by Andrea O’Ferrall
In chapter 6, Monbiot visits more farmers, the first being ‘Tim’ who has a farm in Shropshire and is the ‘twenty-first century equivalent of a Victorian farmer-scientist, drawing on the latest findings and conducting his own experiments to improve his practice.”
Monbiot divides the foods we eat into three categories:
- vegetables and fruit
- cereals
- protein and fats
The majority of the world’s current diet is supplied by cereal crops — wheat, rice and corn. Monbiot is visiting Tim’s farm to find out if the challenge of securing and improving arable farming that produces cereals and grains is possible.
Not only does arable farming — through plowing, pesticides, weedkillers and fertilizers — impose massive impacts on the living planet, but it might also be highly vulnerable to environmental shifts and systemic failure. Faced with both climate chaos and a gathering loss of resilience, changing the way our staple crops are grown should number among humanity’s most urgent missions.
We could try to change eating habits away from these foods, but that would be an great challenge. According to Monbiot:
There’s a useful comparison to be made with government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most successful reductions have so far been those that require the least consumer effort. The lights still come on when we flick the switch, though the power might now be supplied by wind turbines and solar panels, rather than coal and gas. The much harder transformations, at which many governments balk, involve persuading people to change their habits: driving less, changing our heating systems, renovating our homes to make them more energy-efficient. All these things need to happen to prevent climate breakdown, but they are harder to effect than the remote and scarcely perceived replacement of our power sources.
So the change will need to be how we grow our staple crops.
Back to Tim. He shows Monbiot a soil sample of unplowed field compared to one that was plowed. The unplowed soil is filled with an incredible number of worms.
So many he’d never “seen so many in a spadeful. They ranged from tiny purple and yellow specimens to giant pink lobworms.”
The plowed soil had none.
A detail here reminded me again of a lecture by soil scientist Elaine Ingham. What was holding the soil together were, “the polymers secreted by bacteria, worms, tiny arthropods, and the glomalin molecules extruded by fungi. These build the aggregates that harbor life.” Since Tim had stopped plowing his fields, the number of worms had increased by 500%!
The change in soil biology not only allows the soil to hold on to carbon, it allows it to hold on to water as well.
The chapter goes on to discuss the problems with plowing which damages soil biology. Plowing is very harmful to the soil. Not only is it disruptive but stopping plowing will save on pesticides, reduce fertilizer, lessen soil erosion and fuel use. For the numbers, “the usual arable package…a plow, power harrow, combination drill, and roller — burns between 29 and 31 liters of diesel per hectare per year.”
The no-till method uses much less — only 4.5 liters per hectare.
No-till farming uses a no-till drill that doesn’t damage the plants already growing. They drill the seed into the ground. By not plowing, Tim is following the adage, “never let the sun see the soil.” The soil stays covered and is “doubly resistant to climate breakdown. The soil, being firm, and well structured, is less susceptible to storm damage and more resilient to drought.”
Tim reiterates what Tully had said earlier (see my previous piece) — an insect infestation tells you there is something wrong with your plant. “a well-nourished, healthy plant doesn’t need to be sprayed. It deposits silicates on its leaves that protect it.”
Glyphosate
However, Tim does resort to herbicide, the one used almost universally in large scale farming — glyphosate. Monbiot clearly describes the problems associated with glyphosate including affecting honeybees’ ability to navigate, being toxic to many freshwater creatures and being ‘extremely persistent in seawater.’
He also explains how glyphosate works “by inhibiting the action of an enzyme that plants produce called EPSPS, without which they cannot make a number of essential chemicals.”
Unfortunately glyphosate appears to affect many bacteria and fungi that produce EPSPS in the same way, thus causing harm to the rhizosphere perhaps tipping “the balance between beneficial microbes and those that cause disease in plants, which could explain why at least one deadly crop disease seems to be more prevalent in the soil where the herbicide has been used.” Another huge problem is that in gaining resistance to hostile chemicals like glyphosate, “exposure to one toxin can make bacteria less susceptible to others…bacteria become better equipped to defend themselves against antibiotics.”
Monbiot goes on to describe more issues with glyphosate. However on Tim’s farm it is believed that “damage on soil life by glyphosate is much slighter than damage caused by plowing” as evidenced by the large numbers of earth worms.
