To Cull a Mockingbird

Would culling hundreds of thousands of dairy cows across Europe help meet emissions targets? 

Yes, of course. 

The targets would be met, the spreadsheets go green, pastry-scoffing bureaucrats across the continent will be patting each other on the back in cabinet meetings.

And yet, I fear, unresolved issues would rear their head. 

Take Ireland, for example. Ireland proposed plans to cull 200,000 dairy cows over a 3 year period. Not only would the government be paying out the farmers, but also absorbing the loss of income in one of their biggest export markets. The plan has now been scrapped, or rather, postponed. 

Let’s play out more consequences of large scale incentivised cow herd reductions:

• With less supply, the farmers who didn’t sell-out could likely get a better price for their milk. Unless they are capped, farmer’s herd numbers could grow to fill the gap, as demand hasn’t decreased. Ireland could breed another 200,000 cows in a few years and be back at square one.

• With fewer, larger dairy farms, less people are employed. 

• More crop production could take place on the now vacant land which, if not regulated, could lead to more soil erosion and nutrient losses; throwing well-meaning emissions targets askew.

As is so common, silver bullet solutions like culling cow herds give no attention to long term consequences. But that’s to be expected. What’s more frustrating to me, is the lack of awareness of the current situation. With awareness and understanding, we can sober up and think objectively about why we are where we are.

‘Why are these dairy farms so damaging?’ could prompt questions like ‘are they really as damaging as we think?’ ‘How are we measuring this?’ and ‘what policies and economic strategies have led to our current state?’. Then, perhaps, we can have more clarity over food policies.

Plants vs Panels

Solar energy, when converted into electricity in a big metal shiny panel, is a zero-emissions process. No carbon released. 

But, conversely, no carbon is stored either. 

Not many things can store carbon, but crucially, the land that we built the panels on had the capacity to. 

We’ve swapped photosynthesis (what plants do), which absorbs sunlight and carbon dioxide, for photovoltaics (what solar panels do), which only absorbs sunlight and no carbon.

Panels on Roofs, Please

(P.O.R.P… anyone?)

Building roofs have no capacity to store carbon. Or grow food. Or absorb light. In fact, they are just radiating light and heat back into the atmosphere. So they are the perfect sites to install solar panels. What's more, they happen to be right on top of where the electricity is needed, not hundreds of miles away on some farmland or desert. Less cables and storage required.

That leaves open land to grow food, plants, soil and carbon, and act as the earth’s living skin as it was designed to.

Interest Rates

What does a humble grass farmer do with all the extra grass they grow? We wouldn’t want to let it go to waste now, would we?

Perhaps we would. I believe there is any inherent waste in nature, only wasted potential. When I let my cows stomp down my knee-high grass, trampling a layer of green, firm stems to the ground, it is easy to feel like I have wasted my grass. 

‘Oh well, I'll graze it better next time’

But just a day ago, when that very same grass was still swaying upright in the wind, untouched, it was cause for celebration. ‘What a good crop’, ‘that would make great hay’, ‘be a shame to graze that’.

What precisely about a short duration of grazing with cattle has ‘ruined’ this crop so quickly? At surface level (literally), it looks as if those thoughtless cows of mine have crushed every plant, surely killing or stunting each one. But, I remind myself, the grass was nearing full maturity. It wasn’t really growing much anyway; its energy was going to its seed head and roots. It was just begging to be grazed, I could practically hear it.

So during the massacre that was the grazing period, ideally every plant got knocked back in some way. It either got eaten by a cow and shortly became a cow-pat, or it got stepped on, snapped, bent, or buried. 

Let us compare the different banks available to trust our deposit of grass with:

The Litter Bank. The litter bank is an investment portfolio. Our fund manager, mother nature, will surely accept your deposit with gratitude and get to work straight away. Having a litter bank, in most contexts, will pay you back interest in more than one way. Feeding the soil with all that organic matter helps build biology and resilience. Covering the soil surface prevents moisture loss to evaporation, whilst also creating an insulating layer against the cold, the wind, or the heat. It also helps slow down rainfall so the soil can absorb more of it, and creates a microclimate for new seedlings to sprout and for insects to thrive.

I also have several accounts open with the Cow bank. The cow bank pays good dividends. When I deposit grass into the cow, she digests it, absorbing nutrients and making beef, which I can sell. Now, I concede, very little becomes beef, the vast majority becomes cow-pats. But is this wasteful? No! Half-Digested grass is more bioavailable to soil life than fresh grass. And this grass is being returned-to-sender in a big warm, wet, steaming pile of fertiliser.

