Marshall Taylor • Farm productivity
Soil
holds the answers
How can farming meet the planet’s burgeoning sustainability challenge? Farmers Club member Marshall Taylor provides a poignant perspective Farming’s role Agriculture is responsible for a huge proportion of that greenhouse gas by destroying the microsystems and soil organic matter (OM), which is approx. 50% carbon, with cultivations that have oxidized it away and replaced its nutrient value with synthetic fertiliser bearing a considerable carbon footprint of its own. The resulting crop yield has come at a very heavy environmental price, delivering food of lower nutritional value and of lower wholesale price set by supermarkets.
THE Government’s strategy to combat climate change by announcing a swift end to fossil fuel use without identifying a clear replacement policy puts the responsibility for delivering a solution firmly onto the shoulders of farmers and land managers.
Marshall Taylor Marshall grew up in Cheshire and Lancashire on the family’s farms, starting with 28 Ayrshires on 25 acres of silty clay meadows bursting with wild flowers and a huge range of birdlife, all without artificial fertilizer. He attended Harper Adams, chaired the TFA and helped restructure the Min of Justice Land Tribunal. The family now runs a dairy herd on the Somerset Crown Estate, while Marshall runs a bespoke soil advisory service for equestrians. Volis Farm, Hestercombe, Somerset marshall@volis.co.uk
10 • The Farmers Club Spring 2022
If we are not to increase the uninhabitable regions, destroy ever more species and take more natural habitat under cultivation we will need large-scale sequestration of atmospheric carbon. This will put profit back into farming, reverse global warming and provide many other benefits to humanity. If we are to feed nine billion inhabitants by 2050 we have no other option. While our scientists learn more and more about less and less, as they drill ever deeper into their specialisms, it is the applied and integrated biology of a revived soil biome from our grandparents’ era that tomorrow’s farmers will revert to, and apply even more skillfully for crop and forage production, if they are to survive. Aside from methane, which decomposes over a dozen years, fossil fuel consumption has accounted for at least 229 billion tonnes of carbon in the 850 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere.
Soils that once held 8-12% OM are now frequently found to have under 3% OM, a legacy of ploughing without integrated livestock. They will take a decade or more to correct. Nutrients from destroyed microsystems and associated organic matter have been replaced by a reliance on synthetic fertilisers and chemical herbicides as farms try to offset low produce prices with higher yields. Input savings By rediscovering Albrecht farm practices, which this second agricultural (chemical) revolution bulldozed aside in the 1960s, agriculture can reverse global warming, as well as reduce reliance on synthetic sprays and fertilisers, so cutting input costs. Such a change makes a farming profit more likely. Without it the Government will fail in its responsibility for protecting the strategic food supply. In an age when profits must come first, stewarding the land and its wildlife can only succeed by achieving an adequate return on investment. These two points are not accounted for in current plans to change farm production subsidies into conservation payments. The public still lives in a post-war cheap food era, following the abolition of the farmer marketing boards. Without a re-balancing
