BREAKING THE CYCLE WITH GROUNDSWELL AGRONOMY: THE FUTURE OF AGRONOMY REIMAGINED By Richard Harding, ProCam - all views are my own
It was very refreshing to read Adam Driver’s Farmer Focus article in issue 10 of Direct Driller. In this update, Adam echoed many of the thoughts I’ve held since I began my agricultural studies. It seemed then, as it does now, that our constant desire to externalise the problem and then purchase the solution - not by any means unique to farming - is a very flawed approach. We are all seduced by technology, me included, sometimes. Which leads to the assumption that nothing, but a man-made solution is able to provide the answer to agriculture’s biggest challenges, whether they are perceived or real. This takes us back to Adam’s article and his comment about the widely purported “feed the world” narrative, which is really about encouraging increased production at all costs, rather than recognising that the reality of hunger is more about politics, the unevenness of food distribution and fundamentally historic economics. An illustration of our addiction to technology came just last week. At the end of a long day of soil sampling - stubbles to be precise - on a sunny September autumn afternoon, I suddenly felt that sinking feeling while 76 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
discussing soil sampling with a local farmer. We were comparing the very pretty variable spreading maps that had just been produced by a local liming company, with my just-completed more random soil sampling done by hand. To my surprise the farmer was more pragmatic, and wise enough to see that while this would be perceived as progress by many it was unlikely to produce a more reliable result than my random W sampling pattern across his fields. However, what I was doing couldn’t be achieved by those specific maps. By this I mean: picking up the nuances of soil friability, compaction, getting a sense of biological activity through smell, and the general suitability of the soil for direct drilling of the next crop. Or, what the next crop should be, based on the soil’s current state; for instance should we be sowing another cereal if there was enough friability, with or without a companion. Or should it be a large seed like a bean to restructure the slumped soil needing some restructuring with roots not iron? While I completely see the value that precision farming has, we occasionally need to ask the right questions of it and its interpretation. I agree with Victoria Sweet’s question in her article
about Slow Medicine, that sometimes it could be a case of “Is inefficiency more efficient than efficiency?” (ref. Gods Hotel by Victoria Sweet, Riverhead Books. ISBN-13: 978-0399573316). While looking round for some inspirational words I came across something I had seen a number of years ago in Brake the Cycle, a 2013 fundraising video for the Building Man Festival. To quote from that: “Given
ISSUE 11 | OCTOBER 2020
