In Chapter 4 of Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, Monbiot highlights the farm of Iain Tollhurst — Tolly who explains he was able to buy his farm because, “during the war they plowed it and grew potatoes. By the time I got here it was pretty much stripped. Almost everything had been taken and nothing put back in.” Plus, he added, the land is 4o percent stone. Tully has farmed the land for thirty-three years without pesticides, herbicides or any type of fertilizer — animal manure or mineral treatments. His is a livestock free farm — including any livestock products.
So how has he increase the productivity of his land — to the levels of what intensive growers achieve with artificial fertilizers? How did he improve the fertility of his soil? How did he do these things while also bringing a diversity of wildlife back to his farm?
With the zeal of an entomologist, Monbiot carefully observes a field of wildflowers as Tolly leaves to attend to a plumbing emergency. He observes white butterflies on chicory flowers, “a thistle gall fly with red eyes and zebra wings… a wolf spider eating the beetle it had caught on an oxeye flower.”
In another section of the farm,
Tolly’s method is to keep both the predators and pests alive over the winter. Without the pests, what will the predators eat? And that’s not the only reason to keep the pests:
Important to his success are the large number of flower species in the beds between his crops. “Several studies show that the greater diversity of plants in a wildflower bank, the greater the diversity of beneficial insects they harbor.”
Biodiversity is the key to the success of the farm.
So we understand how to avoid pesticides, but what about fertilizers? If vegetables pull nutrients from the soil and you take them out of the system by selling them, how do you get the nutrients back?
Green manure is plants that are grown not to be eaten, but to increase soil fertility.
Tolly has broken his farm into seven sections and follows a seven-year crop rotation. That, and the green manure, promote soil fertility. But there is one more important ingredient — wood chips. Aside from seeds, wood chips are the only substance put on the fields that comes from outside the farm. He adds a small amount of wood chips, “twice every seven years and leaves the worms to pull it into the earth.”
The woodchips have been a vital part of his success. Tolly’s meticulous records show, “that soon after he started adding the chip, the fertility of his soil soared.” The science isn’t firm yet on why this is happening, due to the complex nature of soil biology, but Tolly believes, “it’s adding enough carbon to stimulate the activity of fungi and bacteria, but not so much that it causes them to lock up the nitrogen in the soil, which is what happens if you give microbes more carbon than they need.”
As I remember hearing on a How To Save A Planet podcast several years ago when talking to regenerative farmers in the Midwest, “We aren’t feeding the crop, were feeding the soil. Most farmers have a big hang-up about nutrients, especially nitrogen. They douse their land with nitrogen, and half of it washes off and gets in the rivers. If you get the biology right, the nutrient demand is much less than people imagine.”
Monbiot discusses how organic farms adhere to rules that may or may not be effective. He then comes back to Tully’s farm.
Tolly points out to other farmers that when using outside resources, they can be thought of as ‘ghost acres’ off the farm. “chicken farmers in the Wye Valley harvest ghost acres in Brazil and Argentina: the land from which their feed comes.”
This would mean that much of the carbon savings on farms are really false accounting.
Monbiot discusses biochar, pointing out that it hasn’t been the magic solution it was hyped up to be. This is primarily because it’s very expensive.
After watching a webinar by microbiologist Elaine Ingham, I fully appreciate Monbiot’s conclusion to this chapter.
Monbiot poses a question to Tolly at the end of the chapter, “as we cannot survive on only vegetables and fruit” can his methods be transferred to arable farming?
He answers that technically, yes, this could be done with lower yields but also much less waste of land. It all comes down to finance. “Arable margins are extremely tight, which is why farmers crop their land 100 percent, all the time…If an arable farmer took one third of their land out of production, they’d go bankrupt.”
That’s the problem.
Stay tuned for chapter 5 of Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet.
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This post was previously published on Andrea O’Ferrall’s blog.
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