A saying over this side of the Pond goes, “What America does today, Europe will do in a couple year’s time.” Maybe that’s true in the majority of cases, be it the invention of a pen that writes upside down underwater—handy for sending birthday cards to dolphins, I guess—or setting the latest trend in pop music. But in one area we’ve got you beat hands down, no question. And that’s in drafting daft, unworkable legislation aimed at making life, for the farmer anyway, increasingly unlivable.

In case the trend reverses and you get some ideas from us for a change, or some demented senator wants to improve international relations and facilitate trade by proposing laws for American farmers in line with what’s happening in Europe, let me give you some illustrations of what we have to put up with. I apologize in advance if this gives you nightmares, but remember another old saw “Forewarned is forearmed.”

You’re probably more or less aware of the political and economic trends that have taken place in Europe over the past 50 years or so. To summarize, an increasing number of countries, initially in Western Europe, but recently many from the old Soviet Bloc in the East, too, have come together to form a common trading unit with, ironically enough, the aim of minimizing trade barriers, customs inspections, import/export taxation, and other redundant legislation. The idea is to create a large and powerful economic unit strong enough to compete with the United States in world markets.

The theory is fine, but in reality a Frankenstein’s monster of insane proportions has grown from these simple beginnings, and what was once correctly and usefully known as the Common Market has now become the European Economic Union, whose invasive tentacles of legislation now influence every aspect of life, far beyond what was intended originally. It’s no more just a case of making sure farmers from Portugal to Poland all get a fair price for their potatoes, but pressure is mounting for harmonizing (that is, taking over) everything, centralizing the running of Fortress Europe in Brussels, and having the whole show, politics, economics, defense, taxes, and so on dealt with by faceless, unelected, and untouchable bureaucrats.

Now I’m as enthusiastic as anyone about any way of making contact easier between different countries and cultures. I love whizzing around Europe meeting new folk and exchanging ideas with the minimum hassle at border controls, but if the price to pay for open trade and open minds is what we are increasingly being told to pay, then, to be honest, I’m getting alarmed.

A gap is a rapidly widening between the cities, where the laws are made, and the countryside. Sound familiar? I bet if you compare the mounting reliance on electronic communication—computers, cell phones, and so on—and the accumulating mountains of red tape affecting everyday life you’ll find there’s a direct connection. By which I mean not that I’m anti-computer and against progress in technology, but that more and more of the population has little or no connection with, or interest in, the hard, physical every day realities of earning a crust in the fresh air—like getting the cows in for milking, collecting the eggs, and harnessing the horses. So the urban hordes who govern us come up with yet more crazy ways of doing so, and never care at all what effect their ideas have on us—the honest hewers of wood and tillers of soil who, it should be remembered, continue to put food in their mouths on a daily basis.

I could rant on along these lines for many a page, but you need some concrete examples. I won’t attempt to explain the thinking behind some of this stuff—I guess no one could—but ponder on this for a moment: You are allowed to bury your dead mutt in the backyard, but have an old hen drop off the perch and you are obliged by law to take it to the nearest approved incineration plant. In our case that’s a good hour’s drive away. Same with rotten eggs. No, you can’t compost them or hurl them at the nearest politician. Eggs have to be disposed of in the approved manner.

Suppose you have an apple orchard out back, and a hog you’re fattening for Christmas. Go collect some windfall apples and take them straight to the porker, no problem. But, and you’ll scarcely believe this but it’s true, if you put the same apples in a bag, walk in the back door of your house and out the front, and feed them to Percy-the-Pig, you’ll be liable for prosecution. Why? Well, apparently the act of carrying the apples through the house (not doing anything to them on the way, simply carrying them) means they are now technically household waste, which you can’t give to poor Percy. What worries me here is the mindset of someone who could think up something so stupid and propose to enforce it with all the might and majesty of the Law. And that’s the sort of folk we are up against.

Did you know you can no longer take your billy goat down the road to stretch his legs and nibble at some roadside grass on a sunny afternoon? Not without a Livestock Movement Order you can’t. What’s more, you have to fill out endless paperwork and submit it to the local Ministry office every time you and Billy fancy a bit of a stroll.

We are now told that if you want to send any goat over 18 months old to the slaughterhouse, you have to fill in 17, yes 17, different forms. Talking of goats, my neighbors have half a dozen elderly dairy beasts, but the husband of the household isn’t allowed to drink any of the milk his wife manages to squeeze out of the ancient nannies. Nope. Because the tiny herd is registered in his wife’s name alone, only she can pour it into her coffee, unless they apply for and buy—at some considerable expense—a license to produce milk for general consumption. To get the license they’d have to build milking, storage and processing facilities—which will need regular inspection, for a fee of course—instead of doing what common sense says and thousands of generations have done and milk the goats into a clean bucket.

