“We have encouraged a type of farming which has damaged the earth. Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.”
UK Environment Secretary Michael Gove, October 2017
Twenty years ago I visited a Cotswold farm that sold organic meat, run by a family that were organic farmers pretty much by accident. The farmer’s dad had bought what was known as ‘artificial’ some time in the fifties, because the government was pushing the ‘improvements’ that pretty well destroyed our hay meadows. Dad didn’t much like the look of it, or the way it stung his hands, so he left it in the shed. The farm had matriarchal suckler herds feeding on flower-rich meadows; the ‘artificial’ was left in the shed as a memento of post-war efforts to ‘improve’ agriculture; and the meat was the best I’ve ever tasted by a country mile. I guess the flavour came from the rich variety of flowering plants and herbage growing in the soil of the ancient meadows, where the roots go deep into carbon-rich soil, and microbes and fungi do things that we still don’t fully understand, and maybe never will. These kinds of processes and interactions are crippled when you spread the ‘artificial’ on the soil, and most of the wildflowers are killed off too.
I visited another organic farmer the other day. There are several around here, and what I find so extraordinary about them is that they are just ordinary farmers. Whatever ideas you may have about organic farmers, you can forget. These are just like other farmers, but they don’t use pesticides or artificial chemical fertilisers. No beards, no sandals, no stereotypes. Perfectly ordinary farmers. Not really much obvious idealism even. They are just ordinary farmers who don’t use all the chemicals and who appear to be making a living like all the other farmers round about. This one raises cattle and sheep organically. His brother grows organic vegetables. Another neighbour runs an organic dairy. These are all normal local farmers who have been doing it for years, and appear neither more backward nor more progressive than their neighbours.
I spend quite a lot of time down rabbit holes. One of the most recent burrows was an attempt to compare the economics of organic farming with chemical farming, which was why I went to see my neighbour. Originally I was trying to find out how much money organic farmers save by not using pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and finding out if they really do have lower yields. If so, does the saving on chemicals make up for lower yields, for example? Or was the profitability of organic farming solely dependent on a few people being ready to pay extra for organic produce? If so, how much extra do they pay, and how much of that goes to the farmer?
A report by Pesticide Action Network UK revealed that the fruit and vegetables given out to four-to-six year olds via a government scheme aimed at promoting healthy eating habits contained residues of 123 different pesticides. These included suspected endocrine disruptors which interfere with hormone systems, known carcinogens, and organophosphates that can negatively affect children’s cognitive development. For an additional cost of roughly 1p per child per day, they could have been given organic fruit. Spending such small sums of government money could be an important boost to the organic sector, and to the biosphere.
Another couple of reports showed a 50% decline in wildlife since the 1970’s on chemical farms, but 50% more wildlife on organic farms. This led me down another rabbit hole, encouraged by those who tell me that the state of nature is not the fault of farmers – ‘they are only doing what the government/the EU/the chemical industry tells them to do’. While that kind of excuse would not wash if damaging the biosphere was a criminal matter, it is true that farmers have been encouraged by the EU and by our governments to farm in particular ways.
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has always aimed to stabilise prices and to protect farmers from being undercut by foreign imports. At various times the EU spent vast amounts of our money to support farmers over-producing wheat or ‘butter mountains’, or ‘milk lakes’, and when that was discredited they started to give the money to landowners with virtually no strings attached.
If the EU or our government had wished to influence farmers to farm in ways that were good for the environment, these huge sums of money could have been used to very good effect. In 2018 the Times claimed that ‘the average farmer made £28,000 in subsidies last year and £2,100 from agriculture’. Those subsidies could have been used to swing farmers away from chemical farming towards looking after the biosphere that they have been encouraged to dominate and to damage in the post-war period, and could have allowed them to sell organic food at competitive prices. If such a small proportion of farm incomes actually comes from agriculture, a very small adjustment to subsidies could have been used to make organic produce competitive and available to all. The CAP was designed to rig the market in favour of European food producers, and it could have been rigged to benefit the environment and our food quality. Instead the default position was to support chemical farming, even if the EU’s documents piously announced their concern for nature and the environment.
I am now no longer in that particular rabbit hole either, thanks to reading the Dasgupta Review, ‘The Economics of Biodiversity’, which points out how conventional economics leaves out some crucially important things.
Take a conventional carrot farm. This may well be located in East Anglia, on old fenland soils, and the carrots will be cultivated using all the conventional chemicals, leading to overloads of nitrates and phosphates in the soil and in the watercourses and the release of greenhouse gases from the breakdown of the fertilisers in the soil. These chemicals will reduce the ability of soil organisms like microbes and fungi to supply nutrients, and so increasing doses of chemical fertilisers will be used. The carrots will be sprayed with the insecticide diazenon, an organophosphate that damages the ecosystems of the soil and of watercourses, and with chemicals such as the carcinogenic glyphosate, which you may know as an ingredient of Roundup. These pesticides have a wide range of effects on what are known as ‘non-target organisms’ or, to you and me, everything else. The use of peaty fenland soils for this crop will result in these soils disappearing by oxidation and wind-blow, losing a valuable resource as well as a huge reservoir of stored carbon. These farming activities will reduce the numbers of pollinators and the amounts of food left for farmland birds and water birds and so on. Those of us seeking spiritual refreshment or physical and mental health in a countryside full of birdsong, wild flowers and butterflies had better go elsewhere too.
