Better questions about our food

Asking better questions is recommended by many wise people. The word “better” is a clue that this is not a straightforward process. When we ask a better question, a line of thought emerges that leads to a more productive view of the world — but productive is just another post hoc value judgement.

Here is a starter for ten. How do soil nutrients move uphill? Many nutrients are highly soluble in water. Water has been known to move mainly downhill — the exception would be capillary action. It rains and, as a result, nutrients move from high ground to lower ground. And in poorly managed situations they can pollute runoff and the rivers it ends up in. Let’s just say at this point that we are not interested in spreading industrial fertilisers on high ground — that is not an answer to anything, it leads to erosion of the soil we would like nutrients to exist in.

Here is an observational pointer to an answer. The sheep in out fields graze all the available grass, and thistles too, especially when they get hungry. In doing so they nourish themselves on mineralised vegetation. They then go and defecate and urinate, typically at the top of the field. I think they like to sleep on high ground, under a big tree is ideal it seems.

With hindsight, it is a productive thought to notice that minerals and nutrients walk on four legs to where they are needed. It is a thought and an observation that can be built on.

And here is a basic systemic insight, from a system dynamic perspective. A farmer I follow on Twitter claims he has 50% more forage production from his herbal ley than from the adjacent grass. What nutrient dynamics are introduced by this finding?

One way or another, more sheep (or the same number of sheep for longer) are going to eat that forage. In either scenario there is more defecating and urinating going on. That means we either get more nutrient input on the same area, or we can rest the area longer between grazing cycles without losing any input. That longer rest period can allow other things to happen such as grazing by a different animal such as chickens.

The dynamic implication from a systems loop argument is that more nutrients and faster growth can lead to still more nutrient input and an amplifying loop.

The underlying question is still more penetrating. Is soil being built here? Soil is the literal and metaphorical basis of all terrestrial life. Life has the property everywhere of generating the conditions for more life. If we don’t stop them, soils will develop. The two questions above gave us some insight into the sort of processes involved.

Soil is 99% of the issue. The teeming microorganisms in impossibly complex ecosystemic interrelationships are far from being catalogued, let alone understood. Soil generates itself. If it is not generating itself, there is an issue and odds-on it is an issue of agricultural practice. From this perspective the behaviour of sheep is an epiphenomenon: it is what I can observe at the macro-level. This is counter-intuitive when we spend much thought trying to get as much sheep nutrition as we can off the available land. We are looking at the wrong questions.

Rewilding

There are a bunch of people who are enthusiastic for rewilding. They point out that left to itself (i.e. not grazed), hill land rapidly becomes covered in scrub and trees. In that cover there are more, and more diverse, birds and animals. The feeling that rewilding is somehow natural is, however, a romantic illusion.

There is a short film, now very famous, about the impact of the re-introduction of wolves in Yellowstone. I think there is also a pointed ecological critique. But no matter, the wolves affect the distribution of deer which affects the distribution of trees in the landscape. You haven’t rewilded in any radical sense until there are big predators and herds of ruminants. The point is that wolves are unacceptable in the vicinity of farms and that there is a political problem even with the public.

But the trees too are a visible epiphenomenon of the soil, as are the large mammals. Perhaps easier to get to grips with here are wild boars. Wild boars can be seriously aggressive, more dangerous to people than wolves. And wild boars famously disturb the soil, digging and rooting and churning. And those functions we must assume are important to the soil in its building of itself. My guess and that of farmers who use pigs in an analogous way is that some local soil disturbance can be helpful in the bigger picture. It enables a local ecosystem to escape the dominance of some species such as bracken. The wild boars in the Forest of Dean and across all the forests of Europe undoubtedly play an important role. The romantic version of rewilding doesn’t include wild boars either.

Let’s just say here that the biodiversity at a visible level in a wildflower meadow is much higher than in ancient woodland or in reforested areas. And wildflower meadows are maintained by judicious grazing. Animals may be an epiphenomenon, but they are critical in some of the processes, like where we started, moving nutrients uphill.

There are other processes on timescales that we boggle at. Huge areas of forest have been known to die off in episodes lasting decades, allowing fungal organisms covering many square kilometres to build soil on a massive scale and become the foundation of much lusher, more fecund forests. And I think the research behind the great novel by Richard Waters, The Overstory, reckoned that the decay of a full sized redwood occurs over a period of a millennium, with many successor processes building on the original fall of a tree. Rewilding phooey.

