Good morning to all. This week, I’ve spent much of the time trapped inside because of the rain, but times like this offer a good reason to sit down and sort out tedious jobs like wrapping my head around the Portuguese tax system. But it also creates the opportunity to think about lots of different things; farm planning, business ideas. There are precious moments when the weather will clear, and I rush out to check the new grass, or rush the animals out to enjoy the fresh air and fodder.
Of course, another effect of being housebound is all the extra time that I can spend typing up my thoughts to share with you. I’ve been quite inspired recently by an audiobook. It’s called Regenesis, by George Monbiot. It’s really got me thinking about things, given me lots of inspiration, and provided more context about how we are effecting the environment with our actions.
The author explores the ways our food is produced, how wasteful the process is, the biology of soil, the effect of our agricultural industries on the environment and climate, and ways that all these things could be changed or improved. He is realistic, debunking the myths of “organic” and “sustainable” agriculture, but he doesn’t say that change isn’t possible. He presents farmers and practices that are not so wasteful, but are humble in the way they self present.
The book explains the ways that many organic farms serve to clear people’s consciences, while still harming the environment. Organic farmers use fertilizers on their fields, but instead of applying synthetic chemicals, they will use manure as a source of nitrogen. The problem is that only a portion of the nitrogen from the manure can be absorbed into the soil, meaning that the rest of it runs off and poisons water sources when it rains. The same phenomenon occurs when a pasture is over grazed. Sometimes, the source of manure is ambiguous, so who knows what kind of chemicals were ingested by the livestock before it was produced, sold, and re-sold to the organic farm.
Revelations like this really make me think twice when I’m standing in a supermarket, holding an item marked organic. But I don’t want this to be a hit piece on organic agriculture, it is something that I believe in. The author spent time on a farm called Tolhurst Organic, where he saw different ways of farming. He didn’t find a sensational solution, as the marketing around organic and regenerative agriculture would have us believe exists. Instead, he found practical people, making practical choices that often left their carbon budget slipping into the negative, and they had to work hard to bring it back into the positive.
I learned about the concept of Ghost Acres, which is a way of measuring all the land you’re actually using when you grow food. For example; you might decide to make a no dig garden in your backyard, but you need organic material to get it started, and you must add more as the seasons pass, perhaps you have a really big backyard where you can grow enough material to produce your own compost, but in most cases, people need to buy compost or soil from off the property. How much land is used to produce that soil? A small urban garden, filled with imported material, is in fact much bigger than it seems, but the extra space needed to produce all the biomass that feeds the system is ghost land, unseen and unappreciated.
The book illustrates how, in spite of our scientific advancements, we are only just beginning to get an idea of how much we still have to learn about soil. Our preconceptions about soil fertility are brought into question; is soil nutrition as important as we think? Perhaps we need to place more of an emphasis on soil biology.
When we interact with the land, there are always going to be negative impacts and unforeseen side effects, minimizing those impacts clearly involves coming up with creative solutions that mitigate risk and counterbalance the damage. This means that farming needs to change. We need to do a bit of re-winding when it comes to the more harmful aspects of modern agriculture, like making fields bigger, reducing or scrapping crop rotations, over fertilizing, hyper focusing on less crop variates, etc…
The unfortunate reality is that many farmers are trapped. Supermarkets, subsidies, trademarked seeds, and consumer expectations have forced the smaller farmers (which is most farmers) into a depressing downward spiral of debt. These same factors have elevated the larger farmers onto pedestals which rise ever higher and higher, with further and further to fall. For modern farmers to become successful, they must buy bigger machines, build bigger barns, grow higher yields, sell more at a lower price. The price of each upgrade on the farm doesn’t get cheaper, but the rewards only become smaller…
It is a trap, pure and simple. When farmers can’t afford it any more, they have to sell up, their property often gets swallowed into webs of corporate ownership and management. Shareholders who never put a spade in the earth end up directing farm managers, land becomes even more misunderstood, neglected, poisoned.
It reminds me of another book, a gift from one of our farm helpers last year; English Pastoral (Pastoral Song in The States). This book was written by a farmer called James Rebanks, in which he tells the story of his family farm going back three generations. He describes the series of events – many of which didn’t seem to be so big or drastic – that changed the lives of so many country folk and the way our food is made and sold to us. Rebanks acknowledges the impact that farmers have had on the world, how nature has been driven to the brink of destruction on farmlands, but he tackles the delicate subject of how this process unfolded, how and why the farmers were caught up in a wave.
I started writing about these topics because I’m thinking very carefully about the direction that my little farm should take, but as this post develops, I see how relevant it is. Right now, across Europe, farmers are rising up in protest against a plethora of regulations and market conditions that make their lives even harder.
It’s a complicated topic; the European grain markets are flooded with cheaper products coming out of Ukraine, the price of energy, fertilizer, and logistics has risen, while governments are trying to bring down inflation of food prices on the shelf, the German government wants to reduce the subsidies on diesel, European farms above 10 hectares have been required to keep 4% of their land fallow/unproductive in order to receive support, bringing down already tight revenues, and there is so much more than all that.
The last point about land usage restrictions is particularly interesting to me. As Monbiot writes in Regenesis, crop yields can be increased without the use of fertilizer and pesticides, but this requires a careful management of the land, involving rapid crop rotations, co planting, selective ploughing, learning to balance the numbers of pests and predators through the creation of habitat. Successful examples of this kind of agriculture, such as Tolhurst Organic, demonstrate that land use needs to be radically changed, in fact productive land needs to be reduced by up to thirty percent on farms in order to build more sustainable models of agriculture, at least when growing vegetable crops.
