Writing on the land
By: James Flint
Tags: Climate Change, Soil Carbon Sequestration, Farming, Soil Health, Warwickshire

Pulling iron versus pushing carbon [Source: Dr. Don Reicosky via Jay Fuhrer NRCS Soil Health Workshop, YouTube]

John Richard Granville Stevens — Granville to everyone who knows him — is standing in the field behind his farmhouse, showing me his roots. While he’s doing this, I’m thinking about Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Settlement”.

In the story, an explorer is given a demonstration of torture and execution called, appropriately enough, the Harrow. A baroque device constructed of steel needles and ribbons and glass pipettes and tubes, the Harrow writes the message deemed most befitting of the condemned person’s crimes — literally, their sentence — into the victim’s flesh, over and over, again and again, going fractionally deeper with each pass, in order that it takes a full twelve hours for them to die.

When I first read Kafka’s collected short stories as a student, this was the tale that disturbed me most, much more so than the more famous Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a giant insect. Gregor’s transformation feels accidental, a cruel twist of fate, but the cruelty an explorer witnesses in the penal settlement both wholly pointless but utterly deliberate, while also being mindless as it’s continued by tradition even though the psychopathic Commandant who invented has long since passed away.

And this, Granville is telling me by pulling up plants and showing me their entrails, is pretty much what humans have been doing to the living soil season after season, decade after decade, by carving it into lines with the plough.

We’ve been doing this for a very long time — one of the constellations is named the device, for goodness sake. And in the old days, when the plough was drawn by horse or cow and its use wasn’t accompanied with heavy doses of pesticides and herbicides, it wasn’t so very damaging. But now the sky is telling us the plough’s time is up, and that if we’re not going to suffocate the earth and all who walk upon it, we need to change the way we write upon the land.

Carbon dioxide dispersion (in red) in the northern hemisphere after a winter and of emissions…

… and once plants have grown during spring and summer [Source: NASA]

John Richard Granville Stevens — Granville to everyone who knows him — is standing in the field behind his farmhouse, showing me his roots. Granville and I grew up together. As a teenager, I spent my summers helping him and his father with the harvest on their cereal farm. After we left our respective universities, I hightailed it off to London and beyond in order to try and make it as a writer. Granville went back to help his Dad on the farm, which he now runs. We see each other pretty regularly, as until she passed away in January, my mother still lived down the road from the house where I was born, which itself was on border of the farm. A couple of weeks back I was in the area, so I dropped by. Which is why I’m now standing in his field.

The roots that Granville is showing me belong to vetch and chicory. Chicory sends a long tap root up to a metre deep into the soil, what Jay Fuhrer (of whom more below) calls a “highway”. Vetch, by contrast, has lots of root nodules that bunch nearer the surface and are good for fixing nitrogen.

Vetch roots with health soil aggregates, Upper Spernall Farm, Warwickshire [Photo credit: JAMES FLINT]

I remember those wheat harvests; they’re one of the major features of the sepia summers of my childhood. When I worked for Granville’s Dad, John Sr, back then, his farm was one of the largest in the Midlands. He was working with a wealthy investor who’d made a lot of money in mail-order kitchens, and together they expanded the farm from the homely 500 acres of mixed land use that was (and still is) the family patch to several thousand acres of corn, barley, oats and rape, much of which was very high-quality grain that itself was sold onto other farms as seed.

Both John Sr and Steve Boler were heavy smokers. Boler preferred cigarettes, mainly Senior Service. John Sr often lit his first cigar of the day, generally a stubby Henry Winterman’s half corona, right after breakfast, and could be tracked by his trail of pungent smoke until late into the night. Bothe men died — John Sr of oesophageal cancer and Boler of a heart attack — within a few years of one another in the 1990s, which is when John Granville took stewardship of the place.

My father was the Stevens’ solicitor, meaning our two families had a professional connection that went beyond normal neighbourliness (and which was partly how my summer job came about), and he helped with the paperwork and negotiations as the lands acquired by Steve were sold off to the publisher Felix Dennis when Boler’s son Nick (who’d inherited the land, and who smoked Marlboro) also passed away.

