Thoughts on the State of Nature

All over the news this morning is the 'State of Nature' report that has been developed by a coalition of 25 environment NGO's.

You can read all about the report here, and I think there is a launch event with David Attenborough today. Take a read of the full report here. It talks about two-thirds of species being in decline. I need to read the report in full (it is pretty lengthy) and my initial thought process is from the headlines in the press. 

 

The Today programme has led with the report this morning, and it was noted that 'the culprits are the usual subjects - intensification of agriculture and urban sprawl. Business as usual is not acceptable.'

I think it is pretty obvious that business as usual is not acceptable, but I am not sure that 'the usual culprits' in the form of the intensification of farming tells the whole story. It looks to me like farming has been doing anything but intensifying in the past few years.

It seems to me that there has been a huge amount of work done by farmers who have realised that business as usual (and by this we presume the report means very intensive agriculture with negative environmental impacts) is not the way to operate.

I thought I would take a look at few graphs dotted around because it is easier for me to see things in a picture.

 

This is what fertiliser use looks like at the moment:

This is from here - take a look

This is what water quality in rivers looks like:


You can see this here on page 22 

This is how much we spend on biodiversity (which has dropped recently, presumably with government cutbacks):



Take a look at this here on page 42

This is what the Farmland Bird Index looks like - used as a wider barometer of the health of the countryside:



You can see this here as well, on page 61

On these figures farmland birds continue to decline, but at a much lower rate than over the past 40 years. Yes, there is much work to do. I hope however that the report takes account of all of the work that farmers are doing highlighted in the graphs above, and the record numbers of those in agri-enviornment schemes. It will be interesting to see what the effect of the crazy weather we have had of late has on the environment in the future as well. There is much to discuss.

 

Perhaps the most interesting underlying graph in all of this is the one related to how much the UK spends on biodiversity. We are in the final stages of CAP reform, and it is clear that the relationship between pillar 1 payments direct to farmers and pillar 2 payments for rural development and the environment will be even sharper in focus very shortly. The 'State of Nature' report is a line in the sand in this debate, hence the attention it has received so far.

 

It's all about peace you know

Today I have spoken to a farmer who I used to do a lot of work with in the UK. He is German and has lived most of his adult life farming in the north of England.

 

We were catching up after a while without speaking to each other. He is always good value, talks and swears a tremendous amount and has an infectious personality.

 

He was asking how I was getting on in Brussels and was very interested to talk about the UK and EU question that is exercising a lot of minds.

 

Here is what he said:

 

"I meet up with my family who now live all over Europe every two years. There are 150 of us because I have 8 brothers and 5 sisters and we hire a conference centre so we can all see each other. Between us we speak 10 different languages as a mother tongue.

 

"I don't think some people understand these things. There is no one alive that can remember when England has been occupied. When you have some jumped up horrible people telling you what you should do and where you should go you remember these things. When I was at school in 1955 there were 40 children in the class and exactly half of the class, 20 children, didn't have a father. They were either dead or still in prison camps.

 

"So when I hear all of this EU discussion going on I can hardly understand it. Wars are now impossible in Europe and that is why we have the EU. I wish people would think about this."

 

I thought this was a powerful thing to say.  

Review: ‘I Bought a Mountain’ by Thomas Firbank

If I was a lecturer at an agricultural college, this book would be top of the reading list. I’d tell the students that there was no need to lug the Agricultural Notebook in, that John Nix can stay at home this week and please don’t bring anything to write with. Just read this, I’d say: Thomas Firbank’s ‘I Bought a Mountain.’

Rewind first. My uncle was a shepherd on a hill farm. By virtue of some fall out I’m unclear on coupled with a character who was happier with a dog and stick than with family, I didn’t meet my uncle until my mother’s 40th birthday party when I was 10. He invited me to go to the farm where he worked. I remember the fire and the branding iron to stamp the horn of the sheep. I remember the smell, the smell that gets on your chest. He must have seen my face.

‘It gets yer! It’s n’wonder these farriers can drink.’

I remember gathering sheep with him and Michael Harness. He cast out one way, a dot in the distance, and we the other way to meet back on the old A640 road connecting Yorkshire and Lancashire. The snow started falling, the sheep licked the salt from the road, the cars blared their horns. We bunkered down for a bit of dinner under a small bridge. 

