Tag: regenerative farming

The spuds are in at last

Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.

I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.

So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.

Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife.  Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and  plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted. 

Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.

This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!

Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!

The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.

But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.

Red Kite causing a food stink – and look who’s stirring the pot in Wales

Any guesses where this was taken?

I suppose most of us can remember our first view of a Red Kite – ours was, predictably, whilst driving on the A470 past the Red Kite feeding station in Rhayader. The folks who pioneered the return of this lovely bird deserve all our thanks. Now they’re spreading across the country and we see them regularly in Bath and east of Bristol. On Saturday on our drive up to the Lleyn peninsula we took a back road across the hills beyond Rhayader where we have often seen them in ones and twos, but we were completely taken aback at a flock of maybe fifty birds massing like seagulls behind a plough and swirling noisily in the air. It passed through my mind that either a new – and in my mind unnecessary – feeding station had opened up; or that there was a dead elephant at the very least lying there somewhere. The truth, though announced itself with a horrible putrid smell and explained the excitement. They were gathered over a large waste disposal site which we thought had been closed and capped but which looked and smelt as if the recent rains had flooded and possibly even ruptured the covers. There were pools of water everywhere; a hazard to local watercourses but paradise to a flock of hungry, or more likely greedy scavenging birds.

We look at vultures with distaste and suspicion because of their feeding habits and I wonder how long it will be before a campaign against the Red Kite ‘menace‘ will leak out of the same filthy mess. As we know to our cost in Bath, rats and gulls will take the easiest available food source and if that happens to be human rubbish then that’s what they’ll have. In Bath we even have bilingual signs on the rubbish bins urging tourists to dispose of their leftover takeaways properly – although it seems a bit rich to have them only in English and French. Are the French more inclined to dump their leftovers in the street than other nationalities? – of course not! I suppose in a perfectly ordered ecosystem, the Kites would eschew the rotting burgers and concentrate on eating only rats but in the real world once an ecosystem has been disrupted the consequences simply cannot be predicted. Think of the consequences of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and of doing the same thing with freeing mink into the wild, releasing grey squirrels and of course allowing Muntjac deer to escape. Farm subsidies, along with the Common Agricultural Policy have skewed the whole food economy in favour of intensive farming for decades and we’re only just beginning to understand at what cost. The unpalatable truth is that in every case the disruption was caused by human intervention. “We have seen the enemy, it is us!” Red Kites prefer to eat carrion – dead flesh and roadkill, and were so efficient at clearing the filth from medieval streets they were protected by law.

Aside from that depressing episode we also passed a number of farms showing “No farmers no food” banners. I can totally understand why farmers with poor quality marginal hill farms are struggling at the moment, but even a quick look at the organisation pushing the campaign would show that it isn’t being funded and promoted by farmers but by rather shadowy and wealthy climate deniers and extreme right pundits who have no interest in the welfare or survival of farms here in Wales. This is one of those covert populist campaigns that spreads utterly daft ideas such as green campaigners are forcing us all to eat insects. What can’t be denied is that the Government is so much in hock to agribusiness and big energy, they’ve totally rolled over to the climate denial lobbyists. This is industrial strength ignorance and stupidity and we know it – and farmers would do well to refuse to have anything to do with it because if the No farmers no food gains traction the only beneficiaries would be the oil and agribusiness industry and the hill farmers will be thrown under a bus.

The underlying theme of the new subsidy scheme is public money for public goods. The Conservative government is now brain dead, bereft of ideas and capable only of pleasuring the biggest landowners. None of the major parties, to my knowledge, has come up with a plausible plan for farmers across the whole spectrum from hill to fen which is regenerative; sustainable and working within a market with its greedy exploitative ethos brought under control, and so if the Labour Party hope to run the show they’ll have to come up with something concrete for farmers to vote for. Any footballer knows that the easiest way to run in a goal is to get the opposition divided.

Aside from the polemic, there are dangers which I know have been recognised by Welsh farmers but which are easily buried under culture war rhetoric. In Wales the more isolated areas are also strongholds for the Welsh language and if the population falls below a certain level, the language will disappear. Why should that worry anyone? It worries me because a language, any language, is a kind of cultural DNA. All of Welsh experience and history is encoded within the language and allowing it to die is a tragedy at the level of burning the library at Alexandria in AD 48, and which was all the more poignant because it was said that the fire was the unforeseen consequence of Julius Caesar’s order to burn the ships in the harbour. But this isn’t a plea for a handful of academics to be given access to the language. It’s the language of RS Thomas’s imagined hill farmer Iago Prytherch, and the language of William Williams of Pantycelyn, and the language of the local butcher and the youngsters who served us our Guinness in the bar today. With a language you can write and say and even think some thoughts that are not encoded in any other tongue. Languages are the glue that holds communities together and introduce the memories and experience of the old to the young . Destroying a whole way of life is a terrible crime – so the plight of these farmers demands our fullest possible attention and the kind of policies that uphold the best and most sustainable practices, supported by clear and reliable subsidies. Demonising farmers as backward looking luddites on the one hand, or sending them off to block motorways on a false prospectus are both dead ends.

