Securing our food for the future
Every week at the moment there seems to be another farm sale advertised in our local area as farmers sell up, retire or restructure to cope with the financial implications of various recent political changes. The question of food security, is coming to the fore; can Britain rely upon it’s food system to feed us in the near future as flooding, drought, war and other Geo-political events disrupt our food chains?
UK Food security peaked in the 1980s at almost 80% (having risen from an all-time low of 30% in 1939) largely as a result of the protectionist policies of the EU supporting farmers to produce more food when world prices would have otherwise undercut their farmers. The (as Tim Lang puts it in his book Feeding Britain) ‘leave it to Tesco et al’ approach to food policy (whereby food supply is left to a small number of large wholesalers & retailers to manage) was adopted & was continued by successive UK governments over the last 40 years. This was partly a response to the inefficiency of overproduction of some subsidised foods at the expense of the state and partly due to the prevailing neoliberal capitalism ideology. Neoliberalism seeks to reduce costs via competitive markets - reducing state intervention in the business of producing food, dismantling post-war support mechanisms & preventing farmers from forming powerful anti-competitive co-operatives that might lead to higher food prices.
The consequences of this were that food processors, freed from government intervention, merged & were bought out by globalised companies to take advantage of economies of scale. Likewise, farms were forced to get bigger and reduce costs to survive as processors & retailers sought to eliminate the inefficiency of them buying from many small suppliers. Leaving our food supply to neoliberalism has made generating profit a higher priority of the food system than providing people with adequate nutrition.
In my most recent blog I covered what's going on with farming at the moment, how government policy has affected farming and the countryside throughout the twentieth century and how, in many ways, we are in a very similar situation now to that which we found ourselves in, as a country, 100 years ago. Whilst food security has been left to Tesco, government funding for farming attempts to mitigate the unfortunate but inevitable social & environmental consequences of such a policy.
We welcomed the prospect of being paid for ‘Public Goods’ here as, under the old system, although farmers had the freedom to spend the financial support however they saw fit, this enabled many to simply continue to produce food at below it’s true market value. This was good if you had a large farm with a correspondingly large annual payment but as a smaller farm trying to earn a living by producing food, this put us at a distinct disadvantage. Even today, where help is available, small farmers and new entrants to the industry are subject to greater financial risk by grant funding as it often requires you to be able to complete the work many months before you are repaid, in arrears. The process can also limit the pace of nature restoration when relying upon the income from one project to pay for the next. Locking up money in grant funded work makes it's unavailable for cashflow or growth in the core business.
Some people have criticised the ‘public goods’ approach of the Sustainable Farming Incentive because it fails to recognise food security as a public good in itself. The problem is that public goods are those aspects of land management that farmers cannot sell on the open market, so while food security for all citizens of society may be a public good, food production is not. This was where the EU farm subsidies fell short in that they did support food production but the foods produced were not matched to the nutritional requirements of society. Public goods, on the other hand, do include actions that aid soil health and water quality, which help us to grow healthy crops without distorting the market.
One such criticism that I recently saw posed on Twitter was;
The answer to this question is quite simple; the UK government is certainly not proposing to pay us to stop producing & selling food or devote it to the growing of wildflowers. There are some actions included in the SFI scheme which temporarily take land away from producing food, and also involve planting wildflowers, but as these actions are collectively limited to no more than 25% of the farmed area in any one year. As they only cover the basic costs, it wouldn’t pay our bills never mind providing us with an income to live on. Much of our work involves producing a surplus of animals too that we can send out to ‘conservation graze’ some of the not insignificant acreages of flower rich habitats preserved as SSSIs and/or nature reserves in the local area, but again this isn’t a service that we are paid for - food production underpins all these important, but voluntary, actions.
Food sales remain fundamental to our business at Rosewood Farm
My day usually starts with a cup of coffee and some financial planning; checking our bank balance against the payments that are due or expected. Next I’ll start to work through any new orders that require preparing for delivery. As much as I’d love to ditch the time consuming work of rearing animals and selling the produce, without packing the meat and sending out orders to our customers each week, we’d soon run out of money. If I have time I might take a break and enjoy looking at some of the wildflowers that we encourage to grow around the farm but the prospect of that becoming the ‘day job’ is as distant as it’s ever been.
Although they are home to lots of nationally rare species, the nature reserves we graze are not truly ‘wild’ places as they all once formed part of traditional farming systems. They only now seem distinctive because the farmed landscape has changed so much around them. They were protected due to the huge efforts of farmers, conservationists and campaigners who recognised that we were set to lose so many wild plants, insects, birds and mammals due to the expansion of intensive farming. We cannot rely upon the old farming systems coming back, not least because of the huge costs of both land and labour today, so we must find other ways to integrate more nature into farming.