Having said which, where we live here trees self-seed and grow really fast: I have observed fifteen feet of regrowth on a coppiced willow stump in this year to August. There are willows and ash, oak, hazel, birch, alder, holly. There is a shale cliff behind the house that, when it was excavated fifteen years ago, did not have soil. It is now colonised by trees big enough that I have to fell them in case they fall on roofs. They are part of a resoiling of an area of exposed rock. The number of tree seedlings in areas grazed by the sheep is small, and the sheep preferentially eat the saplings we have planted if we let them. The question is more like “what soil building processes are we suppressing, and which are we favouring, and what does the soil do in that situation?”.

The water cycle

In the spring this year we did not have enough water. That is not a sentence that often gets said in Mid Wales or North Wales. We had fruit trees planted — in the sleet and snow of February — and they were getting stressed.

Almost all the writing about water management in and by soil is about places where there is not enough water. The exceptions are about reducing flood risk downstream. Here we are at the very head of a catchment area and on ground that cannot flood. So, my practical thinking about water has been held back so to speak.

I did a course with Didi Pershouse on The Soil Sponge. The facts are dramatic. A well-developed soil will hold, sponge-like, a hundred times as much water as a compacted or degraded soil. The implication of holding water is that soluble nutrient are held too. So even when normal weather is resumed here with a foot of rain in the last couple of weeks, the holding capacity of the soil is important. Poor soils simply leach water and become even poorer.

The questions here that lead to insights are about the water cycle though. How does water move from the soil through the plants to the air and back again? The beginnings of an answer are that water is a key currency of the soil ecosystem, being exchanged between many micro-organisms. Perhaps the most studied is the exchange between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots. Plants grow twice as fast when they have effective fungal partners: that means much more transpiration of water into the air and much more food in the form of plant sugars going to feed the soil micro-organisms.

When it is hot there is a significant cooling effect of this transpiration. Maybe six degrees cooler under trees. When it is windy any trapped moist air helps to keep the soil surface moist. The soil micro-organisms principally create stable soil pore spaces that are used to hold water when it rains. This is all in the direction of life creating the conditions for life. There is even a very significant effect of well-developed soils controlling fire risk in forest fires.

Even where the water table is above the surface of the ground in ponds and streams, water is creating diverse ecological niches that end up being important. Farmers in this part of the world have traditionally drained their land with field drains and ditches. The best farmers are now reversing that process with so-called river re-wiggling and the creation of ponds. Their aim is to slow the rate at which water leaves the land. I love it when objectives go 180 degrees.

Good questions and really bad questions

There are questions that imply action, where that action is essentially reactionary. When people ask ‘how are we going to feed all the people in the world?’, they are already thinking technology and intensive farming. Their question, though it appears open, comes from a closed mind and is a really bad question. They think that the direction that agriculture is going is necessarily the answer to “productivity”.

When people ask about making space for wildlife alongside farming, they have given away all the possibilities of farming better. They think we should at least have some hedgerows alongside our barren fields. There is no escaping that arable agriculture is far more destructive of wildlife than properly managed mixed farming schemes. Of course, it is a good idea not to drive arable to 100% and species extinction but really …

One of the reasons that people cannot see the alternatives that good questions can illuminate is that they look so different. Diverse mixed schemes are labour intensive, they bring skilled labour onto the land. This reverses a trend we have seen for 250 years at least. That is a measure of how serious the mistakes are in forming questions.

One of the results of bad farming is degenerating human health. This should not surprise us. I want to turn this argument round and suggest that human desertion of the land is as much an epiphenomenon as sheep pooing on the hill. We have failed at the necessary (to the soil) landscape functions and so the landscape fails us too. We no longer know what our roles are, and the land no longer nourishes us, no matter what “intensive” practices we invent. Indeed, precisely because we invent “intensive” practices that miss the point.

So much of this is bleedin’ obvious. If we are losing our soils it doesn’t matter what else we are doing in the medium term. If we fail to capture the available sunlight to feed the soil, we fail. If we allow our soil carbon to oxidise away we will reduce its ability to grow whatever, and boost climate change as well. If we work in the wrong way with the water cycle we will be too hot, have too many floods, suffer worse forest fires, just pile problems on problems and never know where we went wrong.

We think of agriculture as a fundamental, as, I suppose, ground truth. What we know as agriculture is a model that has failed all around the world. We would do well to learn the history of all the catastrophes that the intrusion of naff economics into human integration into the landscape has produced.