Depending on your climate, landscape and context, you may vary where you invest your grass and at what time of year. You could even take some money out by making hay, and moving it to another branch! Ts & Cs apply.

You can’t waste grass. You can only waste potential.

I Hate Weeds

If I walk even in the vicinity of a scotch thistle - those big spiky ones with purple flowers - I feel a gravitational pull towards it. I veer off course. My right leg twitches. I’ll fold the thistle over with my left foot and deliver a half-dozen blows to its stem with the heel of my right. It’ll snap or pull from the ground or at the very least it’ll look pretty defeated.

‘That’s better’ I think to myself, ‘one less nasty weed trying to take over my field’. I walk away smug and satisfied with my effort in protecting my precious grassland. 

This (literal) knee-jerk reaction is merely evidence of my programming. I have probably killed thousands of thistles in my time. My father would pay me £0.05 for each thistle I dug up with a spade. Each swing affirming my mindset stronger and stronger:

‘thistles are weeds, weeds aren’t grass, must kill weeds’

 ‘thistles are weeds, weeds aren’t grass, must kill weeds’

 ‘thistles are weeds, weeds aren’t grass, must kill weeds’

But now I have a confession to make, my fellow thistle-kickers… I’ve stopped caring about thistles. And really any plant that I’ve always called a ‘weed’; Nettles, Ragwort, Docks, Bindweed. Now don’t worry, I haven’t stopped killing them (I was bumping along in my tractor mowing thistles just days ago), but I have stopped caring so much.

It comes down to actually understanding the reason that these undesirable plant species have popped up in the first place. Now that I can recognise the deeper ecological processes going on in the background, the nettles in the foreground become insignificant. 

Here’s the caveat: You can only stop caring about weeds if you have a plan in place to change the conditions that allow them to thrive. Farming without a plan is chaos. If I had no plan, you can bet I’d be out there in a hazmat suit and knapsack - dowsing my weeds in Round-up. That would be my plan: Firefighting. But I'm not, because I now know why they’re there.

Nature is always trying to advance a landscape up the succession scale whilst building soil in the process. Always, always, always. Even the patio outside my house is growing moss and would eventually become grassy, shrubby and even a mature woodland if you gave it time. 

I, as a grass farmer, want to pause this ecological succession at, drumroll please… grassland. So my only job is to create the conditions that grasses, legumes and forbs will thrive in. And not too many of any one species. I need to create enough disturbance to stop my field becoming a forest, but not enough to reset my field back to a condition that allows pioneering weeds to take hold. (Park that power-harrow up)

With this knowledge under my belt, an infestation of thistles is not cause to panic, it’s cause for curiosity. Why are they growing? What management decisions have created the ecological conditions for thistles to thrive? And most importantly, what can I do to change the conditions to encourage my grass to grow?

Can I change the way I graze this field?

Do I need to use mechanical or chemical disturbance to knock the weed back?

How much more rest does this field need?

It would be naive of me to not recognise the invasive nature of some species, that may require different management to traditional methods, but truly the fact remains that the first question to ask is always ‘why’.

I hope that adopting this mindset will be as empowering for you as it has been for me. Hating weeds becomes a lot more fun when you stop feeling powerless.

A Regen Roadmap

Taking a regenerative approach to farming requires a new paradigm. A new lens for how we see the world and how we see our farming businesses. It is much like choosing a new map to look at. That roadmap that’s shoved down the side of your car seat will be useful if you’re driving somewhere, but useless if you are hiking footpaths. The map they show on the weather report is great for planning when to have a picnic, but it won’t show you any political boundaries (if you stumble into communist territory, the picnic’s a goner).

On a digital map, you can click through these layers at ease; satellite, road, terrain etc. It’s very useful. We can also change our ‘map layers’ in real life. Depending on our goals, we see things through new perspectives. When you’re interested in buying a certain car, you start seeing them on every street. 

Farmers who are putting nature first have, for one reason or another, downloaded a new set of map layers. Perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of necessity. But they can now see and monitor new metrics: plant dynamics, energy flow, soil health, water cycles, mineral cycles etc. To start with, these maps will be quite rudimentary, like an old pirates map on stained paper. But that doesn’t matter, it’s the awareness that matters. Over time, through iteration and feedback loops, the eye of the farmer gets trained and the map becomes clearer.