The government is putting the focus on improving soil health as part of its plan to re-shape the farming landscape, now that the UK has left the EU.
As part of the post-Brexit subsidy system, it has announced (June 30th) that farmers will be able to earn up to £70 per hectare for “actions to improve the health of their soil.”
This is a boost to farmers who support “regenerative farming”, an approach which puts nature and climate change at the heart of their enterprise.
Peter Greig owns Pipers Farm in Devon. He and his wife Henry have been farming in this way for 32 years.
He describes it as farming the land how it was 100 years ago, before the post-war intensification of agriculture.
Animals are treated in a more humane way, which means that antibiotics and other synthetic chemicals are avoided. He says it produces food which is more nutrient rich, so is healthier, and tastes better.
“Farming has completely moved away from the basic common sense of working in harmony with nature, to produce nutrient dense food, to producing massive quantities of an industrial commodity which is so destructive to the natural world, and does not deliver the building blocks of human nutrition.”
Peter now works with around forty family farms in the Devon valley. He is trying to encourage “young blood” on to these family farms, so they can “put in to action the wisdom handed down from their grandparents.”
“They had no alternatives. They didn’t have the chemicals. They didn’t have that big machines. They didn’t have the industrial fertilisers … and that is the right way to feed the world.”
However, there are challenges in adopting this approach.
Brothers John and Mark Snell, in their 30s, used to intensively produce milk. Now they rear turkeys and pigs for Piper’s Farm.
John said farming was on “a knife edge”, and that there would always be a need for industrial farming.
“There aren’t enough farmers … We won’t feed the population without industrial farming, it’s going to be somewhere. It’s better off here where the welfare is better, rather than importing everything where you don’t know how it’s reared.”
Mark said the key to the farming system was food waste. He said everyone would like to farm regeneratively if they could, but there wasn’t “a hope in hell” that you could feed the world on it.
“Not with how people live and how people treat food … people don’t have respect for it. It’s too cheap. It’s driven farmers to industrial farming, which is why they get a bad rap. Farmers get a bad rap but it’s the general public and the government that has driven it. People talk about poverty, but if you chuck away any food then sorry but you aren’t poor.”
However, Sue Pritchard is Chief Executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission said there was “hundreds of years of science” behind regenerative farming. It wasn’t “a hippy side-show.”
“Our research shows that a shift to regenerative agriculture will provide a net reduction of 66 to 77 % of greenhouse gas emissions.”
“The nature crisis and the crisis in health and wellbeing and a green recovery following the pandemic means that the whole of the farming system really does need to take up this challenge.”