How to prevent a Brexit food crisis? Dig deep for fair pay on farms

Bear with me while I tell you about the price of potatoes, for it is in such humble roots that some of the blights of capitalism are revealed. It is in the food system, too, that the Brexit fault lines over immigration are opening into alarming chasms.

Martin and Sarah Mackey grow potatoes, along with fashionable greenery such as kale, in Kent. They are tenants on their holding, Ripple Farm, and so have no inherited, accumulated capital in the land to subsidise their business, although they receive about £5,000 a year in EU environmental farm payments. They sell some of their potatoes at local markets for a pound a kilo, about the same as you would pay for the equivalent grade in a high street supermarket. They also supply a trading and wholesaling operation called Growing Communities that mixes their potatoes with other produce in vegetable box schemes, starting at £7.75 for a week’s supply for one.

Source: Theguardian