Apparently the Queen recently asked a group of financial experts why none of them had seen fit to warn her and her subjects about the financial catastrophe “didn’t any of you see it coming?” she queried. There was, after all, plenty of evidence that what we were up to in this country and elsewhere was not going to last long and that when it when wrong it was all going to be very painful. The same scenario seems to be playing out with the issue of food. We all take for granted the fact that we can stroll into a supermarket any time of the year and pick up whatever we need. But if you scratch the surface of the food system it doesn’t take long before worrying facts start to appear.

I don’t know if you caught the film by Rebecca (Modbury Plastic Bag Campaign) Hosking last Friday (BBC2 Natural World: A Farm for the Future). If you didn’t you missed a really interesting piece about what appears to be yet another crisis we are sleepwalking into.

For example, with the world’s energy experts now fairly unanimously agreed that we reached the peak of oil production in July 2008 it’s very alarming to learn that 96% of the food we grow in the UK is totally reliant on oil. That includes pretty much all the organic provision, of course, where the farmers may not spray petrochemical fertilisers but they do rely on oil driven machinery every step of the way in the growing process.

It’s also shameful to learn that we only produce 5% of all the fruit we consume in this country. And that 40% of the prime arable land we have is given over to raising crops to be fed to……yes you’ve guessed it…..animals.

Rebecca Hosking visited some places where they do things rather differently from the norm. One dairy farm in Wales has worked out a permaculture system so that they look after their animals with only one piece of petrol driven equipment – a quad bike. And another ‘Forest Farm’ grows a huge amount of produce in a carefully managed wood spending only around a day a week looking after it with no reliance on oil. Rebecca H nearly fell over at the thought of this. Her father and uncle spend seven days a week looking after their farm. Both these examples show that there are ways of overturning and improving traditional farming and growing methods. And there was more. I was more than a little surprised to learn that ploughing up the land, a practise that’s been going on for hundreds of years, actually kills the soil and necessitates the addition of all the nasty fertilisers that we now get so worried about. The answer is, it seems, not to plough! Let the fantastic ecosystem that exists in the soil thrive and treat it like the thing is really is, a living organism that doesn’t want to be carved up every year and denuded of much of its animal and chemical life.

There are many drastic changes that need to be made. It is to be hoped that those who have presided over the UK’s agricultural policy don’t repeat the same mistake as the bankers. There is a huge amount of such solid evidence on the fragile nature of our food supply. Let’s not wait till we have a crisis before wading in to try to rectify things. Because it might just be too late…….

So let’s get digging!