Time for a soil resurrection

SHORTLY before Easter, we saw the countryside in all its complexities. There had at last been two days without rain, so a neighbouring farmer was struggling to get sugar beet out of the ground, although the soil was hardly dry enough to take the machinery. Weeks late, it was a last desperate attempt where others had given up and left their beet and potatoes to rot. Up in London, other farmers were driving their tractors to Parliament to protest about the Government’s failure to take food security seriously. The lumbering vehicles held up traffic and got the attention of some of the media, but found little sympathy in Westminster, caught as it is in a post-brexit dream world.

For Agromenes, meanwhile, suddenly it’s spring. The years of replanting hedges and trees are beginning to bear fruit, literally. The apples and plums have burst into blossom, their light feathery white contrasting with the stand-out white of the magnolias and the pink haze of the cherry blossom—set off by the insistent gold of daffodils. Gerard Manley Hopkins was entirely right: ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring’—although, rather worryingly, he would have waited for it nearly a month more. It was the abundance of spring that moved him. New life and so much of it everywhere. Flowers and weeds, spreading out in fields and hedgerows, every corner filled with fecundity and the plants our ancestors had taken for granted until sprays, fertilisers and herbicides destroyed so much and left a great deal of the countryside near barren.

It was a weekend of contrasts, but these are the conflicts that we have to resolve if the countryside is to prosper. It will not be as easy to produce the food we need as weather patterns become more and more erratic and rain, storm and drought become widespread. This year’s difficulty in harvesting and sowing will be frequent occurrences here and throughout the world. We won’t be able to rely on certainty of production as we have generally in the past. Our farmers will be even more important for our food supplies, but their yields will be even less predictable. Their insecurity will be our insecurity and that was the lesson of those tractors in Westminster.

London is too far from the land easily to understand the crisis we are in. Every one of the trade deals that have been struck will increase the uncertainty of our own agriculture as imports will vie with home products, but will not reach the food safety and environmental standards we impose here in the UK.

We set many of those standards because we want spring to return to the fecund abundance of the past. We are ashamed that our biodiversity has declined more than in any other nation in Europe. The Government says it is determined we should farm in a way that respects the soil, counters climate change and still produces more of our food, yet it won’t pay the price. Its post-brexit support system leaves most farmers worse off; its trade deals undermine their markets; and it still hasn’t produced the promised regulations for a labelling system that enables us to know when food is truly produced here at home.

However, even in the midst of all this confusion, spring brings us up with a start. It’s true —nothing is as beautiful. Diminished as it is, in an increasingly frightening world, it lifts our hearts. Perhaps this year, in this great season of resurrection, we can commit to the recovery of the soils, the regeneration of agriculture and the recognition of our dependence on the natural world, so our children will enjoy an even more beautiful spring.

London is too far from the land easily to understand the crisis we are in