Dennis wasn’t interested in farming; he was interested in conservation. He didn’t want Granville to farm wheat and barley for him; he wanted to plant trees instead, which is what he did. What he planted before he too died of smoking-related oesophageal cancer (are you staring to see a pattern here?) is now known as the Heart of England forest. Twenty years from its inception it is starting to change the landscape where I grew up and return it to something that soon will, in parts, be more like the landscape that Shakespeare knew than the one that I grew up with. It still has a media connection, too: Channel 4’s Jon Snow is Chairman of its Board of Trustees).

But that’s another story — one that I fictionalised in my novel, Midland, in case you’re interested. Back in the real world of Upper Spernall Farm, Granville had to work out to make his newly old-style family farm generate sufficient income to support a wife and growing family.

The first thing he did, in a move that will be familiar to farmers right across the country, was diversify. Sensibly combining his love of a good pint with a need to obtain a regular income he leased some of his barns to a couple of brewers who wanted to try their hand at making a quality craft beer. Their experiment proved a success and Purity ales are now sold in bars and supermarkets across the country and no doubt abroad as well. If you haven’t tried them, you should — they’re very good.

Spernall Park, Upper Spernall Farm, Warwickshire. It took farmer Granville Stevens seven years to grass this field like this, after decades of monoculture crop rotation had destroyed the soil. [Photo credit: JAMES FLINT]

He also started to landscape some of the land adjacent the farm into a something of a park, a setting for marquees that could cater for weddings and other events, another handy little earner. His wife Nell, a keen rider, stabled horses and gave lessons. And together they re-introduced some livestock — badger-faced sheep and long horn cattle — with an eye on selling some quality pasture-fed meat.

But the mainstay was still cereals, if rather less of them than before. And one thing that Granville noticed, as he tried to continue the farming practices of his father, was that he was having to use four times the chemicals to get the same yields from the crops that they’d got back in the 70s and 80s. It was the same when trying to grass the sweeping field that would become his park. It had been a classically farmed wheat field for as long as he could remember, but grass just wouldn’t grow on it — it took about seven years of trying before he could get the seed to take.

“My father’s generation mined the soil,” Granville tells me, bluntly. He couldn’t grow things like his dad had done because decades of growing a small number of crops on a schedule that included ploughing (aka tilling) the land once the harvest was done, leaving the ground naked for a season, and then spraying it with herbicides to remove weeds before planting the next year’s crop, had killed the soil.

And “killed” is a very literal term here. It turns out that soil isn’t dirt. A healthy soil contains about 45% minerals (sand, silt and clay, in descending order of particle size), 25% water, 25% air (the air and water existing in the pore spaces), and somewhere between 1 and 8% “soil organic matter”, which is a living ecosystem containing billions of tiny organisms from protozoa and fungi to worms and beetles and a veritable jungle of species in between.

These creatures feed on carbon. They source this decaying vegetal and animal matter (including each other) and from the carbohydrates — i.e. sugars — that are made by plants from the carbon they suck in from the air and which they then exude from their roots. Some of the carbon they ingest gets buried because they trap it in the structure of their own bodies or excrete it, a process of mineralisation that also heavily involves the huge mycorrhizal networks of fungi that lace the earth and which makes the crucial elements nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus available, in the end, back to the plants. At the same time, like us, they respire, inhaling oxygen and breathing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, some of which is also immediately recaptured by the leaves of the plants above. And they go about this business of feeding, fighting and f***ing, the members of this microscopic ecosystem create particles or “aggregates” that form the spaces in the soil in which air and water will get trapped.

I’m not going to write a primer on this process here. If you’re interested there’s a great Wikipedia page on the subject, a page which also includes the key point you need to take away from this for the purposes of reading this piece. And that is this: “Soil has a crucial function in the global carbon cycle, with the global soil carbon pool estimated to be 2,500 gigatons. This is 3.3 times the amount of the atmospheric pool at 750 gigatons and 4.5 times the biotic pool at 560 gigatons. The pool of organic carbon, which occurs primarily in the form of soil organic matter (SOM), accounts for approximately 1,550 gigatons of the total global carbon pool, with soil inorganic carbon (SIC) accounting for the remainder. The pool of organic carbon exists in dynamic equilibrium between gains and losses; soil may therefore serve as either a sink or source of carbon, through sequestration or greenhouse gas emissions, respectively, depending on exogenous factors.”

