Government in the United Kingdom has a challenge. It needs growth – because that’s what it has promised the electorate, and because growth is the chief way to fuel public services.
But growth requires more ‘Stuff’. This Stuff needs inventing, scaling, marketing and selling – and because we face an immediate and cascading ecological crisis, this growth must be urgently decoupled from fossil fuel production.
The big dream for government is that technology will be the thing that allows the growth in Stuff without carbon.
But – radical though it sounds – it’s possible that more Stuff is not the way to solve an ecological crisis that the production of Stuff created in the first place. I know – dunk me – I’m a witch.
Technology cannot be the tail that wags the dog – it should support growth, rather than becoming an end in itself, or a tool to enable the continuance of failing systems within economic models that have placed so little value on nature.
Regeneration, not technology, should be at the heart of growth – and land-based industries can provide, if not the blueprint, then the inspiration for regenerative economies throughout society.
Emissions reduction
Across the economy, carbon emissions reduction has become the aspiration by which government believes the economy can deliver growth and climate action together.
And because government has very little understanding of land use (and I’m using the word ‘government’ to mean national administrative entity; this isn’t a party-political point) it has assumed that farming is the same as, and should be measured in the same way as, any other industry.
But while arguably in the worlds of energy, transport and even built infrastructure, an emissions mitigation-first approach can deliver radical and necessary transformation – an emissions-first approach on the land is leading to a new chapter in the story of ecological degradation.
An emissions-centric approach has led to the inaccurate assumption that ruminant agriculture is a problem. It’s led to a drive towards fully housed systems that can rear animals quickly to increase feed-conversion ratios. And most calamitous of all, it has supported the disastrous notion of land sparing, where policymakers feel good about forcing farmers off the land so that it can be used for forestry (to boost emissions reduction targets through sequestration) and rewilding, while food production is increasingly consigned to factory processes, either in metal vats or wire cages.
This is a vision of dystopia. Not only because this excessive oversimplification of land-use function is a perversion of nature – which thrives on complexity and which has delivered multiple outcomes together for millennia – but because the distortions created by a carbon-centric lens run the risk of actually increasing overall emissions, failing to deliver adequate carbon drawdown, restricting adaptation to extreme weather, and further degenerating biodiversity.
Of course, we need forests and wild places as well as food, but wherever possible – and I accept that this won’t always be achievable – we must try and integrate these outcomes together.
Multifunctional land-use
Land-use is a multi-function activity whether policymakers and campaigners understand it or not. Mitigation, adaptation and biodiversity are all continually on the balance sheet.
If a farmer produces the same arable crop in the same field with ploughing and petrochemicals year in year out then they will produce low quality food while destroying their soil health and biodiversity, increasing flood risk and diminishing their economic resilience. If they farm it well, in a long rotation integrated with livestock, with perhaps one year of shallow ploughing and almost no petrochemicals they will produce more high-quality food, while boosting their resilience, regenerating soil health and biodiversity and reducing flood risk.
Leadership in the fields
Technology can be used as the enabler of continued ecological abuse, or as the promoter of renewal and ecological restoration.
And while government remains fixated on emissions-reduction, and technology to decarbonise existing processes, it will continue to deliver ecological harm across large swathes of the countryside.
But there are people in rural Britain who are thinking much bigger than the government.
Politicians now need to look away from Whitehall and the city and into Britain’s fields and hedgerows because in the regenerative community I see innovation, intelligence and imagination.
I see land stewards delivering food, fibre, forestry, jobs, economic resilience and ecological renewal – producers who wake up excited and motivated by their profession every day of the week. I see pioneers with businesses that support multiple families in their localities.
I see people who look outwards and care passionately about the world around them.
Technology, supporting regeneration
In the countryside, regenerative land use means better business and ecology – but the transition is centred on people – individuals – farmers and other land stewards – who are prepared to think differently, independently and deeply – who have questioned the assumptions of the status quo and the ubiquitous mainstream advertising messages that fill every farming magazine.
And in this regenerative landscape, technology has played a different role. It doesn’t paper over the cracks of an industrialised food production paradigm that contributes to greater ecological decline and presents a fundamental threat to our species. Instead it supports knowledge exchange and enables shorter supply chains that increase farm profit shares.
Regeneration is the memory of traditional, sustainable and sometimes indigenous knowledge coupled with the steroids of modern real-time data and global information sharing.
Technology has enabled a scale of understanding that past generations of farmers could only dream of – granular levels of soil data, satellite carbon, water and heat imaging, remote biodiversity modelling, bird counting, and insect monitoring. It’s enabled knowledge sharing across social media platforms, from chat groups to podcasts.
These technologies have supported land regeneration by making it easier for farmers to market directly to the public, to collaborate across landscapes and regions, and to manage livestock in free ranging systems.
Technology has enabled the baselining and data capture that’s a pre-requisite for functioning natural capital markets.
Here, technology is welcome, because it is supporting people – farmers – to achieve ecological transformation. To not only reduce emissions, but to deliver full carbon cycling – to ensure healthy soil that supports production systems, while holding high volumes of water and preventing flooding – to restore biodiversity from the soil upwards and outwards, in the knowledge that the fate of the lapwing, the stoat and the human are all dependent on the success of the soil microbe, the bacteria and the mycorrhiza that provide the very building blocks of food webs across the planet.
Yes, there is a need to support farm systems that have rapidly intensified (to meet society’s low-price demands) – to help them through their transition to environmental and economic resilience – and yes, that will require some technologies to mitigate their ongoing ecological intensity through that transition pathway.
But the real opportunity is to grow food without fossil-fuel reliance. To reintegrate food and fibre production with natural systems. To manage the full carbon cycle, to reduce emissions, to adapt land so that society can face the future, and to restore biodiversity so that farming can thrive without chemicals.
Instead of putting its faith in technology to provide growth and emissions-reduction – government should now begin believing and investing in people – in regenerative land-use that delivers food and fibre in harmony with nature – in technology that supports in-field and supply chain innovation – and which, ultimately, achieves ecological security for human beings in this increasingly chaotic world.
ffinlo Costain is the Editor-in-Chief of 8point9.