‘Here lad, sup this. Bloody cars blaring. These sheep were here ‘afore them.’ 

Fast forward. I deliver milk before school with another farmer, and I learn to shear with him as well, and then on one day the uncle gives me a chance in shearing some of their sheep. Then I go to agricultural college, and at the end of my first year on a lovely June evening I get a call from home. He has died. He collapsed in the big shed at the farm and Michael found him.

And that’s it then. You can’t learn anything from someone who isn’t around any more. And all you ever wanted was to know him. To understand him and be friends with him perhaps, to be part of it. But you never were. The only thing that’s there now is a crook he gave you behind the door, and a tightening of the chest sometimes when you think back. That is all that can be said for that.

Back to the book. I’d tell the students to come prepared to drink tea and talk all about how wonderful the book is, how even almost 75 years after it was first published there is something very relevant in here for anyone who cares to get into it. “The man who can strike a mean is the man who makes a dull success of what he undertakes,’ says Firbank “yet the ordinary people who move with the ungoverned swings of the pendulum live foolishly and fully. My pendulum was at the extremity of its arc when I came to Dyffryn.” 

You may manage to buy a copy here 

He had worked in Canada in the ‘30’s and heard about a hill farm for sale near Snowdon. He starts his story with the purchase - “I first saw Dyffryn in a November gale. As I rounded a spur of a hill to turn into the long valley the full power of the storm caught the car. The rain was being driven horizontally, and struck on the windscreen. It poured in torrents over the bonnet, but left me dry. I liked that weather.” Firbank, with no farming experience at all, buys “a sheep farm of 2400 acres, lying in a long rectangle with its upper boundary some 3300 feet up and its lower boundary the flooding river parallel with the road. A good house, 2 cottages, plenty of farm buildings and the price was £5000.”

The book takes you through the farming year, and if it was just that would probably only be of interest to hardened agriculturalists. It is much more than that, because Firbank is so honest and writes with such passion that you are likely to get through a big chunk of it in one sitting. He learns after some time that he must just work very hard, but that everyone will help him if only he asks them. “As the excitements of the life flooded my consciousness, so that I worked and worried and ask questions from daybreak till dark, the hillmen, my neighbours, sensed at once the change of heart and admitted me more and more to their circle.”  

I like the book because the focus is on shepherding through the year - and if you consider hill farming, there isn’t a tremendous amount that has changed in practice. On lambing time he notes that “we have been privileged, for the gods have performed before us the great play of life. We feel we have assisted at a miracle. And, of course, we have.” You hear further about shearing, preparing for the annual sale and buying rams from Firbank who seems in control of the operation, but with some sense of philosophical detachment from the process at the same time. That is probably why the book works so well. 

My copy has been around a while

I could go on and on about this book. For me reading it again recently, I am surprised by the parallels between farming then and farming today. One chapter talks about the big snow of 1937, where they dug sheep out of snow drifts and pulled their last one out on day 21. “The more we mortals build,” says Firbank, “the more there is for the fates to destroy.” Looking at the year that hill farms have had this year, I think the experience that Firbank had at Dyffryn all those years ago would resonate with many sheep farmers today.

A lovely thread throughout the book which almost underpins it, is the relationship that Firbank has with his wife Esme who joins him at Dyffryn a short time after the purchase. “The gods thought fit for me to meet Esme” he says. “In early spring when the grass was a-rustle with growth, and the trees gave budding promise, and the birds and the beasts preened and stretched in the luxury of the sun, Esme came back with me to Dyffryn.” Esme is the driving force behind a lot of ideas, and it is clear that there is no way that Firbank could have done it without her. The story of Esme is probably another book in itself, and if you read this you will see from a quick internet search that the story of ‘I Bought a Mountain’ most certainly didn’t stop with the publication of the book. I will leave that chapter for you to discover yourself.

The debates we are having in agriculture now, especially in relation to hill farming, could be pulled directly from this book. The weather I have already covered, but Firbank plays with diversifying his income with varying degrees of success through pigs, poultry and a cafe for tourists. He  sets up a hydro-electric system to power the farm (renewable energy to cut costs? Interesting!) talks about the need to produce more food from the hills (this sounds familiar) to invest in agriculture as the basis for economic growth in the rest of the country (I have heard this before somewhere) and of the need for more people to work in agriculture and that the future is bright (hang on, what year are we in?). 

