A once conventional farmer’s view on sustainable futures by Abby Rose
Farmers are the caretakers of the earth on many populated parts of the planet. It’s little understood that the choices farmers make affect us all profoundly. The plant varieties a farmer choses affects biodiversity of insects, wildlife, weeds; grazing animals differently can significantly increase the carbon stored in the soils and reduce carbon in the air; planting cover crops and trees can prevent flood damage in nearby towns.
Farmers are not just responsible for producing food but they are the caretakers of the land, the environment and their choices affect us more than we imagine.
It’s important to understand farmers perspectives — if we understand why choices are made we can begin to affect the environment at the cause, rather than patching up many of the symptoms.
One farmer who has begun to celebrate his caretaker role is John Cherry from Hertfordshire. Just a few years ago he had yellow, solid soil that demanded heavier and heavier machinery to cultivate. Weeds thrived and everything else fizzled away if they didn’t have extra fertilisers and lots of herbicides to keep them happy.
In the last 5 years John has gradually moved away from conventional high input (lots of chemical fertilisers etc) farming practises by using a combo of no-till (never ploughing the soil), mob-grazing (savannah-style grazing patterns) and herbal leys (mixed cover crops).
The reality is that 95% of farmers in the UK are conventional farmers, so it’s inspiring to see examples of conventional farmers using more sustainable approaches to farming and caring for the land — changes are made gradually and John is a great example of a farmer making these changes. John’s farm is not organic and he still uses general weedkiller to clear any cover crops before planting the desired crop but he is working with the land to replenish the earth.
Here he shares with us what it takes to be a proud caretaker of the land and regenerate soils after many years of conventional farming.
Why did you begin to look for alternative farming methods? What/who inspired you along the way?
John: I think most people keep an eye out for things that improve what they are doing, but having read Albert Howard’s Agricultural Testament and Eve Balfour’s Living Soil when I was studying 30+ years ago, I’ve always had a feeling that mainstream agriculture has taken a wrong path, but also there was something a bit mimsy about the current organic movement which didn’t really appeal.
We probably spent 25 years just learning how to farm, there’s always some new challenge to keep you busy and stop you doing anything radical, but it was a visit to Tony Reynolds’s farm in Lincolnshire that really opened my eyes to what is possible: he’d sold all his cultivation tackle some years previously and was growing excellent crops without moving the soil at all, and it wasn’t ‘easy’ soil to farm either. We then visited several other farmers who were experimenting in equally interesting ways with exciting results, like Simon Cowell in Essex and Simon Chiles in Sussex; all these people are true farming heroes.
As a backup to this, there is The Farming Forum (TFF) on the web, which is an invaluable resource to anyone looking to change any part of their farming system, as there are increasing numbers of farmers posting about their experiences and experiments with new ideas and ways of doing things. From here I learned about characters like Gabe Brown and Joel Salatin in the USA or Colin Seiss in Australia who have successfully completely reinvented ways of farming in their particular environment. Allan Savory’s insights into the impact of grazing animals was another lightbulb moment, although he had his vision on the savannah in Africa, and the others in the USA or Australia or wherever, the principles remain good. The clever bit is to apply the principles to your own conditions. For instance, Colin Seiss realised he could grow a cool season (C3) cereal like oats direct drilled into his warm season (C4) native grass pasture and he would get a crop while the pasture was dormant. Joel Salatin looked at that and turned it round so he now cuts a warm season forage mix into his cool season pastures and gets a fantastic forage boost at a time of year when his pastures would be relatively dormant (late summer).
Are there times when you were worried or daunted by the change? or maybe didn’t believe it would work?
John: I suppose I’ve become a bit evangelical about this, so I don’t have doubts that it can work…you only have to look at the abundance that grows where man doesn’t interfere to realise that nature makes a good fist of producing biomass from the basic ingredients of soil, seed, rain and sunlight. No ploughs or power-harrows are needed to grow a forest. We have made plenty of mistakes, but we are spending so much less money on establishing crops, the odd failure doesn’t hurt and we learn by these mistakes.
What do you think is needed to convince more conventional farmers to move away from high-input farming?
