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The following excerpt is from Ben Raskin’s new book The Woodchip Handbook: A Complete Guide for Farmers, Gardeners and Landscapers (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

The Woodchip Handbook

By Ben Raskin

Restoring Damaged Soil

With the potential for woodchip to boost soil health, hold onto water and promote plant growth, it is a small step to look at how to effectively harness that potential for rescuing degraded and damaged soils. There are numerous examples of how this has been done, and we’ll look at a few of them here. In some of the studies woodchip and biochar are used either comparatively or in combination, and there is certainly potential for combining the shorter-term benefits of woodchip with the longer-lasting properties of biochar. Both the physical and biological properties of woodchip are used in soil remediation.

Bioremediation

We have already seen the potential for woodchip and the fungi that decompose them to absorb potentially polluting nitrates, but there is some evidence that it could be used more widely to help deal with other manmade pollutants, ‘such as chlorinated and non-chlorinated hydrocarbons, wood preserving chemicals, solvents, heavy metals, pesticides, petroleum products, and explosives. There is an even stronger body of evidence on the potential of biochar for this purpose, but creating biochar is more costly and in most cases some of the energy is lost during the production process. Woodchip is cheaper and easier to produce, so it is worth looking at those situations that could use it.

For contaminants that would eventually break down anyway, such as oil and diesel spills, woodchip appears to have the potential to significantly increase the speed at which the contaminants disintegrate…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Feeding Britain one farm at a time

October 13, 2021

Feeding Britain one farm at a time

On Farming Today this morning, in a conversation about food security and climate change, it was suggested that two fifths of the people on planet earth would not be alive today were it not for the use of mineral fertilisers – an interesting assertion and one with which Malthus might well have agreed, were he still alive.

The issue is important, not least because of the impact of chemical fertilisers on climate change. I read in last weeks’ Farmers Weekly about a farmer who had recently undertaken a carbon audit which concluded that 80% of his emission footprint came from the use of nitrogen fertiliser. Whether or not that is accurate, what is beyond question is that agriculture’s umbilical dependence on nitrogen fertiliser is now being questioned as never before.

After I finished milking and was moving the electric fence for our cows’ daily parcel of mob grazed herbal ley, I was quietly marvelling at the extraordinarily productive capacity of their 12 and a 1/2 acre field. This field has not only produced three excellent cuts of silage but over the last week has fed 80 cows who have produced around 7,000 litres of milk which will convert into around 3/4 of a ton of cheese! All this from the field which has now been around our seven year rotation four times and is more productive than ever.

Marvelling at this productivity, which has been achieved with few external inputs, just crop rotation, herbal leys and recycling of animal manures, I realised that I am in an unusual and interesting position, having been farming without any nitrogen mineral fertiliser for nearly 50 years and observing the impact of my farming practices on yield outcomes. Not many farmers in the developed world can claim to be part of this cohort, since the overwhelming majority of food producers have been nitrogen fertiliser dependent since the post-war period.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Land Skills Fair: This is What Diversity Looks Like!

October 7, 2021

Land Skills Fair: This is What Diversity Looks Like!

Last week I attended the Land Skills Fair (LSF), an event co-organised by the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA) and Land in Our Names (LION). The event was intended to be about “sharing knowledge and skills about farming, forestry, crafts, food and land justice”, with an impressive range of talks, workshops, tours and musical entertainment on the programme. The format is hardly original, mirroring recent agricultural knowledge exchange and community events (think ORFC in the field, Farm Hack, FarmED, the Green Scythe Fair, etc.) but which of course dates back to the classic agricultural shows and fairs found all over the world. But something about LSF felt fundamentally and importantly different.

