English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

July. Mayflies dance above the pools where the cattle drink. Swallows hawk around catching the flies that swarm the cattle muck. Rooks dig amongst it for worms, larvae, beetles and grubs, and spread the nutrients across the field.

Our permanent sheep pastures, like the one we stand in now, have a different mix of almost fifty species of grasses and wild flowers that can endure more uniform grazing, and which thrive on a shorter sward. Birds like skylarks and meadow pipits love these shorter sheep-grazed fields. Two or three times a year I see a tiny hawk, a hobby, hunting them. So, the lesson is not so much that cattle are good, and sheep are bad, as that we need a healthy mosaic of diverse farmland habitats: our animals are the tools that can shape places for better or worse. And all of our grazed habitats are much more biodiverse than any intensive monocultural cropped farmland.

Isaac and I head home. I am soaked to the knees, Isaac to his middle. We kick through the molehills that litter the pasture as we go, spreading the soil across the grass.

~

Astonishingly, farmers over the centuries have not really known much about the biology of plants and soil. Soil was just the dirt we grew crops in, the stuff beneath the pasture surface, of no great significance in its own right. We took it for granted. We knew it had a pH score, but not that it was a living ecosystem. If soil was thought about at all, it was only to wonder whether we had knocked it into a fine enough seedbed with the harrow or whether it needed a top dressing of lime or artificial fertilizer. But if you had asked my father or grandfather, or me, what soil actually was, or how its ‘microbial life’ worked, you would have been met with blank looks.

Isaac and I have learned about soil together over the past couple of years from our friend who teaches ‘regenerative agriculture’. She taught us some simple things in our fields. She dug, with a spade, six-inch squares of soil and we counted how many worms there were in each. This showed us how much healthier the soil was in some places than others, and we discussed how our past farming had created those differences. Our teacher pushed a plastic ring into the ground and poured water into it to show us how much more water healthy soil holds, and soaks up quickly, than poor soil. And she forgave my ignorance about photosynthesis and patiently explained how much better plants are at growing when they have more leaf mass and deeper roots, than when they are always grazed short.

She has helped us understand that the living soil is the most important habitat on the farm – the basis of the food chain – and that all farming is ultimately ‘livestock farming’, because whether the farming on the surface is a plant crop or an animal grazing we are always exploiting and utilizing incredible numbers of living things above and below the surface. About half the living things on earth live in the soil. It is its own world, with all kinds of strange and wonderful relationships between plant roots and algae, bacteria, nematodes, weevils, protozoa, fungi and a host of other things I don’t pretend to understand. A handful of healthy soil can contain more bacteria (and countless other tiny living things) than there are humans on earth. The good news for the soil on our farm is that, unlike on ploughed and ‘improved’ land, it is permanently covered in a thick and diverse carpet of grasses and wild flowers – meaning it is never completely exposed to the sun, rain and wind which would heat it up or blow it away or erode it. In some places, plant roots can reach down three feet deep, holding the soil together and providing pathways for nutrients.

The secret to keeping it healthy, we now know, is to mimic wild herbivore behaviour with sudden bursts of mobbed grazing, that tramples the grass and dots it with shit, piss and saliva. It looks trashed, with wasted grass trampled down, but it is soil heaven. Dung beetles, worms and countless other creatures start to take the leaves and the herbivore muck (which is also full of condensed and partly digested plant matter) back into the ground. A giant feast ensues, a soil-based feeding frenzy, which we can encourage further by having more trees and hedges that litter the ground with leaf matter and rotting wood. Together they all play a valuable role in soil formation, and over time new soil gets created and carbon gets trapped in the ground. Our soil is now safely held in place, with no erosion, and its subterranean ecosystem can thrive, free from fertilizers and free from the plough. The birds told me this was working, because they spent all their time feeding on the two fields I managed this way as an experiment four years ago. The soil is the base layer of our ecosystem.

Unfortunately, we can’t all be fed from pastoral systems. The plough, and the annual crops it makes possible – corn, wheat, barley, soy, sorghum, cassava, potatoes and rice – provide food for most human beings. But in the past thirty years we have learnt that ploughing is ecologically disastrous: it breaks open the soil’s microbial networks, raises or lowers its temperature (by baring it of vegetation on its surface and exposing it to the elements), kills its bacteria and micro-organisms, and leads to wind and rain erosion on a massive and unsustainable scale. This news is staggering – and hard to take in for many farmers. Add into this mix the fact that artificial fertilizers and pesticides destroy much of the life in the soil and farmers (and human beings in general) have a major problem on their hands. Our civilization rests on the plough (and the chemical tools of the post-war period) and yet