Mini-Report: UK (Leeds, England)

These conclusions arise from my first stop on my ELP, in England (UK). England makes for fascinating comparison to the US and Canada since it is so similar culturally (Anglo-Saxon), but also has the Old World attitude. Hence, comparisons and contrasts between England and North America are very fruitful, and informative, with no lingual barrier and a lot of shared traditions in government, economics, etc. From England, I took away a few key ideas:

English ‘scale’ of agriculture is very different from N. America, and derives from very different traditions. N. American agriculture is often focused on the large scale, and has historically had an almost slash-and-burn attitude towards land use, with many pioneers simply abandoning their land on the east coast and moving west when conditions no longer suited them. While England did have this attitude as a population control (ship unwanteds off to the colonies in N. America, Australia, India, etc.), at the same time the much higher population density, coupled with thousands of years of farming tradition, largely prevented this particular exploitation of the landscape. As a result, English farms have remained small and family owned (dozens of acres, usually <50 for over 50% of farms currently), and with small ag. consortiums/corporations. This contrasts with N. America, where ag. consortiums (e.g. Purdue) and average farm size has continuously increased over the past century and often number in the thousands of acres. That said, there is a commonality between the behaviour of farmers in North America and the UK. In Canada, where crown land is leased/rented, and in the UK where renting occur under specific circumstances (for example, the commercial portion of the university farm). The issue is that when farmers are renting rather than loaning the land, they often become narrow-mindedly focused on immediate profits, without thinking of long-term ramifications. If you own the land and expect to pass it to children, you often want to leave it in the same or better state, but if not, there is no incentive, beyond regulations, laws, and penalties, to ensure that people do not use it for short-term gain. Finally, because the English (like Japan) are limited in amount of land, the solution is to either convert extremely high amounts of land to agriculture (leading to the low percentages of natural land remaining), OR to significantly intensify land management, which has been a double-edged sword, as it allowed for potentially better management, but also meant poor land practices can cause unprecedented damage to soil. They also have been ruthless about aggressively draining and farming peatland throughout the isles in the past 150 years, which has led to increasingly high losses of C and represents a major challenge for any sort of C goal (given that peatlands emit C at exponentially higher levels than mineral soils); thus, England represents a ‘late-stage’ peat exploitation. They also seem to vacillate wildly between no soil disturbance (pasture) and hyper-soil disturbance via aggressive tillage (most of their arable ag.). As a result, they are losing C on arable soils at an unprecedented rate.

England has a frighteningly high percentage of land in agriculture (~72%, divided between ~40% pasture and 20% arable, of which over half is wheat), and a worryingly low amount of forest (<13%). Some of this is related to historical/cultural phenomenon; since ~50% of the land is not ideal for arable cropping (too rocky/steep), England has a surprisingly high amount of pasture, which is generally better for the soil from a C perspective, and a much better way to handle marginal land than forcing cropping onto steep hillsides and mountains (as was done in N. America with negative results, e.g. Blue Ridge Mountains c. 1900). However, at the same time, the rise of industrialization and the attitude of ‘mankind’s supremacy over nature’ led the British, throughout the United Kingdom, to aggressively convert peatlands and forest into human uses, e.g. Professor Holden told me of drained peatland ‘grid forests’ in Scotland that were used as hunting ‘estates’ for rich men to have fun, but which resulted in major peat loss. The UK government has a plan to try and regenerate some natural land, but they wish to do so primarily by converting land out of pasture into arable uses or forest while eliminating peatland from production, and while this sounds good from a C perspective, at the same time good upland pasture might make for marginal cropland.

I made a point of discussing the conversion of farmland to natural uses with Professor Holden, in particular the conversion of land out of pasture, a vital problem given the much higher potential of pastureland to store C compared to arable uses. He argued that the risk of continuing to farm peatland, which can put out at least 10-100x more C in a year than any mineral soil, greatly outweighs the potential losses of converting mineral pasture to mineral arable. Essentially, the peatland should never have been converted to farmland in the first place, so eliminating its usage is a much more important step to take in stabilizing C in England’s soils than any other single thing that could be done. That said, perhaps it might be wise to heed the words of the editors at Nature in 1928, who stated “Those possessing a first-hand knowledge of the disforestation which has proceeded apace in parts of the British Empire overseas are well aware of numberless cases where the hopes based on the. agricultural development, to promote which the areas were disforested, resulted in disappointment. The land, with the long built-up humus layer and resulting forest soil, was a good forest land ; but once exposed soon became worthless for agriculture. Mr. Forbes says, ” a country cannot both have its cake and eat it.” We ate our ‘cake’ when our ancestors, several centuries ago, cut the forests, both from the real agricultural lands and from the true forest ones [….] But this is no argument justifying the forester selecting agricultural land, however poor from the agricultural point of view at the present day, and placing it under tree crops. I repeat that the money, in a densely populated country like Britain, would be more correctly spent in improving the food producing lands, whether crop or meat ones. In parts of Europe the improvement of the grazing lands is a recognised. part of the forest officer’s duties; it has been brought to a high level and merits a close study by foresters in Great Britain.” Heeding this advice, then, perhaps the best solution for the UK would be to cut back on peatland production, but instead of trying to convert pasture to pure forest, should attempt to create an agroforestry compromise like the dehesa silvopastural lands of Spain, wherein trees and pastureland are mixed, thus retaining them as agricultural land but gaining some of the C benefits of forestland. Another solution might be the Skipton solution, of having wealthy people or government willingly reforest their open land to allow their neighbors to continue farming without issue.

