Article by Patrick Holden, Chief Executive of Sustainable Food Trust. Reproduced from LinkedIn with kind permission.
The government’s Land Use Strategy consultation document has received glowing endorsements from most of the leading conservation organisations who all seem to think that this is a really good step in the right direction.
And so it is, in the sense that at least the government are consulting on the best way to use our precious land, given the inevitable conflicting needs of recreation, reforestation, nature restoration, renewable energy generation and sustainable food production. The fact that they recognise these tensions is good, as is the opportunity to feed back on their proposals.
However, this issue of the apparent alignment of the government and most of the conservation organisations on future land use is a huge concern of mine, because I would say that their collective strategic conclusions comprise what amounts to a land sparing rather than land sharing approach, in terms of the way in which our future farming and food systems will be developed.
Land sparing vs. land sharing
What do I mean by this? It’s complicated, but in essence, the question that confronts us all is: how do we want our future food to be produced, whilst at the same time addressing legitimate concerns about nature depletion, climate change, declining public health and urgent need for more renewable energy?
The so-called land sparers, including, by the look of it, the government, have concluded that the best way to reconcile these tensions is to produce as much food as possible on the best agricultural land, leaving more space for nature, renewable energy generation and recreation. Advocates of this approach argue that the decline in biodiversity is now so serious that we need to spare more land for nature and adopt what they call ‘sustainable intensification’ techniques to produce more food with fewer chemical interventions on the best land. By doing so, it is said that we will still be able to feed ourselves, especially if we change our future diets to a more plant-based version.
It all sounds very compelling, but with a degree of trepidation and some qualifications, I am suggesting that this is a wrong strategy. Instead, I believe we should adopt a land sharing approach, producing food in harmony with nature and keeping as much agricultural land in production as is possible.
The case for land sharing
Why do I believe that this approach is better? Partly because I am old enough to remember that back in the 1950s and 60s, in other words before the widespread adoption of intensive chemical-based farming, we used to produce food in harmony with nature at scale. This was because traditional farming systems allowed the field to be a habitat for the vast range of species which used to coexist in the understory of crops or grasslands, without unduly compromising productivity.
Let me give an example. Last year we produced an acre of carrots for schools in West Wales, using no chemical fertilisers or pesticides. If you are a carrot grower the biggest challenge that needs to be overcome is weed control. So, we metaphorically waged war against the weeds for about eight weeks, using mainly mechanical methods and also some hand weeding, not wanting to eliminate them, but to make sure that the crop predominated.
By early September, although the carrot crop was healthy and predominant, there remained in the understory of the crop, an extraordinary range of weeds, insects, spiders, and other life forms, none of which threatened the yield (around 10 or 11 tonnes harvested per acre) but, as a result, enabled the carrots we harvested to be nature friendly, delicious, nutritious, (we had them analysed) and free of chemical residues. This was how all carrots were produced back in the day, mostly as part of a traditional arable farming rotation.
I’ve been using those principles and practices on our farm in West Wales for more than 50 years and I know from direct experience that this approach could work at scale, producing really good food, even on relatively marginal land like ours, whilst at the same time enabling our fields to be a habitat for a vast range of invertebrates, wild plants and flowers, (otherwise known as weeds), insects, birds and small mammals, many of which have become rare and threatened species, as charted in the conservation organisations’ regular “State of Nature” reports.
Challenges and misconceptions
Critics of this approach will say ‘we could never feed the world’s growing population if we go this way’. Yet the SFT’s ‘Feeding Britain From the Ground Up’ report models the national application of a land sharing approach and concludes that as long as we wasted less food, and ate differently, (no more cheap chicken and pork or products from mega dairy farms, instead plenty of vegetables, heritage grains, and livestock products from mainly grassfed animals) we could maintain our current levels of national self-sufficiency in staple foods.
More than that, by doing so we could sequester much of the carbon that has been lost from our soils in the post-war period and avoid the need for expensive stewardship schemes, which are at best only mitigating the relentless declines in biodiversity that I referred to above.
