The big highlights of next summer’s farming season will be the Great Yorkshire, Royal Welsh and Royal Highland shows. You may notice an omission. Yes, despite an explosion of interest in good food and a boom in farmers’ markets and local shows almost everywhere, what used to be the pinnacle of British agriculture, the Royal Show, opened its gates for the last time this year.

For those of us who have often watched the lines of pampered cattle waiting to be judged, and looked into the watery eyes of long-serving stockmen when their animals won, the end of the Royal after 160 years last week will not have passed without emotion. I have been going for longer than I care to remember. Members of my family were involved in running the food hall in the show’s heyday, the 1970s and 1980s. They would share the sadness but also the anger that many feel about what has happened to the showcase of farming.

For the reality is that the demise of the Royal Show was not just about a failure to move with the times. Nor was it about a failure to recognise and showcase the explosion in regional food varieties, though all of these things are true. The real story of the Royal, despite the quaint bowler hats of its stewards, is that it represented an industrial model of agriculture that has failed, but which its governing body, the Royal Agricultural Society of England, has never really abandoned.

For too many years the Royal’s failing was that it had become the bastion of an arrogant agricultural establishment that gave barely a hoot for the concerns of the public when it came to food safety, the culture of the countryside, animal welfare, damage to wildlife, pollution, or potential genetic pollution. Its Stoneleigh site in Warwickshire is still surrounded by buildings occupied by the offices, private clubs and hospitality suites of agribusiness - the National Farmers’ Union and feed, livestock “improvement” and biotech businesses - few of them open to the ticket-buying public. The agricultural establishment preached demanning then wondered why the number of farmers shrank from about 160,000 in the 1980s to 40,000-50,000 today. No club thrives that sacks its members.

There were people who tried to get it right. My late uncle, who made blue Cheshire cheese and ran the food hall, often came off worse in arguments about whether the show was about food, and hence about what consumers wanted, or just about the technological farming that big farmers wanted to give them. He saw the model in the excellence of the food fairs of Europe. They didn’t. At that time, the close of the 1970s, few of his contemporaries ever met a consumer. They just grew commodity crops and received fixed prices for their milk and corn in return. After he left, the food hall began its slide. It reached its nadir last week when colleagues struggled to find even a burger (not their food of choice) or a glass of wine.

I think I know when it all went wrong. For a decade or more the organic movement persisted with the Royal. Rather like the public it clung to the view that the show held a symbolic position in the hearts of people who loved the countryside. Then, in 1989, Patrick Holden, head of the Soil Association, went to one of the stewards and suggested the show might like to become a festival for farming, food and sustainability, not just high-input agriculture. As part of this vision the association wanted a reasonably central position the next year. Instead the association found itself banished to “outer Siberia”, a stand in the arable area, far from the centre of the 250-acre ground.

It was about this time that the Royal began to lose money. Soon the organic movement was organising its own events, the people who cared about good specialist food had moved to local shows and markets. Even the specialist cereal, beef, grassland and slurry boys had set up events of their own. In one of multiple ironies the chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society of England today is Hugh Oliver-Bellasis, an admirable man who believes in all that Holden was trying to do in 1989. As he will have found the key decisions were made years ago by people who still sit on committees. It is all too late.

The loss of a “big tent” for British agriculture is a tragedy for the stockmen, the pedigree breeders, the smallholders and the burger salesmen – the infantry let down by their generals.

But it is a bigger tragedy for UK agriculture, which needs leadership more than at any time since the industrial revolution. For the men in bowler hats have failed not just the countryside but the planet. The agriculture and food industries may be responsible for as much as 30% of all global carbon emissions and, if climate change targets mean anything, we shall need to eliminate nitrogen fertilisers – on which intensive agriculture has been based – and return to building soil fertility through crop rotation. That will transform the landscape, mean a loss of cereal production and the end of cheap white meat such as chicken.

The caravan has moved on. The question is, who will lead it now?

Sunday Times 12/7/09