As with any LWA-led event, LSF was a testament to the sheer energy and health of the movement, with an abundance of inspiring ideas and projects to engage with. Key to this was event co-lead LION, who ran their own space, asking searching questions about ‘Access to land for BPOC in the UK’, the problems of inheriting systems which have their roots in colonial and oppressive histories, as well as ‘diversity and inclusivity in land-based activities’. There were also plenty of sessions run by veterans of the UK local food scene – like Jyoti Fernandes, Jonty Brunyee and Charles Dowding – offering insight into their innovative models as well as ample space for dialogue and exchange. And then there were the vast array of skills sessions on offer from woodwork, to seed saving, and composting – I myself was there to deliver one of these workshops on using weeds as a way to understand soil health (more on this here if you’re interested).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part 2

September 30, 2021

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part 2

Despite the climate change mitigation emphasis on carbon sequestration, building soil carbon is first about food security, second about atmospheric carbon drawdown. By working with nature’s natural cycles to provide nutritious food with a low environmental footprint, Regenerative Agriculture will provide the transition from fossil-fuelled agro-chemistry to utilizing the farm’s natural resources, argues Stuart Meikle in the second part of this series.

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part 1

Farming to naturally regenerate plant nutrients

A sustainable food system is one that will be able to generate nutrients from natural sources, and without using fossil-fuel supplied energy. Given that pre-1900 the human population was fed using accumulated soil fertility, such is feasible, for a few. Also, in times of war, the likes of Great Britain in the 1940s was also able to sustain itself briefly by exploiting the fertility accumulated in its grasslands. It was not rebuilt because artificial fertility became widely available and the economic choice.

That access to artificial fertilizers throughout the latter half of the 20^th century then created a false sense of security during which real soil fertility was largely forgotten.

The rise of what is called regenerative agriculture shows that times are changing. It is all about soils and how soils can be managed to produce harvests without resorting to artificial fertilizers. As the functionality of the soil becomes paramount, so scrutiny is also placed on all that shocks the soil biome faces, be it tillage, pesticide use, or the application of artificial fertilizers (which may include unprocessed manures from housed farmed animals).

Regenerative agriculture also requires the careful consideration of system offtake, be it for food, fibre or biofuel.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carbon Starvation – A Crisis Of Our Time?

September 10, 2021

Carbon Starvation – A Crisis Of Our Time?

Are we beginning to see carbon – the fundamental building block of all life – as a pollutant? Instead of demonising carbon as a cause of climate breakdown, we need to restore balance in the natural carbon cycle that has been disrupted by the use of artificial fertilisers. In advance of his upcoming series on farming within planetary boundaries, Stuart Meikle offers a primer on the complex role of carbon in our soils.

Carbon is everywhere, in us humans, in all animals, birds and aquatic life, in all plant life, in the soil, be it alive or dead, and in the atmosphere. With the agenda increasingly dominated by Climate Change, we could, however, be forgiven for thinking that the only carbon that counts is in the atmosphere. We even count other greenhouse gases, which may not even contain carbon (like nitrous oxide), in terms of carbon (dioxide) equivalents.

As a consequence, are we beginning to see carbon, the fundamental building block of all life, as a pollutant?

In recent months, building upon other published articles, some of which appeared also on the ARC2020 website, I have been researching and thinking about what sustainable food systems look like. They start with the soil. And that becomes more apparent when one considers artificial fertilizers in the context of fossil fuel availability, their physical availability, and their propensity to pollute and emit. Agriculture is beginning a whole new ball game.

When it comes to understanding the vital plant-soil-plant interactions, I would highlight the work of three soils specialists: Dr Christine Jones, Dr Elaine Ingham and Jon Stika. And there are many others…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our household farming future

September 1, 2021

Our household farming future

Back to the blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future with a little more about household-based farming.

A couple of posts back Greg Reynolds suggested I might write some short declarative sentences about my case for household farming, which struck me as a good idea. So here’s my best shot at it.

To reiterate my basic position, I think we face a future of high climate, water and land/soil stress, lower energy and capital availability, and socioeconomic/political turbulence and contraction. In these circumstances, I think farm societies will emerge that are strongly based on smallholder households devoting much or most of their attention to the intensive cultivation of small land areas for meeting their own food and fibre needs.

