A graze success

More and more British farmers are switching to sustainable practices. Jason Goodwin looks at the benefits of these measures and meets six farmers helping in the fight for our planet’s health

- Jason Goodwin

BRITISH farmers are involved in an agricultural revolution. For 70 years, we went to war with Nature to feed the nation. Spending money on a cocktail of chemicals and carbon brought bigger yields, but most of the extra profit left the farm. The suppliers of seed, pesticides, fertilisers, genetics and machinery mopped up the subsidies and the costs were borne in waves of environmental degradation.

Now, across the country, farmers and landowners are exploring new ways of producing food, allying with natural processes to reverse a catastrophic decline in wildlife and even challenges to human health. The biggest input for many farmers now is forethought: Nature is complex and diverse and so, increasingly, are the farms that work with her.

Regenerative farming aims to restore soil fertility and structure, where agriculture could be said to begin. The idea of integrating livestock and crops is so basic—animal dung feeds the soil, which grows the crop— that non-farmers may puzzle over why plant and animal production were ever separated. Why would anyone raise animals away from the areas where their feed is produced or grow crops far away from manure?

Mob grazing, or intensive rotational grazing, was developed after Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean stock farmer, observed how herd animals in the wild graze and then move on. Hard-bitten, the grasses spring back—absorbing carbon from the air, shedding roots to feed the micro-organisms that create soil, and putting on fresh growth, fed by the dense application of manure.