'Context' - A Blog
'Opening the Ley' - a recent painting. Might a come back in ley farming be a way forward for us in managing soil health?
Is It Time To Pack Up The Plough...Or Get It Out Again?
14/05/2021
A lot of thought is going in to ‘no till’ (also known as ‘no dig’ or ‘no plough’) systems of land management these days. Could it be that the writing is on the wall for this several thousand year old implement and all its elegant simplicity of purpose? I’m not so sure.
Without doubt, this change of attitude towards ploughing has come about for the best of reasons. With our growing understanding of the complex balance of the ecosystem of the soil, it has become clearer that ploughing causes a disruption to this ecosystem, and it is right that as our understandings of these processes grow, we should do our utmost to work with them.
A few years prior to ploughing up the ‘pigs’ field, (see previous article) I had had a conversation with my previous boss on the first farm I had worked at, an all grass dairy farm just over the hill in West Sussex. The conversation was prompted by me asking about why we kept an old plough parked up in the nettles, that I had never seen used. He explained to me (not without a certain wistfulness) how he had changed from true mixed farming, with arable (wheat, oats and barley) crops, sheep, cattle and pigs to just dairy and beef farming, because the economics had changed. This plough had belonged to this old era, and was kept ‘just in case’. Does this plough in the nettles (which must be one of many laid up alike, on ‘grass’ farms all over the country) symbolise how the plough has already become redundant to a significant portion of our livestock farmers? Perhaps the plough really will become a thing of the past.
But there are reasons why the plough has been with us for several thousand years. Its capacity to wreak a transformation in the soil, changing it from what it has been, to the potential to be something else for a relatively minimal input of energy is an incredible asset.
The discussion on the pros vs. cons of ‘no till’ systems in a farming context is a complex one and it seems we still need to increase our understanding of the minutiae of the soil processes involved. We also need to gain clearer data on how the different systems affect the ability of farmlands in differing soils and climates to sequester carbon in the longer term.
My feeling is, here in Britain at least, that it’s not time to park up our ploughs for good just yet. I’d even go so far as to suggest that we should perhaps be using them more on some of our farms.
The more involved insight from the progression of ‘no dig’ systems is that nurturing soil health is paramount. We need to try to keep our arable ground ever healthier, maintaining and increasing levels of organic matter in it, and giving opportunity for the ecosystems within it to keep regenerating.
We should also be making the best use of our farmland here, rather than relying on importing more and more food from all over the world. We need plant based protein crops like never before, which means arable ground. Until there is wider consensus on a viable, demonstrably environmentally sound, field scale alternative, that really means ploughed ground.
So are there other things we could be doing which provide us a way forward for now, using tried and tested techniques?
I think so. I can see little better way to do this, in our existing arable areas, than with grass. The increased use of ‘leys’ (temporary grass crops, in the ground for 2 to 10 years) offers the chance to do all these things, and it seems that utilising that grass (that we have such a good climate for) with grazing livestock would be really sensible. More use of this well established system of ‘ley farming’ might offer a much more sustainable way of managing our arable lands.
To return to the ploughs that have already been abandoned on what were once mixed farms, but are now all down to permanent pasture in the ‘livestock’ areas of the country; I can’t help wondering if this wasn’t our best move either.
One of the biggest problems facing such farms these days is an over reliance on anthelmintics (or wormers in common parlance). These are medicines used to destroy parasitic intestinal worms whose life cycle is part spent in the gut of the animal and partially on the pasture they graze. Wormers have been a godsend to livestock farmers, but we have now come to rely on them so heavily, that the parasites are evolving resistance to the anthelmintics faster that we can generate new ones to cope with this.
One of the other most effective ways of disrupting the life cycle of these stomach worms (hence reducing the need for wormers) is to graze the stock as much as possible on ‘clean’ pasture, i.e. that which has no, or very few, infective worm larvae in the grass itself. Just about the ‘cleanest’ grass you can get, in fact, is by ploughing in the grass, growing an arable crop for a year or two and then reseeding to grass. Ley farming again in fact.
I’m not saying we should just ‘return to the old ways’. Our science and technology allow us to farm better and with far more understanding than our forbears were able to.
Modern tractors are becoming able to adjust the way implements are used on a micro scale within fields, based on information about the details of each square yard of the field, using satellite technology. Routine testing for the presence of infective livestock parasitic worm larvae has already wrought a transformation in our use of anthelmintics, by allowing these wormers to be used far more sparingly, thus helping to preserve their efficacy for the future. Technology can, and does, adapt to the needs of the farming system.
From my view, the use of mixed farming systems, which, with the judicious use of the plough, could still offer us so much, has disappeared largely due to its economics not stacking up in our current economic system, but this is an economic system which fails to take account of soil health.
It seems that it’s not just famers who are needed to wreak the changes to safeguard the future of our soil, but all of us.
Maybe one could take the ploughed field itself as a metaphor. Our deeper understanding of the environmental significance of our increased understanding of soil health, is the insight that our apparently perfect looking ploughed field has a sea of inverted dock plants under it.
