Landscapes co-evolve with Community
What might it mean for a community to be shaped by its function in the landscape? We have lost the sense that the landscape has its own power, its own needs, its own interdependence with the people who live in it. The paths available for communities to take without doing violence to themselves are much more constrained than we might think.
We can get some of the flavour of this question by thinking about the Amish or inhabiting the world of Wendell Berry. Almost every question is a community question, from personal relationships through agricultural methods, wise use of technology, patterns of trading, and understanding of science. There is no place for an individual decision-maker reliant on abstract knowledge — the status of an individual without roots is uncertain.
Farming here in mid-Wales is dominated by two things: chickens and tourists.
There are, within a few miles from here, several large chicken sheds, each with tens of thousands of birds. Some of the hens are nationally free range and birds can be seen scattered on grass close to the sheds. As with any large and intensive animal operation, biosecurity is key, a point driven home at the moment by outbreaks of avian flu in nearby Cheshire. As I understand it, the local chicken economy is sealed from the wider world of chickens: chickens for meat and eggs are bred and raised locally, so that only food is brought in and any disease outbreak can be tightly contained.
I don’t think any of this is formally planned or contracted. People find a way to make the local economy work and to reduce the community risk quite spontaneously. I would rather such poultry production did not exist, but we benefit from ridiculously cheap eggs that we get from an honesty box down the road, and the fattest chickens I have ever eaten.
Perhaps more contentiously, if there are sightings of foxes, including a couple of losses from our own chickens, the foxes are hunted down and shot very promptly.
Even more mysterious is hedge-dressing. The local lanes are all bounded by hedges and those hedges are more meticulously trimmed than any I have ever seen. Our own hedges along our fields are trimmed by a young man on a tractor who does six or more passes to shape the hedges to perfection. This year the poor guy picked up some old fence wire in his cutter and had to spend a couple of hours extricating it.
The process gives the whole area a look of being carefully tended, certainly a tourist issue, enhancing the fantastic scenery. I don’t know who pays for it, I suspect that some of the money from the old single farm payment subsidy is reinvested. But everyone does it. Our neighbours to the north are two brothers in their seventies who are accustomed to use foul weather to come out on an ancient tractor to trim the hedges.
Fences always need replacing and need to be just so and, every winter, replacement hedges are planted between the fields. The feeling is one of pride in maintaining the look of the area. Of course, all of it needs to be up to standard to maintain the look. It is community or nothing.
The soil
I have a puzzle and if you have insight please get in touch. Several of the old hedgerows between our fields stand several feet proud of the level of the fields. Indeed, in exposed places a couple of fields away, gnarled trees stand on their roots, proud of the soil altogether. I think that logically the soil must have been lost off the fields, which are all down to permanent pasture.
Soil loss can have at least two modes. The fields might have been ploughed to reseed the grass or to plant stubble turnips and the soil particles may have been washed away while exposed. Alternatively, the soil organic matter may have oxidised away, destroying the soil structure. The destruction of the soil biology by herbicides, by sheep and cattle wormer medicine, by compaction by machinery, by badly managed application of fertiliser would be a component factor in the destruction of the soil.
I have observed this up close. To dig a fence hole requires lying on the ground pulling the loose material out of the hole as you dig, to a depth of three feet. In one particular field, there is a surface six inches of wet turf and grass roots, giving way to dusty dry sand a gravel — after inches of recent rain! The subsoil is indeed dry and barren of any organic matter. Close to a hedge, however, there is three feet of rich dark brown soil, which is damp and smells good.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the community deals with the visible more easily and readily than with the hard to see. There is nothing more fundamental to community than soil and indeed if we only knew it, nothing more fundamental than the health of the soil biome.
Outside interference
The opposite of a community sorting itself out, guided by its landscape functions, is bureaucratic intervention/interference. I am grieving for our ducks and hens who are confined to makeshift runs when they are used to roaming for miles and foraging for what they need. There are draconian penalties in place to try and halt the spread of avian flu. The idea that the regulations are producing rather extreme cruelty to my livestock that is incapable of flying!
I can give a couple of examples of incentives and regulations that are counterproductive. In assessing the acreage of land that a farmer has for his/her single farm payment, satellite images are used to assess how much land is actually being farmed. Large areas of bracken for instance are excluded, and there are sometimes grants available for spraying bracken. Herbicide of any description is a no-no for soil health. Grazing and woodland are two separate categories for administration purposes and you are not allowed to mix them under the grant terms. But silvopasture, the combination of wooded areas with grazing, is a key technique for regeneration the land.
