Dirt into Soil
Mother Trees in Haugh Wood, Herefordshire*
Beside the old threshing floors in Eddie’s big barn, where the wagons were hauled in loaded with sheaves, were the great bays underneath the oak framed roof, where the sheaves would be stacked up to the rafters. The double doors gave a strong through-draught, and in the days when the winter was spent threshing the corn with flails, and winnowing the grain, this draught was used to blow the light chaff away and leave the heavy grain behind. To the side of one of the threshing floors were the steps up to the granary, where the winnowed grain was stored. My favourite place was under the granary stairs, a space with a work bench, and behind it under the granary a half-cellar where the cider was kept, trammed up in the half light, the liquid that fuelled the harvest as coca leaves fuel Bolivian miners.
As a child I loved the fragrances of this place. There was a smell of axle grease, the same axle grease that was used on the old wooden wagons and drays, mixed with smells of dust, chaff, old potatoes and dogs. There were all manner of relics here, from earlier farming epochs. And it was the place where the sheepdog bitches came to have their pups. For centuries this was the place where the labourers would spend days in the winter, wet days especially when outside work was harsh, glad to have work through the winter, sneaking off from the rhythmic battering of threshing to numb themselves at every chance at the cider barrel.
The sheaves were soon replaced with bales and the threshing was done by the combine harvester, but it was still the place you went as a child to see a new batch of mewling kittens, or a litter of pups with a mother twisted between snarling and fawning as you picked up her blind pups. The world smelled of barns, and cows’ breath, and of cowshit, its crust curling in the summer sun under a dance of golden dung flies.
I’m not telling you this because I’m feeling nostalgic tonight, but because I feel so conflicted about farming, where ideas that may determine whether we can continue to feed ourselves on a planet shared with all the miraculous natural creation, are being, forgive me, threshed out on farms like this. People who have any kind of critique of farming (or hunting, or shooting) are often seen as city people who don’t understand. I’m not one of those city people. For many years various kinds of farm life were all I knew.
Which was why, when I went on a farm walk organised by a local regenerative farm, I immediately felt at home. I may see farming as one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change, but put me with a family in a farmhouse kitchen, talking about their excitement at their plans for reviving the vitality and biodiversity of the soils on their farm through regenerative agriculture, and I immediately warm to them, even though I am deeply troubled about what farming is doing to the countryside and to the planet. I have a lot of questions about farming, which was why I had signed up for this farm walk.
For many years I have believed modern farming methods to be disastrous. Since the war the orthodoxy was that to get the yields you had to lash on the fertilisers and the herbicides and the fungicides and the insecticides. Governments and the chemical companies spoke with one voice, and who were farmers to argue? I have always believed that no good could come of applying so many poisons to the living world, but of course if ever I suggested this to farmers they were very scornful. To slather the countryside with all these chemicals was the orthodoxy and to question it was to risk being accused of not being a country person, and therefore not being qualified to have an opinion. But with the growth of regenerative farming this has changed.
What is central to the regenerative farming movement is the soil. This is not a movement started by soil scientists, nor is it particularly supported by the government or the agricultural colleges. It is inevitable that I will call it a grass-roots movement, because it is led by farmers, and it was promoted much more effectively by Graham Harvey, former agricultural story editor of The Archers, than by any government agencies or ministries.
That same farm with the great threshing barn had an orchard full of cider fruit, mainly White Normans, and superb Blenheim Orange pippins. Eddie did nothing to it. The suckler cows grazed it year round and it never failed to provide the cows with ‘keep’ and it never became poached, no matter how dry or wet the season. Eddie had no idea why it was so good, but now the theories behind regenerative agriculture are beginning to explain it. It seems likely that because the soil had been undisturbed for a hundred years it had the complex soil biology that allows transfer of nutrients and moisture to where they are most needed.
Regenerative agriculture is – I’ll say it again, because it is very important - all about soil. It recognises, at long last, that the soil is a complex ecosystem that we may never fully understand. For maybe seventy years we have been farming hydroponically, believing the soil to be just some dirt that needs the addition of a cocktail of chemicals in order to grow heavier crops. Suddenly these young regenerative farmers are admitting that what their dads have been doing for all these years has been damaging the soil, damaging the worms and the fungi and the microbes and invertebrates that make up a microscopic ecosystem in the soil that is, when healthy, as complex as anything in Amazonia. Their new farming techniques are all about protecting the soil and restoring the living communities within it, and recognising that this ecosystem provides and distributes nutrients through a web of fungal and microbial and plant interactions, too complex for us to fully understand yet, and too important for us to risk damaging with the Neolithic club that is chemical farming. We may have known for years that legumes fix nitrogen, for example, but we are only just beginning to realise that all the organisms in the soil may be involved in complex interactions that supply the nutrients that plants require, and may also help them combat pests and diseases. Work on soil, and on the fungi of forests, is beginning to uncover networks that send liquids and nutrients and the products of photosynthesis where they are needed. If any of my local readers want to see this in action, go to Haugh Woods near Hereford, enter some of the thick stands of Western Red Cedar, and you will see young trees growing in the near darkness where nothing else grows, fed the products of photosynthesis (that they themselves cannot produce in the dark) by their parent trees, via networks of fungal filaments or mycorrhizomes.
