In his 1946 work While Following the Plough, John Stewart Collis reflects on the transformation of a rural field from barrenness to bounty through agricultural cultivation, and exclaims: 'A farmer is a liberator of the energy in the earth, ceaselessly creating what is good, and adding on a vast scale to the beauty of the world' ([1973] 2009, 35). 1 Collis was writing at the tail end of a flowering of British agrarian literature in the modernist period which included, along with the brooding rural novels satirised so brilliantly in Stella Gibbons ' Cold Comfort Farm (1932), popular non-fictional prose works such as A. G. Street's Farmer's Glory (1932); Claire Leighton's The Farmer's Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry (1933); Adrian Bell's Men and the Fields (1939); and Fred Kitchen's Brother to the Ox (1939). But Collis was perhaps the last Anglophone writer of the 20 th century who could articulate such an entirely positive view of the aesthetic role of farming and its beneficent relationship with the earth. A year later the 1947 Agriculture Act, passed by Clement Attlee's post-war British government, consolidated measures, some of which were already coming into play when Collis himself was labouring on the land, to maximise Britain's agricultural productivity. The legislation was driven, as Jessica White notes, by the concern in Britain during the Second World War about the 'precarity of food supplies' and a growing 'obsession with self-sufficiency' (2019, 71). The Act offered farmers greater financial security, but the detrimental environmental impacts of the practices they were encouraged to adopt, from the removal of hedges to accommodate ever larger machinery to the increasing deployment of pesticides and artificial fertilisers, became increasingly evident in the second half of the 20 th century.Less than two decades after the publication of Collis's paean to life on the land, the American scientist Rachel Carson was conjuring up a terrifying picture of a 'strange blight' creeping across the villages of the USA, of dying songbirds, of farms on which no chicks hatched, and of orchards full of apple blossom unvisited by bees (2000 [1962], 21). While the opening of Silent Spring takes the form of a fable, the rest of the book explains in factual detail the impacts of the ongoing 'universal contamination of the environment' that was taking place as a result of the increasing use of pesticides (23). In the UK, J. A. Baker wrote of the decimation of the peregrine falcon population as a result of the agricultural use of DDT, graphically representing its effects on the birds: 'Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsion, withered and burnt away by CONTACT Tess Somervell
