Richard Haddock At least ‘dirty’ farmers have worms

HERE we go again. ‘Modern farming is wiping out worms’ read the headline as I opened my weekend paper.

Oh dear. Yet another stick with which to beat farmers. Yet another black mark for the industry which is supposed to be safeguarding, rather than wrecking, the environment.

Yet another sweeping generalisation which will be aimed at every producer from Penzance to Perth and which the average newspaper reader will glance at, sigh, conclude it merely confirms what he’s always thought about farmers – and move on to the next page.

But of course there’s farming and there’s farming. Read the detail and the precise type of farming referred to is soon defined as ‘intensive’ – a word which should properly have been included in the headline, if only there had been room.

The contents of the article do, however, raise some serious concerns. A study by the Natural Environmental Research Council discovered that 42 per cent of the fields it investigated had poor earthworm biodiversity and 16 per cent had no deep-burrowing worms at all.

Now, you don’t need to be a highly qualified agronomist to realise that such a situation is not desirable. The presence and activities of deep-burrowing worms are essential for keeping soil in good heart and helping it drain properly. Worms, in other words, are one of the farmer’s best friends.

So what has brought about this situation? The report’s authors are quite unequivocal: excessive ploughing and use of pesticides, primarily linked to vegetable production.

Suddenly the picture becomes clear, particularly for any livestock farmer from the South West who has ever visited East Anglia or the Fens and shuddered at the prairie farming operations which have over the years degraded soils, turning them into a neutral growing medium where crops will only grow if huge amounts of artificial fertiliser are piled on to complement the pesticide load.

The damage done, the study concludes, will take at least a decade to correct because of the worms’ slow reproduction rates. It’s probably going to take far longer than that given that only 60 per cent of the farmers whose soil was tested said they would be prepared to change their farming practices to help populations recover. I presume the other 40 per cent will claim they have no option but to carry on the way they are.

Why am I getting so interested in this? Because of the point I made earlier that the broad-brush presentation of studies like this is going to tarnish the whole industry. Even us, in this region. Here, thanks to decades of traditional livestock farming, we can boast healthy, worm-rich soils which remain as fertile as they ever were. That’s a situation where, you might have thought someone would have decided to award us a few brownie points.

It won’t happen because no one ever praises livestock farmers. Dur- ing the years when I was trying to effect some culture change at the NFU it was made clear to me that the livestock sector was an unfortunate stigma on the face of the industry.

More than one NFU president told me livestock was the ‘dirty man’ of farming. But those toadying office holders who were so quick to nod their agreement were by and large from those regions where, it now turns out, farming practices are wrecking one of the industry’s most precious assets.

I rest my case. Livestock farming – if all you are used to is growing nothing but barley or parsnips – may appear dirty and smelly. But I am proud to be able to announce, with a well-founded air of superiority, at least we’ve got worms.