This list is not exhaustive. I want not to depress you but to make a point about the economics of biodiversity and of farming. Most of the losses listed above are losses to the biosphere and to society. Few of them are listed in the farmer’s annual accounts. He will be concerned to list the subsidies we pay him and the sales of carrots on the one hand, and against that he will set wages, the cost of chemicals, fuel and whatever else his accountant thinks he can get away with. The subsidies that we pay him will be perverse to the extent that they support him to carry out activities that damage the biosphere. The subsidies may in some cases be what keep him in business. In all cases the losses to the biosphere and to humanity will not figure as losses on his balance sheet.
There has to be a reckoning at some point, a better reckoning than our traditional accounting systems have to offer, so that the damage to the biosphere shows up in farm accounts and does not allow landowners to profit from harmful practices. We are getting better at attributing value to the soil as a commodity, to the value of the soil as a carbon store, and at putting a cash value on pollinating insects or flood prevention. We can calculate the cost of water purification, of repairing some kinds of ecosystem damage, and we can discover that the healing properties of spending time in a flourishing ecosystem may save the NHS hard cash. We have started being able to assess the true cost to us of unsustainable farming methods. These are all real costs, born by us all and largely caused by farming systems we are supporting from our taxes. For us who are not farmers it is pure unadulterated loss. Even the few pence off a kilo of chemically produced carrots is actually paid by us anyway, paid for out of our taxes in the form of farm subsidies.
For the farmer, losing out along with all of us, there is the compensation of current income. But the history of this carrot farm will have been the destruction of the original peasant community and of priceless wetlands with a teeming wildlife, followed by the destruction of the fenland soils and the inestimable loss of a huge carbon store, and in the last seventy or so years serious reductions in all the remaining forms of wildlife that managed to survive the drainage only to be zapped by chemical farming. The unsustainable extraction of profit from the biosphere is being subsidised by us, and by future generations who will continue to pay for it.
I have known for most of my life at a gut level that measuring our society’s success in terms of ‘economic growth’ and ‘gross domestic product’ was just plain nuts, because ‘growth’ in this context means using up the world’s precious resources as fast as possible, and ‘gross domestic product’ (GDP) measures things that we produce without measuring what we destroy in the process. This example is from the Dasgupta Review:
“A very simple example of the gaping holes in our accounting might see woodland destroyed to build a shopping centre. GDP records an increase in produced capital, but no depreciation of the “natural capital” that absorbs carbon, prevents soil erosion, creates a habitat for much-needed pollinators, and provides direct benefits to us – from recreation to purified air – that reduce burdens on health services. Such losses carry economic costs.”
The government has produced a document in response to the Dasgupta Review. Although this outlines a range of measures, including the claim that it intends to halt the loss of biodiversity (not to reverse the decline) and to ‘protect’ some of the environment, the word ‘pesticide’ does not occur once. Not once. Protecting 30% of nature is a hollow promise if 90% of our most productive soils are to be drenched four, five, maybe even seven times a year with chemicals that are inimical to life. In the words of Professor Dave Goulson, “ 70% of Britain is farmland. No matter how many gardens we make wildlife friendly, if 70% of the countryside remains largely hostile to life, (my italics) then we are not going to turn around insect decline.” Or any other decline.
Although we are now accustomed to it, the idea that we should make chemicals that are fairly indiscriminately hostile to life processes and spray them on the countryside is not a sane idea. We have only a vague idea of the damage that these chemicals do to complex ecological processes, and we have no idea how much damage they are doing as they build up in the sea. We are reassured of their safety by multinational companies who write their own safety data sheets – the same kinds of companies that conspired to tell us that global warming was a scare story so they could continue sell more oil – who only concern themselves with the mildly challenging task of getting their chemicals accepted by the regulators. We are reassured when the EU enshrines policies such as the Precautionary Principle and Integrated Pest Management into law and they get mentioned in the Rio Declaration. I’m not so reassured, because round here I see that most of our farmers (with the blessed exception of those few organic farmers) simply spray everything as often as they want or as the chemical companies advise, with little regard for the toothless guidelines and codes of practice. At some point I am certain that we will have to stop doing this if we are to halt the destruction of the biosphere that literally sustains us. If that is so we need to stop right now. And don’t trot out the argument that we need food. We waste 30% of our food already, and if we need food then above all we need a biosphere that is healthy enough to produce food. When that has been ruined we really will need food.
In the meantime, buying organic food may have more effect than casting your vote, and it might be good for you too.
https://www.pan-uk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/Food_For_Thought_Press_Release_FINAL.pdf
https://www.soilassociation.org/take-action/organic-living/why-organic/better-for-wildlife/
Excellent, as always.