Everything in farming is down to the earth
IT’S a pretty safe bet the term “back to basics” is one of the most over-used in the media these days.
Farming’s no exception – yes, we’ve been urged to trundle down this road recently as well – and to make better use of what lies, often quite literally, at the root of everything we produce: the soil.
It’s true that it’s very easy to overlook the importance of what is a key ingredient in just about every farming venture.
Perhaps it’s because the land we work on seems to have been around forever and gives the impression of never changing that leads us to concentrate on other things which seem more pressing.
Most of us, I guess, are beginning to realise it’s overly simplistic to think we can sort out all the problems we come up against with more fertiliser or lime. So jogging our memories with a wee reminder which might encourage us to get back to looking after this particular basic won’t do us any harm.
I think it was Mark Twain who said land was always a good investment – as they weren’t making it any more.
That’s maybe not quite right, but it sure is a slow process if a booklet on soils which is going to be handed out at the Highland Show is correct.
According to the Valuing Your Soils guide released earlier this week it takes something like 500 years for an inch of top soil to be created from the various forces of nature that go into creating it.
But I wouldn’t be inclined to hang about on it being made because the same booklet says that, in the UK alone, almost 3 million tonnes of soil are either washed or blown away every year!
Now I haven’t done the maths, but it certainly looks like we’re losing it at a faster rate than it’s being made.
The importance our soils is being recognised on the wider front as well – and there has been news in the past week of a fair bit of money being invested in more research into how our soils are coping with modern challenges like climate change.
While the scientists seemed to go through a phase of thinking that the soil wasn’t really much more than something which held plants while we could play about with it like a great big chemistry set, they have now cottoned on to the fact it’s the interaction of the millions of different creatures that wriggle and move about in the earth which keep our soils in tip-top condition.
And we should play our part, too.