It is hardly surprising that civil servants do not understand their role in responding to landscape. They are deliberately divided into silos so that agricultural efficiency has nothing to do with flooding or with nutrition — but it is this integration of concerns that is the proper subject of responding to landscape. Landscape is all about cycles: the water cycle, the nutrient cycle, the energy cycle, etc. The cycles work, or are broken, in a given location and there is little that can be generalised.
Local food
People who have land around here tend to raise animals to eat themselves, and for their families. Sheep, pigs, chickens, goats, cows: maybe in that order. We share some of that bounty and it is noticeably better than commercial food. There is a mini-economy that is not money-based.
Those animals are also the animals that are capable of regenerating the land and its soil. The microbiomes of the animals are closely tied to the microbiome of the soil, and the animals help with nutrient cycling and with energy cycling by maintaining high growth rates of plants in the landscape, aka pasture mainly.
Farmers here do not recognise regeneration either as a need or as an activity. But many of their activities are positive in this regard. There is a section in James Rebanks’ English Pastoral where he describes how the advent of the supermarkets to rural areas disrupted this to a considerable degree: why grow your own potatoes when they are so cheap to buy? But the denouement in the book is that the farmers who were not seduced end up being the ones with the best soil.
The argument used by agribusiness companies and the “advisers” who turn up on a farm amount to labour and money saving on the one hand and increased “productivity” on the other. It turns out that much of both are illusory in the medium term: more and more inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, machinery) and not enough gains to pay for them. The legacy is insufficient labour available to implement the things that do work: Rebanks’ examples are cutting back the bracken and thistles by hand rather than spraying them. The local landscape needs the labour of its local community to be maintained without undue damage to its ecology.
Landscape responses that are high in biodiversity tend to be high in labour input in order to realise their productive potential. Elements of that potential get intertwined so that they cannot be easily mechanised. We need to recognise that diversity is important, valuable and necessarily messy. That is the message of the “old-fashioned” farm with great soil.
Values
I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to human community. The Barbaric Heart, Curtis White
The way this works positively is through the forging of community. People provide each other with meat from their pigs and sheep, and it is wonderful twice over: wonderful meat and great to know who raised it and the ties implied in the community.
From there the existence and promotion of small-scale animal husbandry starts to address regeneration of the soil by the back door. The animals will do some particular healing in some particular places. They will be well looked after, because economies of scale are lacking. They will me moved around to make use of the available space, like pigs cleaning up windfalls in an orchard or turkeys eating acorns and beech mast.
We get a neighbour’s wood provided for the woodburning stoves, manure for the garden, favours moving heavy logs with a tractor, stone from a neighbour’s quarry for the lanes, and contacts to get work done at mates’ rates. We give away the gluts from the polytunnel and maybe in a couple of years we will have fruit to share.
All of this is not economics, it is community. And because of community, the landscape gets tended. Some of the landscape functions work as they should. No agricultural expert would come at it that way, and the community basically rejects outside views as being interference, whether from bureaucratic measures, salesmen’s schemes, or well-meaning environmentalists.
It is underpinned by family ties: extended families default to sharing expensive equipment and doing favours for each other. There is very little that can’t be done by calling in favours across the network or interconnected families. I quite understand that this can have its dark side, but what we are addressing here is how the landscape and the community generate each other and care for each other.
Fungi rule
I have been reading Merlin Sheldrake’s magical Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. The productivity of the landscape here is controlled, as elsewhere, by the fungi in the soil microbiome. Our ignorance of the soil microbiome and how it controls our lives is profound, even bottomless.
If I knew how to read them, the fungi would tell me what ails my sunken fields. It is written there. Since I need to know because I need to help the healing, I am finding out by doing. I plant trees, I sow deep rooted herbs and forbs in the pasture, I rotate the animals round the grazing to allow the plants both to grow fully and be cropped down, to keep them growing strongly. I have huegelkultur mounds with tons of buried wood to provide nourishment for fruit trees. As we manage our own livestock rather than borrowing sheep, we can control what medicines they are given.
My own health and that of my family is contingent on that soil microbiome. Without understanding in detail how, both the soil and my own health need to move in tandem towards flourishing. At that point I belong in the landscape, its community, and its functioning. The imperatives of the landscape itself, most of which are invisible and unknown, control that process.
