Download Keeping Soil In Good Heart

Keeping Soil In
Good Heart
Ploughed Field, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
Why is it that we consistently fail to appreciate how precious and extraordinary
soil is?
C
PRE Lancashire considers why we need to improve
practices and to protect this fundamental natural
asset, as it is extremely important both to food yields
and crucially to our health.
We start with soil’s simple story, which is central to the
evolution of life and our presence on Earth. Without soil, the
higher forms of life on Earth would not exist. Millions of years
ago, while the earth was still relatively warm, primitive soils
were formed by heat-tolerant bacteria. As the Earth cooled
further, it became habitable for other soil creating organisms
and with the creation of higher quality soils, plants were able
to evolve. Soils and plants then worked together to create
more soil; and soils became richer as they recycled plant
matter into nutrients usable by plants.
Almost all land-based life needs soil and that life in turn
sustains the soil which ultimately feeds it. So despite our
vast technical ingenuity, we rely on this apparently simple
substance for nearly all our food. It takes thousands of years
to form to significant depths from weathering, plant and
microbial activity, but can be destroyed in decades or less. If
cared for, it can stay fertile and productive for millennia, but if
abused it can be lost in a season. It can be renewed, but only
over many generations.
To grow awareness and understanding of the profound
importance of soil for human life, the Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations declared 2015 the
International Year of Soils. The FAO is supporting effective
policies and actions for the sustainable management and
protection of soil resources.
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West Lancs Crop
LEFT: Ploughed Field, North Yorkshire
BELOW: Field being ploughed
“Soils are not something we can
simply fix if it breaks: it can take up
to one thousand years to form one
centimetre of topsoil.” - José Graziano
da Silva, FAO Director-General.
Our bodies are developed from and
nourished by nutrients and organisms
found in soil. Yet despite the fact that
healthy soil remains crucial for food
production, we too often do not look
after it. All this is well known to
science and you would imagine that
soil and fertile land would be protected
by environmental policy, especially
with growing fears about the future of
our food supply. But you would
be wrong.
With this in mind, in January
West Lancashire
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2016 the CPRE North West Group,
comprising branches in Cheshire,
Cumbria (Friends of the Lake
District) and Lancashire, is hosting a
presentation on ‘Soils’ for its members
to consider best practices in terms
of campaigning in the future for its
protection and enhancement. CPRE
has identified two things we need to
protect if we are to secure production
of food for the long term: first, our land
capacity and second, the quality of
our soils.
Policy for safeguarding our highest
grade farmland is weak. There
is a paragraph (para. 112) in the
Government’s National Planning
Policy Framework which states
Local Planning Authorities should
take into account the economic and
other benefits of the Best and Most
Versatile Agricultural land – the best
for producing crops – but, where
large amounts of land are needed for
development, Councils need only “seek
to” to use areas with poorer soils for
development. As a result of this weak
protection, we have continued to lose
9,000 -10,000 acres a year of farmland
to housing, roads, and industry.
Forty per cent of this is our best land.
Yet for decades Governments have
weakened protection for land, as if food
production mattered little.
What of protecting soil quality itself?
Policy is arguably weak here too. There
are some rewards and some penalties
to encourage good soil management’,
but the current Government is keen on
deregulation and leaving it to farmers
who ‘know best’. We may think we
are unaffected here, yet the UK and
Europe is losing precious fertile soil
at an alarming rate, in the UK alone
we lose 2.2 million tonnes of valuable
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Bare soil
Ploughing, Essex
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RIGHT: Ploughed Field, Feltwell
topsoil every year.
We agree it is true that most farmers
know that the soils they farm are their
natural capital and source of their
wealth. Without soils there is no grass
or grazing, no crop or production. But
farmers need to make a living and a
profit. Farming, more than ever, is
under intense pressure to produce at
low cost in a tough and volatile market.
The short-term drive to make the sums
add up can override concern to protect
the soil. The conventional chemical
model of farming we have got used to
in the past 40 or 50 years does nothing
for the incredibly rich and complex
population of organisms that keep soil
alive (about which our understanding is
still in its infancy) and help it to recycle
the nutrients on which we depend.
Also some crops, such as growing
maize for aerobic digestion and silage,
can be problematic due to very heavy
machinery which compact the soil at
surface and can do at deeper levels
causing all kinds of problems; also
over time failure to replace soil organic
matter not only damage our wildlife
and our climate – they also
damage soils.
The solutions are not rocket science,
nor even soil science. Planning policies
need to stop treating greenfield
land as an unlimited resource ripe
for development. We also need to
understand the soil we have better;
the soil-maps we have are some 30
years old and the way land is classified
more than 50 years. An overhaul is
long overdue. Only then we will have
the data to monitor the quality and
quantity of is the soils being lost and
assess its value in terms of the food it
grows, the biodiversity and the wildlife
it supports, the way it soaks up and
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filters water, prevent flooding and locking up carbon to limit
climate change.
We could look to our Scottish neighbours where a Land
Use Strategy that aims to ‘fully recognise, understand and
value the importance of our land resources, and where our
plans and decisions about land use deliver improved and
enduring benefits, enhancing the wellbeing of our nation’ is
informing planning decisions.
To protect soil quality, we have, above all, to get farmers
and growers across the country on board. They need to be
given the incentives as well as the techniques to keep their soil
in good heart. We also need a Common Agricultural Policy
that principally pays farmers to protect the natural assets
they manage and from which we all gain such benefit. There
is evidence too that, if we can rebuild the natural fertility of
soils, we might just produce more food that has not travelled
so far, is of better quality and costs less.
Many destructive farming practices not only damage our
wildlife and our climate – they also damage soils. This is not
sustainable in the long term yet governments fail to recognise
the urgency of the crisis we are facing.
CPRE will continue to campaign to protect our soils from
needless development and encourage best farming practices
to maintain soil quality so we may grow abundant crops and
feed ourselves for years to come.
For further details: www.cprelancashire.org.uk
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