What we choose to do next is what really matters. We can take a moment to think about changing our systems and plans to address the problem, hauling our boots back on to spend a while pulling the upturned roots of the docks out, or we could just admire the ploughed field that looks good for now and forge on ahead regardless.
I for one, have never known a dock plant to disappear of its own accord.
A few years prior to ploughing up the ‘pigs’ field, (see previous article) I had had a conversation with my previous boss on the first farm I had worked at, an all grass dairy farm just over the hill in West Sussex. The conversation was prompted by me asking about why we kept an old plough parked up in the nettles, that I had never seen used. He explained to me (not without a certain wistfulness) how he had changed from true mixed farming, with arable (wheat, oats and barley) crops, sheep, cattle and pigs to just dairy and beef farming, because the economics had changed. This plough had belonged to this old era, and was kept ‘just in case’. Does this plough in the nettles (which must be one of many laid up alike, on ‘grass’ farms all over the country) symbolise how the plough has already become redundant to a significant portion of our livestock farmers? Perhaps the plough really will become a thing of the past.
But there are reasons why the plough has been with us for several thousand years. Its capacity to wreak a transformation in the soil, changing it from what it has been, to the potential to be something else for a relatively minimal input of energy is an incredible asset.
The discussion on the pros vs. cons of ‘no till’ systems in a farming context is a complex one and it seems we still need to increase our understanding of the minutiae of the soil processes involved. We also need to gain clearer data on how the different systems affect the ability of farmlands in differing soils and climates to sequester carbon in the longer term.
My feeling is, here in Britain at least, that it’s not time to park up our ploughs for good just yet. I’d even go so far as to suggest that we should perhaps be using them more on some of our farms.
The more involved insight from the progression of ‘no dig’ systems is that nurturing soil health is paramount. We need to try to keep our arable ground ever healthier, maintaining and increasing levels of organic matter in it, and giving opportunity for the ecosystems within it to keep regenerating.
We should also be making the best use of our farmland here, rather than relying on importing more and more food from all over the world. We need plant based protein crops like never before, which means arable ground. Until there is wider consensus on a viable, demonstrably environmentally sound, field scale alternative, that really means ploughed ground.
So are there other things we could be doing which provide us a way forward for now, using tried and tested techniques?
I think so. I can see little better way to do this, in our existing arable areas, than with grass. The increased use of ‘leys’ (temporary grass crops, in the ground for 2 to 10 years) offers the chance to do all these things, and it seems that utilising that grass (that we have such a good climate for) with grazing livestock would be really sensible. More use of this well established system of ‘ley farming’ might offer a much more sustainable way of managing our arable lands.
To return to the ploughs that have already been abandoned on what were once mixed farms, but are now all down to permanent pasture in the ‘livestock’ areas of the country; I can’t help wondering if this wasn’t our best move either.
One of the biggest problems facing such farms these days is an over reliance on anthelmintics (or wormers in common parlance). These are medicines used to destroy parasitic intestinal worms whose life cycle is part spent in the gut of the animal and partially on the pasture they graze. Wormers have been a godsend to livestock farmers, but we have now come to rely on them so heavily, that the parasites are evolving resistance to the anthelmintics faster that we can generate new ones to cope with this.
One of the other most effective ways of disrupting the life cycle of these stomach worms (hence reducing the need for wormers) is to graze the stock as much as possible on ‘clean’ pasture, i.e. that which has no, or very few, infective worm larvae in the grass itself. Just about the ‘cleanest’ grass you can get, in fact, is by ploughing in the grass, growing an arable crop for a year or two and then reseeding to grass. Ley farming again in fact.
I’m not saying we should just ‘return to the old ways’. Our science and technology allow us to farm better and with far more understanding than our forbears were able to.
Modern tractors are becoming able to adjust the way implements are used on a micro scale within fields, based on information about the details of each square yard of the field, using satellite technology. Routine testing for the presence of infective livestock parasitic worm larvae has already wrought a transformation in our use of anthelmintics, by allowing these wormers to be used far more sparingly, thus helping to preserve their efficacy for the future. Technology can, and does, adapt to the needs of the farming system.
From my view, the use of mixed farming systems, which, with the judicious use of the plough, could still offer us so much, has disappeared largely due to its economics not stacking up in our current economic system, but this is an economic system which fails to take account of soil health.
It seems that it’s not just famers who are needed to wreak the changes to safeguard the future of our soil, but all of us.
Maybe one could take the ploughed field itself as a metaphor. Our deeper understanding of the environmental significance of our increased understanding of soil health, is the insight that our apparently perfect looking ploughed field has a sea of inverted dock plants under it.
What we choose to do next is what really matters. We can take a moment to think about changing our systems and plans to address the problem, hauling our boots back on to spend a while pulling the upturned roots of the docks out, or we could just admire the ploughed field that looks good for now and forge on ahead regardless.
I for one, have never known a dock plant to disappear of its own accord.