This is not my vision of an ideal society – it’s just what I think a feasible human ecology will look like in probable future circumstances. As I see it, there could be better or worse kinds of household farm society, and in future posts I’ll discuss some of the possibilities for creating better ones within the framework of what I’ve called ‘least worst politics’ – in other words, how people can try to make the best of the challenging circumstances to come. But I’m not going to get into that here. In this post, I’m just going to lay out why I think we’ll see household farm societies in the future.

Where there are global commodity chains supported by cheap energy and cheap capital, producers tend to concentrate on a handful of highly processable and transportable crops (mostly cereals, grain legumes and oil crops). This enables them to maintain profitability through seeking economies of large scale (large farms with few workers and a lot of energy and capital-intensive infrastructure)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who Will be the Last Farmer Left?

August 29, 2021

Who Will be the Last Farmer Left?

A dwindling number of GTA growers worry that aggressive provincial development plans will make it tough to survive

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Homes lose running water in Klamath Basin as houses compete with farmers, ranchers

August 28, 2021

Homes lose running water in Klamath Basin as houses compete with farmers, ranchers

Water well pump servicers with TW Wells get a water well outside Klamath Falls running again on Aug. 5.

*JPR News*

Homes in rural areas of the Klamath Basin have lost running water as their wells fail. Part of the reason: more farmers and ranchers are pumping water from underground than any other year, because they didn’t get any irrigation water from a nearby lake.

In a small residential town called Midland outside Klamath Falls, Terry Smith stands in her driveway with her neighbor’s garden hose in hand.

That’s been her primary source of water since the well to her own home went dry several weeks earlier.

“I have no water,” Smith says, exasperated. “I can’t take a bath. I can’t clean my house. I can’t cook. And now my well is probably not going to work. I’ve lived in this house for 30 years. This is our retirement.”

Smith is waiting for emergency officials to fill her new storage tank with water, which will eventually be delivered in a tanker normally used for delivering milk. In the meantime, she’s been filling 5-gallon jugs with water at a filling station in Klamath Falls and taking up her neighbor’s offer to use water from their hose.

When Smith’s well stopped working, she called a contractor to drill it deeper. This was going to be a gamble, since there wasn’t a guarantee that it’d work, and she’d have to pay the contractor several thousand dollars regardless.

“I keep thinking today’s going to be the day that the [water] tank gets filled,” Smith says. “Today’s going to be the day when the well gets drilled. But it isn’t.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Food and farming reads of 2021

August 2, 2021

Food and farming reads of 2021

We share some of the most interesting reads from the past year, on everything from toxic weedkillers to bringing back beavers.

Toxic legacy: How the weedkiller glyphosate is destroying our health and the environment

Stephanie Seneff

Stephanie Seneff is an MIT scientist who has now dedicated her life to debunking the myths around the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. Her book, Toxic Legacy, rests on a foundation of comprehensive, objective and accessible science – the credibility of which is assured through Seneff’s impressive academic credentials, achieving four different degrees and publishing over 200 articles.

With a dry wit and powerful sincerity, Seneff takes readers on a meticulous journey that details the toxic impact of glyphosate on people and the planet. First navigating the history of glyphosate and how it works as an herbicide, Toxic Legacy unearths the roots of our glyphosate dependency and extent of our exposure. Seneff then unravels the science exposing glyphosate’s toxicity, exposing its links to the degradation of the microbiome, liver disease, infertility, antibiotic resistance, depression, soil degeneration, water contamination and mass biodiversity loss. Ending on a note of cautious optimism, Toxic Legacy concludes with a call to transition towards organic, regenerative and sustainable agriculture, offering guidance on how to ‘take control’ of our health and protect ourselves against glyphosate’s toxicity.

