The subtitle of this recent book by Guardian columnist on the environment, George Monbiot, is subtitled “Feeding the world without devouring the planet”. It is about how we need to phase out farm food and alter the farming that supplies it, so as not to continue to destroy Planet Earth. His arguments are complex, detailed, and backed by numbers: it takes a while to realise that his basic argument is to reject farming as we know it.
The world beneath our feet
It starts with a spadeful of earth from some Oxford allotments. He examines its particles under a microscope and concludes that it contains more life forms than the Serengeti. Soil is composed of structures within structures, all self-organising to maximise their species and habitat: earthworms, roots, fungi, glued together with fibres and aggregates which contain yet more: mites, bacteria, ciliates, amoebae. Through the pores, water, nutrients and oxygen pass. Soil does not exist for our benefit. Its structure is made of self-organising systems, each creating its own equilibrium within the soil environment. He is against breaking the ground because it destroys this soil structure. In other words, he favours no-dig cultivation.
At this point I almost tossed the book aside. On my Kent allotment, no-dig just favours the prolific outgrowth of bindweed that sends its evil white roots through the clay soil, and then twines around my beans or currant bushes, suffocating them.
Soil erosion
But I read on, intrigued with how he applies soil research to farming. I am familiar with the effects of soil erosion as I have seen it in gaping gashes through damaged land in South Africa. Regulation in the EU and in the UK should prevent the worst effects, but some farmers are scornful of form-filling compliance that delivers them subsidies. In fact, UK farming is full of abuses: intensive poultry farming that pollutes the Wye, sheep farming that has stripped out the temperate forest in the West, indoor dairy herds fed with imported maize so intensively cultivated that it destroys the soil. When soil collapses, the terrain turns into a dustbowl.
Sustainable farming
From Chapter 4, Monbiot embarks on detailed accounts of three radical farmers who are all trying to be exemplars of how to farm sustainably. The first, Tolly, farms in the Chilterns, mostly strawberries and vegetables without pesticides. Instead, he relies on strips of native wild flowers which host the predators that devour the pests. He also adds woodchip, and grows green manure (clover or trefoil) in complex seven-year rotation patterns. Across the whole rotation there are only a few days when the soil is bare. But no animal manure is used which causes “soil obesity” and often excess runs off to pollute rivers. Also imported animal manure depends on “ghost acres” overseas which farm the animals to produce the manure. Organic farming dependent on it needs two to three ghost acres for every productive acre, so not viable on a global scale.
The next farmer, Tim, is in Shropshire, farming arable crops by no-till. Since he stopped ploughing, the worms in the soil have increased six-fold. He has also saved on fuel and tractor work. However he does have to dose the land with glyphosate to kill the pests.
The next farmer, Ian, made his money selling seeds and then bought the farm to use for experiment. The land used to be under a mono-crop of barley to sell to Heineken brewery. He keeps a small area like this as a control crop, while he experiments with heritage seeds in the rest, in complex rotation which includes a fallow year of “herbal ley” (mixed wildflowers). His new system is more profitable than the one it replaces. Heritage wheat is much more profitable than conventional. The trouble is that this would not work upscaled because, for five years out of every eight, no food crop is grown.
There is one ray of optimism with regard to no-till arable farming: the use of perennial grain plants which are being bred and tested for no-till cultivation. But the pest cycles are as yet under-researched, so by no means ready to upscale.
Baking British bread
In discussing wheat sales, the bad story of British bread manufacture is told. Sometime in the 1890s (just before Mrs Beeton wrote about it) machinery was devised and a new process to make bread much more quickly in factories. But this process actually strips out the structure and vitamins from the wheat grains in the milling, and shortens the yeasty leavening by using chemical additives. The “nothing better since sliced bread” is a marketing lie that has foisted an unnutritious product on the British public for over a century and caused the closure of the small local bakeries. Just taste the loaves in a Brussels bread shop with a bakery at the back, and this is obviously a more nutritious and tastier product. To get more nutritious bread in the UK, you have to buy a bread machine, and seek out the expensive heritage flour.
Conglomerate monoculture
The dominance of big business in both food and farming is another story that emerges in Monbiot’s arguments. He is against the Global Standard Diet, which forces us to depend on fewer and fewer cultivars and species. I was horrified when I discovered, in trying to buy broiler chicks for a poultry project in South Africa, that there is now only one hybrid dominating world sales, just as the Cavendish banana dominates in plantations. The food trade, now organised by a few huge conglomerates, dominates both the buying and the supplies. Thus farmers have to supply what they contract for, which results in the Global Standard Farm, destroying the soil, the forests and the climate with mono-crops depending on pesticides and chemical inputs.
What is the alternative? Monbiot cruelly demolishes most of the assumptions of those who are trying to eat and buy in ways that lessen planet-harming farming. Buying local helps, but it just cannot be scaled up. Farming in more sustainable ways, as in the three examples described, saves the soil, but it would not provide enough food for our burgeoning population.
What is needed is to change our diets. If more people turned vegan this certainly would enable more of the land to recover. Getting your protein from beef releases 113 times more carbon than pea protein. It is not only the carbon emitted, but also the lost opportunity to rewild the land with forests that suck the carbon from the atmosphere.The average carbon opportunity cost of a kilo of beef protein is 1,259 kilo compared to 17 kilo for soy, according to a 2018 study by Timothy D. Searchinger in “Nature”. So 4 kg of beef is emitting carbon equivalent to a return flight London–New York. But there are various worrying arguments against a purely vegan diet.
The solution that Monbiot heralds is to switch to a diet based on fermented products now being developed in laboratories. These are not the lab-grown burgers now being marketed as a meat-free alternative. Monbiot thinks this will fizzle out as it is incredibly resource-intense to grow these mimic meat-cell structures. He then describes a fermentation process being developed in a Finnish laboratory, using hydrogen-oxygenating bacteria. He cooks a pancake from this product and reports it is delicious. The laboratory is resource-intensive in use of energy and in the metallic machinery, but this would become cheaper with scale. The winning argument is that it uses much less land than farming: 1,700 less land farming bacteria than farming soy.
The lessons of this book, summed up on p229, with regard to farming are clear: stop farming animals, use less land, water and chemicals on farms, rewild land released from farming, use Earth Rover to map the world’s soils, enhance soil fertility with the smallest possible intervention. With regard to food, diversify the system, break the global corporations grip on the trade, replace protein and fat from animals with precision fermentation.
Bucolic myths and living systems
There are two sub-themes he returns to in the finale. The first is about the myths that shape our lives. The pastoral idyll has thrived for many centuries, and is still displayed on the many TV programmes about vets and shepherds that attract the innocent British public, unwilling to consider the bloody violence and planetary harm caused by our current food systems.
The second is about complex self-organising systems. He points out that both the living systems within soil, and the global food trade, are both examples of this. When a complex system reaches tipping point, it collapses suddenly, like the soil into a gully on eroded land.
Our food system is dangerously dependent on the standard crops and the few firms. A small change could tip it. He thinks that will come soon. We had better be ready in our kitchens to make those pancakes from fermented flour.