Wassailing – let the season begin!

Some of the revellers watching the draw for the wassail King and Queen in the orchard behind the pub on Saturday

I’m not sure if the bloke in the stovepipe hat above was representing the Engineering Section of the Cider Club as Brunel, but as you can see, Littleton people – and lots from elsewhere – went the extra mile on Saturday night and turned up in proper mummers’ costume and makeup. It can be extremely cold in late January but if there’s a clear sky we often enjoy a perfect moonrise over the orchard just as the volley of blank, black powder shots are fired of to scare the demons away. Sparks and flames light the sky and we all get going on the saucepans and empty barrels while cheering lustily, fuelled by a variety of ciders. Lifesaver – the original cider – comes in at a modest 4% but there’s also Lifetaker which – our son reliably told us – is nearer 10%. I used to love cider but as I’ve got older it seems to have taken against me and in any case I’m usually driving so I have a perfect excuse not to make myself ill. Someone there liked it so much they’ve even had themselves tattooed.

Of course these ancient celebrations of the New Year – Plough Monday is another example – feel a bit pagan. My attitude to them is a bit too open minded for some. I’ve always thought of paganism as a sort of “open all hours” spirituality, a bit like a left luggage office where you can look for something that’s missing even if you don’t quite know what it is. The word pagan is bandied about so sloppily, often as a religious insult, that it resists all definition. For me, the Earth and her courses could never be appropriated into any spiritual systematics because we barely understand them, and so we just need to express our gratitude and joy at these times of turning. I’m there because I used to be the Vicar, and I can be relied on to bless the trees in as amusing a manner as possible and in less than 100 words.

The funniest part of the ceremony was the point at which a slice of bread soaked in cider is hung on the branches. The Green Man attempted a sub scientific explanation which had the insects which would otherwise have munched on the shoots and buds attracted away by the smell of cider. I prefer to think that the smoke from the bonfire would have been a more efficient deterrent. Anyway, someone asked a young boy – about seven years old I should guess – if he would hang the slice of bread on the tree. He demanded with a completely straight face – “Is it gluten free?“. So bread hung up and a glass of Lifesaver poured around the roots, a poem read by the Green Man, shotguns fired, pans beaten and a blessing from me and we all followed the King and the Queen back to the marquee in her ceremonial chariot.

As we walked down the avenue marked by lanterns I fell into conversation with a farmer I’d known for thirty years and whom I’d confirmed, married and whose children I’d Christened. I may well have also Christened him since I knew his parents well. He gave up an afternoon a few years ago to show a group of us his new robotic milking parlour. I thought I’d hate it, but it was evident that the cows who got their udders cleaned and backs scratched on their way through liked it so much they would try to go back around for a second feed – prevented by the software. Anyway we talked about regenerative farming and about his small wind farm – fiercely contested at the time, and the fact that he powers the whole milking operation from solar panels and sells raw milk from a vending machine in the yard. We talked about no-till and regenerative farming and soil improvements, not least how long they take to show results, and I felt I was talking to someone we should applaud as a farmer rather than offer knee jerk antagonism; lumping all dairy farming into an undifferentiated mass of baddies.

Later we bumped into a nursery nurse who’d looked after our youngest when he was a baby and she threw her arms around him and gave him a big hug. I think he was totally taken aback at being remembered at all, and touched by how much she’d cared about him. I was able to tell him that I’d had to fetch him home from Nursery once after they’d fed him “mud” aka mushrooms!

There was an excellent folk band, joined by a ukulele group and we sang a couple of wassail songs including the Gloucestershire Wassail and then they all went off on more well known songs. During the evening we discovered that an elderly parishioner had died during the night and there was palpable sadness at the news.

I remember Margaret Thatcher claiming that there’s no such thing as community. What a deluded thing to say! She’d obviously never known what it is to experience good neighbours; a shared culture; a village; a history and the mutuality that thrives on shared experience. 

Wassail, wassail all over the town!
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing-bowl we’ll drink to thee!

The first verse of the Gloucestershire Wassail traditional carol sung on Epiphany Eve

Postscript

I spent most of Friday writing another long piece, but I couldn’t make it work. It just felt bad tempered, incoherent and plain wrong. I know myself well enough to be sure that I’d have kept on fiddling with it and press the publish button with the faintly guilty feeling that I’d let myself down. Anyway in a rather Jungian moment, I somehow managed to press select all and delete; throwing away hours of work. After a few fiery moments as I hunted desperately for my deleted words I realized that my inattention and a fat thumb had done unconsciously what my unconscious was demanding, and I felt completely peaceful about it. I still don’t know how I did it, but thanks anyway to my inner critic. As someone (much disputed) once wrote, you need to learn to “kill your darlings!” It’s not unusual for me to incorporate twenty or thirty edits in a piece, but I’ve never ditched the lot before. Lesson learned.

