Death of the British Farmer : Disease is just the latest crisis besetting rural life. The world of an endangered species.(Brief Article)

There was no mistaking the pall that hung over British farming last week. Fed by the carcasses of thousands of pigs, sheep and cows, funeral pyres pumped black smoke into the sky as the country battled the latest scourge to its agriculture industry. This time the enemy was foot-and-mouth disease. FMD is wildly contagious; it can move from one place to another on a car aerial. Out of control, it can wreak economic havoc. Britain took drastic action. In London, visitors to the zoo walked across entrance mats soaked in disinfectant, and the gates to Richmond Park's 2,360 acres were locked to protect the royal deer herd inside. But the countryside felt the brunt of the precautions. Livestock movements were frozen. Farmland was off-limits to outsiders. Farmers stayed home, and rural towns became ghost towns. In Scotland, Dolly the cloned sheep was placed under protective custody. In Shropshire, ground zero of the last foot-and-mouth outbreak, which led to the incineration of more than 400,000 animals in 1967, there was a sense of foreboding. "It's the silent spring here," said conservationist Paul Evans after a walk in the woods around Much Wenlock. "There's no one about at all. You can almost feel the tension in the land."

You can. But what ails British farming runs much deeper than a catalog of diseases, however terrible. FMD, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), last summer's outbreak of swine fever--they are the headline-grabbing new signs of a longstanding problem. Over the past five years farm income in Britain has fallen by nearly 75 percent; last year alone it fell by a quarter. In the past two years about a third of Britain's 150,000 full- time farmers have quit. The future for those remaining is not bright: the average age of a British farmer is 57. "Farming will never be the same," says Keith Thompson, 40, a dairy farmer in Cheshire. He and his wife no longer take milk in their tea; they need to sell it, and every drop counts. "My eldest boy asked me if there'll be a future in farming for him," says Thompson. "He said he didn't want to live the life my wife and I [do]... With four kids, the state could look after us better than I can."

Everybody has a favorite villain. Farmers blame BSE and other diseases, a strong pound that hurts exports, hikes in the price of fuel and fertilizer and the "anti-countryside" policies of Tony Blair's "townie" government, whose heartland is urban Britain. Environmentalists blame "factory farming" for creating conditions that breed food-safety scares and for operating on the assumption that "the chemical industry has made nature irrelevant," as agriculture writer Graham Harvey puts it. Blairite politicians blame nearly two decades of Conservative Party pro-farmer deregulation during the '80s and '90s, which they say gutted hygiene rules. Economists, ...