The tone of Seneff’s writing is understated yet powerful, scientific but accessible, providing a fresh and vigorous review of research on glyphosate. But considering such a wide scope of evidence often comes with drawbacks. While Seneff’s credentials are flawless and the evidence persuasive, Seneff often draws a correlation between rising disease rates and glyphosate use, the relationship of which is unsubstantiated in certain cases…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collective Farming, Community and Connection

July 31, 2021

Collective Farming, Community and Connection

Cédric, Mathieu and Hervé of the collective farm (GAEC) La Ferme des 7 Chemins in Brittany. Image courtesy of La Ferme des 7 Chemins via Facebook

What does a socio-ecological transition mean for farmers? Farmers from the Nos Campagnes En Résilience project share their thoughts on social issues in farming, the role of farms in the community, and how Nos Campagnes En Résilience can help to build rural resilience in France.

In France, collective farms are quite common (known as a Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun, or GAEC). Social issues on the farm are central to farming in a collective set-up. But these farmers are also keen to look beyond the farm to build community and connection.

Cédric Briand is part of a collective dairy farm in Brittany with two other partners (pictured above). They manage a a herd of Bretonne Pie Noir, a local heritage breed of dairy cow. All of their milk is processed on-farm, where they produce artisan cheeses.

Ludovic Boulerie is an artisan baker and farmer in a collective farm in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in the West of France. Together with his two farming partners (pictured below) they produce cereals and aromatic herbs and bake bread in the on-farm bakery.

Gilles and Marie Avocat are retired sheep farmers and cheesemakers who were part of a collective farm in the French Alps. They have always been very involved in the community as advocates for local organic food.

Ludovic (on the right) with farming partners Cécile and Youry of the collective farm GAEC La Billardière. Image courtesy of GAEC La Billardière

Farming can build community through food

Ludovic puts it succinctly: The end goal of farming is to feed the population. So there’s a direct link between farmers and their local communities. Farming can build community through food.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Finding meaning in the hard work of farming and growing: What will drive the next generation?

June 19, 2021

Finding meaning in the hard work of farming and growing: What will drive the next generation?

My husband Nathan and I run a small-scale organic farm in West Wales that specialises in edible horticulture and we are currently looking for an assistant grower. Having lost our last assistant grower after about a year and half of employment, we have been posting the job description pretty much anywhere we can for more than three months now. We had two good applications that went nowhere and a few conversations with less experienced people who didn’t really want a full-time job. In the interim, we have taken on a temporary assistant grower finishing up a postgraduate degree in Sustainable Food and Natural Resources – that’s a road that likely doesn’t lead to the field. And we don’t seem to be the only ones struggling to hire…

There’s been a lot of talk post-Brexit about where farm labour is going to come from. We all know the story – the average age of farmers is around 60 and while there are young people interested in farming and growing, especially on the organic and regenerative end of it, it’s not something that’s seen as either lucrative or easy. And the rush of interest in farming and growing that brought in many young first-generation farmers in the last decade is waning, I fear. The seminal 2014 New York Times piece, Don’t let your children grow-up to be farmers argued for the futility of the endeavour in the face of well-heeled ‘non-profit’ farms sucking up grants, ‘hobby farmers’ taking space in local farmers’ markets and the brutality of carrying heavy student loans while breaking your back in the field. While this is an American context, it is still not so very far from the reality in Britain – that economic playing field is still very uneven.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

May 29, 2021

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

For ten years now, I’ve been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don’t teach religion myself–and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres’s Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres’s book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I’ve tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class–about which I’ve probably shared my thoughts about too many times already–was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn’t have been a shock to me, after I’d lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems–but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about “living in the heartland” would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Agriculture In A Post-Oil Economy

May 19, 2021

Agriculture In A Post-Oil Economy

The decline in the world’s oil supply offers no sudden dramatic event that would appeal to the writer of “apocalyptic” science fiction: no mushroom clouds, no flying saucers, no giant meteorites. The future will be just like today, only tougher. Oil depletion is basically just a matter of overpopulation — too many people and not enough resources. The most serious consequence will be a lack of food. The problem of oil therefore leads, in an apparently mundane fashion, to the problem of farming.