Step away from the bonfire George!

An unknown apple in a collection of Welsh apples in Cwmdu last autumn.

I was casting around my collection of photos for the image of an apple suitable for a short piece on sin and the avoidance thereof, and then this cracker came along and I thought “That’s it!”. If you wanted an illustration for a little excursus on Girolamo Savonarola the last thing you need is an illustration that inflames the passions of the ordinary sinner like me. You’d need a manifestly ugly and dangerous looking specimen as seen through the eyes of – lets say – Savonarola; you’d need something like this. Seen through the lenses of his rheumy eye, this is what a cow looks like to George Monbiot whose latest pronouncement from the pulpit condemns regenerative farming as “Climate change denial” and urges that we bend every sinew (a questionable image, I know) to replace meat with some kind of fermented gloop, provided by the fast food industry by way of the very suspicious ultra processed food path, known to most of us as the royal road to diabetes and early death.

Savonarola, who was a gift to the Gucci handbag manufacturers of the day, persuaded the rich of Florence to burn all their luxury goods in what became known as the “bonfire of the vanities” four years later he was the one on the bonfire, and the members of the guild of luxury goods became even richer as they replaced the vanities so eagerly despatched to the flames. My fear is that George Monbiot’s fervour for heading off climate disaster has tripped into a kind of fundamentalist mindset where all means are justifiable if the end is (in his view) correct.

It seems to me to be obvious that the only people to genuinely benefit from these industrial foods are the producers of the feedstocks, the supermarkets and the PR industry who will need to spend billions persuading us that processed fungus with added bacteria is absolutely the thing. “Look” they say, “It even bleeds.”

You don’t need to be a vegetarian or a vegan to be utterly opposed to the deliberately caused suffering of farm animals. You don’t need, either, to be a halfwit to know that there is a strong connection between soil fertility, ecological diversity, food security and human health. These either/or arguments are cheap and easy but they’re still an extension of the old colonial attitude that would consign millions of the poorest pastoralists to unending poverty. Yes, industrial gloop might save the earth for the left behind in the west, but for poor farmers in India and Africa it would be a slow descent into starvation. The rich would, of course carry on eating foie gras and wagyu beef and driving their SUV’s. Michael Pollan’s advice – “eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables” is both sensible and achievable.

Yes we need to take immediate action to curb methane and CO2 emissions and to bring carbon back into the soil where it can be stored safely; and yes there are ways of doing this well short of the bonfire of the vanities; evidence based ways of reducing the impact of intensive cattle farming on the earth’s atmosphere, and yes it will require cultural change. But waiting for the Seventh Cavalry to come over the hill and save us all with some kind of ram stamped iron pump is an essentially religious assertion. And I’m just not that religious!

I’m not suggesting that regenerative farming will save the earth, but what it could do is form one component of a strategy for carbon storage and – ultimately – reduction, using less oil, less chemicals, less intensive production of effluent with nowhere except rivers to go. Using prodigious amounts of energy to store carbon is no better than an industrial wet dream afflicting those industries who hope to supply that energy. There’s only one way to reduce carbon and methane release into the atmosphere and that’s by releasing less of both – is that so complicated? The a priori rejection of regenerative farming that Father George is suggesting seems to indicate that there’s no point in arguing with him because he’s always right. That’s bad science, bad journalism and downright daft tactically. Short of a Robespierre style reign of terror casting farmers as terrorists, dispossessing them of their land and handing the land over to the oil companies to balance their carbon budgets by planting tree deserts so they can supply the energy to ferment human waste and turn it into cordon bleu toothpaste tubes of delight.

This is simply not a credible strategy but a Tory style culture war. I’m sad to see a previously solid green activist fall into this trap.

Juggling with three landscapes makes my mind spin

Heavily polluted runoff from an abandoned tin mine

Just before we left Cornwall the week before last, and after we’d loaded the car and returned the key, I had a quiet couple of minutes leaning on the gate looking out to sea while the birds were singing their hearts out in anticipation of spring. A Mistle Thrush rehearsed his repetitive chorus; Robins sang their plaintive songs, Great Tits, Blue Tits and gulls of several persuasions added their descant; crows and Magpies rattled on about nothing much – all adding to the rhythm of waves beating on the pebble beach below; and I realized how little I wanted to leave. I struggle to quantify or even understand the healing power of nature, but I completely and gratefully accept it.

