‘Buy British and look after the soil - for the sake of the planet!’
‘Buy British and look after the soil - for the sake of the planet!’ This was the combined message from the three speakers at Carhampton Climate Group’s Farming and Food Production event on 18th March, where more than 50 people gathered to hear about the complexities of modern farming from people who are working to meet its challenges every day.
Jo Oborn of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group opened the event with some thought- provoking statistics on the effects of decades of monoculture. ‘You won’t find monoculture in nature,’ she said, showing how increasing food demands since the 1940s have led to a 40% decrease in soil quality and in the nutritional value of the food we grow.
Jo works with farmers to increase their soil health through crop rotation, erosion prevention and the use of natural fertilisers and pest controls: methods already adopted by Carhampton farmers, Andrew and Tracey Speed. ‘I never buy in fodder for my sheep and cattle,’ said Andrew in his talk. ‘I grow lucerne and beans for protein and maize for starch.’ His sheep eat down the plants from the oil-seed rape crop, destroying the rape weevils and eliminating the need for chemical pesticides. The livestock produce 1,000 tonnes of manure a year to fertilise the land, supplemented with treated human sewage. ‘If people complain about the smell,’ said Andrew, ‘I tell them, “If you stop producing it, I’ll stop using it!”’
Andrew has also managed Dunster Deer Park for the past 18 years, restoring the land from nature-sparse coniferous forest to nature-rich native heathland and open broadleaved woodland. ‘It’s all about appropriate land use,’ he said. ‘Rewilding good farmland is bad for the planet. It means more food imports using dirty fuel: a container ship consumes 250,000L of fuel per day, with carbon emissions equal to 30,000 cars a year’.
Eric and Lucy Parker face a different set of challenges in their Carhampton dairy farm. Grazing the cattle avoids intensive indoor management, but feeding grass has its challenges. ‘We have to buy in additional feed to balance the grass/maize ration,’ said Eric, but we are under pressure not to use soya, and to be careful about where it is sourced.’
This is a challenge facing many livestock farmers. Land for growing food is in short supply and alternatives to soya need more land to grow, but soya is notoriously hard to source once it reaches the international market. Low milk prices present another challenge to dairy farmers, but the farm’s membership of Arla, a large South-West cooperative, makes all the difference. ‘The 100 farms in the cooperative produce 420,000 pints of milk per hour,’ said Eric. ‘That means we are big enough to process our milk into a variety of well-known products, and that gives us a better price.’ And with so many farms in the cooperative, farmers can experiment with different approaches to wildlife checks and improvements. And environmental impact is routinely monitored: farm carbon footprints are now assessed annually and farms will be paid a sustainability supplement from this August.
At the close of the meeting, Councillor Christine Lawrence voiced the feelings of all who attended, saying, ‘We have heard real people talking about real situations with real knowledge, passion and concern. It shows that small villages like this can make a difference.’
