Dare to dream

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Modern technologies seem to be enabling us to do almost anything we want. Our main task now, is to decide what it is we do want to do, and why 

We have reached a point in human evolution where we seem able to achieve almost anything we can imagine. Advances in genetic science enable us to clone animals, revive extinct breeds, cure more and more diseases, grow bits of animals in factories for food, and even, in the fullness of time, to design human offspring. 

Advances in technology mean that we can now farm 10 hectares of mixed farming from a laptop using autonomous machinery, drones, robotic milking parlours, lasers, and indoor cropping facilities that are completely detached from the natural world.

Policing the population is now done with facial recognition cameras, monitoring of communications, and in the US, robotic dogs!!

Elections are won by manipulating the social media feeds of voters and exploiting the echo chambers that exist in this space.

Most of these achievements had already materialised even before we started really to understand and apply Artificial Intelligence. The potential rate of change we are about to experience with AI is frankly terrifying. The phrase “Appropriate Technology” keeps coming to mind.

Organic farming vs Regen Ag 

As an organic farmer I have been through an interesting period of self-reflection over the last 10 years with the rise of the “Regenerative” farming movement, and am often conflicted. In my eyes there is “Good” regenerative farming and “Bad” regenerative farming.

On the plus side, the present obsession with soil health shared by a majority of farmers is a wonderful thing and of course is the core concern both of Regen Ag and Organic Farming – but although the two approaches have many similarities there are also some differences. We both respect and nurture the life of the soil, and we both believe in the importance of cover crops and their crucial role in maintaining soil health. But it is the way we incorporate these cover crops and release their nutrients for the following food crop that often accentuates the difference between Organic and Regenerative. As an Organic farmer I still often rely on shallow ploughing, especially in wet years, to incorporate my cover crops. In contrast, most regenerative farmers still rely on using chemical weedkillers to kill cover crops, deeming undisturbed soil to be the most important focus. 

This has been a fierce battleground of philosophies for a number of years. Although the producers of agrochemicals have formally accepted that some of their products cause cancer in those who apply it, they still deny its catastrophic impact on the ecosystem and on consumers.  Organic farmers don’t buy this. Chemical weedkillers are damaging to all forms of life — including the consumer. The evasive legal manoeuvres of the manufacturers and their intensive lobbying does raise a large degree of suspicion as to what they really know about their own products. 

Regenerative farmers believe that any movement of the soil is sacrilege and impacts soil life profoundly, while releasing large amounts of carbon. As an organic farmer I can’t ignore all this, yet I wrestle still with how to prepare the ground for crops both without chemicals and without cultivation. No-dig methods maybe applicable on a small scale, but are currently not suitable for large areas of food production, which would require insane volumes of compost.

This week, however, I was reading an article about the latest advances in weeding technology and was suddenly struck by a seismic moment when I learned that the latest laser weeding technology would offer a completely chemical free way of destroying cover crops and weeds without disrupting the soil. This on the surface would solve one of my biggest issues with regenerative farming: reliance on chemical weedkiller.

Yet this is only part of the story. Organic farmers and Regenerative farmers also differ in the way they deal with pests and disease. Regenerative farmers still often rely on a suite of chemical solutions or genetic modifications in their crops, to keep the pests away or at best to reduce the need for agrochemicals. However, genetic modification of crops for pest resistance serves only to accelerate the evolution of pests to evolve beyond the modification, so new genetic modifications are needed every few years to jump ahead of the evolved pest. As pests, aphids are incredibly advanced – they give birth to babies that are already pregnant. Do we really want to accelerate their evolution still further?

Organic farmers believe in harnessing the ecosystem and the predators that already live within it to control pests. For example: 

One Blue Tit chick shortly before fledging will eat 100 caterpillars in a day. Often there are 10 chicks in a nest – which between them could consume 1,000 caterpillars in a day. Around a biodiverse field with plenty of hedges and trees it would not be uncommon to have 10 Blue Tit nests, so that would be 10,000 caterpillars being eaten in a day; not an inconsequential amount. Many other species also feed on caterpillars, Truly, nature can control this troublesome pest.