John: I really don’t know what it will take to convince others to join us, there is a lot of interest at the moment because the price of wheat etc is so low and the cost of inputs is so high that farmers are being forced into looking at anything that will save money. Unfortunately, just trying to shave a few quid off the cost of establishing crops is not the best way of growing high quality food, but it can open your eyes to new ways of farming.
For a lot of people the use of glyphosate to kill off crops is extremely problematic. Do you ever see the possibility of alternatives?
John: Glyphosate does wind people up, it is a weedkiller and so has a certain toxicity, but for some reason has been demonised by green lobbies. I would love to find a way of burning down weeds before our crops emerge that didn’t involve roundup, but at the moment there is no realistic alternative. If glyphosate is banned we will probably have to go back to cultivating the soil again, which will set the whole agricultural renaissance back several years. I’m sure there’s a way round this, we just need a little time. Hold the glyphosate attack dogs! A lot of the problems people perceive with glyphosate is its use with glyphosate-resistant GM crops in N and S America, where it is sprayed multiple times a year, to completely sterilise the soil. There’s a whole school of no-till farming over there based around this idea, which to my mind is wrong-headed and will soon break down as nature works out a way of defeating it (which is already happening with glyphosate resistant weeds making an appearance).
Why have you chosen to not be organic?
John: As I said before, I was much influenced by the ideas of the organic pioneers Howard and Balfour, but I feel that the current organic movement is too proscribed by bizarre rules: thou shalt not spray this, thou shalt not spread that but thou can use copper sulphate etc. As a result most broad-acre organic operations are based around the plough, which to my mind is an instrument of the devil. Well, maybe that’s a bit strong, but I think it’s much better for my soil to spray once with Roundup than to cultivate multiple times to get rid of weeds. Better for the planet too, as we use a fraction of the amount of diesel that a cultivating farm does and we’re not oxidising our humus and releasing it’s carbon into the atmosphere (as CO2), instead we’re sequestering CO2 from the air and locking it up in the soil as humus, improving the fertility of our soil at the same time.
The exciting thing is though, that we are in a very dynamic time for farming, there are new ideas appearing all the time and as we play about with cover crops we’re refining their usefulness to suppress weeds and add fertility and gaining more understanding of soil biology and how to encourage mycorrhizal fungi, rhizobia etc — sharing this information peer to peer via the internet.
“Farmers are taking the lead again in spearheading an agricultural revolution, rather than cravenly following recipes handed down from chemists on high!”
How do you feel now you have taken on these new farming methods?
John: This whole adventure has given us a massive energy boost as we have substituted physical labour for intellectual enquiry, we are doing far less ‘tractor work’ and much more leaning on gates watching what nature does and working out how we can mimic it, rather than trying to fight it. One of the happy results is that we now have much more biodiversity, in the form of insects and birds, to look at too.
John is also committed to sharing his learnings with others and organised their first Groundswell Ag — No-Till demo day earlier this month. With over 500 farmers in attendance and a line up of awesome speakers, including two super inspiring females Jill Clapperton and Farmer Sarah Singla — farmers have been calling it the Glastonbury of farming.
You can hear more from John on our podcast Farmerama. Each month we share stories of experimentation — growers, farmers and food-makers doing things a little bit differently — all nicely woven together with music, poetry and songs to make for a fun journey into the roots of our existence.
You can listen to the latest episode online here or subscribe on tuneIn or iTunes here.
Please have a listen and if you like it, share Farmerama with anyone you think would enjoy it! We want to knit an ever wider web of people who understand the importance and resilience of smaller-scale farming. Plus we are always looking for more contributors, ideas, anecdotes or stories from farmers and their friends all over — so please do get in touch if you have something you want to share!
Further Comment: We definitely do not advocate for the use of glyphosate and want to highlight the World Health Organisation recently deemed this chemical a ‘probable carcinogen’ — however we do think it’s important to share real stories from real farmers who are taking active steps to farm more agro-ecologically and in this case John still has glyphosate as part of his practice. This points to one thing — innovators out there, this is a problem that we need to solve. How can we deal with cover crops without ploughing the soil at any time of the year and in different climates? Any suggestions we would love to hear more!
Thanks to Joana Casaca Lemos.
