Grass

What could be simpler than grass? What could be more Welsh than hilly grass fields grazed by sheep? Isn’t that just the way it is?

George Monbiot is his book Feral uses the word sheepwrecked. He means that between the sheep grazing everything down to a short sward and allegedly compacting the soil with their hooves, Welsh hills are a desert. He is deeply wrong, but it is a good starting point.

What happens if you don’t graze a Welsh sheep field? We planted fruit trees in two of our fields and, as amply demonstrated by some escaped sheep in half an hour or so, sheep would rather eat young fruit trees than grass. So we have to keep the sheep out of those fields, and the grass in many places grows waist high.

We knew this, actually, because part of the annual cycle is to let some fields grow and to mow them for hay or silage, or indeed haylage (whatever that is). But it remains surprising to see a green grass field turn into a swaying rippling sea of grass seed heads. Things are not what they seem.

Our guiding thought is to build the soil. This year we had quite a drought and heatwave, and where the soil is thin the grass burnt to a crisp. The soil can certainly do with building: building its thickness and its ability to store water and nutrients. The problem with tall waving grass is that eventually it will die back and prevent new growth. No new growth means no sugars for the soil biology and an impoverished soil.

So, the grass that doesn’t look like a Welsh sheep field needs grazing! It needs eating and trampling and manuring. That doesn’t need to be by sheep, but that is a later part of the story. Grass that is chewed and trampled over a few days will regenerate in three or four weeks at this time of year, then the process can be repeated. Maximum growth.

Tall grass that has been chewed and trampled does not look like a Welsh sheep field either. It looks distinctly brown and messy with bare patches. Our neighbour who runs these sheep says that sheep prefer short grass. The evidence of my observations is that this is not true: they were in bliss moving into fresh high grass. Of course, it is so much easier to give the sheep a few acres to go at and find what grazing there is than to move them all the time. This is where George Monbiot is wrong — he is not observing properly managed grazing.

Hang on, you said the sheep would eat the trees! Well yes, so we have to contain them in an electric fence and move them on. Like many things that sounds so simple. Actually, the first time our four borrowed sheep went into a small paddock with an electric fence, our neighbour picked them up physically and threw them in, I kid you not. Only after that were they blissful! And when we moved them from the first to the second paddock they again refused to move; this time I sweet-talked them!

Biodiversity

Roots go down into developing soil roughly as far as the plants are tall. This is the second problem with cropped grass: it is short. However, there is a bigger issue about roots. Different species of “grass” have different root systems. Some have really deep roots that can bring up water and nutrients from further down. Some have tap roots that can break up compacted layers of soil. Some have symbiotic bacteria that can fix atmospheric nitrogen. Some act as bridges between different species for mycorrhizal fungi. Many functions.

So, the next job with a sward is to introduce different species to do these different jobs. And if they are nutritious for grazing animals, well that is a bonus. What we do is to oversow a herbal ley seed mixture into heavily grazed areas. Given some rain, that germinates fast and introduces some diversity. For what it is worth, we sow as a mix:

certified MERVIOT red clover

certified ABERHERALD white clover

certified ABERDAI white clover

certified ABERACE wild white clover

certified alsike clover

certified Bruce birdsfoot trefoil

Sainfoin

commercial sweet clover

Commercial LACERTA chicory

Burnet forage herb

Yarrow forage herb

Sheeps Parsley forage herb

certified ENDURANCE ribgrass

There are other plants that are significant here, including trees, which play a role in pulling up water and in providing shade. At this scale, the farmers who understand how to make these diverse ecosystems work talk about mosaics. They mean a patchwork of different sorts of environments: the pasture itself, clumps of trees and shrubs, ponds and marshy areas, scrub like brambles and gorse. These areas are hosts to a huge variety of insects and birds and animals that have important roles to play.

In living memory, it is this diversity that was removed under mistaken ideas about management. Hedgerows were removed, areas of brambles cleared, marshy areas drained. I find it fascinating that this has come full cycle. George Monbiot is wrong here too: he wants to allow the Welsh hills to “rewild”, but the biodiversity he celebrates is higher in flower meadows than in scrub and woodland.

There are some elements here that I do not claim to understand yet. The regenerative agriculture people who I am in contact with don’t seem to have a story about bracken and thistles and nettles which have a tendency to take over. One of the ways in which bracken is “controlled” in conservation schemes is to use hardy breeds of cattle such as longhorns or highland cattle, and part of what happens is that bracken rhizomes are disrupted by the animals’ hooves. There are some clues there.

Biocides

Conventionally reared ‘free range’ sheep and cows suffer from worms, intestinal worms. The reason why they are susceptible to worms is that they regraze areas where they have left their droppings, allowing the worms to complete their lifecycle. If livestock are moved on every few days with a longer cycle before regrazing, then worms are less of a problem.