For many years the chemical orthodoxy stifled innovation and research. It was easier to spray poisons and chemical fertilisers than to investigate other techniques or breed resistant strains, and there was not enough demand for alternatives. Regenerative farmers have to experiment, to develop new techniques to overcome the problems ‘traditionally’ solved by chemicals, work that could have been sponsored by governments many years ago. This sort of regenerative farming is a tacit admission by young farmers that chemical farming was a blind alley. Often they have to work through these issues with Dad, who fears change and may control the finances. Often they do not dare to completely cut out the fertilisers, although their theories imply that the soil can only recover to the point where natural processes supply the nutrients if the artificial fertilisers are stopped altogether. They do not dare to cut out all the fungicides and insecticides, although the theories would suggest that for nature to recover enough for natural pest control to take over, you have to stop spraying and wait for the recovery. They tend to talk as if the soil has become addicted to chemicals, and needs gentle withdrawal, but it may be that the farmers were as addicted as the soil, and they too need time for rehabilitation.
Worst of all, they cannot let go of their dependency on the herbicide Glyphosate.
A central theory of regenerative agriculture is that ploughing is bad for the soil, so crops are sown by machines that scuffle a thin surface layer and plant the seeds very shallowly, leaving the soil intact, with all its worm holes and fungal rhizomes and the complex soil structure that microbes create around themselves in the absence of chemical fertilisers. There are many ways of suppressing weeds in regenerative agriculture, where complexity is preferred and mixed crops in the same field replace monocultures. It is held to be important to maintain soil cover at all times, and ideally never to have visible soil, and a tolerance of the weeds that also provide food sources for wild birds is therefore almost an inevitable side-effect of regenerative farming. But at that crucial point when seeds are sown and need to establish themselves, the use of Glyphosate is almost universal on regenerative farms. This is a deadly persistent biocidal cancer-causing herbicide that has been promoted by the manufacturers using all sorts of underhand methods, and it is hard to see how it is compatible with the principles and the practice of regenerative agriculture. It is likely to be banned in the EU some time soon, though our government likes to be free of the feeble environmental protections of the EU. Its use in regenerative agriculture is a compromise that needs to be replaced by new techniques as a matter of urgency. It cannot be compatible with the restoration of soil health.
One other area of interest is the place of livestock and manure in regenerative agriculture. On this particular farm the beautiful Hereford cattle are embedded in the DNA of the family, and farming without them would be unimaginable. They compost their manure before they apply it to the land, so that it is more efficiently incorporated into the soil to build up fertility and soil carbon, and to some extent it reassures that the soil is being fertilised in a more traditional manner. But any review of the future of farming and the future of nature must conclude that livestock farming is wasteful of land and of foodstuffs and a major contributor to global warming, and although I would not expect this particular family to give up breeding these beautiful cattle, regenerative farming needs to develop alternatives to manure. The nutrients in the manure come from the soil and are recycled through animals, but there are other ways of recycling nutrients and making them available to plants that do not involve cows’ stomachs, and these methods will also, like manure, increase the carbon sequestered in the soil.
As for the wildlife, I was told that they have birds like yellowhammers there now, though I didn’t see any. It is maybe too early to say how regenerative farming will help to restore biodiversity, but it could hardly be worse than the conventional chemical farming, which has resulted in the UK being in the 10% of countries in the world with the worst loss of biodiversity. My impression is that regenerative farmers care more about nature in general and tend not to be trying to force the maximum yield out of every last acre. The interest of regenerative farmers in conservation is a poor second to their interest in soils, but nature recovery on their farms is still likely in the absence of sprays, and with a new style of farming that is moving away from monocultures towards companion planting, that prefers the soil to be covered in plants, and that understands that it is not necessary to eradicate all the weeds that used to feed birds on winter farmland.
Footnote:
Mother Trees
These young Western Red Cedar trees in Haugh Wood, Herefordshire, (top) are growing in such darkness below their mother trees that nothing else can grow there. My suggestion is that they are able to grow in such conditions because of fungal mycorrhizomes that connect them to the mother trees and enable the transfer of nutrients from photosynthesis, which is not possible for the young trees in such dark conditions.
A few hundred yards away is a plantation of Lodgepole pines, another American tree species. There the only young pines are growing in open patches or gaps in the tree cover among other vegetation, where plant growth is made possible by the light getting through. My suggestion is that here for some reason such a mycorrihizal network does not exist and the young trees cannot survive without adequate light.
I believe this is an illustration of the complex way soil biology supplies nutrients to plants, when environments have not been too badly damaged by man. If you want more information on how this works for trees I suggest you read a fascinating new book called ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ by Suzanne Simard, Penguin Books 2022, which describes how a young forest biologist made astonishing discoveries about the relationships and communications between fungi and trees, in the teeth of the opposition of old-school foresters who were spraying the wonderful forests of British Columbia with Glyphosate and trying to turn complex ecosystems into ‘commercial’ monocultures.