Articles | Farming for the future - does nature hold the key?

Written by The Source | Posted on 11/09/2009 | Category: Real Food

Before she became an environmental film-maker, Rebecca Hosking grew up on a South Devon farm managed by her father to take as much care of the wildlife, as the cows and sheep he farms. Her documentary film, ‘Message in the Waves’ helped her lead the UK campaign against plastic bags from her home town of Modbury. But now her follow-up, “A Farm for the Future”, which attracted millions of viewers and three repeats on BBC2, sees Rebecca return to her home farm for good, to put into practice the farming she believes will be crucial for an oil-depleted 21st Century.

The most important thing I learnt when making “A Farm for the Future” is that working with nature (rather than against it as we currently do) is the biggest key to farming in a low-energy future. For example, I think it’s important we understand our landscape. The South West used to be mainly sheep and coppice wood and then dairy farming. But now we’ve become so focused on commodities that we are growing large amounts of cereals in a region that has high rainfall and a clay soil. How did that happen? It’s important to understand what to grow on the land because if it doesn’t want to grow there, we are just making work for ourselves. I’ve spent a year observing our land and it’s amazing how much just the weeds can tell us about the quality of what’s under our feet.
Soil is a really important element for me. We can’t have healthy plants, animals and humans without healthy soil and we need to take care of it like we would our animals. But over the last 60 years we’ve worn it out and as a result we’ve lost 70% of the nutrients in our fruit, veg, meat and dairy since World War II. Just like the credit-crunch we are now realizing the scale of our soil debt and we simply can’t borrow any more. We need to go back into the black by replacing the nutrients in a sustainable natural way without relying on imported chemical fertilisers. Then we need to really understand the water table on our land and learn how to hold onto it as long as possible to ride out droughts and sequester flooding, both of which will be important in the future.
The next thing that’s important is to move away from monoculture and towards polyculture food production and for farms to become less specialised. Our farm is currently a livestock farm with beef and sheep, but twenty years ago we would have had a mixed farm. Mixed farms have more resilience for the future because you produce everything you need within a closed-loop system. You also have more products to take to market. Because of climate change we should be planting crops that need less energy and mixing trees, shrubs and perennials back into the farm system to provide a diverse habitat and enrich the soil.
A big challenge we face as farmers is the social and economic side of things. We have no idea where we’re going to be in the future with fewer resources, more expensive oil and the impacts of climate change. I’ve never thought that being a farmer was easy, but last year's fuel crisis, with oil prices continually rising, was a real wake-up call. Our costs went through the roof - animal feed, diesel for the tractors, agricultural contractor bills - and the biggest rise was in the price of fertiliser. Fortunately we use very little chemical fertiliser, but many farms were driven to bankruptcy.
It’s clear that farming needs to make a transition to the future, but if we make it too fast we will go bankrupt. If we make it too slow we’ll also go bankrupt. At the moment we are ‘beef farmers’ and we find that selling into the supermarket chain seems to be the only convenient option, particularly in a recession. But we want to move slowly away from these relationships with supermarkets to a more localised market where we can sell a wider variety of products. This requires building links with the community which is now difficult for most farmers who have become so marginalised by selling their produce as commodities to a middle-man.
I have come back to the farm, not because it’s easy but because I want to make the work my father has done sustainable into the future. I’m concerned that when pushed to improve our national food production, it is wildlife that will suffer. Yet it’s nature that holds the key to our success because time and time again scientific studies have shown that a large diversity of species in a growing system increases yields, reduces pests and disease and produces truly sustainable food. Biodiversity can have huge financial benefits for your farm. The only problem is that these systems are not profitable for big agribusinesses that currently hold the power and prefer to maintain the status quo. And if you’ll excuse the rock band references this is a status quo that can only lead to dire straights.

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