Chapter 9: The Good Seed

Gabrielle

2039

Farming is a business like any other. It may also be a vocation, a life-style choice or even one of the few remaining outdoor occupations, but the one thing Gabrielle knew for sure was that farming is a business.

Although she had sympathies with the principles of organic farming and rather distrusted Genetic Modification, what mattered at the end of each accounting month was that she'd balanced the books and generated enough profit to stay in business. In a world where famine and food shortages were a daily reality for more and more people in the world, including those living just on the border of the European Union, Gabrielle was convinced that it was almost her moral duty to provide as much food to the world as she could from the farmland she owned.

Business was rather better than it had been for many years and the future looked promising. International food prices were continuing to rise and this in turn significantly improved her profit margin. Much as she was saddened by the television images of the unfortunate starving millions in Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Chile and Pakistan, it remained an undeniable fact that farmers like her were unlikely to be amongst those who'd suffer as a result of the changing face of global food economics.

Gabrielle's sympathies weren't bogus. She'd been a bit of a globe-trotter when she was younger. In those days, fuel prices made a flight to Africa and Asia affordable even to students and graduates willing to defer their loan repayments. She'd seen the real face of famine in Bangladesh, Mozambique and Uzbekistan that tourists wouldn't normally be exposed to. A tour company would keep such horrors as much out of sight as possible. Her interest in Third World famine relief continued through her generous donations to foreign aid charities and her practical assistance in shipping out food that the supermarkets considered substandard to countries whose citizens had rather fewer scruples than spoiled London shoppers. She also made a practical contribution by employing immigrant Indians and Pakistanis on her estate, however much this was frowned upon by people in nearby Rickmansworth.

It made perfect economic sense, of course; just as much as did the cultivation of GM crops, cloned cattle, synthetic fertiliser and multilevel fruit farming. So when Gabrielle didn't attracting the ire of the prejudiced for making a hiring decision for one sound economic reason, she was attacked by green idealists for putting business interests ahead of what they believed to be ethical farming. If they had their way she'd have to live on half her current income, lay off most of her staff, leave land fallow that was now used for meat and dairy, and the only beneficiaries would be the poor of Ethiopia and Venezuela who'd be shipped out all the vegetables that the supermarkets had rejected.

Such criticism was inevitable when you farmed so close to London. Indeed, hers was the first farm that one would pass by when driving on the busy A404 (M) from the M1 to visit the bustling new town of Buckland Common. She'd never have been criticised so much if she was living in Wales or Northumbria, but here where land costs were high and the distance to market was so short there was nothing she could do to satisfy her neighbours. When she didn't suffer taunts from Greens who could never appreciate the value of a good leg of lamb or beef on the bone, she had to direct her farmhands to paint over racist daubing on the fences that enclosed her estate. Who'd have thought that farming would become so political in the twenty-first century?

The racist taunts resulted from the fact that so many of Gabrielle's immigrant farmhands came from the Indian subcontinent. Presumably it would have been less of a problem had they come from within the European Union, but Gabrielle doubted whether Georgians, Armenians or Moldavians would be treated with much more respect. Skin colour was obviously an issue, although a high proportion of local residents were themselves third or fourth generation Indian or Pakistani. The usual excuse for the vitriol was that the people Gabrielle employed were taking jobs that would otherwise go to honest Englishmen. This wasn't the kind of view that would be shared by anyone who'd ever tried to employ local people, especially from the London area, who would know one end of an agricultural implement from another; or for that matter who had the technical knowledge and qualifications in biology and genetics to understand what was required in modern agriculture: at least not at the level of wages now standard for agricultural workers in the United Kingdom.

And why the Indian subcontinent? Most farmers of Gabrielle's acquaintance resourced from rather less expensive foreign countries such as Morocco, Palestine, Senegal and the Congo

One reason for sure was that Gabrielle's longest-lasting lover, the one who'd most often shared her bed, was a second generation Indian Muslim who still had plenty of contacts in the subcontinent of his grandparents' birth.

Although he also had a wife whose upkeep he maintained and who he even occasionally fucked, he wasn't a jealous man. He didn't mind at all that Gabrielle was a woman for whom the word polyamorous had been invented and was fully content to share her body with other like-minded men. Furthermore, Ghazi Patel was at least as keen on cock as Gabrielle. Indeed, as she watched him glug down a mouthful of semen or gurgle on a stiff cock deep down his throat, it seemed that he enjoyed the physical pleasures of a man rather more than she did. She liked a fuck but, although partial to buggery, she preferred to keep her anus in good condition so she could enjoy it the more on special occasions. Ghazi was less reserved. He liked to fuck a man up the arse and was even happier when a man did it to him. Gabrielle got sexual stimulus from Ghazi's expressions of orgasmic delight and often shared the spurt of semen when it was eventually released by the man who was fucking her lover up the arse.

Gabrielle had a taste for having both holes engaged when she consented to the delights of sodomy. It seemed a waste for her more sensitive hole to be neglected while the other was being penetrated. After all, why have sex with two or more men at once if you couldn't indulge in double penetration?

Another reason why so many of those on Gabrielle's payroll came from the Indian subcontinent was the standard of education they'd received. This was usually significantly higher than the level they'd have attained in England's failing school system. But the chief reason was actually almost charitable. It wasn't just that Punjabi or Guajarati men were good fucks, but it was also Gabrielle's response to the conflict between the republics of Pakistan and India that had displaced so many refugees and filled so many news site web pages.