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Healthy soil, then, which is a living ecosystem as complex as a coral reef, cycles and stores a whole heap of carbon, and plants are the channels by which it’s piped down from the sky into the earth. Properly aggregated soil can also absorb a tremendous amount of water, soaking it up and holding it like a giant sponge. Heavy rainfall is absorbed by soils in winter and gets held inside the land, percolating only slowly through it to rivers and other watercourses by which time it is, or should be, thoroughly filtered and running clear. All those pore spaces in the aggregates that are now well suffused with water come in very handy in the summer, when the temperatures go up and droughts replace the rains. Now they’re ready for plants to send down roots to find them, roots that exude more carbohydrates for the ecosystem and ingest those handy minerals on their way to having a drink.

When the land is ploughed the aggregates that hold the water are minced up and compacted, along with all the organisms that live inside them. Initially this actually increases activity in the soil organic matter, as the ploughing churns vegetal matter into the soil and makes more carbon food available. But without plants above to absorb it the carbon respired as a result of the feeding frenzy escapes straight into the atmosphere. And while plants find nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus quickly for the first few years of heavy tillage, the fungal networks that help produce these minerals have been sliced up too, so the stocks of them are not replenished. This is what Granville meant when he said that ploughing was mining the soil. This is literally the case. The plough allows plants to pull out the minerals, while destroying the ecosystem that puts those minerals back.

In addition, now that the aggregates have been compacted, rainfall can no longer penetrate so it sits on the surface of the land instead of slowly percolating through it. This means it runs quickly into rivers carrying whatever it picks up along the way. The rivers, inundated with run-off from all the ploughed fields along their banks, begin to overflow, as not only is there more water flowing into them, but that water is full of eroded soil — all that sand, silt and clay — which appropriately enough silts up the channels and reduces the amount the watercourses are able to carry.

The result, which anyone who has briefly looked at British television news over the last few winters will know, is flooding, not just of the countryside but of our towns and cities. Not to mention the build-up of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilisers carried in the run-off, which feed algal blooms that in turn starve the water of oxygen which kills the fish and insects which disrupt the ecosystems — birds, otters, us — that depend on them. And so it goes on.

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You could talk to my sister about that side of things. A keen wild water swimmer, she currently lives in Pembrokeshire where she can indulge her love of getting up before dawn to find a freezing cold pond or bay to immerse herself in, which is both entirely mad and -extremely fashionable. But she used to live in Warwickshire, of course, and then moved to the Cotswolds for a while. She eventually packed up and left for Wales, because neither area felt to her any longer like the countryside.

Sixty years of mechanised monocultured had, to her eyes at least, turned one of Britain’s loveliest rural landscapes into a green desert. It still looked like countryside as you barrelled through it from the snug confines of your Range Rover but climb out of the SUV for walk — or swim — and you’d soon discover that the soils were eroded and compacted, that the rivers and streams were choked with slit and algae and sewage (a separate issue), and — crucially — that there were hardly any birds or insects. That’s the giveaway.

When we were kids, you couldn’t drive across the county in the summer without your fender getting peppered with the corpses of unfortunate flies and gnats. Now, on an equivalent trip, you only get one or two. Pesticides and monocultures have drastically lowered the population. Correspondingly, when we were kids, you couldn’t lie in bed much past dawn because of the racket of the birds outside your window. But when I wake up at my mother’s house now, it’s quiet. With no insects and few wild areas or fallow fields, the birds have little to feed on. When my sister wakes up in the morning in Pembrokeshire, it’s like it was when she was a child. That’s presumably why she can get up at 5.30 so easily and head out for a dip, the lunatic.

There’s a flock of birds here now, though, finches, I think, by the way they’re wheeling high above Rockhouse Bank, the steeply sloping field we’re standing in. Granville has just had a three-month bird survey done, a baseline against which he can benchmark the environmental impact of his new planting regime.