To what extent could food be produced in a world without fossil fuels? In the year 2000, humanity consumed about 30 billion barrels of oil, but the supply is starting to run out; without oil and natural gas, there will be no fuel, no asphalt, no plastics, no chemical fertilizer. Most people in modern industrial civilization live on food that was bought from a local supermarket, but such food will not always be available. Agriculture in the future will be largely a “family affair”: without motorized vehicles, food will have to be produced not far from where it was consumed. But what crops should be grown? How much land would be needed? Where could people be supported by such methods of agriculture?

WHAT TO GROW

The most practical diet would be largely vegetarian, for several reasons. In the first place, vegetable production requires far less land than animal production. Even the pasture land for a cow is about one hectare, and more land is needed to produce hay, grain, and other foods for that animal. One could supply the same amount of useable protein from vegetable sources on a fraction of a hectare, as Frances Moore Lappé pointed out in 1971 in Diet for a Small Planet [12]. Secondly, vegetable production is less complicated…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Two hundred miles from Hartlepool

May 15, 2021

Two hundred miles from Hartlepool

I’m going to interrupt my present blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future for one post to comment on recent political events in Britain. Where this post ends up in fact is pretty relevant to some of the larger arguments of my book.

The events I’m referring to are last Thursday’s elections in which, among other things, many people across the country voted for their local councils, electors in Wales and Scotland voted for their national assemblies and – most prominent in the news – a byelection in the ‘postindustrial’ northeast English town of Hartlepool that had previously only ever elected a Labour MP opted for the Conservative candidate by a large margin.

That candidate, Jill Mortimer, has been described in the press as ‘a farmer’, but I haven’t seen any descriptions of her farm nor any discussion of agricultural issues around the election. As I’ll relate below, the issues thrown up by this election do seem destined ultimately to devolve towards farming, but only by a roundabout route which I shall attempt to unpick here.

Mortimer’s main electoral pitch seemed to be about creating more local jobs by ‘cutting red tape’. It surprises me that anybody would still buy the line that the lack of jobs in Hartlepool arises from an excess of ‘red tape’, especially when that line is spun by someone from a party that has increased red tape and reduced jobs by exiting the European Union. But Brexit has always been more about political symbology than rational calculation. It’s the Excalibur of contemporary British politics – the true leader in these times of trouble shall be known by the fact they can extract a well-honed Brexit from the recalcitrant stone of Brussels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Agroforestry: An ancient practice with a promising future?

May 10, 2021

Agroforestry: An ancient practice with a promising future?

How are we going to tackle agriculture’s enormous contribution to the climate and biodiversity crises? One of the few things everyone agrees on is that it won’t be easy, and part of the reason for this is the huge amount of disagreement around the viability and sustainability of many of the proposed solutions. Moving to faster-growing breeds of livestock, for example, could risk delivering carbon gains at the expense of biodiversity and animal welfare. There are, however, some measures with more universal support, and one of the most potentially significant of these is agroforestry.

Traditionally defined as the growing of commercially productive trees and agricultural crops on the same piece of land, agroforestry is, despite its new-found fame, a very old practice – though one which has sadly been almost entirely lost from our landscape. In contrast to the prevailing mindset around trees and food production, which largely sees these two land uses as mutually exclusive, agroforestry systems are designed in a way that provides benefits to both enterprises, while also generating a range of environmental gains such as improved soil health, reduced runoff, increased biodiversity – and of course, carbon sequestration.

It’s no wonder, then, that agroforestry has received widespread support from many different quarters over recent years. But with a range of different possible approaches and few on-the-ground practitioners, what might its implementation at scale actually look like? Thanks to the pioneering work of the likes of Stephen Briggs and his alley cropping system of apples and cereals, we have proven models that show how agroforestry can work on cropland. But with the exception of some research trials carried out in the 1980s, there has, as far as I’m aware, been very little research done into how agroforestry might be best implemented in grassland areas…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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