Nature reserves act as reservoirs of biodiversity to recolonise the lost nature within farmland, but it can only spread out into the landscape if we provide the right conditions [and space] for it to thrive. This doesn’t mean that we’re going to turn the farm into just another nature reserve; that would only exacerbate the problem, as we’d then have no surplus of cattle to use for conservation grazing when they’re needed during the summer and autumn months. The farm has still got to feed our animals during the winter so that they can continue to produce food year round so integrating wildlife and food production is the way forward.
The next round of the Sustainable Farming Incentive opens next month for small farms and in September for everyone else. As I mentioned in the last blog, it’s really disappointing that the scheme will not support our species rich floodplain hay meadows but, should our application be accepted, we’re planning to expand the network of flower margins around the farm and the financial incentive will certainly go a long way towards covering the costs of this work. We’ll use our own time and machinery to carry out the work, and complete it alongside productive crops for the cows.
Opposition to allowing wildflowers to grow on the basis that they reduce our food production is still a common one, even within farming. Many people become resistant to change as they age, and restoring nature is no exception. Having spent a lifetime seeing wildflowers as ‘weeds’ to be eradicated on farms, appreciating that they are important can be difficult. Although we have had a massive impact upon the landscape over multiple generations, those changes usually happen so gradually that we often do not even notice them, and if it happened before we were born, we may not even be aware of the difference. Dubbed ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, this generational forgetfulness is responsible for my own thinking that the way the family farm looked in the 1980’s, when I was growing up, represented normality. It was only through taking an interest in the history of our local landscape that I began to appreciate just how different things once were, and what has been lost.
I can’t deny that wildflowers are attractive to look at, but to dismiss them as irrelevant to food security is to overlook many of their most important roles in nature. As a lot of our work consists of packing the meat that we sell, I’ve found that the time passes much more quickly and productively by listening to audio books. I was inspired to learn more about bees and other wild insects after listening to Silent Earth by academic researcher & Bumblebee enthusiast Dave Goulson. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole to go down so I won’t attempt to repeat the plethora of beneficial interactions that insects (and particularly pollinators) play in food production. If you need inspiration for your own garden or just want to learn more about insects generally and what can be done to help them, I’d recommend reading and/or listening to any one of his books, and short videos on YouTube.
Few people truly realise how vital insects are to us because they so often only experience them as a nuisance, eating our crops, food or finding other ways to annoy us. It is usually only the ones that we find pretty, like butterflies, which have the power to elicit our appreciation. What’s missed is the vital role that insects play in functional ecosystems - without insects our farm wouldn’t produce any food at all, we rely upon them to decompose plant residues and manures, drawing down nutrients into the soil for reuse by the next crop. Pollination is often the most recognised contribution insects play in food production, with the domestic honey bee taking more than it’s fair share of the credit, but with most pollination of flowering crops carried out by Bumblebees, we really need to take better care of our wild pollinator habitats.
Oilseed Rape crop in full flower in May
At this time of year you’ve be forgiven for thinking that bees do OK from arable farming as fields of oilseed rape are in full bloom in May providing an abundance of pollen and nectar for bees. Imagine, though, if you were a bee nesting within a monoculture of wheat, barley & OSR. The cereals provide no nectar so you are dependent upon a single crop that flowers for one month of the year - what do you feed on for the other 3-5 months of the year when you’re not hibernating? Without wild flowers, our flowering arable crops provide only feast or famine for pollinators. A large arable farm, growing a rotation of these three crops, featured among one of my early jobs in farming. In the summer part of my role was to mow the margins and ditches alongside each field between harvesting a crop and cultivating for the next one. I found this task rather soul destroying as although I enjoyed the work, the only chance to see any wildlife was while turning the tractor around at the end of the field which would break the monotony of a long day working in a large arable field, and here I was, cutting it all down.
Modern pesticides have given us the ability to eliminate annual weeds from within arable crops, but it is the nitrogen fertiliser applied to grasslands over many years that have made meadows and pastures hostile to wildflowers too. When we first took possession of our farm our attempts to encourage more wildflowers to grow were thwarted by this nitrogen legacy. Gradually, as the years went by and the artificial fertility faded, some wildflowers, such as the Pignut that survived only along one grassy bank, spread, while others, such as Cowslips, remained locally extinct.
