Getting off the Treadmill
With Kate Still
Kate Still works at the Soil Association, a charity that campaigns against intensive farming, so we figured talking to her might be a good starting point when learning all about soil and farming. As Head of Farming Programmes, Kate works daily with farmers helping them to transition to regenerative farming, acknowledging that “they’ve been stuck on a bit of treadmill”.
The idea of cutting themselves off, you know, is obviously quite a terrifying prospect. So it's understanding that it's quite a slow, steady transition to rebuild that soil fertility and soil health and soil organic matter going forward.” Over the years farmers have overgrazed their fields, lost that much-needed bacterial balance by overspraying chemicals and killed biodiversity by sowing a single monoculture. They’re now “looking and testing what they’ve got, because they just sort of assumed it was doing okay”. And the pressure is on as government subsidies prioritise farming regeneratively and consumer demand is increasing for more products that “recover and replenish soil health”. With any shift in behaviour, acknowledging that “the choice that you’ve made previously were the wrong choices is obviously quite challenging” but as Kate deals with this daily, she knows that one of the best ways to help this transition is “to give farmer’s access to each other.”
“A lot of it is about confidence building, and a lot of it is about hand holding and seeing what your neighbour has achieved, seeing what people have achieved on the same soil types as you, in the same situation, so that you can build confidence.”
Transitioning over to a regenerative way of farming can be daunting, but taking “baby steps” with some “low risk” methods proves successful, from “cover crops” to applying “farming manure” is a good “quick and relatively non-scary practice to do.” For Kate, moving away from inputs and towards a regenerative way of farming is paramount: “the climatic impacts of nitrogen production, the biodiversity destruction from agro-chemical use, and the massive potential to store carbon in healthy soils [...] we can’t afford not to”. As the world heats up, and the climate catastrophe looms, we are “still lacking evidence”. Research costs money, and right now agrichemicals are still king. However, the Soil Association is working on an “innovative farmers programme, a sort of farmer-led research”, to provide somewhere for farmers to learn and share their knowledge.
Looking ahead, Kate is finding “funky bacteria” within mob grazing a minefield of information, she’s realising how little we know about “soil biology” and is looking forward to doing more worm hunts and continuing to learn about this complex world of soil.
To find out more, check out -
www.soilassociation.org/
