Thousands of miles of hedgerows, thousands of ponds, have disappeared from the landscape.

This is a direct result of the way we have produced our food in the last four decades. In Britain, for example, many of our best-loved farmland birds, such as the skylark, the grey partridge, the lapwing and the corn bunting, have vanished from huge stretches of countryside, as have even more wild flowers and insects. But the damage it has caused has been colossal. The cost is in the collateral damage of the very methods of food production that have made the food cheaper: in the pollution of water, the enervation of soil, the destruction of wildlife, the harm to animal welfare and the threat to human health caused by modern industrial agriculture.įirst mechanisation, then mass use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, then monocultures, then battery rearing of livestock, and now genetic engineering - the onward march of intensive farming has seemed unstoppable in the last half-century, as the yields of produce have soared. In the West at least, most food is now far cheaper to buy in relative terms than it was in 1960. That cost, however, is not in immediate cash. It has now reached a point where a growing number of people believe that it is far too high, and that bringing it down will be one of the great challenges of the twenty first century. For more than forty years the cost of food has been rising.

Cute bee real