However, there were things to do back in Bath, not least a Bath Natural History Society lecture on regenerative farming given by local farmer, Jeremy Padfield. It was an excellent talk on a subject I’ve often explored in the Potwell Inn and I made so many notes that I felt inspired to write an account for the Bath Nats website and the annual report. A quick enquiry about length solicited a noncommittal response and so I set to and wrote just over 1000 words just as an email from the editor of the annual report arrived to suggest 350 words. So a postcard then! Much anguished editing and sacrifice of my little darlings boiled the stock down to a thick jus and off it went.

Simultaneously a report in the Falmouth Packet, (local Cornish newspaper which I like to keep an eye on), printed a story about the lovely strip of coastal land running up from St Just to St Ives. It’s a place we know well and have often walked, and the newspaper was working itself up into a froth because the area has just been designated a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) due to the rich biodiversity of the land which has a tremendously wide variety of habitats rare flora and fauna and even a breeding colony of Dartford Warblers. Sadly and predictably one or two farmers were describing the move as a “land grab” – comparable to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – well Natural England weren’t exactly bombing the area in order to protect it, and at first sight this seemed like a bit of a Luddite knee jerk reaction. Nonetheless I was interested to see whether their fear of being driven off their land was justified.

The outcome was that I was reading the (54 page) Natural England report on the West Penwith SSSI at the same time as I was reading about the new ELMS scheme for Farming subsidies; trying to discover what actual subsidies would be available to Cornish farmers in the SSSI, whilst writing my piece on Regenerative Agriculture.

The lecture itself was illuminating . Since 2009 when two Duchy farms reached an agreement to work together it seems that tremendous progress has been made: here’s my shortened report.

Regenerative Farming has become a bit of a buzzword recently but it’s an idea whose time has come, not least because of the new Government policy – the ELMS scheme – which aims to move farm subsidies completely from the old system based on farm acreage to “public funding for public goods” – rewarding farmers for carrying out important environmental work. Compensation for lost output will now be based on income foregone. LEAF has two functions, firstly as a charity promoting Integrated Farm Management and secondly as a marque for food produced under LEAF standards. 

Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife.  Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and  plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted. 

This may sound like a revival of traditional farming, but what makes it profitable is the use of very hi-tech equipment like drones with three yearly intensive soil testing and highly technical GPS delivery systems which have dramatically reduced the amount of artificial fertilizer applied to the soil. 

The most memorable illustration of the evening was when he took an apple to represent the earth and then cut successive slices away to represent otherwise unprofitable land. The proportion left on which food crops could be grown turned out to be breathtakingly tiny. A well attended talk which drew together the threads of shared interest that unite farmers, environmentalists and consumers. 

Dave Pole – report to Bath Natural History Society.

Impressive stuff, we thought – as seemingly most of the members present agreed. However when I checked on the DEFRA website, some of the subsidies looked pretty minimal – the best example being the skylark nesting patches for which they would receive just £10. Lapwings come in quite a bit higher. Just how much admin time it would take to replicate the old EU subsidies, or whether it’s even possible is a moot point. If these measures are not properly funded then the government will be expecting farmers to fund environmental improvement of the land from their own pockets. That would be a good deal easier for a farmer on 2000 hectares of prime land than for a small mixed farmer with just a couple of hectares of grassland in the middle of a SSSI.

Then, shockingly, the Observer this weekend featured a piece on the present state of the replacement farm subsidies being managed by DEFRA. It’s almost unbelievable, but only .44% – less than half a percent of the sum set aside has actually been paid! There was no detail on which farms and farmers had actually received their payments, but one regenerative farmer reported a 48% fall in government payments.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the undeclared policy of the government is to do precisely what those West Penwith Farmers fear most – drive them off their land in order to achieve heaven knows what objectives. After a recent edition of Countryfile on the BBC featuring the mining of lithium and selecting Cornwall as a prime area for reviving the (all kneel please) economy , I wrote to the BBC complaining that there had been no spokesperson opposing the extension of this wasteful and polluting process. If joining the dots is the only way to figure out what this government actually wants to do with the countryside I’d say that on present evidence their policy amounts to greenwashing the continuation of an extractive economy which has brought the environment to the brink of destruction.

Too hot – even for red peppers

We had to remove five of these pepper plants from the greenhouse this week, because they were in danger of expiring in the heat. It’s hardly surprising that plants can be extremely fussy about their environment. A couple of years ago we had aubergines in pots in the same greenhouse and they sulked and looked deficient until I moved them outside into a border where they instantly revived and produced a decent crop. Even chillies will complain if they get too much heat.