Grass crops, including cereals, provide most of the world’s human & animal energy requirements and are pollinated by the wind, so it’s tempting to think that we could manage quite well without bees. However there’s more to nutrition than energy, protein is more often than not the limiting factor. Crops that produce the bulk of our protein needs are legumes; peas, beans for pulses and vetches & clovers for our grazing animals - all rely heavily upon wild bees for pollination so - no bees, no beef.
We have used clover leys for many years for our cattle as they provide plenty of high quality forage which, when used in conjunction with meadow hay, keeps them well fed, and producing beef, throughout winter when the conservation grazing is not available. Our clover leys are a particular favourite of the Grey Partridge, a species that has nationally reduced by 92% since 1967 due to insect declines, which forage upon the many insects that organic clovers support.
Clover supports a great deal of insects, which makes it a popular crop with the Grey Partridge
The SFI scheme encouraged more arable farmers to establish ‘legume fallows’ as a break crop in cereal rotations that also improve soil health. These have largely fallen out of favour as specialised arable farms no longer keep the grazing livestock that are needed to make full use of the crop, so the incentive was helping to bring them back more widely. This was a boon for wild bees and other pollinators as, when cut on rotation they provide a source of pollen & nectar throughout the summer, and subsequent cereals crops also benefit from lower fertiliser needs.
Before artificial nitrogen fertilisers were widely and cheaply available, farming was more dependent upon clovers and other legumes for feeding the soil via the nitrogen fixing nodules on their roots. UK farming now relies so heavily upon artificial fertilisers that recent military attacks on Iran by the US, led to sudden price spikes and supply disruption for fertilisers, forcing many arable farmers to consider whether it will be even worth planting crops at all this autumn. This has significant implications for food security, as those countries we rely upon for imports are also facing the same supply issues.
One other major advantage of clovers over artificial fertiliser is that they fix the nitrogen exactly where it is needed - in the field. The traditional way to apply nitrogen was to broadcast it on the growing crop - the disadvantage of this was that it was too easy, if the machine was not set up correctly, or the driving less than accurate (as was not uncommon in the days before tractors were steered by GPS) for the fertiliser to be broadcast into hedgerows and ditches too. Today fertiliser spreaders are more accurate and fertiliser is too expensive to waste, but this was less of a concern in the early days when many hedgerows accumulated elevated levels of fertility that made them unsuitable environments for wildflowers. The increased fertility encouraged more vigorous plants like nettle to grow in hedgerows, which were then controlled by spraying with herbicides which further helped to eliminate wildflowers from field margins. Hedgerow growth benefits too from the additional fertility and the cutting of hedgerows by flail has not helped as the nutrients from the hedge clippings are now mulched and recycled straight back into the base of the hedge rather than being removed and burned in the field, as happened when hedgerows were managed by rotational coppicing and laying.
Nettles out competing wildflowers due to elevated fertility levels in a hedgerow
We aren’t a rich family, and don’t have vast acreages to set aside for rewilding. We rely upon the farm for a living and our farm relies upon growing food to make restoring wildlife habitats viable. We’re not creating a sanctuary or a haven for flowers and insects but a vital stepping stone in the landscape, away from the Ings, for birds and bats and bees to thrive in the wider countryside. Monocultures of deep green cereal fields are common now and arable and meadow flowers are rare, insectivorous birds like the Corncrake are rarer still, even though they were once such common birds across lowland Britain, the 20th century saw many insectivorous birds struggling to adapt to changes in farming practise. Rapid intensification of food production from the 1940’s onward was initially successful while we still retained enough natural resilience in our soils but as farming is a marathon, not a sprint, and we are now seeing that we are much too reliant upon annual energy inputs to grow food.
Pesticides and artificial fertilisers enabled heavy land like ours to be farmed intensively until it’s soil biology, and with it any resilience, has been all but depleted. This makes it all the more dependent upon the continued use of artificial inputs, a wholly unsustainable situation. Today it is long overdue for some rejuvenation. Incentivising restoration is the prudent way to ensure future food security, and match-funding any payments encourages continued food production from the land. Unless you’re a landowner with deep pockets, or have an alternative source of income, there is no other way.
Food production is not threatened by funding nature restoration on farms but by the continual low returns for food crops received on the open market. If you want home grown food to contribute to food security it’s important to recognise that food crops need to be viable or farmers will be forced to stop growing them - with food you certainly do get what you pay for. Providing a pesticide-free habitat with summer long stands of flowering leys and wildflower meadows is a valuable public good, and the benefit spreads much wider than our own crops. It is not directly rewarded by the market but it does feel like the best investment that we can make in present and future food production. It represents optimism that we can rebuild what has been lost in the countryside and continue producing food for many more years to come.