Here in Europe you now need either a license or a certificate of competence for just about everything: using a chainsaw to chop some logs for the fire, changing a disc on your angle grinder, unloading the delivery truck with a fork lift, and on and on. If you want to collect a fallen tree with your horses, make sure you fill in the appropriate Risk Assessment paperwork before setting off, or you will be in trouble.

Another neighbor, a small-time farmer eager to bring in some much needed cash from the outside, decided to become a pest controller, poisoning rats and the like. So off he goes for training, which costs him the biggest slice of a thousand dollars, gets his certificate to operate, and quite literally one week later the law is changed and the poisons he’d been trained to use are banned. Unbelievable.

To get any of the new subsidies for farmers (who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?) you have to do a regular environmental audit of your whole farm, and officials circulate in helicopters and read satellite printouts to make sure you haven’t plowed a field you said you wouldn’t this week, or your cows haven’t churned up mud in your gateway. It’s truly frightening.

This sort of petty-minded thinking just snowballs. And creates absurd anomalies. Like nearly all the small local slaughterhouses have shut down, drowned under a sea of unworkable new laws. When my wife and I lived in Scotland we had to take our organic lambs 250 miles to have them butchered, and yet at the same time other legislation is passed to prevent animals from being transported long distances. What, then, are we supposed to do for the best?

Certifiably insane and uninformed, not just ill-informed, animal rights activists in Germany have forced through legislation in one district that forbids plow horses be kept in stalls. They must now all be housed in loose boxes. And what is agreed to in one tiny corner of the European Union could easily be applied and enforced everywhere else in the name of conformity.

It’s only a matter of time before some do-gooder spots a draft horse working up a bit of a sweat turning the hay, and hey, we’ll be stopped from using our horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen for exactly what they are bred for in the first place. Far fetched? I don’t think so. A few years back an animal rights group managed to prevent a well thought out and planned proposal to operate a horse-drawn bus service in a university town, on the grounds of the risk to the animals’ health from traffic fumes, although the service was to operate in a pedestrian-only street.

What’s really sad about all this is that there’s often a tiny kernel of reason in the thinking, way, way back in the legislative process. (Interestingly, it was that unpleasant German, a certain Mr. A. Hitler, who was the first European to outlaw the docking of horses’ tails, decades before anyone else got around to doing anything about it.) But the hammer used to crack the nut is out of all proportion, beyond any common sense limit.

We all disapprove of extreme factory farming methods, yet as always, the laws designed to rein in the excesses of big business deal a death blow to the little guys. None of us would like to trade places with a battery hen in a cage too small to turn around in, or live among hogs in a sweat-box fattening unit. But we don’t need to be told that the most productive animals are ones that are properly looked after, do we? Those of us lucky enough to be brought up in and work in the country have to be sensible and aware of good and safe practices or we’d soon be in trouble. We don’t need a Nanny State to peer over our shoulders and smack us around the ear if we are seen doing something we know is right and normal, but which they, the State, know nothing about, but being obsessed with controlling everything, feel they have to poke their nose into.

Here’s a final stinker (literally) to keep you banging your head against the barn wall in frustration. Some years back we had to get an individual passport for all the cattle (recently the horses, too, and they are muttering about sheep next) and a farmer had a cow die. He rang up the Ministry of Agriculture, told them the cow had died, and asked what to do. “Bury it,” they said, “and send us back the passport”. So he did. Then, just last year, along come new laws forbidding on-farm burials of fallen stock and the Ministry contacts the farmer again. “Hey,” they said. “We’ve checked our records and something is wrong with the paperwork about that cow you buried five years ago. We’re coming over to dig it up and check the ear tag numbers.” Which they duly did. And fined him, too. Crazy, or what?

We know for sure now that this livestock identification idea simply makes life complicated for the farmer and doesn’t do anything else. For example, the thinking behind it is partly to do with clearly identifying food animals, especially in terms of medicines and treatments they may have been given and the conditions under which they’re reared. Fine. The customer, if he cares a jot anyway, knows that British beef is free of dangerous hormones and nasty infections. But, and here is the really stupid part, on the same supermarket shelf you can find beef imported from foreign shores that’s not required to comply to the same health regulations. Its history is completely unknown, yet we have to compete in the market place with this meat, which could be, and often is, reared under conditions and with growth promoting implants that are banned as unsafe and unacceptable in this country.

So please you be careful that the urban bureaucratic mindset that is rapidly taking the pleasure out of farming and making making it a pain over here doesn’t spread across the sea to the USA. Consider yourself forewarned.

Charlie Pinney of Cwmduad, Wales, does his best to keep his draft horses and other livestock below the bureaucratic radar screen. This article appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Rural Heritage.