This week I also learned an entirely new and very useful term from a book on the economics of so-called green capitalism. I’ve mentioned it before – “The Value of a Whale” by Adrienne Buller and I thoroughly recommend it. The term is “Knightian uncertainty” which describes the likelihood of an event occurring for which there is no possibility of assembling any predictive data. We’re very comfortable with the idea of risk because, as the author points out, when you’re throwing dice it’s simple to calculate the odds of throwing (say) three sixes in a row. A Knightian uncertainty is the kind we might ascribe to ecological and climate events like the ones we call “tipping points” and she cites the example of the possibility of the Thwaites Glacier collapsing completely – it already dumps 50 billion tonnes a year into the Antarctic Ocean and if it failed would raise sea levels by up to ten feet! We know it’s capable of happening but the scenario leading to such a catastrophe is simply too complicated to calculate. There are too many variables and too many possible contributory factors to make a calculation of risk. Therefore the only rational response is to abide by the precautionary principle that minimises any activities which even might be a contributory factor.

Anyway – enough of the dismal science; today we may or may not be in the midst of one of those climactic moments because we won’t know until a few more drought affected summers have passed, by which time it might be too late to do anything. “Wait and see” is not a coherent basis for climate change policy any more.

In the real world we get up increasingly early to tend the allotment and then we pretty much lock ourselves into the flat with the windows and shutters closed against the heat. Today we watered and went just as the Farmers Market was opening, and where we discovered that hundreds of other people had adopted the same heat busting tactic.

After a long process of trying out all the local butchers we’ve finally settled on Kimbers Farm Shop who are at the market every Saturday. We’ve got to know them pretty well and today the conversation inevitably turned to the drought and how it was affecting their grass-fed herd of beef cattle and the flock of sheep kept by one of the sons in law, nearby. They’ve been farming the same land for 300 years so for a long view of farming they bring a world of experience, and they’re having a desperate time at the moment. Their grass is so parched and brown that they’ve had to start cutting grass and taking it to the animals rather than grazing them in open fields. As she explained the rationale to us, one of the family members told us how – with four legs to trample, and a rear end to distribute the manure – cattle and sheep make a significant amount of precious grass inedible. It’s immensely labour intensive taking the food to the animals, and they’ve had trouble with some machinery clogging with seed heads, so it’s being done by hand. The shame, she said, is that so many wealthy incomers have bought up farms in the district and refuse to allow farming on them. In a sane system, they would be forced either to maintain the land properly themselves or rent it to farmers who would do it for them, but here in the UK if you’ve got the money you can take prime agricultural land out of circulation during what’s becoming a food crisis – just so you can enjoy the view without the bother of cows and sheep making noise and smells. We all too easily forget that there are a series of interrelated crises going on simultaneously. It’s not just climate because food production is an intimately related

Of course there are ways of regenerative farming that can preserve and build up the soil and its capacity to hold water, but they all take time to implement. Today’s Guardian featured a nice photo of a sheep dozing in the shade of a tall oak tree. The trouble with the photo is that the tree must have been at the very least fifty years old as the old joke related of the man asked for directions to a distant place and who responded with “well I wouldn’t start from here!”

Yesterday we went out into the heat to plan a route to the hospital I need to attend for a routine surveillance procedure next week. With thoughts of the drought, the heatwave and the increasing evidence that a climate catastrophe upon us right now; We had discovered that it’s only accessible by car since there’s no bus service – it’s a private hospital that only takes patients like me for a fat fee when the local NHS hospital need to massage their figures. We had to negotiate much of a ring road which was as close to hell as anything else I’ve ever experienced, and eventually after several false turns emerged into a business/industrial park in which our building was sited and indistinguishable from all the other units in which -for all I know – Russian oligarchs are busy waterboarding prisoners they’ve hijacked and sent to this country for ‘interrogation‘. It was not an encouraging introduction to these state of the art facilities in which I will be sedated and unable to flee.

I’m maundering I know, but these crises are bowling down the road towards us and yet no-one seems to be taking ownership of them or even attempting to formulate some policies. Anyone can make a mistake but to run a whole country into the buffers takes a peculiarly ideological kind of stupidity. We’re promised a bit of rain next week so we should be able to report soon on how well the Potwell Inn allotment has coped with this second heatwave in a difficult summer.

Why ‘frinstances’ matter when we think about food security.