Why does the government strategy document make this less possible? Because, first of all, it excludes recommendations for so-called grade one and two farmland, presumably based on the assumption it will be business as usual on the best farmland, in other words continuous arable cropping to increase the amount of food from those areas where we have the best soils.
Secondly, and even more importantly it presumes that a significant amount of the so-called poorer agricultural land, which they regard is inherently less productive, will be taken out of farming altogether to be used for reforestation, energy generation, rewilding or turned into recreation areas. I accept that a certain amount of land should come out of production to create space for nature, but that must not at the expense of a land sharing strategy.
On the face of it this approach sounds sensible, but in my opinion, it will neither enable the restoration of all the lost biodiversity that we’ve witnessed in the post-war period, nor produce the healthy vital food needed to reverse declining public health, illuminated by exponential increases of previously uncommon health conditions – from obesity and diabetes to food intolerance and cancers. This is because much of the food that will be produced under this strategy will inevitably be from a chemically based approach, using fertilisers and pesticides, to enable us to maintain national food self-sufficiency in staple products.
Those convinced that a land sparing approach is better will argue that we can minimise the use of agro-chemicals and use gene editing and other emergent technologies, which, together, enable farmers to produce larger quantities of safe food.
Most of the conservation organisations have signed up to this approach, even though their own reports have chronicled the decline of nature. One of those people is Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England. I heard him give a talk at the Oxford Farming Conferences dinner this year and was surprised that he did not seem to acknowledge that a land sharing approach was a better strategy, at least from what he said that night. Another land sparer is my good friend Henry Dimbleby who shares a similar perspective. It’s not that either of them reject mixed farming, but rather that they see it as an add-on as opposed to a central strand of the land use strategy.
Why is it so few conservationists, or even members of the Climate Change Committee recognise the potential of a land sharing approach? Perhaps because they’ve been told for decades by ‘grown-up’ farmers and policymakers that, although well-meaning, advocates of mixed biologically based farming systems, like myself, are romantically clinging to an outmoded assumption that we can produce food in harmony with nature, whereas in the ‘real’ world, chemicals will need to be used to avoid Malthus’s predictions of mass starvation coming to pass.
Integrating time-tested farming practices with innovation
Just to be clear, I’m not against using cutting edge emergent science to assess the impact of different farming systems or to improve the productivity of biologically based farming systems, and definitely don’t want to turn the clock back. I’m looking forward to a world where we can accurately measure and improve the climate, nature and social impacts of truly regenerative farming using the very best and most up-to-date technology.
However, because some of the merits of the farming system I am advocating have yet to be validated using trusted data, you perhaps can’t blame the conservationists for listening to the proponents of sustainable intensification. By contrast, as I have had the privilege of seeing with my own eyes, I know we can produce surprisingly large quantities of food, even on relatively marginal land, in a way that allows nature to coexist in the field, not just around the edges, with nature friendly food production.
Even conventional farmers might be quite pleased at the proposals in the Government’s Land Use strategy, because they will be encouraged to produce more food on less land, which is more or less the mantra that some members of the NFU and others are advocating.
One good example of how a land sharing strategy could be better for climate relates to soil carbon. Ed Miliband is proposing to spend tens of billions on carbon capture and storage, yet a far better approach would be to encourage farmers in arable areas to be paid to adopt mixed farming, rebuilding their soil carbon stocks through the adoption of rotations with a fertility building phase, thereby drawing down significant quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Soil carbon stewardship would be a more tried and tested strategy than the unproven carbon capture and storage approach. This is important, because the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero are big stakeholders in the land use strategy discussion.
That’s not to say I’m against solar PV or wind, quite the reverse. We need both of these, but we should make sure that we minimise the amount of productive agricultural land that is used for the generation of renewable energy.
A call to action
For those reading this piece who share my concerns, I believe there is a need to build a coalition of individuals and organisations who are supportive of the land sharing approach, because otherwise more and more farm land will be taken out of production making it much more difficult for this strategy to be implemented. If you are interested in continuing the conversation, you can get in touch via the Sustainable Food Trust team.