Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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more from the Brits
Prof Sir John Beddington, the Government's chief scientist, forecasts "a 
perfect storm" as population growth, diminishing resources and climate change 
create shortages in food, water and energy. Our generation may be the last, 
as well as the first, to be able to take food supplies for granted.


It's time to get back to the land
Over the last 20 years, the proportion of food that we grow for ourselves has 
slumped. Finally, the Government has taken note, says Geoffrey Lean.
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/6952912/Its-time-to-get-back-to-the-land.html

By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 7:44PM GMT 08 Jan 2010

My mother was a Land Girl, one of the 80,000-strong Women's Land Army that 
dug for victory during the Second World War. One of the family's most 
cherished photographs is of her young self wielding a spade as she helped 
grow vegetables on what had been an immaculate lawn.

The picture seems a world away from today's mechanised, computerised, 
industrialised, depersonalised agriculture. But if a growing number of 
experts are to be believed, my children's generation will increasingly go 
back to the land to dig not for victory, but for survival. For once again, 
our food security is at risk. Then, German U-boats menaced the imports on 
which Britain had become reliant after decades of neglecting agriculture. 
Today, domestic food production has again been declining, just as world 
supplies look like getting much tighter.

Prof Tim Lang, of City University, perhaps Britain's top food academic, says: 
"We are sleepwalking into a major food crisis." Prof Sir John Beddington, the 
Government's chief scientist, forecasts "a perfect storm" as population 
growth, diminishing resources and climate change create shortages in food, 
water and energy. Our generation may be the last, as well as the first, to be 
able to take food supplies for granted.

"We need to produce more food," Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, told 
the Oxford Farming Conference this week. A statement of the obvious? It 
actually signals a change in policy. For decades, ministers have seen 
agriculture as unimportant since, as Benn's own department put it less than 
two years ago, as a developed economy, "we are able to access the food we 
need on the global market": manufacturing and the City would earn us enough 
to buy in supplies.

Over the last 20 years, the proportion of food that we grow for ourselves has 
slumped: we produce just three fifths of what we need. The gap between 
imports and exports doubled between 1995 and 2005, and is now the largest in 
Europe.

The alarm bells went off three years ago, when wheat and maize prices more 
than doubled, and those of rice more than tripled, in just 12 months, 
creating the first steep and sustained rise in world hunger for decades. Most 
ominously, it happened at a time of record global harvests, and was largely 
caused by soaring demand from the mushrooming middle classes in China and 
India, and by the rush to produce biofuels. How much worse will things be if 
world production falters?

Beddington's perfect storm may ensure just that. Global warming is expected 
to hit harvests worldwide, even if some countries may initially benefit. 
Agriculture uses vast amounts of water – 20,000 litres goes to produce just 
one kilogram of beef, including growing feed, watering the cattle and 
processing the meat – which will get much scarcer as populations and demands 
grow. Supplies of fossil fuels will also become more limited and expensive, 
yet farming depends on them, too: in the US, 10 calories of fuel must be 
burned to provide just one calorie of food. And the financial crisis and 
declining earnings from manufacturing cast doubts on how easy it will be for 
Britain to buy food on tight world markets.

So we need to produce more. But food security will depend as much on how we 
grow it as on how much we harvest. The oil-soaked, water-gulping, 
soil-denuding, nature-destroying intensive agriculture that has marched 
across the country – spurred by the Common Agricultural Policy – may soon 
look as dated as my mother's photograph, as we realise we have no choice but 
to farm sustainably. As a Cabinet Office report concluded two years ago, 
"existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more 
resource-constrained future".

That will have to mean taking more care of the soil, the very foundation of 
farming; about half of our arable land is thought to be at risk of erosion, 
with intensive farming the main culprit. It will involve conserving water and 
fuel, and almost certainly increasing organic agriculture as artificial 
fertilisers and pesticides become scarcer and costlier.

And it will probably mean reversing the decline in the numbers working the 
land. When the Second World War broke out, 15 per cent of the workforce was 
employed in agriculture; now it's less than two per cent, and the average age 
of farmers has risen to an alarming 56.

This week, the Government produced a new food strategy, which tentatively 
points towards a more sustainable future. It is well overdue, although long 
on goals, short on specific action, and coy about spending money. But it may 
yet prove a turning point, as Britain finally starts to fight a peril 
surprisingly similar to the one that led my mother to pick up her spade.