The other day I was checking bees I keep in a cider orchard on a local farm when I came across Bob, the farmer. After a bit of the usual chaffing, I said ‘When are you starting on the Regenerative Farming then Bob? What with the price of fertiliser having shot up with the war in Ukraine, you might save a bob or two,’ to which he replied ‘Load of bloody nonsense!’ This kind of snappy dialogue went on for a while, but the upshot was ‘I’m going to keep on farming the way I always have done, boy!’ And in a way I don’t blame him. Farming since the fifties has got into a very easy routine. You spray with Roundup or suchlike before you plough – that’s all the strangely yellow fields you see everywhere. Then you spread nitrates and phosphates from Russia or Ukraine, and you cultivate, and then you spray another weedkiller around the time you sow, just in case, and throughout the season you spray insecticides and fungicides and herbicides at regular intervals, often on the advice of agronomists employed by the chemical companies and paid commission on sales. Some fields are sprayed seven or more times each year, according to DEFRA surveys.
This kind of farming is boringly simple. I could show you a farm over Bromyard way where the farmer went to live in Australia, leaving the farm in the hands of the agronomists and the contractors. He just phoned them from time to time. There are many such farms, with a simple regime of growing oilseed rape alternately with cereals, and field beans once in a while. You don’t need much skill and it isn’t very interesting. And you won’t find many birdwatchers hanging around the place either. This kind of farming is mainly responsible for the UK having one of the worst biodiversity declines in the world, 50%, the worst in the G7 countries and in the worst 10% worldwide, risking ecological meltdown.
This way of farming is an orthodoxy that developed after the war as governments hand in glove with the chemical factories encouraged farmers to farm with chemicals. Most of my life, if I questioned this orthodoxy, farmers would look at me as if I was stupid. Everyone knew that you had to use chemicals. How were you supposed to grow crops otherwise? You plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, and they are sprayed and fertilised by God’s almighty hand. The only opposition was from the organic farming movement, which was seen as a subset of farming to cater for the middle classes while the big boys got on with the chemical farming and the cheap food.
Until now, and the sudden huge interest in Regenerative Farming, an offshoot of the organic movement, which appears to have much more to offer the farmer. This may be partly because we have now realised that polluting ‘chemical’ farming is quite literally costing the earth; partly because the price of fertiliser has risen as a result of the war in Ukraine, but maybe most of all because it is such a positive, optimistic, adventurous movement.
The organic movement is largely negative. You don’t use pesticides and you don’t use chemical fertilisers. You sell to the middle classes and not to anyone else. And although you hope that your organic farm may have more wildlife, that doesn’t necessarily happen.
Regenerative farming is very much more positive, and although it is not defined and regulated like organic farming, it has two fairly consistent basic approaches to the issues of maintaining soil fertility, food supplies and nurturing the natural world. And it is about things that you do, unlike the ‘things you don’t do’ of organic farming, which I think makes it much more exciting and innovative.
The first approach is a matter of processes. Regenerative farmers care about the health of the soil, and wish to farm living soil, not dead dirt. The processes they use involve minimal tillage, the use of cover crops to protect the soil and provide soil carbon and nitrogen, and the integration of livestock in the farming cycle. They also aim to farm without chemical inputs. So cattle will graze on pastures rather than being fed imported feed in big sheds, and often they will graze on the herbal leys made famous by the Archers. Farmers are innovating and experimenting, using buckwheat sown below the oilseed rape to confuse the flea beetle, or milling a fodder radish crop into the soil before planting potatoes instead of spraying against wireworm. This kind of farming is exciting and interesting: one farmer told me how he enjoyed no longer being on the sheer boredom of the ‘inputs treadmill’. He compared farming with chemicals to an addiction that had damaged his soil for fifty years or more; it was still going cold turkey but it was slowly recovering.
The other side of regenerative farming is that it has defined outcomes, and that also makes it more positive and exciting than organic farming. Its defined outcomes are to improve soil health, to sequester carbon, and to increase biodiversity. Where chemical farming uses monocultures, regenerative farming sees value in complexity and understands that there are vital interactions between plants and fungi and microbes that are essential not only to farming but to the whole biosphere. And where organic farmers may just hope that nature will thrive if you lay off the sprays and the fertilisers, regenerative farmers aim to take positive steps to make their land more hospitable to wildlife, increasing tree cover and reconnecting watercourses with the landscape.
It is particularly useful to look at nitrogen to compare the two approaches, since nitrogenous fertilisers have now become so expensive. Nitrogen is the main gas in our atmosphere, 75% of it, and so it is right there in the soil already. All you need is soil healthy enough to contain the right microbes, and some leguminous crop such as beans or clover. The microbes will fix the nitrogen in a useful form and store it in nodules on the roots of the legumes, where it will be available for later crops. The nitrogen becomes available in the most harmonious, cheap and simple way imaginable. Nature does all the work. Conventional farming buys nitrates from Russia or the Ukraine, where the production emits stupid amounts of carbon di-oxide, ships it half round the world (more CO2), and spreads it on the fields (more CO2). 17% gets used by plants, the rest does a combination of producing a large amount of potent greenhouse gasses, polluting rivers and seas, and damaging the very bacteria that fix nitrogen. The approach of the organic movement has always been that there are usually enough nutrients in the soil and the trick is to use farming techniques that make them available to plants, and this attitude informs all their techniques.
The old orthodoxies were already being demolished by a new kind of farmer, even before fertiliser prices made farmers sit up and take notice. The Knepp Estate, loss making after years of chemical farming, is now, since they rewilded, not only an inspiration to landowners all over the country but also a profitable enterprise. James Reebanks in the Lake District has described how his father’s loss-making conventional farm returned to profit as his son embraced regenerative farming methods. We are starting to understand that the damage done to the soil and the rivers and the oceans, and the greenhouse gas emissions of chemical farming, a huge financial burden to present and future generations, is not even necessary for the farmer’s short term profit.
Old Bob, and all the other old Bobs, are not going to change willingly, unless the government pays them to, but all around the countryside I am starting to notice fields of herbal leys, and crops of green manure, and other signs of change. When I ask I usually get told that the old fella has retired and ‘the boys have taken over’. Better still sometimes it is a daughter, maybe even more likely to be interested in biological complexities than the sons, and maybe less interested in the big machines - though here too there is suddenly a growing market for exciting new machinery suitable for regenerative farming.
I believe this movement has a momentum that may be able to rescue us and the biosphere from the deadly destructive farming system that has led to this country being one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. It cannot come a second too soon. This looks like the first year ever that this village has not had a single swallow or a single house martin. The swifts are always the last to arrive, but I am not holding my breath for the arrival of these extraordinary birds either. I find myself thinking ‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now’ but also hoping just maybe soon to hear the joyous sound of their screaming parties as they race each other round the houses every evening.
Very hopeful. Hurrah
Great read Richard, thank you.