During the endless sequence of lockdowns over the past two years one of our biggest challenges was feeding ourselves. Being dropped by supermarkets was far from unusual in the early days. After years of weekly deliveries from Waitrose we discovered that just when we needed them most we were sidelined by the sharp elbowed who hogged all the delivery slots at the very time we were being advised to avoid busy public places like supermarkets. It took months to persuade them that we fitted all the criteria that would classify us as vulnerable. Eventually deliveries were restored but the relationship had been irrevocably damaged. During that time our sons helped us out, the students on the same landing offered to do shopping for us on day one of the lockdown, and we managed to get bulk supplies of some of the most important staples. A local baker who had been one of our middle son’s apprentices let me have a 25K bag of flour, I got a kilo of dried yeast on the internet and doubled down on the sourdough. We grow our own vegetables so there was a supply line already in place. During that time all trust in the system broke down and we began to explore some of the alternatives. We established contact with a local flour mill and ever since we’ve been able to source far better quality organic flour than we were ever able to get from the supermarkets. We explored local butchers shops and found a newsagent who was always happy to sell milk. The farmers market closed for a long while but when it started up again we discovered we could buy almost anything we needed there. It turned out that we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of queues and can’t be arsed assistants at the instore pharmacy in the supermarket because a local small pharmacy was marvellous for advice (and even flu jabs) when the local GP’s became virtually unavailable. We discovered some of the farm shops in the area and gradually figured out which suppliers were the real deal and whose expensive niche products were overpriced novelties. One key moment was when a local farm started to sell fresh low temperature pasteurised milk from a slot machine at the market. We bought five glass bottles and since we began we’ve had better milk and stopped sending about five plastic bottles to landfill every week. Of course there’s the additional environmental benefit because most of these shops are within walking distance. In fact I’d say without any hesitation that the crisis was, for us, just the nudge we needed to take local food from an aspiration to a behaviour. When, this Christmas, the deliveries from Waitrose were, once again, all taken by 2.00 am on the day that online orders opened, without a moment’s thought took our business to the local outlets who had looked after us for 2 years, and we enjoyed better quality than we’ve had for years even though our total spend was no greater. Although it still makes sense to have some things delivered by the supermarket, they have too often failed to deliver on ubiquitous commodity products like milk; but it no longer matters to us because we can get almost anything we need locally from traders who recognise us. In the process we’ve discovered a whole network of local artisan producers whose products are of better quality by an order of magnitude than the mass produced supermarket imitations.

Does it cost more? Well yes, although you’d have to qualify that by saying that when we buy really good quality food we eat rather less of it. Our cheese consumption has gone down dramatically because I no longer hack off lumps of commercial block Cheddar as snacks. Our meat consumption has decreased significantly now because we buy smaller quantities – leaving our expenditure roughly the same.

The key to the significance of all this is that the changes in our shopping and eating habits didn’t come from abstract principles; they were almost forced on us by the inadequacies of the existing food supply system. So much of what we read and hear in the media comes across as constant nagging from some supposed moral high ground, but what if we approached it from the more practical point of view, which is to say that local food chains work better; they’re far more secure and they provide better food PLUS they entail all the environmental and health benefits we aspire to.

It’s pretty well understood now that much of the resistance to the kind of environmental measures we know we have to accept is down to fear – fear of change and fear of losing the things we’ve come to rely on. Maybe there’s a role here for what I call ‘frinstances’. Being much less vocal on the oughts of our environmental campaigns but turning up the volume of the ‘is’ of better and more reliable local food chains. I usually run a mile from business jargon; but one statement has stuck in my mind for years now. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It couldn’t be more true. Here we are trying to change a whole entrenched culture and all we seem to do is throw strategy after strategy at it with a generous side order of statistics and threats. Maybe it’s time to give up nagging and start singing?

Just for a moment it seemed as if we we could be pushing at an open door

Nuff said!

When I saw a piece in Farmers Weekly declaring Jeremy Clarkson as the 2021 champion of farmers I thought to myself – well the lunatics really have taken over the asylum! I tried to kid myself it was a bit of postmodern irony but – well no. I guess if you wanted to appoint an ambassador who could rise above the facts and blame everyone except himself for making a miniscule profit in spite of the subsidies – and do it while pouring insults and bile over tree huggers and vegans he’s definitely be your man. I know it’s only entertainment, but out here in the real world there does seem to be something of a cultural sea change going on in the more thoughtful parts of the farming community. The talk on the street is that public money will, in the future be attached to public goods, and that means paying more than lip service to the soil and the environment.

So Madame and me have been looking around at some of the local farmers who are heading in the same direction as us and today we revisited this farm which ticks most of the boxes, that’s to say they’re doing the things on the signboard – broadly regenerative farming – and they’re marketing direct to the local community. Less food miles, more emphasis on building up good soil. They don’t appear to call themselves organic but there are many farmers – particularly in the US – who want to go beyond the rather lax standards of “official” organics. Too many loopholes and exceptions which you can see for yourself if you search on the internet for the official organic specifications. Best of all they seem to be making a living which, if you’re a farmer who’s interested in dipping a toe in the regenerative waters, is going to be important. After all, if you’re at all interested in building your soil you’re surely not going to be inundating it with persistent chemicals.