“It’s unusual for a flock like this to be here this late in the year,” he says. “It’s because there’s food here for them now.” He bends to point out the seeds on the cover crops he’s growing in this field: a carbon rich mix of buckwheat, forage wheat, mustard and sunflowers. It’s important to get the mix right. When it’s time to plant his cereal crop, he’ll spray the cover crop once with glyphosate to kill it off, then instead of then ploughing the field will leaves the dying plants to lie. The digestion of the bacteria that break them down works on a ratio of six parts carbon to one part nitrogen, and it’s important to get the crop mix right. If it has too much carbon in it the bacteria will draw nitrogen from the soil to help them digest the rotting stalks and leaves, nitrogen that then will need to be replaced artificially. Which means another chemical, more diesel to power the machines to spread it, and of course unnecessary extra expense.

As the cover crop lies dying, feeding the bacteria, the winter wheat can be planted — “drilled” — right into it. This then grows up through the detritus from the cover crop which is still lying there to protect or “armour” the land. Protect it from what? From rain. It turns out that rain is very damaging to soil if it falls on it directly. The impact of the drops compacts those delicate aggregates we talked about above, compressing them and reducing the soil’s resilience and its ability to hold water. The leaves of plants — dead or alive — prevent this by absorbing the impact of the rain. It’s another reason that you don’t want to leave your field ploughed and unprotected for months between plantings.

Next year’s seedlings growing through a sprayed-off cover crop, Rockhouse Bank field, Upper Spernall Farm, Warwickshire. [Photo credit: JAMES FLINT]

You’ll have noticed that Granville still uses glyphosate, a herbicide whose name tends to sound an alarm in the minds of environmentalists (among whose number I count myself). And with good reason: the overuse of glyphosate, which tends to be sprayed on those naked ploughed fields several times to clear out tenacious “weeds” like black grass and wild oats prior to planting a field of wheat or barley, has many deleterious effects on the land.

But glyphosate isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. In fact, it’s one of the few herbicides to break down in the environment readily and quickly, and a single, sparing application once or twice a year to knock down a cover crop on healthy land to avoid the need for ploughing can be an ecologically effective device, especially for farms that are trying to transition from monoculture routines to a no-till rotation. And it’s preferable to moving off the cover crop, too, as this leaves heavy clumps of plant matter that block the drill and prevent the new plants from emerging.

Full “organic” status therefore often eludes farmers who use no-till techniques, even though they may be capturing more carbon and building better soils than certified organic farmers. These latter tend to rely on ploughing and crimper rollers to prep fields in between sowings, an approach which often leaves them at the mercy of the weather — and which also burns an awful lot of diesel.

In the long run, once a proper soil-armouring rotation is established, it’s possible that even that annual spray of glyphosate will become unnecessary, as the cover crops themselves start to suppress particularly pernicious weeds like black grass and wild oats. These kinds of plants tend to get a hold on land that’s been degraded by over-farming, and a “meadow mix” of 10 or 20 species prevents them from dominating as they just become one plant among many and can’t out-compete, rather than being the only plants that can thrive in the harsh environment of a naked ploughed, sprayed field in winter on already degraded land.

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The EU — and, therefore, the pre-Brexit UK — has been relatively proactive on reducing the harmful chemicals used in farming. The chemical that Granville used to use to control blackgrass was banned some years ago, which left farmers relying on several less harmful but also less effective compounds. To get rid of the blackgrass after ploughing, therefore, farmers started combining or “stacking” three or four of these products, on the theory that if one didn’t kill the plant another would.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that these products are deployed as “residual herbicides”, which means they’re sprayed on the soil surface after ploughing, so that any weeds grow up through them and pick up the herbicide as they go. This doesn’t just kill blackgrass; it kills lots of non-problematic plants that might otherwise help increase diversity and improve the soil health.

The second is that stacking itself tends to encourage the blackgrass to evolve metabolic resistance to all the compounds at the same time. Which means that in a few short years nothing works any more, the blackgrass has become resistant to everything, and then, as Granville succinctly puts it, “you’re f***ed.”