Then again: one in four recognised species in the world is a beetle. There are more than four thousand different species of beetle in the UK alone. Over 450 of them eat slugs and slug eggs. If managed intelligently these natural allies can protect crops very effectively. They certainly prove effective on our farm. To realise the true potential of beetles and other natural controllers of pests one must simply provide appropriate habitats for them and, importantly, encourage them to move amongst your crops, not just round the outside of fields.

On the face of things laser weeders doubtless have their place. But they provide a very specific, high-tech (and therefore expensive) solution to a more general problem: how to keep weeds in check without soil disturbance and without chemical weedkillers. This is the Holy Grail. 

The role of the Economy 

Economic measures come at the problem from a quite different angle. Soil tillage is already being monetised with carbon credits, offsetting and insetting and is the focus of many grants, subsidies and big retail labels. In practice however the singular obsession with carbon has created a financial feedback loop between economically hard-pressed farmers and multi-nationals who are willing to pay farmers to help make themselves seem more sustainable. Again, technology is rapidly evolving to try and measure carbon sequestration accurately and match it to farming behaviour to further facilitate this feedback loop. I personally believe the Carbon cycle is a complicated and dynamic thing that is nothing like as simple as we’d like it to be — and importantly it is indeed a cycle. It is not static. 

Without a doubt carbon-intelligent farming is a part of the future of food production, but the obsession leaves many other damaging practices in modern farming unaddressed. So for example the laser weeders may be good for carbon – but they also mean that the damaging approach of growing vast fields of monocrops will continue. The current norm for many farms is to exclude every living plant and animal from the field except for the intended cash crop. Agriculture for the last sixty years has adopted a reductionist approach to production forever driven by efficiency and increased yields. 

Since the ironically named “Green revolution” in agriculture in the 1960s world crop yields have increased by over 45%, and this has been necessary as the world population at the same time has increased from three billion to currently just over 8.2 billion. However, over the same period we have lost 10% of the world’s forests, 60% of the world’s vertebrates and 50% of the world’s invertebrates. Most of these decreases are the result of farming, through habitat loss and pesticide use.

Abbey Home Farm 

The 660 ha mixed farm I work on now stopped using agrochemicals and adopted Organic principles and banned ‘The Hunt’ in 1990. I joined the team just 25 years later – and what I witnessed blew me away. I have lived in the countryside for 45 years and worked in it for 30, in woodland management, hedge laying, and coppicing, as a beef farmer, shepherd, care farmer, pig farmer, veg grower, fruit picker, and worked in an abattoir. Whatever farming may entail,  I’ve done it!!  — both conventional and organic. But I have never before seen so much abundance and diversity of life than I have I seen at this farm. The farm has now experienced 35 years with no agro-chemicals, seeking always to balance food production and bio-diversity – and the effects are profound. I am passionate to share what I have witnessed. 

My gut feelings on this were backed up by a comprehensive entomology study carried out at the farm last year. This is a quote from the entomologist:  

“Thanks again for the opportunity to survey the farm, which I was very impressed with – you’ll be pleased to hear that I recorded more species at Abbey Home Farm than I have recorded anywhere else that I have surveyed on my own, which is pretty impressive when you consider I’ve been working across large parts of southern England and Wales for 10 years now. So keep up the great work!”

Every year on the farm, there is a seasonal nature event that lasts a few days or weeks depending on the season. On the first few genuinely warm sunny spring days, a temporary wetland in a wood becomes the stage for all levels of the food web. It starts with unbelievable numbers of toads and frogs coming out of everywhere and engaging in frankly what can only be described as a joyous orgy. Barely before this gets going, the predators turn up. This year alone peregrine falcons, red kites, buzzards and ravens were all photographed making use of the valuable early Spring source of protein supplied by the spawn and adults that this brief but vital singular moment provides to the inhabitants of the local area and beyond. We have no peregrine habitat on the farm, but we are obviously on their radar at this time of year. As we move into late spring this same young woodland explodes into wild strawberries and orchids of many different kinds. It’s amazing how quickly nature recovers if we just step away.

We have hedgehogs, polecats, stoats, and weasels a-plenty. Foxes are bold and are often seen on this farm. Admittedly, John the wise farm manager and I have a different relationship with foxes. For  me, focused on fruits and vegetables, they are allies to control the rabbits and pounce on unsuspecting pigeons. For John they are an ever present threat to his free-range poultry and lambs. All his production systems are planned with foxes in mind.