So that was a cheerful early start to the day; and then we turned to the allotment and while Madame sowed spinach and lettuce for the winter I mixed a barrow load of potting compost, filled fifty pots (all recycled from previous lives) and planted out the overwintering garlic using the best cloves from last season. They’ve all gone into what was supposed to be the new strawberry bed, which was conceived and built before we thought about getting a polytunnel, but we’ve used it this year to grow the some of the alliums because it’s so easy to hoop and net. If you like, it’s an overlong cold frame. Garlic needs a period of cold before it will start into growth and so this is the perfect place for it to begin its journey. Later on in the spring the young plants will be planted out into a much larger bed. The strawberries are in their luxury quarters in the polytunnel as the young offsets develop ready for their first season. This time we’ll devise some kind of narrow hanging bed that can be suspended in such a way it doesn’t rob too much light from the base level which is half full already with winter delights.

We’re so busy at the moment we seem to be living on bread and soup; but we talked about the pleasures of this season today and we agreed that it’s lovely that we’ve made a strong start to next year’s season already with time in hand before the bad weather sets in.

As it happens the travelling fishmonger was outside the farm shop and he’d got masses of fish straight up from Newlyn. We bought enough fish to feed a small army, including some locally (just up the River Severn) smoked kippers – I assumed the herrings must have made a longer journey. Anyway we had a late breakfast of kippers and fresh sourdough bread with mugs of tea. Very traditional!

Digging the dirt – could do better

No doubt this derelict shack will be appearing on AirBnb sometime soon but all that glitters is not gold.

There’s a huge difference between running cattle and sheep on 5000 hectares (12,300 acres) and growing vegetables on an allotment; but the starting point is exactly the same – earth.

Having allowed my imagination to run free in the last couple of posts, it’s time to get back down to some allotment basics – after all, one of my principal aims for this holiday was to get stuck into some serious reading about regenerative farming. I certainly got stuck at first but switched course and now I’m beginning to think that I ought to make a proper list of the books I’ve been reading so readers can join me in the journey. I’ve now just about finished reading Gabe Brown’s “Dirt into soil” and although it’s hardly aimed at our 200 square metres of allotment and is really slanted towards mixed farming with grazing animals, it cleared up a few mysteries for me and turned my thoughts about soil improvement completely upside down. It’s also given me a much clearer perspective on what is, and what isn’t regenerative farming and since our UK government is talking the talk about changing agricultural practices it’s up to us to make sure they’re also walking the walk. After all for a government that announces it’s going to move towards carbon zero and then announces it’s considering opening a new coal mine – followed by the assertion that we’ll need more nuclear power stations – this isn’t an encouraging start.

Until now I’ve always thought of soil improvement as largely a matter of adding lots and lots of compost. We started off committed to organic gardening and then, a couple of years ago we went no-dig as well. This last season we grew a variety of insect pollinators and companion plants alongside the vegetables in all our beds, and it’s gone well – and with the pond we’ve had vastly more visiting insects. Of course we’ve changed so many variables and the weather has been so random, we’ve only got anecdotal evidence that our changes have worked but we’re pretty sure that the following strategies worked:

  • Netting all the alliums from sowing to harvest with fine insect net
  • Using nasturtium to draw blackfly away from food crops
  • Sowing Calendula and Tagetes on most beds
  • Butterfly and bird netting all the brassicas

Sadly the expensive treatment with nematodes had little impact on the slugs, and the beer traps sheltered more slugs underneath than drowned in the beer.

The asparagus was spared the heavy beetle attacks that we’ve had in the past, and given that our near neighbour had his plants devastated it looks as if the border of calendula and the increased parasitic insect population may have helped. I’ve written a lot about our liability to waterlog in the winter – partly due to underground streams. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort digging woodchip filled paths between the beds to drain the water away and the two worst affected beds came through the winter very well. We’ve also added grit and sand in the worst places along with masses of compost and leaf mould. The upshot has been that our need to water in dry spells has greatly decreased. We escaped the blight with resistant varieties and early cropping of the container potatoes so, looking back it’s been a pretty successful season most of which was spent battling against a headwind of adverse weather.

If you’re still with me, you’ll have noticed that every single effort to improve our earth has been via applications to the top surface. What the Gabe Brown book – and all the others I’ve been reading – brought to the top of my thoughts was to see what’s going on under the surface, and the usefulness of ground cover crops during the winter, so that the plants go on feeding the soil through their roots all year round. And there’s the revolution, because most of us instinctively think of plants as a kind of one way street for water and nutrients when in fact they’re completely biologically interlocked with billions of soil organisms which, in return for carbon in the form of photosynthesised sugars, provide the plants with many of the micronutrients they need to grow and thrive. All this mutual aid is conducted through the truly huge mycorrhizal networks that wrap the roots and occasionally even grow inside them. Plants send signals seeking specific nutrients and the fungal networks ship them in. The astonishing discoveries of science now tell us that the creation of soil can be much faster than we originally thought and that in contrast to the received wisdom that everything goes on from above, soil creation is as much concerned with the recovery of nutrients from the subsoil. Soil can actually grow from below. This is a vast simplification but it has big implications for the way we grow plants, because these networks – having evolved over millions of years – mean that we can no longer think of what goes on underground as separate from the plant we harvest. Soil microbes have the astonishing ability to break down subsoil and rock and dissolve the essential nutrients in a way that’s barely understood. We need to start seeing our crops as giant solar energy farms, converting carbon dioxide into food through the process of photosynthesis.

