Did Travel Broaden Some of Britain’s Great Minds?

I love travelling. I am at my most creative when I have just come back from somewhere, or even when I’m waiting for a plane in a clean cut airport lounge. And the adage ‘travel broadens the mind’ is so inherent in our ‘Gap Year’ culture, we rarely even question whether or not paying 6 grand to STA Travel is going to publish us with an enlightened and insightful view of the world.

I believe that until I have seen more of the world, I cannot write about it with authority, or develop a complete political ideology. If I have never seen Tiananmen Square, or the Dharavi Slums, never walked the streets of Washington D.C, or set foot on African soil, how could I really know all that much? How could I make any lasting decisions on how to view the world, if viewing it from the porthole of a window that is South East England?

Historically, I am not alone in this feeling. A plethora Britain’s great thinkers took time out to ‘find themselves’. So, let’s answer a few questions like- where did Lord Byron go on his Gap Year? Who discovered the humble potato? Is travel really necessary to broaden our minds when we have access to the panorama of the Internet?

The first person to organise a round the world trip, before Thomas Cook opened on the high street, was Ferdinand Magellan, a Spaniard in search of good spices. This was in 1521. Even on this maiden voyage, things were discovered that were pioneering in 16th Century Science, such as the size of the Earth, making an International Date Line necessary that is still in effect today.

So how about the Brits?

A legacy of Exploration has given Britain a leading role in the discovery of new lands and knowledge. Adventurers like Mary Kingsley provided the first empathetic account of African tribal culture. Francis Drake carried out the first British voyage of discovery to the New World. Walter Raleigh introduced Britain to the potato. All of these early explorers where learning from travel like curious children asking questions. Can we go a bit further? Learn a bit more?

Then there are the creatives. Art and travel have always seemed intertwined. The Romantic Poets are a good example for this. Percy Shelley eloped with a different girl practically every week, to Europe, to Scotland. Travel was a Romantic tradition, and often discussed is the legendary Swiss retreat that the Shelleys went on with Lord Byron, on which they all wrote and Mary Shelley began ‘Frankenstein’. Byron, who went on the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ of the world from 1809-1811, wrote “With these countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end.” He surmises further, writing- “What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.” In short, one of Britain’s greatest poets doesn’t think he would have written if he had not travelled.

Popular Culture is not exempt from the ‘Travel Inspiration’ phenomenon. The Beatles perfected their craft in Hamburg. J.K Rowling finalised The first Harry Potter manuscript in Portugal. Even Prime Minister David Cameron took a pre-Oxford Gap Year in Hong Kong.

Travel in 2014 no longer means discovering the Americas, but Space. In a month where Europe has faced Economic troubles, talk of referendums and curbing immigration, it has also collaborated to land a spacecraft on a comet. Scientific discovery is the true golden egg in the exploration nest, and without the curiosity it takes to launch missions like this one, we would never make Scientific progress. And ultimately, isn’t that ability to look outside ourselves what makes us special as humans?

There is a line from the film Good Will Hunting that comes to mind, as said to the young genius-  “So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.”
Well, I’m not sure how smelling the Sistine Chapel is helpful in life, but there’s definitely value in experience. An empathy perhaps, that has coloured the works of many great writers, and shaped the ideas of individuals. Inspiration to create something new. Or discovering something that you would never otherwise have found.

How Farming Became A Battery Operated Economy

Our Economy started with Factory Farming. It all began when a chicken farmer called Anthony Fisher went to New York and met right wing economist ‘Baldy’ Harper. Harper introduced Fisher to the idea of Factory farming his chickens, already an established method in the US. (So the story goes, a farmers wife was delivered an excess of around 200 chickens sometime in the 1920s. The chickens spent the winter in her house and all survived. It was the first evidence that chickens could be farmed indoors on a mass scale.) Fisher went on to create Britain’s first Battery Farm, and his company Buxted Chickens was a success. Fisher used the profits to found the Institute of Economic Affairs, a Free Market think tank which Margaret Thatcher said “created a climate of opinion which made our victory possible.” So there you have it, an economy founded on chicken farming. Who’d have thought it?

Research Factory Farms and you will drown in a barrel of pathos, force feeding, and pollution. So finding straight economic figures for this article has been tricky. Nevertheless, I will try to keep this free from a welfare angle and just focus on one question. What does the economy of Factory Farming really look like?

Origins

Factory Farming, we often forget, has only existed in the UK for around 60 years. After the Second World War a lot of impetus was put into the UK being self sufficient. Incentives lead to farmers creating bigger, consolidated farms, and higher output expectation lead to factory farming being adopted across the board to meet demand.

Effects On Local Farming Communities

Factory Farms tend to be owned by big companies and usually buy machinery and other supplies from conglomerates their own size. A University of Minnesota study compared the local expenditures of small and large farms. It found that farms with gross incomes of over $900,000 spent under 20 percent of total expenditure in their local community. In contrast, smaller farms with gross incomes of less than $100,000 made 95% of expenditures locally. It is worth considering this wider economic effect when calculating the cost of Factory Farms.

The True Price of Higher Living Standards

The go to rhetoric of the Intensive Farming Industry is that they are feeding the people, and at a low cost. How heroic. However, there are a lot of hidden costs equated with bigger farms that use more mechanised farming methods, despite their apparent efficiency. Monoculture Farms produce more food per worker, which shows efficiency in some respects. However sustainable farms produce more food per acre. This means that sustainable farms create more jobs and more food. But what’s the cost?

The answer is interesting. A major study by Jonasson & Andersson, (1997) showed that giving pigs more space led to more use-able food being created, and less cost on veterinary bills. More recent studies are suggesting the same thing, such as an Exeter University sustainable agriculture study of 9 million farms showed it increased productivity by an average of 93%. In fact, when assessing the most productive way to introduce farming to Africa, a UN report found that small, sustainable farms were best. So why do we still cling to factory farms in the UK?

The cost difference isn’t even as large as it portrayed by the shelf prices. To get down to numbers, a 2002 study found that a Free Range egg cost just 1.54p more than a battery egg. This equates to £2.51 per person per year. So long as the consumer, and not the farmer, is willing to pay the difference, perhaps a time has come when we no longer need Intensive Farms? It may be time to embrace other alternatives, improving the quality of the meat, the productivity of the land, and the deal for smaller farmers.