Whilst we must remember this was written at the beginning of the war and at a bleak time in the country, Firbank finishes by noting that “men are loath just now to return to the land. The life is hard, the wage small, and the instinct of husbandry is dead in them. But man was born of husbandry, and he may again turn to his only sure help, the soil. He will readjust his values, and may taste in the end the ultimate joy of tending Nature in her labour.”  

Everything changes, yet everything stays the same. 

Review: 'Waste - Uncovering the Global Food Scandal' by Tristram Stuart

I always read the inside cover of books first before I take a read. In the cover of ‘Waste- Uncovering the Global Food Scandal’ we learn that Tristram Stuart ‘has been a freelance writer for Indian newspapers, a project manager in Kosovo and a prominent critic of the food industry. He lives in the UK and rears pigs, chickens and bees.’

It was the last bit that did me. I said a naughty word under my breath and made an assumption, like many of us do on first impressions, that Mr Stuart was probably the type of chap with floppy hair who ate organic muesli on a morning. He would probably make frankly absurd statements about the future of farming and the food industry. I was wrong.

Organic muesli aside (he probably does, I have since met him and he is a nice bloke), there is no doubt that this book is an impressive work. More PhD thesis than airport holiday read - the notes and bibliography cover well over 100 pages themselves - the author covers the globe looking at all aspects of the food chain from farmers through processors to retailers and to us, the consumers. With constructive criticism for everyone throughout, Stuart does at least provide thoughts on ways that the food waste issue can be sorted out. “Don’t bring me problems!” a food industry manager might say, “I want solutions!” In ‘Waste’ Stuart gives a everyone a fair run for their money.  

He also is a master of illustrating the problem in handy figures, often citing work done by WRAP, the Waste Resources Action Programme in the UK. According to WRAP research, in the UK we throw away 4.1m tonnes of food every year that could have been eaten. That is ‘484 million unopened pots of yoghurt, 1.6 billion untouched apples (27 apples per person) and 2.6 billion slices of bread.’ I am sure somewhere there will be an analogy putting all of this horrendous waste in the weary context of double decker buses end to end/football fields/number of times around the world/here to the moon etc but if it is in this book I have missed it. The figures themselves are stark enough to make you sit up and think.

Read about the author here 

He certainly doesn’t hold back on his views on meat and dairy production mind, which could make some farming folk wince. He notes that ‘if we ate less meat and dairy products, there would be more food to go around’ and does a global gallop through the reality of how much meat different nations eat - from the Americans at 123kg per person per year, to the UK at 83kg, the Chinese 55kg, the Ugandans 10kg and the Indians 5kg.  Apparently the combined weight of cattle on the earth now exceeds that of humans (aha, found it!) and meat production has multiplied by two and half times since 1970. 

Reflecting on my own travels in India last year, where restaurants were tentatively putting ‘non-veg‘ options on the menu; it is clear that as Stuart points out ‘when developing-world countries get richer, their populations are inexorably adopting the meatier, milkier diet of affluent countries.’ The author’s gripe here is that the consumption patterns of the West should not be a blueprint for the East. He argues that us wasteful westerners should get our own house in order. Food waste and feeding grain to livestock are on the same page for Tristram Stuart.

Of most personal interest to me and in my work in Brussels, is the focus on the part that supermarkets play in all of this. Sparse shelves are a big turn off for consumers; they think they have missed the best and as a result the systems of big retailers and food outlets intentionally over order. This means of course that there is a lot of waste. Coupled with examples of some of the well known practices of unfair trading in the food supply chain, Stuart argues that better and more honest relations between consumers, retailers and farmers would go a long way to solving the food waste headache. I don't think there is much to argue with there.   

It's unlikely I'll ever look at the food in our fridge in the same way again, and if you read this book it is likely to have a similar effect. The central premise of the book is that the perceived future for the food and farming industry - to produce more more more quick quick quick - is incorrect, and that it would be far more advantageous to get better at eating what it is we are already producing. This is a serious book on a serious subject, and most definitely worth a read. Published in 2009 (I am relatively late to the party) some would say it came out a little before its time. Looking at current discussions at European level, the plethora of reports on food waste and the rise of food banks, it seems the time for getting on top of this issue has finally arrived. 

You can follow the progress of Tristram Stuart via his campaigning website http://www.feeding5k.org