AT THE start of November is a day so limpidly lovely that it could make you cry. The sky is royal blue, and tiny white clouds scud across it. It’s warm enough to take off my fleece.
There’s still plenty in the soil to keep me over the winter: purple sprouting broccoli, curly kale, spinach, chard, winter lettuce, and yet more celery, should I feel able to face it. The last of the cheerful pink cosmos sway in the breeze on the herbaceous border, alongside the tithonia and asters. No frosts have hit us yet, but they will come, taking the flowers with them, and quite probably the lettuces.
It is a day for looking backwards and forwards. As I look backwards, I am agog that this has been possible, that anything has grown, and that I have been feeding myself and continue to do so. As I look forwards, it is in the knowledge that, if this is to happen again, if it’s to go on happening and not be a fluke, then I must renew the soil. It has fed me; now I must feed it.
Not too far away is a former arable farm that now grows crops to produce energy. It’s a sign of our times that on a 1050-acre estate it wasn’t possible to make ends meet, as margins were cut. It’s fundamentally wrong that this is the case.
Now, however, the farm produces enough carbon dioxide to heat 8000 homes all year round through growing biofuel crops. At the end of this process is a product called digestate. It looks like manure, but doesn’t have manure’s thick consistency. It can be delivered in one-tonne bags. The downside is that it will cost me £50 a bag.
The limpidly lovely day would have been ideal for a mulch delivery. Instead, I opt for the day after, when it pours with rain. It is biblical. I get soaked, waiting for the digestate men to arrive, but they are cheerful and friendly; so it doesn’t matter.
The digestate man gives me the sales pitch. A stick would grow in it, is the general overview, but it’s too strong to be used alone. It needs mixing into soil. So long as it improves the soil, more worms flourish here, and the soil’s biodiversity and richness develop, I’ll be happy.
In the normal course of events, who thinks about soil? Perhaps very few of us. Before all this, I certainly never did. But it might be a plan to start thinking, because we all depend on it for our food.
And the news isn’t good. A government survey found that almost four million hectares of soil in England and Wales are at risk of compaction; more than two million hectares of soil are at risk of erosion; intensive agriculture has caused arable soils to lose 40-60 per cent of their carbon capture; and soil degradation a decade ago was expected to cost us £1.2 billion every year.
Here we have it, yet again: intensive agriculture setting the soil and the environment back, costing us the earth in every conceivable way. The words “intensive” and “agriculture” simply shouldn’t go together. You try squeezing more out of the soil, using chemicals, and the earth will pay you back. In desolation.
The State of Nature report, in 2016, said that the major decline in British wildlife over the past 50 years was linked to intensive farming practices. At this stage, one in ten British wildlife species was threatened with extinction. One in ten. With extinction.
Intensive agriculture and the system that appears to require it make me fizz with anger. It’s easy to say that The Chemical Brothers are to blame. But we, as consumers, have our role to play. If we expect a loaf of bread for 50p, milk for under a pound, or a supermarket chicken for a fiver, we are directly causing harm to our environment, contributing to the suffering of creatures that have a short existence before their deaths rather than a nice life, and seeing lots of farmers go out of business every year. With that, the nature of our own environment changes.
Ask yourself: who is paying for prices to be so low? If it’s the soil, the wildlife, the chicken, the cow, the farmer, ask yourself if you could, perhaps, pay a little more to ensure that the soil is enriched, that wildlife returns, the chicken lives its full life rather than just a few months, the cow grazes outside in the summer, and the farmers don’t shoot themselves.
It doesn’t really matter what size plot we all have, whether it’s a window box, a patio, an urban backyard, or rolling acres: we can all make a difference to the soil around us, as well as preserve it through our shopping choices.
November also marks Soil Week. Again, who knew? But, as soil produces around 95 per cent of all that we eat in one way or another, it’s time for me to sit up and pay attention.
It wouldn’t be excessive to say that we know more about the solar system than we do about soil. In a mere teaspoon of soil, you would find more micro-organisms than there are people on the earth. The soil beneath our feet is an incredible and yet alien world.
Rather like the rainforests (which we’re also busy destroying), there is much untapped potential in the soil, much that we don’t yet fully understand. How is this? Well, the micro-organisms produce antibiotics to protect them against one another. These are the basis for some of the antibiotics that we use. We are literally making medicine from the soil.
And the soil is full of wonder. Mycorrhizal fungi connect plants to each other, and trees to each other too, to the most remarkable ends. Trees and mycorrhizal fungi support each other too. Fungi give trees nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, and trees in their turn provide the fungi with carbon.
I may be running about with digestate, but soil takes a long, long time to create. It is thought that it takes around 100 years to build just five millimetres of soil, and yet it’s the work of a moment to destroy soil through the use of chemicals or erosion.
Soil is also a wonderful and needful storer of carbon. It stores three times as much as all the plants on earth, including trees. Intensive farming, however, releases carbon, and so we are losing soil 50-100 times faster than it is being remade.
If we want to prevent flooding, capture carbon, preserve our environment, and, yes, feed ourselves, caring for the soil under our feet has to be at the centre of everything we do.
It is quiet at the allotments in November. The spring-and-summer growers have disappeared back to their homes, leaving their plots slumbering over the winter. There is just a hardy crew of us spending our time enriching the soil. Every week seems to bring more tonne bags of digestate, more piles of manure, sacks of leaves collected to make leaf mould.
It is easy to think of a garden, or an allotment, as a place that you inhabit in the summer: sitting outside drinking a glass of white wine, perhaps, taking in the view.
But the summer can’t happen without the winter. The processes of renewal, restoration, rest, and enrichment must all happen now. They are what gives us the high-summer joy. Winter, it turns out, is the real time to garden. This is when the change, the development, the renewal really happens.
That’s like the rest of life. We want life to be all summer days, sunshine, and happiness. Writing this in a pandemic, I know full well that this isn’t so. But it is in the seemingly bleak times that renewal happens, that the soil of our own lives can be enriched. It can’t be July every month of the year. We need it to be a rainy day in November sometimes, however miserable that experience may be.
This is an edited extract from This Blessed Plot by Hazel Southam, published by Canterbury Press at £12.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.39); 978-1-78622-342-5.