There is a very peculiar way that the English have had of viewing the land culturally/historically that may relate to their ruthless conversion. Going at least ten centuries back, historical records referred to what we would call undisturbed, ecologically healthy forest as “wasteland.” In other words, the prevailing cultural zeitgeist is that land that is not cleared of natural vegetation and managed by humans is completely useless and a waste (this is marked in England by hedgerows or stone fences dividing all land into neat blocks of pasture). This is a very different concept than I had, growing up in the desert, of wasteland as a place where no plant grows and the ground is bare and ‘dead’. As Professor Holden and Lord Tempest noted, this has led to significant resistance on the part of the English people to the idea of reforestation, and not simply for economic reasons. People resist the idea of more woodlands because they associate the square division of the countryside with beauty and order, while they associate the idea of non-uniform tree cover as undesirable and ‘destroying our traditions.’ This can be contrasted fruitfully with N. American ideas; as my father-in-law has noted, Americans had a very aggressive attitude (probably inherited from the English) of viewing wild land as something to be conquered and have order imposed on it by humans, but at the same time, this morphed into the idea expressed by conservationists that there are two types of land: human land, where humans live and belong, and ‘wilderness,’ which is pristine, untouched, and not interacted with by humans except insofar as they might act as tourists in it, only venturing into it briefly before returning to the ‘human lands’. Hence, N. Americans are more interested in preserving natural, non-utilitarian land uses, but only so that they may visit it temporarily and study it (but never live in it), while the English only like land if it serves a useful purpose. Obviously, there is a distinction lost here, wherein land can be lived in and yet still preserved for more uses than the purely human or utilitarian, what might be a more traditional ‘tribal’ outlook seen in many cultures across the globe historically (including European), but in our era most particularly seen in aboriginal peoples, e.g. First Peoples.

Limitations on land conversion/urbanization are present in England, in particular, there are legal barriers to cutting down more forest for conversion purposes (excepting construction) to farmland, and similarly, some barriers on converting precious farmland to urban uses. This is termed the ‘green belt’ concept, and is also present in New Zealand apparently. NZ forbids natural land being converted to farmland, while the UK will not allow any designated ‘green belt land’ (agricultural or natural) to be converted to purely human/urban uses. Additionally, farmers cannot sell their land to developers, preventing the sort of farmland destruction currently occurring in Canada’s best farmland in the Great Lakes region of southern Ontario. However, there appear to be no barriers to conversion of farmland or pasture to natural purposes, which is positive given how little natural land still exists in England. This is similar, I think to some other countries in the EU, but is very different from North America, which has always had an attitude of ‘burn baby burn’ when it comes to land conversion, with the notable exception of public parks. Then again, much more land in N. America is still natural, so it may not seem as critical, even if it is still vitally important.

One fascinating insight from Professor Holden was their research into peatland regeneration with the goal of ensuring peatland as a C sink, not source. What they found was surprising; completely flooding this land reduced CO2 emission….while drastically increasing NOx and CH4 emissions, which are far more dangerous greenhouse gases, while too little water did not prevent massive C losses! The solution, apparently, is to find an ideal water table, which works out to approximately 5 cm below the soil surface; this prevents the creation of NOx and Methane, but also prevents too much respiration, and thus turns the soil into a sink. This conclusion, if applicable elsewhere, once again points to how human overcorrection between ‘natural’ and ‘human’ states, and our inability to find a middle ground, often hurts nature more. The solution is not to take humanity out of the solution (we are an intrinsic part of nature), nor is it to turn all natural into anthropocentric uses (avoid being too utilitarian and thus destructive). Instead, we need to find a balance (in this case, 5cm of drainage) that allows us to properly manage nature without either destroying it or remaining entirely separate from it.

England suffered more extensively environmentally than N. America did from the Industrial Revolution; this can, in part, be attributed to the higher pop density and inability of Englanders to move away from their pollution. However, they are far more forward-thinking on renewables and other farsighted policies (and apparently made phenomenal progress in a short time on converting their car fleet to electric due to oil pressures), whilst N. America lags behind considerably, especially in the political insistence of conservative/liberal either being doomsayers or naysayers but no middle ground (see: Alberta/SK/any Republican state vs. west BC or California, as well as all of the Gen Z and Millennials refusing to have children or care about society or other humans because ‘we are horrible and are all going to die’). There is a downside to England’s renewable energy thinking policy, namely, their investment in biofuels, which is a method of converting good food crops (i.e. excess corn in NA, which is where the practice started) into energy, a wasteful practice at best when we are concerned with feeding a growing global population, especially as the process itself may require more energy to create than is gained….

