People have commented to me that wheat is getting a bit expensive, and I suppose that, in a way, it is.
Yet it is amazing what you discover when you start poking about.
Looking back to Periclean Athens, if your estate could produce more than 200 medimnoi of wheat you were a full citizen and were expected to serve as a Hoplite with your own equipment.
If your estate could produce over 300 medimnoi of wheat then you were gentry indeed and were expected to keep a horse and turn up on that to fight! Obviously we are talking big money here; after all 200 medimnoi of wheat was worth 600 drachma.
For a chance at that sort of land young Greek men with no land of their own sailed to Egypt to serve in the army of the Ptolemies (Cleopatra and her family) because they would be given on retirement enough land to put them into the 200 medimnoi category.
The thing that makes this interesting is that 200 medimnoi is eight metric tonnes of wheat! Even at its most expensive recently, you’d still get change from £1,700.
In Athens, if you were really wealthy, they would ask you to pay for a trireme, the standard warship of the period.
You paid for maintenance and the crew’s wages (5,000 drachma or 66 tonnes of wheat) and it you got it sunk you might have to buy a new one (again about 5,000 drachma or 66 tonnes of wheat. Oliver Walston could be getting a call from the First Lord of the Admiralty asking him to provide us with a carrier task force at that rate.
Now wheat yields have increased, in Egypt, fertile with the annual flooding of the Nile, yields were reckoned to be 445kg per acre for wheat.
Farmers in other parts of the world huddled together in bars and consoled each other that Egyptians were doubtless liars and no-one ever got more that 300kg per acre.
The big change though is in wages. At this period the wages for the average family, small farmers or village craftsmen, if paid in wheat, would have been 727kg a year. That would have fed them and their families and they could have traded a bit to buy some beans, lentils and perhaps the occasional goat while the wife made the family’s clothes from wool she bought and spun herself.
You might wonder why I labour the point. To put it simply, the last couple of centuries, probably since the opening up of the Americas, have seen the price of food fall to unprecedented levels.
Compared to our ancestors either we are unbelievably, fabulously rich, or the price of food is so incredibly cheap as to be incomprehensible to anyone born before 1500 AD.
Socrates, the great philosopher, once served as a soldier (as a citizen he felt he should, even though he wasn’t wealthy enough for it to be obligatory) and it was commented by his friends that he did this even though his sole asset was his house worth 500 drachma, or six and a half tonnes of wheat.
Wander into Athens now and see how many houses you can buy with seven tonnes of wheat?
Indeed, I remember one comment made about England at the time of Napoleon, where the yield from an acre would pay a farmworker for a year, now it might just pay him for a week.
So, we have built a civilisation on food being almost obscenely cheap.
For most of human history food was expensive and you literally ‘ate bread by the sweat of your brow’. Yet for the last 200 or so years we have turned everything upside down. Imagine it, wheat at £60 a tonne, so cheap I know people who rigged up systems to burn it as solid fuel in their central heating boilers.
So where are we now? Just reading around can be worrying. Oil is now being predicted to reach $105 a barrel by the end of this year.
Because we are using all the oil we can produce now – and may indeed have hit ‘peak oil’ – when people use biodiesel they aren’t substituting for oil, they are adding to the total available.
Some pundits point out that whereas six years ago we used 12 million hectares to produce biofuels, now we use 80 million hectares. At the moment this provides for 3 per cent of world energy needs but by 2030 biofuels will need to provide for 10.6 per cent of world energy needs. This is nothing to do with global warming and carbon footprints, this is just to ensure that we don’t run out of fuel.
It probably took 150 years for our civilisation to swing from a man’s annual wage being the yield of one acre, to that same acre paying him for a week. I wonder how long it will take to swing back?
Obviously we can try and push for increased yields, but to match the scale of increase we have seen since they huddled in gloomy bars and decided the Egyptians were liars if they said they got over 400kg an acre, we would have to hit 20 tons an acre. GM is not going to deliver that.
So personally I don’t think that wheat is dear, I don’t think it is dear at all.
• Jim Webster farms beef and sheep on 150 acres at Barrow-in-Furness and is a past president of Cumbria CLA.
