Raymond Blanc > Blogs > The Good Earth

“We plough the fields and scatter/ The good seed on the land.” The advice of the old hymn is strongly discouraged by the new “soil strategy” just published by Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Secretary. Why?

Next to the oceans, our soil is the biggest carbon store. The soil of Britain contains 10bn tonnes of carbon, equal to 57 times our national greenhouse gas emissions. And ploughing it up releases some of the carbon stored within the soil. UK land has been steadily degraded by 200 years of intensive farming and industrial pollution, the report for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs warned.

Mr Benn’s strategy is “low tilling and no tilling” in order to reduce the impact on the environment of growing our food. Already the so-called “barley barons,” the large farmers who can afford to invest in new equipment, practise “precision farming.” They use machinery that, instead of churning up the earth, turns over only the top layer of soil that includes the stubble from the previous crop, and plants the seed in this shallow tilth.

Another advantage of this new machinery is reflected in the rest of the quatrain of the hymn by Matthias Claudius (1740-1815): “But it is fed and watered/By God's almighty hand.” For many generations it’s been our hand and not God’s that does this, and the new machinery can prevent over-pollution of the land by chemicals. With these machines farmers can take soil samples, test them, and then use global positioning systems to deliver fertilisers or pesticides to the specific areas where they’re needed.

There is another reason for minimally disturbing the fabric of the soil, though, and that is to safeguard our topsoil, which will be crucial (said Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at Defra), to increase our food production. He wants to double it in the next 20-30 years. “We face many challenges of climate change, we have to produce twice as much food, it needs to be more nutritious, and if we don't take care of our soil and our water, we will not be able to accomplish that task,” Professor Watson said.

More than 2m tonnes of topsoil is lost every year through water and wind erosion. This reduces food production, increases flood risks and, of course, undermines the efforts to capture carbon emissions. Professor Watson summed up: “We have come to a point now to recognise that safeguarding our soil, improving our soil, sustainably managing our soil, is absolutely fundamental in the long term.”

The government is finally encouraging farmers to put organic matter back into the soil and to reduce the inefficient and polluting use of nitrogen based fertilisers.

Does all this sound familiar? It does to the Soil Association, which has been advocating all these measures for so many years, but says they’re not enough. Peter Melchett, the Soil Association’s policy director is clear: The government “will not put right the huge degradation that our soils have suffered over the last 200 years, partly as a result of what the government calls intensive agricultural production. Organic farming should be acknowledged as a key approach to protect our vital soils.”

It sounds to me from Mr Benn’s report as if the government is halfway there. Why doesn’t it take the logical next step and encourage and reward organic farming?