The Famous Marshes

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Some way in from the Atlantic coast, south of Normandy but not as far south as the Dordogne, it is an in-between country, a backwater, with all the benefits that unfamousness can bring. You won't find here the endlessly tarted up bijou manoirettes of the famous places.</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 229 ><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="2d9a4da0.jpg" border=0 width="164" height="218" ALT="Snakeshead " ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="383"><div>  Instead, the low limestone hills of Charente have small, poplar- and willow-lined rivers curling between them. Buzzards cruise overhead and hares start from hedgerows that are thick with old man's beard. There are cowslips in the pastures, even snakeshead fritillaries in the wetter meadows. Mistletoe is bundled up in the branches of the trees like overgrown Christmas decorations. People move rather slowly and talk to each other in the shops.Sit down for a chat in any kitchen, and it won't be long before there's a glass of pineau des Charentes in front of you, a sweet, thick, fortified wine - Cognac is just to the south west.</div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="4e1c8960.jpg" border=0 width="200" height="150" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></B></div> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="803" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 306 WIDTH="396"><div> If the half-forgottenness of Charente is one side of the picture, the state of British farming is the other. Seen from Charente, rural England looks like a frenzy of change and self-denial. For all that one reads in the British press of the new `artisan food economy', the growth of so-called farmers' markets, the boutiquisation of the smarter English market towns, the fact is that the juggernaut of industrialising change is still steaming through rural England. The demand on farmers to compete in the international food market; the abandonment of local food networks; the land-take of new roads and new houses; the high return available from farms turned over to polytunnels growing early vegetables; the economies of scale available from amalgamated, low-labour-cost farms: it will be many decades - if ever - before that train comes to a stop, let alone turns around. </div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="32e902c0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="300" ALT="St. Germain" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN=2 HEIGHT= 229 WIDTH="795"><div> It was inevitable that farming families under strain in England would sooner or later choose to abandon the struggle and move over to the opportunities and openness which places like the Charente can offer. France seems to hold out something of a promised land for beleaguered British farmers. It is, as a country and a culture, deeply friendly to it 550,000 farmers. They mop up a quarter of all the EU farm subsidies every year. Twice as much EU money goes to French farmers as on the entire EU aid budget. Farming is France's most important industry, its political class is pro-farming to a man (Chirac began life as Pompidou's farm minister) and its people believe, deep in their gut, more in good than in cheap food. Marshal petain used to entertain peasants to lunch in the Elysee palace if they could claim their families had farmed the same piece of land for a thousand years. The French government doles out aid to young farmers in the form of direct grants, cheap loans, “installation advice” and government-funded agencies which can block land sales to inappropriate agribusinesses and steer land towards new young entrants. Old farmers are given money to retire. As a result, the average age of French farmers has dropped from 55 to 40 in the last 15 years.</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 344 ><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="49f902c0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="300" ALT="Morning sky view from La Vergne" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="396"><div> It is this foot on the ladder which makes the difference. Farm incomes as a whole are no higher than in England. In fact, 40% of people working on French farms earn less than the minimum wage, but it is the extraordinarily careful policy context, and the cheap land prices, which makes coming here so attractive. The French government divides the country into an incredible 480 “petites regions agricoles” on which to base farm policy. For each of them the grant system - augmented by special funds from the commune, the departement and the region - is specially tailored. This, and the equally unbelievable figure of 800 different agri-environmental schemes available for farmers in different terroirs, is the source of France's great and lauded food diversity and its sense of local richness. Christine Lagarde, the French trade minister, has said recently that `farming is fundamental to identity.' Those are not words you will hear from many a British minister.</div> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="803" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 213 WIDTH="396"><div> Many English farmers have responded to the carrot. There are thought to be some 250 English farming families now owning, living on and working French farms. I visited four of them in the Charente last week. But what happens when you take English farming culture into another world. Does it work? And does it make them happy? </div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="4de90cf0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="207" ALT="Spring Lambs now is the time to try a B&B holiday" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 20 WIDTH="396"><div> <B>The Marshes</B></div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="396"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="20" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="396" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN=2 HEIGHT= 172 WIDTH="795"><div> Hilary and Andrew Marsh are from Shropshire. Both are now in their late 40s and they have four feisty and dynamic daughters. Hilary trained as a nurse but Andrew's family had owned and run the same mixed dairy and arable farm outside Newport since 1919. When two bypasses and a third major road were built round Newport in the 80s, their land was sliced up into difficult and unmanageable portions. Local politics meant that they were unable to get planning permission to turn their shattered farm over to housing. A new neighbour started to complain about the smell of the cows and the slurry they produced. What Andrew calls `yuppy newcomers to Newport' were wound up into a campaign against them. His father fell ill and everything which had seemed to Andrew so attractive and necessary about farming - `it was in my blood, it went back generations, I was my own boss' - suddenly looked more like a prison than a