Though it is possible to increase crop yields per hectare without using fertilizer, the profit margin will be effected by the reduction of productive land. The challenge is to balance the books, that means buying in much less material from off the farm to feed the crops, which is a saving, smaller tractors may be used, which are cheaper too, but at the same time more human labour is required to maintain poly-cultures and harvest crops that grow together but mature at different times. Doing farming well is clearly extremely difficult, but I don’t see that as a reason that it shouldn’t change, after all, farming in its current form is broken.
Farmers depend on government assistance to survive, since the subsidy models across Europe are exacerbating the issues faced, it stands to reason that policymakers need to come up with new solutions. The ability to produce food is the foundation of human civilization, which I imagine is at least partly why our governments are so protective of the industry (even though agriculture represents just 1.4% of GDP in the E.U), but the protective measures are incapable of protecting agriculture from its biggest enemy; the market economy.
Agriculture is at its heart a patient industry, the process of growing food is seasonal, slow. I would argue that these tenets make farming incompatible with modern economies in an interconnected, hyper fast world. If that were not the case, the industry wouldn’t need protecting… That is why protecting agriculture is so hard, why government support structures are inadequate, resulting in protests. How can these issues be solved?
I don’t believe there is an easy solution, but I do believe there is a model out there that could feed the world, without destroying it. Governments need to build practical working relations with farmers, there need to be more farmers sitting in on high level policy meetings, and more university educated bureaucrats need to work as apprentices on farms. This way, both groups will be able to form a better understanding of the other, then come up with more workable policy.
There is some really interesting legislation coming out of Britain, where they are trying to replace the common agricultural policy (CAP) of the E.U, which saw 80% of all payouts given to just 10% of farmers. The situation in Portugal under the CAP is particularly startling;
In Portugal, according to data from 2020 released by the IFAP (Agriculture and Fisheries Financing Institute) and available on the European Commission’s website, 65% of beneficiaries with 6.8% of the area received 12.5% of direct support, while 1.5% of the largest beneficiaries, holding 43.5% of the area, received 32.8% of the direct support. (source: researchers from the university of Aveiro and the University institute of Lisbon)
The E.U is working to adjust their policy to be more fair, I hope they can do a decent job of it. New policy in the UK aims to distribute the money more fairly by increasing the amount granted per hectare, while also changing up the prerequisites for receiving funds to favour habitat restoration and environmental management. Post Brexit agricultural policy in the UK is now aiming to encourage farmers to be more ecological, which means that incentives to reduce productive land in favour of natural habitat will become more viable for small farmers (who collectively own most of the farm land).
For example, new UK policy will increase pre-existing pay-outs to farmers who maintain species rich grassland by a factor of 3.5, from £182 to £646 per hectare. Increases of this scale can be genuinely impactful if you are running a business that makes almost no profit, or even loses money.
The UK government will now pay farmers with applicable land £1,242 per hectare for connecting river and floodplain habitat, this kind of terrain is not easy to make money on if you are trying to grow crops there, it's also extremely risky to plant on flood plains. With this extra cash, more money can be invested in other parts of the farm. Perhaps the best bit of all is that this is not an outrageously expensive venture, but rather a re-distribution of the funds that were previously locked away in the CAP.
We’ll see how this plays out, but it certainly looks like a big step in the right direction. At the end of the day, these kinds of subsidies are only half the answer, because the farmers still need to learn how to undo the damage caused in recent decades; the massive over-saturation of nutrients in the soil, the pollution of river systems, lack of soil biology and so forth. Allowing smaller landowners to benefit from the subsidy system will give them an opportunity to redesign their farms, to face a completely new set of challenges, to enjoy the sounds of birds returning, the sight of worms in the ground, all the while giving them a chance to experiment and learn to farm with fewer chemicals and other inputs.
However, there is push back from within the farming community in the UK. Some farmers and industry leaders suggest that the new schemes such as the Sustainable Farming Incentive, along with post Brexit border checks, are putting the country at risk of food shortages due to the reduction of productive lands and extra red tape surrounding imports. This is where solutions and problems become harder to reconcile. Governments can clearly make an effort to encourage industry to change, but without effective connected thinking and mutual understanding between interest groups, it is exceedingly difficult to overcome the complex challenges of growing food while protecting the ecosystem.
As I wrote earlier, I do believe that productive land should be reduced, but that will require society at large to work as one. Subsidies that help farmers survive lost income are crucial, but those farmers also need to learn to change their farming practices on the remaining productive land, to reduce debt and change their business models by cutting out or reducing expensive fertilizers and machines. Much of our productive land is used exclusively to feed livestock, resulting in huge wastages by the time that meat and dairy products finally reach the consumer.
According to a landmark study published in Science in 2018, which includes data from nearly 40,000 farms and 1,600 packaging types and retailers, animal agriculture provides just 18 percent of calories and takes up 83 percent of farmland. (Source: Sentient Media)
Reducing commercial livestock operations means that consumers must eat less meat, and we as a society would need to take into account the disproportionate effect of change
on livestock farmers. These people would need extra support to transition their own land, in some cases they would need outright compensation. There is already some framework in the UK for paying farmers to retire, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to ensure a robust farming economy and sufficient food production levels as we navigate through these challenges.
Are we up for it? I’m not sure. Regular people, urban and rural alike, will need to come to terms with the reality of what we are doing to the planet, and somehow get onto the same page regarding where we should go from here. Furthermore, we need to take drastic action that leaves everyone involved feeling respected and compensated for the loss and changes that are needed to bring us into a more sustainable world.
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