The no-till strategy, by contrast, involves actually keeping a small population of herbicide-susceptible blackgrass in your fields, rather than trying to eradicate it entirely. By using rotations of cover crops and livestock you create conditions that are naturally bad for the blackgrass and good for your other crops, which limits the growth of the blackgrass and also saves you money, as now you’re not battling it annually. The cover crop itself and the single spray of glyphosate will get rid of it, and if you have a bad year when, for whatever reason, the blackgrass does get out of control, you can use a stack of the other permitted compounds to get rid of it, in the knowledge that this will work because you haven’t used those chemicals so much that the weed will have built up metabolic resistance to them.

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Another type of chemical that Granville no longer uses ever since it became subject to an EU-wide ban is the neonicotinoid. This is a pesticide that is particularly effective against flea beetles, which attack oil seed rape. It sprayed onto the seed itself before it’s even planted (this is called “dressing” the seed); this allows the active ingredient to become systemic within the plant as it grows.

The advantage of this is that the pesticide is incredibly targeted. Because it’s not being sprayed on the soil at all, it doesn’t affect the soil ecosystem, only the flea beetles that eat the actual rape seed head. The disadvantage is that, because it’s in the whole plant it also ends up in low concentration in its pollen, which is much loved by bees. After studies demonstrated that the neonicotinoids were building up to harmful levels in bee populations, the neonicotinoids were removed from sale (though not before a long and bitter controversy had raged across the media and the courts).

Flea beetle is so damaging to rape that without neonicotinoid-dressed seed it’s very hard to farm rape in Europe now. The only alternative insecticides are the synthetic pyrethroids, to which flea beetles are becoming resistant while beneficial insects like ground beetles are not, or neonicotinoid sprays which are effective but can only be used in a single application, meaning they’ll kill one batch of flea beetles but are no use for subsequent waves of the pest, when they inevitably come.

Rape yields are therefore now much lower than they were, which means the price charged per tonne goes up, and that allows farmers in non-EU countries who still do use neonicotinoids to undercut EU farmers who don’t. EU trade barriers offer some protection from this competition, but Brexit will remove this protection for UK farmers and as a result the bright yellow fields of rape flowers that became so common in the 80s and 90s are starting to vanish from our countryside again.

One thing that’s not in doubt, however, is that Granville’s new cover crop rotations help him suppress flea beetles in the absence of the sprays he used to use. In fact, it turns out that these kinds of rotations are the only way to suppress flea beetles and grow rape economically without access to the sprays. But this has a political implication too. Cover crop rotations only work if they’re carried out over many years, allowing carbon to be funnelled into the soil and soil health to rebuild. But a lot of farming in the UK is done on tenancies of five years or less. Rich landowners own the land and lease it to tenants who, given that they’re on a five-year lease and have to show returns within that period, are incentivised to grow crops with guaranteed profit margins in monoculture rotations. Rape can no longer be grown profitably this way, so rape is not grown. And alas, as we’ve seen, other crops grown this way become less and less profitable over time as the soil degrades because of the harsh rotations and more and more chemicals have to be used to keep yields high.

All of which means that for things to really change, and for better soil management to be the first thing that farmers think about instead of the last, the tenancy culture needs to change. Tenancies need to be longer, more like ten years as an average instead of five, and landowners need to start to work more closely with their tenants, with both sides cooperating to focus on improved soil health as a key outcome above and beyond any single year’s harvest. Only in this way can the future profitability of these farms and the viability of the land they’re on be assured.

Farmer Granville Stevens standing in one of his cover crops. [Photo credit: JAMES FLINT]

To educate me further, Granville gives me a book and gets me to watch a video on YouTube. The book, titled “Dirt to Soil”, is by a North Dakotan farmer called Gabe Brown, and is a first-hand account of how he turned the fortunes of his farm around using cover crop rotation techniques that he in turn discovered via the work of farmer and ecologist Allan Savory. The video is of a workshop by another farmer and soil researcher from that region, name of Jay Fuhrer.

Do check these out, especially the video. It’s an hour-long recording of Fuhrer — who is a charismatic speaker — talking to a bunch of burly, cap-wearing dudes from the mid-west, not the kind of crew you’d expect to be lining up to get lectured on carbon capture and biodiversity. But here they are, a roomful of them, lapping it up. Why? Because their soils are eroding, their farms are dying, and Fuhrer, Brown and a growing caucus of people like them appear to have answers that promise to regenerate their soils, protect their way of life — and as a side-effect that no one admits to worrying too much about but which that’s handy to tease liberals with — may well help save the planet.