Worms are treated with chemicals for the sake of animal welfare. The chemicals are part of a range of biocides that farmers are tempted to use for various purposes. Wormers, however, are an issue.

The droppings of animals not treated with wormers are dealt with very quickly by dung beetles. Apparently, there are twenty-seven species of dung beetle that make an appearance when they are not killed by residual chemicals in the dung. Dung beetles make off with pieces of dung and bury it. Clearly that is an important soil function. It also limits the breeding of flies which are otherwise a nuisance to animals and humans.

We put our chickens to work following the sheep, to eat the grubs that will otherwise be pests. That is if you like a biological control mechanism, far more intelligent than using biocides. And yes, hens can be intelligent!

It is hardly surprising that biocides suppress soil development. But biocides are used for their short-term targeted effects and their impact on wider systems is never assessed. It would be a rare Welsh hill farmer who ever assessed the state of the soil under their pasture. Their interventions are more likely to be an occasional (every few years) ploughing and growing a crop of stubble turnips to “clean the soil”: meaning dealing with thistles and nettles. The alternative in their mind might be to spray the nettles and thistles with herbicide. Ploughing, of course, is a disaster for soil structure and soil erosion.

George Monbiot’s Welsh desert is to do with stock management, not to do with stock. It is the short-cuts used by farmers who have forever been denied a fair price for their products that produce the desert, a point George is well placed to understand. The price of wool this year is five pence a kilo!

Landscape functions

In truth, the fundamentals here are landscape functions. Not economics, not social policies, not tourism, not even wildlife. The functions of the landscape are to:

· Capture the available sunlight and turn it into plant energy for the rest of the ecosystem, especially the soil.

· Recycle the water that falls as rain, largely via plant transpiration, and even out the supply of water to plants over the seasons and the big weather patterns.

· Recycle nutrients via plants and animals. Animals are the only transport mechanism to take nutrients back uphill when they have been washed down.

· Control the microclimate to make it productive for plants and animals. Trees are most important here.

· Limit how fast extreme rainfall events cause runoff into rivers, thus allowing flood control.

· Enable complex social arrangements to support all the above with specialist skills and exchange of labour.

There is no escape from these functions. Floods are floods and drought is drought. Nutrients lost are lost forever, and synthetic replacements are part of the problem. Most important is the first, because the energy from sunlight is irreplaceable on a daily basis.

Short cropped grass does not capture much of the sun’s energy. How could it? We need a multi-storied plant cover to capture what there is to be captured. That alone tells us that grass should be long and growing at its maximum rate, that it should have diversity to stabilise its micro-environment, for instance with deep-rooted plants and shallower, faster growing plants. The soil can only develop given this solar energy, but it depends on plants for a key stage. Conversely, a lack of adequate plant cover will allow the sun to overheat the soil (even on a hot day in Wales!) and kill some the soil biology and structure.

Let’s go back to our opening points. People think that a field that is green and, where the grass has been eaten by sheep, it must be productive. Our eyes see the endpoint of sheep meat and don’t see the process that produced it, most of which process is completely invisible anyway. The relevant soil organisms are largely microscopic, the soil structure and its active functions hard to study and even harder to understand. Grass misleads us. Monbiot is merely misled differently, to ask wrong questions.

We can look at the difference between meat produced in a regenerative system and other meat. If you are following these arguments you will be able to see that the products of agriculture that works with the natural landscape functions cannot help be more balanced in its micronutrients and more suited to our diet in its macronutrient balance, such as the ratio between omega3 and omega6 fats. But we don’t try and design the system to produce those outputs, that would be to commit the same mistake in a more sophisticated way!

If we study the operation of the landscape functions, especially if we can do so for a river or stream catchment area as a whole, we will begin to understand something else, and at least to realise for instance that taking out a hedge increases downstream flooding and a loss of local biodiversity. We need to have a standpoint that makes some sense, unlike the politician who said he had had some pulled pork in the US and found it tasty despite the lack of production standards. Hopeless. Witless. Dangerous. Idiotic.

Our grass

I look at the mess our four sheep have made on a beautiful meadow. And I look and I look, because it is the change from day to day that I need to see. I need to factor in the weather and I need to compare with differently managed fields next door. Some things I cannot control until we have our own animals, such as the use of wormers. I think about all the work stringing electric fences, all the expense of the equipment, all the stress of paying attention so as not to make mistakes that will see our lovely fruit trees eaten.

And nothing is obvious or given. I need something to control the rabbits that doesn’t eat the chickens. Maybe we need polecats and red squirrels instead of grey squirrels. And I need the next intersecting set of animals: probably a cow and calf, some pigs, maybe turkeys. These are not extra inputs or outputs, they are part of enabling a whole grass ecosystem to move to a higher level.