Our civilisation rests on soil
Many past civilisations have collapsed as the soil in their hinterland was destroyed. But ask anyone, anyone in the metropolitan elite what the state of our soil is and they won’t know, won’t know even that there is an issue. Of course it is the great urban systems that exert pressure on the hinterland that leads to soil degradation and death: there is nothing else. Aboriginals maintained the health of the ecosystems that supported them for forty thousand years. We cannot manage four centuries. And we don’t know.
At the other end of the telescope when we moved into our smallholding it was and is paradise but I have spent two years clearing rusty barbed wire and broken fencing. Not to mention an old corrugated iron barn full of unspeakable rubbish. So the clues were there that the soil in the fields might not be clean. The whole concept of clean is difficult. People might think a field is clean if it is uniform grass rather than clumps of nettles and thistles. You can’t get a grant for your land if a field has been overtaken by bracken.
Grazing animals have intestinal worms, they just do. And the lifecycle of the worms includes larval stages in the soil and on the grass, where they reinfect their host animals. All animals have some worms: too many worms and the animal gets sick. Breaking the cycle of reinfection is a complex and subtle management problem, so another meaning of a field being clean might be that it has a low level of parasites. There are other insects that may be a problem — farmers sow mustard for instance to get rid of leatherjackets/crane flies.
You will know from this blog series that all this is too focussed and limited. We need to ask about the ability of the soil ecosystem to thrive in its own terms if it is not to present and endless series of issues for “solutions” to make worse. The general view from economics is that when you put economic pressure on a system, people will find ways to export costs. In this case costs are exported mainly to the biosphere and the soil in particular. Customers also get a raw deal.
Poor science
Farmers get advised by people who want to sell them products to make their life easier and more profitable in the short term. So our view of soil health is clouded by farmers putting more and more fertiliser on their fields to produce “healthy” crops. And farmers plough and harrow their fields to “improve” the soil. Adding air to the soil gives a flush of fertility by oxidising the soil carbon. Herbicides and fungicides hide problems and insecticides make sure there is little food for birds. All these things dramatically damage the ability of the soil ecosystem to heal itself.
The wormers given to stock to deal with intestinal worms are strong chemicals. They come with warnings about how long the animal concerned must be left (weeks) before its meat or its milk can be consumed. There is a problem parallel to that of antibiotics where the worms evolve to become resistant to the wormers. And of course the wormers do not just kill worms. They are still present in the dung that is excreted.
There is a deeply wrong-headed campaign to implicate livestock in global warming because of the methane they emit by belching. Actually, there can be no healthy agricultural soils without ruminants, so this pseudo-science would lead directly to the death of our civilisation. But lets look more closely. There are a range of beetles, dung beetles, that deal with animal dung. One function for one type of beetle is to bury the dung deep under the ground, up to a metre. The wormer given to the animals kills the dung beetles, but better managed, dung is quickly buried deep in the soil. That is simple, observable, carbon capture. Across all the pasture in the UK for instance this mechanism would make an immediate difference. But no, cows are a problem.
A quick comment about rewilding, beloved of George Monbiot and others. Allow nature to regain its grip. In the frame we are establishing here, this is to say if you stop managing the land you will not be exporting any costs to the biosphere. I am not sure that abdicating responsibility has ever been a solution to anything.
More symptoms
Rest assured I have been observing and wrestling with the observations. The lazy input/output view of agriculture is that you add things to the soil and you extract things from the soil. One of the good things to add is animal manure. So in the places where the sheep shelter and sleep and produce mountains of poo, you might expect good soil: lots of good input and much the same output in terms of grazing.
This is not what we see. In those places the soil is barely two or three inches of sod and then straight into bone dry subsoil: sand and gravel with no organic matter. And after six inches of rain in a few days the subsoil is still bone dry.
Your metropolitan elite journalist or policy wonk thinks that soil just is. He may know it accumulates slowly and can wash away if you mess up. He absolutely does not know that it teems with life, and has more biodiversity than the Amazon rainforest. Like all living systems soil creates its own environment: builds pore structure and closely controls the distribution of nutrients and water. Or not. Our soil under the hedgerow trees is as good as dead. What killed it?
Briefly this is what it means for the soil to be dead. It has no soil structure, no pore space, so when it rains Welsh rain, the water runs off even flat surfaces, taking soluble nutrients and any loose soil with it. The lack of soluble nutrients means the soil is acidic and grass does not grow well. But the soil is literally dead: there are virtually no earthworms which are the most visible sign of soil life.