So when we add artificial fertilisers to a crop the plants just grab up the 25% of the fertiliser they can use and the rest goes into the soil and gets washed into our polluted rivers. Worse still, the plants get lazy and just go for the industrialised fast food and the sugar/carbon trading mechanisms get broken. When we drench the soil with insecticides and herbicides exactly the same thing happens. Industrial farmers and gardeners then start to try to make up the deficiencies with more additives and chemicals. The other way we break those mycorrhizal connections is by digging and turning the soil, and these relationships are precisely the mechanism by which carbon gets stored in the earth.

So farmers, gardeners and allotmenteers, not to mention every other human being on earth have a common cause in not ploughing, tilling and digging; not using artificial fertilisers and not using chemicals. What ought to be the good news for farmers in particular is that chemicals and diesel oil are increasingly expensive and eat into profit margins – plus, the premium value of the produce from regenerative farms means better profits. What’s not to like?

Here’s the downside. It looks as if the agrochemical business and their captive bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture are greenwashing as usual in pushing no-till, direct drilling supplemented by – you’ve guessed it – herbicides to kill weeds, plus the usual pesticides and fungicides which will do nothing to solve our problems. There is another way, for instance, to suppress weeds and reduce rainwater runoff, and that’s carefully calibrated cover crops.

But it’s not all good news for vegetarians and especially vegans because the very best and most efficient way of improving the soil is by doing (or not doing) all of the above plus carefully controlled grazing – sometimes known as mob grazing. This kind of approach can capture carbon in the soil far more efficiently and more quickly than by planting trees alone. Further – and I know what question will be next – controlled grazing on healthy soil means that dung, a potent source of methane when stored in lagoons and sprayed on the soil later – is quickly broken down by prodigious numbers of insects and soil organisms and feeding the soil. Not only that, by feeding cattle on their evolved diet of grass and forbs rather than industrial grain, their digestive systems function far better and the need for constant worming and antibiotics almost disappears. Meat will, of course, become much more expensive, (perhaps more realistically priced) which should please everyone with a concern for animal welfare.

Of course this won’t make catastrophic climate change go away – we’ll still have to break our addiction to oil in every other department of life – but farmers, allotmenteers and gardeners can at least do something to help, and everyone can help by supporting change, buying better rather than blaming farmers and growers and calling out politicians when they try to pull the wool over our eyes.

Putting it together – in a reflective mood

Some of this year’s borlotti harvest

I don’t normally suffer from insomnia, but sometimes I’m reading a book that’s so mind changing I can’t wait to wake and start reading again. Charles Massy’s “Call of the reed warbler” is one such book that straddles half a dozen fields of interest that, until now, I’d pursued separately. I’ll write at much greater length later, but meanwhile here’s a quotation from the last chapter – Towards an emergent future – that, even before dawn at five o’clock this morning, filled me with excitement and hope for the future. This book is a wonder. At around 500 pages it’s not a breeze, but it will stand as a bulwark against the phoney greenwashing schemes of the (literally) unholy alliance of the politicians and the multinational companies who are reducing the earth to dust and our lives to exhaustion and sickness.

“Significantly, the new regenerative agriculture is not just being practiced on small backyard plots or half-acre (quarter-hectare) allotments (for these too are part of the solution, and some of the practices apply and are indeed being practised there). No, the approach is also being applied on tens of millions of acres, while elements of it have the potential to be applied equally broadly worldwide, as I have described in this book. These include holistic grazing management, grassland grains, pasture cropping and natural intelligence agriculture, a new agroforestry, farmer-managed natural regeneration, biological agriculture and many others.

Therefore, this revolution has the potential to make massive inroads into addressing the key Anthropocene challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, distortions to the nitrogen, phosphorus and other biogeochemical cycles, land degradation, malfunctioning of the water cycle, and so on. In addition, regenerative agriculture has astounding potential to address human ill health; to therefore address the huge burden of modern health costs on society; to make farmers more profitable and free of the clutches of banks and large multinational chemical and energy suppliers; and to free farmers and urban cousins alike from capture by the merciless behemoths of agribusiness, commodity trading, financing, retailing, food processing and the like. Consequently, we need to be aware that a new regenerative agriculture is subversive: but in a truly constructive way. That is why I call it an ‘underground insurgency’, for it is a bottom-up revolution instigated by a new mind.”