Although hopefully banished to history now, “The Hunt” has often been touted as a solution to the problem of foxes in livestock — but in my experience as a shepherd, the local fox is a respected adversary with whom you play a slow game of chess. When the hunt comes through the area all the foxes get displaced. They become detached from their usual easy food sources and take bigger risks to feed themselves. Ironically, the end of the fox hunting season coincides with lambing season – so just as you let your young and vulnerable lambs out into the field, they are surrounded by displaced hungry desperate foxes.  Various old sayings come to mind: 

“Better the devil you know” …. 

“Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people”

And 

“Make your own decisions on your own reality and knowledge”

Needless to say biodiversity is something we need to work with — not eliminate! Humanity has been trying  eliminate our fellow creatures for many a year and it hasn’t worked. Let’s try symbiosis!

The present, single-minded obsession with carbon will not stop or reverse the decline in biodiversity. We must learn to welcome biodiversity back into our crops and realise the potent role it can play in helping us produce these crops. Re-wilding has its place and can create rich areas of biodiversity. Every farm should seriously consider where it can establish a large area of undisturbed habitat, but if we can persuade all farmers to share their fields with a wide diversity of life this will be truly transformative.

This brings me back to the beginning of the article. We now seem to be acquiring the knowledge and the tools to achieve almost anything we can imagine. So – 

What technologies do we really need – and why? 

The problem as I see it is that word “imagine”. Often with technology this imaginative process is applied to singular challenges that need solving – and this is what leads to a reductionist agriculture.

I suggest we need a different approach. The starting point should be to ask “What kind of world and society do we want to live in?” Having pictured that we should then apply and develop technology to achieve that goal.

Genetic advances may one day enable everyone to live forever – but is this what we really want? And why not stop making animals extinct before we try and resurrect them? Shouldn’t we try to celebrate the inherent genetic diversity of life rather than tailor it to our needs and wants?

With modern automated farming models, what the scientists don’t seem to realise is that to spend your day working amongst nature producing food for society and your family is a wonderfully rewarding and enjoyable way to spend one’s life — as demonstrated by the number of people who spend their weekends and spare time on their allotments and volunteering on farms. I count myself incredibly privileged to be a farmer and have no desire to be replaced by a robot.

As for policing: Isn’t the society we would all like to see based around well-educated populations that instigate solidarity and respect within communities?  Eradication of poverty and a focus on education would solve many more crimes than any facial recognition camera or robot dog will ever be capable of achieving. The phrases “Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself” and “If it harms none do you as you will”. Both are effective tools against crime if embedded at a young age.

In terms of politics, it would just be nice if we could see some coherent goal to aim for, rather than the constant short-term drive to win the next election.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we should be asking what we want it to do for us, not just what can it do and how can it make a minority of people unimaginably rich. Surely, we want it to help end poverty — not to make it worse.

With farming, we need to imagine the landscape we want and the food we want to harvest from it and then use technology to achieve this. I personally imagine a landscape rich in biodiversity everywhere on and off farms, not just round the edges of fields but right in the middle of them. Food that is rich in nutrients, produced by farmers who are rewarded appropriately for their efforts, and eaten by a population with equal access to healthy food in healthy amounts no matter where they live.

I could easily be called a dreamer — and rightly so. But many powerful things have resulted from dreams. One has only to consider a certain speech by Martin Luther-King to appreciate the power of dreaming and of daring to imagine. 

Now that we seem to be acquiring the ability to achieve almost anything, we must take control of the narrative and take the world in a direction the majority want it to go. Absolutely not should we continue down a route defined by a grotesquely rich minority.

Andy Dibben is Head Grower at Abbey Home Farm, Cirencester: a mixed farm of 650 hectares that has been free of agrochemical for the past 35 years. He says:  

“We pride ourselves on sharing our space, and what we have learnt. The farm incorporates a pre-school nursery; hosts residential visits from inner city children; engages with kids who have been rejected by mainstream education; trains horticultural apprentices; provides peace and quiet to traumatised people to reflect and move on; interacts with other professionals in the food industry and consumers; and seeks to re-engage the population with nature.

Farms are the perfect venues to deliver all these social benefits. Support us; seek out your local sustainable producer and buy their produce. You won’t regret it. The future is ours for the taking.”

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