Because the grass grows poorly, the exchange of sugars from roots to fungi and bacteria is also poor and soil structure does not develop as it should. Basically, those surface two inches of poor soil is all this system can achieve. Totally impoverished. Life will generate conditions for life but not if we keep poisoning it.
One answer to what kills the soil is the wormer medicines. There are other really strong medicines too to deal with other diseases such as scab. And the sheep are dipped in a tank containing organophosphate chemicals infamous for causing nerve damage in people. I haven’t found good information yet about the effect on the soil of sheep lying on the ground. They certainly produce bare patches of soil where they lie habitually.
And there is quite a lot of recent research on the various species of dung beetles and the little ecosystems they establish within a cow pat. On a positive note it seems there are strong economic benefits to limiting vetinary medicines to allow the beetles to restablish. We have weak dung beetles activity here.
For now, understand that the pressure on prices for lambs means keeping more than you otherwise might and having to limit the amount of time it takes to look after them until they can be sold: all short-cuts are valid. That means more chemicals more often and that means exporting the costs onto the soil, which then does not support the grazing numbers as well as it did. Pressure from the cities kills the rural idyll soil.
Management approaches
To manage the health of the soil while grazing is a skill that was lost. When there were shepherds moving the sheep around, there could be an approach to grazing tailored to the sheep’s needs and to the health of the grass and underlying soil. And people had the appropriate generational timescales. Nettles and bracken and thistles could be controlled as I do with a scythe.
The modern approach to this is rotational grazing through small paddocks. Sheep or cows graze for 3 days or a week and move to fresh grass before they can be reinfected by larvae from intestinal worms. This also allows grass to be grazed quite hard followed by a period of recovery. This rapid recovery growth to longer grass captures more energy for the plant roots and starts to build the soil.
A field can be so infested with eggs and larvae that farmers end up routinely worming rather than testing animals and using wormers when it is absolutely necessary. The other technique is to have a species break and have cows rather than sheep or vice versa. Cows and sheep do not share parasites. And hens, ducks and turkeys clean up to a certain degree.
Monocultures are never good news and grass is a monoculture of sorts. By using herbal leys with plants such as chicory, the prevalence of worms is reduced by as much as 40%. And the leys have deeper roots that the grass, doing more soil building and helping store nutrients and water.
Stewardship of land
We are stewards of the land whether we recognise that or not. Rewilding is not stewardship, and the wolves and bears and eagles that might take it closer are not tolerated, showing how weak the concept is. We need to clean up one watershed at a time to start to work properly with diverse ecosystems again.
As stewards we need to eat what the land produces as it regenerates. This is not a consumer, what shall I eat today, sort of question. We need to focus on ruminants and getting the soil to respond to appropriate grazing. As it happens the food produced by such an approach is of far higher quality than the degraded systems we use now can produce. The question of how we will feed the world is an urban question which disguises all the ways we will collapse our civilisation. Stewardship produces highly productive food systems but they are not at the behest of anyone but themselves.
Stewardship also answers the question of how we derive the nutrients we need to thrive. A healthy soil mines the nutrients needed for the entire food chain above. A depleted, deprived, sick soil simply cannot do that. Mineral contents of plants have fallen dramatically in the last seventy years.
Despite the rhetoric about supporting nature, you can still get a government grant for ploughing up your pasture to plant stubble turnips, or if it is too steep to plough, for spraying it off with glyphosate. Even if you are directly adjacent to an SSSI. People are starting to talk in policy terms about not leaving soil bare, but my reading is that stewardship of the soil is not even on the horizon. The basic knowledge about how soil works is only just starting to spread in farming communities, even though older practices produced better stewardship results.
James Rebanks, one of the best spokesmen for regeneration, says that on this farm the cattle (belties) get no medicine, so no wormer. It is entirely possible to reverse the current cycle of becoming dependent on biocides and killing the soil.
The soul of agriculture
I mistyped soil as soul and immediately liked the result. People who deny soul have no soul, they fail to respond to awe-inspiring things around them. Agriculture that neither knows nor cares about the miraculous things that soil can do if we let it, is a lifeless and depleted way of producing poor food for supermarkets and other institutions that don’t care. Like much of economics there is a pretending that this is a matter of costs and markets, but this is only to make the death stark.
Farmers sometimes talk of reducing expensive inputs by allowing biodiversity to do its work. But to be a steward of recovery and regeneration of systems that can restore human flourishing is of infinite value.
