Harvest Festival Address by Jerry Carr-Brion on Sunday 9thAugust 2026
Today we have gathered together some locally grown fruit and vegetables. Many thanks to all of you who have brought produce in for our display. It’s good to have something to show in a year of such severe drought.
The modern urban or suburban lifestyle can make us detached from how our food is produced. Food simply becomes a matter of likes and dislikes. Alternatively, the media often divides foods into magical superfoods that are supposed to add years to our lives or diabolical junk or processed foods that threaten us with premature death. In many cases the evil e-numbers that are supposed to kill us naturally occur in significant quantities in the so-called superfoods. In any event, the production of food can be easily ignored, despite all of us depending on it.
In the UK, many farmworkers still suffer from low wages, often at or just above the national minimum of £12.71 per hour. Employment is often seasonal, and migrant workers are needed to boost the labour force during seasonal peaks. Many self-employed tenant farmers work extremely long hours themselves and may end up earning less than the minimum wage on an hourly basis. Prices tend to be set by the large supermarkets and food companies, who are always keen to drive down the price the farmer receives.
The situation in many other countries is worse than in the UK, with multinational food companies making huge profits while only a few pennies in the pound of the shop price finds its way through to the people who actually grow the crops. So, I would like to make a plea to all of you to choose Fairtrade items where possible, which help to give a somewhat higher proportion of the price to the producers.
Of course, the exploitation of farm workers is nothing new. The Epistle of James, written in the 1st or 2nd century, condemns the rich who exploit the labourers, ‘The wages you never paid to the men who mowed your fields are loud against you, and the outcry of the reapers has reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.’ Of course, in those times, the majority of the population would be involved in agricultural production, and the farming year would be much harder to ignore. To help the local farming industry, it’s a good idea to buy foods directly from farms, either from farmer’s markets, farm shops or from a farm-run veg box scheme. As farmers face the challenges of a changing climate and uncertain income, they need us to remember them when we buy our food.