life. </div> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> <B> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="803" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 606 WIDTH="396"><div> And so in 1998 they decided to move. An agent they'd found in Farmer's Weekly took them on a whistlestop tour of a few selected farms in the Vosges, in Normandy and in the meadowlands in central France. The farm they found in Charente, La Vergne, some 200 acres of pasture and woodland, with about 70 rather bony Holstein cows, a working milking parlour, enough milk quota and many rather ramshackle buildings, was the place they went for. `It wasn't love at first sight,' Hilary says. `Not at all. It was a business case.' Andrew was still just young enough to qualify for the French grant for young farmers (pounds 6,000) and more importantly for a pounds 60,000 loan from the French government at 1.75%. With that and the proceeds from selling their part of the Newport farm, they bought La Vergne for pounds 400,000. </div> <bR> <div> It was a total uprooting. For all of them, perhaps especially their girls (Alex then 11, Alycia 9, Eleonore 5 and Hannah 2) `it was a very emotional time. We had to say goodbye to everything we knew,' Andrew says, `and to all the work put in over generations.</div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="49090580.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="600" ALT="By permission Martin Pope Photographer Daily Telegraph Mash Family with cows" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 273 ><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="48c900b0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="267" ALT="Spring 2006 La Vergne" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="396"><bR> <div>  But when they came to La Vergne, they loved it. `It was exciting,' Hilary says. `And the peace and tranquillity after Newport. We wanted to be away from the village, somewhere with all our own space around us and that is what we've got here. We have enough land here for the cattle to graze around the house and that's what you want isn't it?' </div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 275 WIDTH="396"><div> In the seven years that have passed, the four young Marshes have transmuted almost entirely into French girls. The two oldest now have French boyfriends and flick easily between perfect Charentaise French and perfect Shropshire English. You wouldn't mistake them for English girls. Their body-language, their dismissive, half-pouting `phoof' at another ridiculous parental suggestion, their shrugging of shoulders and the expressive `I dunno' of their held-out hands - none of that is very Newport. The younger two have been dipped even deeper into the French marinade and now, although they speak English fluently it is with a French accent. According to their mother, they are not natural writers of English, but Eleonore has come top of her class in French.</div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="494900d0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="269" ALT="By kind permission Martin Pope Photographer Daily Telegraph Marsh family with cow" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN=2 HEIGHT= 115 WIDTH="795"><div>  The girls argue at home in French. They whisper together in French if they don't want their mother to understand. Perhaps something of a gap is opening between the generations. If Andrew, a big, massively hairy and very gentle man with startlingly blue eyes, wants to get tough with a supplier of feed or equipment, he has to ask the strong-minded Alex, now 18, to do it for him. `I sometimes think we've made a rod for our own backs, the way we've brought her up,' he says ruefully.  Hilary sometimes embarks on a French sentence with her girls and then feels lost, unable to say what she needs to say to them. The country they came to adopt has, in a way, come to adopt them. </div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 383 WIDTH="396"><div> It has not been easy. The Holstein cows they bought with the fram had been starved and were poorly. There was a stage when a cow would be dying on them every day. They have replaced half of them with the much more robust and more beautiful creamy brown and white Montbeliards from Haute Saône-Doubs in the east of France. But still a dairy farm is an unremitting discipline. Neither of the Marsh parents have been home to Newport more than once. The cows must be milked every day twice a day and they trust no one but the family to do it. Last summer Hannah said to her mother `What does a seagull look like Mum? What does a beach look like?' Hilary was chastened by the question, organised for the family to get up at 4 in the morning, milk the herd, prepare food for the day, and drive to the seaside so that Hannah could for the first time in her life have some answers to these questions. They were back at the farm at 8 that evening, with the herd bellowing for relief, and the family then milked the cattle for the second time that day. `Cows sometimes have to be a little flexible,' Hilary says. </div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="482900a0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="266" ALT="By kind permission Martin Pope photographer Daily Telegraph E& A with cows" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 273 ><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="492900b0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="267" ALT="By Kind permission of Martin Pope photographer Daily Telegraph H & A & H cow and calf" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP WIDTH="396"><bR> <div> When Andrew and Hilary were doing up some guest rooms last summer, the older girls did the milking and the younger girls did the cooking. Hilary has started some cheesemaking, selling it through the network of the English church to which they belong in Poitou-Charente, while trying to run a gite business, which is  slow, and hoping to do up some of the more broken and disintegrating aspects of the farm. Their life, to a casual visitor, does feel stretched very tight indeed and it is certainly a sort of existence, an intensity of work and a level of income which most of us would quail at. `I have never worked as hard in my life,' Hilary says. `And if you didn't have a strong partnership, marriage, whatever,' .</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN=2 HEIGHT= 38 WIDTH="795"><div> Andrew says, `you'd be stuffed. But this is where we are, and it's the choice we've made.' Would they go back? `No, never, not now this is our home.</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN=2 HEIGHT= 45 WIDTH="795"><bR> <div> We are grateful to Adam Nicolson reporter Daily Telegraph and Martin Pope photographer Daily Telegraph for their kind permission in allowing us to use their article and photographs in our blog.</div> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></B></div> <bR> <div> . </div> <bR> <div>  </div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=80 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="0b7fa591dkelyh.jpg"> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>