England is both 20 years ahead and 20 years behind N. America in terms of specific conservation ag ideas. Surprisingly, they do not seem to be aware of innovative continental European practices (e.g. the spading plough form of reduced tillage), being content to be obsessed with N. American ideas that work well on the large scale, low pop density, and relatively ‘new’ agricultural soils in the New World, but which may not be as suited to the high pop density, smaller scale, and old ag soils of the Old World. This also applies to their crop selections/rotations, which are decades behind N. American models but slavishly imitate them. Additionally, while they have correctly identified excessive tillage as a problem, they have not learned from specific failures of no-till (i.e. pest problems and its inability to actually increase soil C rather than merely redistribute it) and thus they are ‘reinventing the wheel.’

In relation to the previous, England seems to be currently obsessed with copying the culture and institutions of the USA. I heard complaints from multiple people to this effect in England, and I also noticed that England seemed more concerned with issues in the US and modelling their own personal politics after US politics than with their own issues. Obviously, this was a small sampling size in one particular area of the country, but it was disconcerting to only hear American music and see people dressing in American styles and acting in an increasingly rude, American fashion. I know this is a problem in Canada too, and it got me thinking about the effects of the dominant global culture. There may be things to admire when a particular nation is a superpower (e.g. British stoicism, American willingness to fight in and reconstruct after WW2, etc.), but at the same time, it really seems, at least in the modern world, that what other cultures take from the dominant one is their WORSE features, not their best (e.g. American entertainment or cheap, low-quality fast food instead of work ethic or cheerful persistence). This is bad enough when it erodes good cultural norms, but it can also be dangerous when adopting agricultural practices, i.e. chemical agriculture was largely adopted by the world because the dominant powers used it, and this caused unforeseen environmental consequences because of a lack of conceptual understanding of the long-term effects of this form of resource extraction. Hence, while there is some reason to adopt innovative foreign agricultural practices, especially if they work in that country, there needs to be a lot more caution and copious trials undertaken to understand fully the ramifications of each practice in a particular region or country before giving it a stamp of approval and moving on.

England has a lot of complaints about the EU’s CAP agricultural policy, stating that it was ineffectual and incentivized farmers to not be innovative by rewarding them subsidies, and prevented shifts to sustainable agriculture. The UK’s ELM policy is supposed to be more environmentally conscious, and focuses on rewarding farmers for what we might call ecosystem services and sustainable farming practices, but my impression was that their definition and goals might be too broad and non-specific to be truly effective. In particular, they have conflicting goals (e.g. keep farmland quantity the same, improve soil health, reduce peat farmland, expand forest, AND build many new homes), and while their overall goals are noble (net C zero by 2050, improving the state of the environment and the lives of citizens), it was not very clear how this would work. Thus I am not convinced yet that England’s “UK ag for the UK” programme is necessarily any better (except its more local focus), and its rollout, while valuing farmer input, looks to be every bit as clumsy if not more so than the EU’s policy. It remains to be seen how it will all work out, but the clear lesson is that not having a firm policy in place has not been good for England’s farmers.

Finally, some thoughts on technology. One of the main aims of the Leeds farm project (and the GFEI) is high-tech solutions and increased technological complexity for farmers as a way to improve intensive farming. I have very mixed feelings about this; in many ways, technology is what dug us into this unsustainable hole in the first place, and it seems hubristic to imagine that all of our little gadgets will magically solve our problems, many of which have been caused by greed and unquestioning acceptance of technology in the first place! In other words, humans ask ‘how soon can I adopt’, NOT ‘Is this technology actually going to benefit, in the long term, every aspect of my life, or will it harm it?’ As an example, when smart phones were first introduced, I seemed to be the only person asking the latter question, and looking at the way that smart technology interferes with and damages our interpersonal relationships, to say nothing of our attention spans, while those around me gave me blank looks when I dared to question if this technology would benefit humanity, and their responses could be summarized as ‘but it is soooo cooooool!’ I think more people should have paused like I did, and on some level, this caution leads me to be skeptical about highly complex solutions to the problems of sustainability, especially since such solutions are predicated on a degree of affluence and access to technology that always leaves out poorer/subsistence farmers. Using Occam’s razor, ‘the simplest solution is often the correct one,’ we should be questioning the current awe with ‘smartfarm’ tech and precision agriculture, and should instead be asking ‘what are ways that we could reduce the complexity of the current agronomic system,’ as complexity often breeds waste, and creates difficulty in management. It also reduces the actual skill of people, turning them from innovative thinkers and problem-solvers into technology operators whose skill lies with making the technology work, NOT in understanding the underlying problems of what is being managed by this tech. This was the tragedy of the Industrial Revolution, the transformation of craftsmen into factory workers; the former had actual artistry and skill and traditions, while the latter are merely good at repetition and running machines that make things according to a pre-determined diagram, without true innovation or thought going into the process. This is how creativity dies, and I have seen this happen to farmers across North America, as the pressures of the modern market turn them into functional factory workers (e.g. chicken farmers in Virginia USA).