their livelihoods, but they fail to stop the behemoth. "The town is already suffering from it. They just keep winning all the little skirmishes. It's relentless - and it's kind of crap, really. They already take £1 of every £7 spent in the UK and are involved in every facet of life. They even sell funerals and weddings now. It's cradle-to-grave stuff."
She is aware of the cynicism that might meet a well-heeled writer and broadcaster telling people to grow their own, buy local and steer clear of the supermarket. "I cringe when I hear Prince Charles talking about this stuff, because it makes it sound like it's for toffs. Supermarkets are not all bad; it's just that things have gone too far when they are squeezing out the small producers. We just need some balance. I know it's not realistic for everyone to grow their own food, but they can at least try to buy local."
Our Farmleaves you with a profoundly depressing feeling that our current food model is simply unsustainable. Are we headed for a fall? "The entire food industry is completely predicated on cheap oil. Not just oil but cheap oil, and that era is almost over. Our food is in constant transit, whizzing around on planes and trucks. The saying goes that we are only ever nine meals from anarchy. In other words, if we run out of food on a Monday, by Wednesday you would be willing to shoot someone else to get food for your kids. That's scary stuff. We all need to get prepared."
There is hope in the book, though, and it comes from the simple pleasures of country life: mornings spent in the potting shed; giving a pig a rub behind the ears; the sense of community in small-town life. The fact that the woman documenting them previously considered any form of domesticity a trap just makes the point all the more forceful. "Imagine," she says, laughing. "I had to wait until I was in my mid-50s to discover how incredible a laying hen is."
Our Farm: A Year in the Life of a Smallholding, by Rosie Boycott, is published by Bloomsbury, £15.99 in UK