But is this a choice we want to make? Its hard to compare different types of environmental damage. Monbiot suggests a device called a crimper roller that kills weeds or cover crops “without either plowing or herbicides,’ but it can only be used on frozen soils. Another device he mentions is the robot weeder that “use bolts of electricity” and appears “to have the lowest environmental impact.”
This was a long chapter. There’s more!
Monbiot was focusing on arable crops. Tim discusses his wheat crop and the constraints he faces:
He sells to a flour mill, which seeks total consistency. Every loaf has to be the same, so every load of grain must fit the specs. They want a protein content of over twelve percent, a Hagberg Falling Number of over three hundred and a water content of fifteen percent. If we miss any of that, its disqualified as milling wheat and goes for animal feed instead, and we get a lower price. They don’t make concessions. They don’t accept suggestions.
Then the topic moves on to the topic of bread.
Higher protein wheat leads to bread rising better which means you get a larger loaf for the same amount of flour. Because British wheat was lower in protein, Britons wanted to find a process to effectivey use British wheat.
They developed the “Chorleywood Baking Process…Instead of gently kneading the dough then letting it rise for three hours, as traditional bakers do, the process uses high-speed mechanical mixers to stretch the dough and lengthen its protein chains in just three minutes.” To achieve the whole sped up process of baking the bread, it needs “twice the quantity of yeast, as well as chemical oxidants, hardened fat, extra salt, enzymes and emulsifiers that tend to be made from petrochemicals.”
As might be expected, this highly automated, capital intensive process favored large corporations over small local enterprises. “Within a couple of decades, most of the remaining small bakers had disappeared, and the bread belonged to big business.”
Agroecology
Monbiot also visited the farm of Ian Wilkinson, a farmer practicing agroecology. “Agroecology means not only farming more sensitively, with fewer chemicals, less use of machinery and more reliance on natural systems, but also changing the relationships between farmers and the rest of society” — increasing food sovereignty.
Like Tolly and Tim, Ian began with tending to the soil biology. The farm he had purchased had grown only one crop — barley for the Heineken Brewing Company — and the soil was seriously depleted. Through complex fertility rotations Ian “reckoned that in 7 years the carbon content had roughly doubled.” Ian’s farm has been profitable.
“We don’t use fertilizer or pesticides, so no money is spent on them… Some bakeries are paying 600 pounds for heritage wheat flour. That compares to roughly 150 pounds for conventional wheat.”
A positive outcome from using agroecology principles is that “sometimes the yields from agroecology are higher than from conventional farming, especially when all the produce small farmers take from their land is counted: leafy vegetables that might grow beneath the cereal crop, or the means that might grow through it.”
But we must get back to the question of yield:
We need healthy food that’s cheap enough to let everyone eat well. We need high yields to ensure that farming feeds the world without sprawling across the planet. We need healthy soils whose vertility can be raised without either dousing the land with fertilizer or removing it from production for long periods. We need, as far as possible, to stop using herbicides and pesticides and to reduce the need for irrigation. We need farm landscapes that provide habitats and corridors for wildlife. The technologies we choose should be simple and cheap enough for small farmers to use so that capital does not overwhelm labor. They should be varied enough to reverse the dangerous homogenization that creates the Global Standard Farm.
Kernza
In the last few pages of the chaper Monbiot goes into detail about Kernza, a perennial wheat. He was surprised that the bread he made from its wheat rose nicely and tasted good.
Because I like to garden, I looked into buying Kernza seeds. I discovered that Kernza growers ‘must be licensed before buying, planting, or marketing Kernza, and they must adhere to the trademark program and its associated Identity Preserved Program for the duration of their license. The Land Institute (TLI) owns and manages the Kernza trademark.’ So no Kernza growing for me.
What About Meat?
Monbiot ends the chapter saying,
A transition from short-term to long-term crops and the short-term to long-term thinking that should accompany them, is one crucial step toward a better world. But there is further to go. We cannot complete the journey until those of us who have a choice of diets stop eating animals and find new sources of protein and fat.
I have written about the previous five chapters of the book. If you’re interested in this topic, read them. And definite read Monbiot’s book.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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