2025-02-12
33 分钟This is the Guardian the Guardian Archive Long Read.
Hi, I'm Bella Bathurst.
I'm a writer and photojournalist and I'm the author of the Nacaman.
If I specialize in any kind of writing, then it's probably in collective biographies.
This Long Read is an excerpt from a book I wrote, Fieldwork, which was published by profile in 2021.
My aim was to write not about agricultural policy, the way that we farm, but about the people who do it, and to try and understand what makes farming so different to every other profession.
So I started with a chapter on what's officially known as fallen stock collection, or more usually just as knackering.
Andersons, as I called them in the book, are the undertakers of the animal world, the people who dispose of the cows or sheep or pigs or chickens which through disease or surplus or old age, never make it to sale.
I live surrounded by farmland.
I'm used to seeing the anonymous grey tipper lorries coming and going, but I realized that I knew nothing about the working lives of those drivers.
As part of the research I spent a day with Ian Carswell, a knackerman for a firm in the West Midlands, picking up dead sheep and cattle.
That day was illuminating, sad, sometimes wrenching, occasionally black humoured, but an amazing insight into work which goes on every day, all, all the time, in plain view but completely out of sight.
Since then, many things have changed and many have stayed the same.
Andersons have been bought out by a larger company, Ian Carswell has retired, three female drivers have joined the team, the company are doing more mental health training and social media, and Covid made no difference at all because of the mild, wet, huge humid weather we've had this year, it's been a bad one for losses.
Chicken farms have reduced their numbers because of avian flu, and when I ask the managing director, Will Anderson, what he feels about the future of farming, he just says nervous.
Welcome to the Guardian Long Read Showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
For the text version of this and all our long reads go to theguardian.com longread the knacker man the Toughest Job in British Farming by Bella Bathurst, read by Andrew McGregor and produced by Esther Opokujeni.
Names and dates have been changed.
One bright morning in the middle of May, Ian Carswell's tipper lorry came sliding to a halt in a Tenbury car park.
It was a smallish thing with raw grey sides and nothing distinctive about it, the sort of truck that carries topsoil or aggregate all over the country.