Fuhrer’s mantra is that we need to stop pulling iron and start pushing carbon instead. He starts from premises that farmers know to be true — the environmental factors that help crops grow — and using straightforward and well-supported science builds a pretty unassailable case that the techniques in use for the last few decades have been working against that, not with it. Gabe Brown’s book does much the same job.

What’s so compelling about both of these guys, and the reason they have so many of their peers thumbing their pages or booking seats at their talks, is that they’re not suggesting that everyone need chuck everything out and start over. Their words resonate with farmers because they are farmers themselves and are extremely careful not to come over as preachy or anti-anything. This is not a hippie mantra they’re peddling. A change in rotation, a removal of one piece of expensive kit from your barn and one quite frankly onerous task — that of ploughing — from your annual roster, a less addictive attitude towards herbicides and pesticides, and the tighter integration of animals into the crop management cycle, and better soils, higher yield, lower erosion, healthier rivers, higher profit margins and lower levels of atmospheric carbon are all yours for the taking.

The last bit, that bit about including animals in the rotation, is crucial. Firstly, it helps a lot with the evangelism. No one is asking anyone to go vegan or even fully organic over this. It’s a key part of the Brown/Fuhrer package that animals, correctly grazed on the cover crops, actually accelerate carbon capture and soil regeneration. How so? Because stressing plants through animal grazing makes them grow faster and more virulently and pull more carbon from the atmosphere and push into the ground (where it gets transformed into carbohydrates that feed the fungi and bacteria that in turn build the soil aggregates), and of course the droppings from the animals also provide nitrogen and help feed the beetles, flies and worms nearer the surface that also help to build soils.

It’s good for the livestock, too. Animals grazed on the rich dietary mix that a cover crop provides are far healthier than those fed on hay, grain or soy; they’re also happier and less stressed. As a result, they produce much less methane and have fair less need for antibiotics and other medicines. In other words, by farming this way you get both better crop yields and better meat yields. It’s a bit like rewilding, but only for part of the year.

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The funny thing is that the more I learn about all of this, the more familiar it seems to me. When I was in primary school, like most English school children in the 1970s I was taught about life in medieval times. In between the basket weaving and lute playing there was always lots of stuff about the great innovation that was the medieval crop rotation, which allowed small mixed farms to produce enough food to support large families with lots of hungry mouths. Back in those days, geese were often used for grazing, left to maraud around the after-harvest fields where they lived large on beetles, worms and the seed heads from wild plants like chicory and groundsel until the winter frosts killed them off.

At that point the geese went in the pot for Christmas and once the snow and ice retreated the land was ready once again for the planting of barley, oats or wheat. Every three or four years every field would be left for clover and wild grasses which would fix nitrogen and replenish the soil with the help of a flock of grazing goats, cows or sheep. And so the cycle went, for a millennium or more, actively creating rather than destroying soils, until widespread mechanisation and chemicals arrived in the wake of WWII and the strip-mining of the land began.

We need to get back to some of this, and with the insights of modern science at our disposal our farmers and our landowners have it in their power to do just that, without the suffering the backbreaking labour and other vicissitudes that were the lot of the medieval peasant, and without needing to get anyone to really make any kind of radical upheaval or huge change to their way of life. Nothing like the radical upheavals and changes that are going to be forced on us all if we don’t do it, that’s for sure.

Granville is already changing, and his changes are already having an effect. After we’ve been tramping round the fields for an hour or two, he asks me to look down at my boots. I spent an awful lot of my childhood in these fields, helping with the harvest, hunting rabbits, generally running riot. In Midland, the novel I mentioned at the start of this piece, I write about the experience of walking through them at this time of year and describe the huge heavy clods of clay-laden earth that would clump up around your Wellingtons and make them difficult to lift. But today there’s hardly any dirt on my boots at all, just a thin sheen of watery mud that will dry off and fall away after a short stroll down the road.

That’s because the dirt in the fields has gone. In just a couple of years of experimenting with a cover crop rotation, Granville has already turned it back to soil.