It’s a bright and sunny morning in the north of England, and I’m looking out over my garden with a cup of tea before I start work for the day, work for the moment still being a computer set up on my dining table in my lounge.
But as much as I would enjoy talking about my garden, and my plans for the year ahead, I actually want to focus on something else in this post.
What I wanted focus on, were those things that give us hope for a better future, not just for us personally, but for wider society.
While I am by nature an optimist, I have for the longest time been struggling to bring that optimism to my view of the wider world. We do after all have plenty of negatives to distract us: From climate change and a growing population, to the pollution of our rivers and oceans, or the manipulation of our elections, and the predatory tactics of certain social media companies, not to mention an increasingly hostile Russia, double standards in our political leaders, and the increasing costs of running our cars or heating and lighting our homes.
Granted, on the other side of the coin there are vaccines and anti-virals to help us fare better in the pandemic, while the age of the self-driving electric car seems seems to be drawing ever closer.
The difficulty I have though, is that these positives seem vastly outweighed by the negatives. There is a growing will in society to reduce the impact we have on the earth, but no convincing plan to do it. Instead we talk about carbon offsets that allow to continue doing what we want in one part of the world, because trees are being planted somewhere else.
Or the positives aren’t quite a positive once you get into the details… Electric cars are wonderful, clean running, quiet and almost able to do the driving for us. But, they require more natural resources to build, including rare earth minerals, so each vehicle needs to travel at least 70k miles before it breaks even environmentally on the cost of production, and even that is assuming the electricity it runs on doesn’t come from a fossil fuel powered source.
Just writing all this down feels like its summoning the clouds of negativity to obscure the morning sun.
So, where is the optimism mentioned in the title coming from?
Well, I don’t have an answer for all the world’s ills of course, but I did find a glimmer of hope in a book I read a few months ago, and a documentary I watched just last week.
The subject? Farming, and in particular, the case for some seriously old-fashioned style farming.
The book and documentary in question are both called Sacred Cow – the case for better meat, and whether you’re a carnivore or a vegan, I think the ideas outlined will surprise and appeal.
How can I possibly find such optimism in a book about farming and the rearing of livestock for food?
Well, its the implications… but to explain those I need explain the idea that Sacred Cow is based on:
The idea is simple.
If you graze cows (or other livestock) differently, they can help to regenerate the land on which they graze, so that it grows better grass, captures more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, makes the animals healthier and happier.
Its a practice known simply as Regenerative Agriculture.
So, what special tools or machinery do you need to do this, what extra chemicals do you need to spray on the land to make this work?
Practically nothing.
All you need to do is fence the cows into one area of land until the grass gets down to the right length. Short, but not too short. If the grass is too short it will take exponentially longer to grow back, which is inefficient, too long and your spending more time moving the cows than you need to, which is also inefficient.
Once the grass gets to the right length, you move the cows to another fenced in area and repeat. For maximum efficiency you give the cows enough land to last them a day, then move them, and after thirty days the grass on the first plot of land has fully grown back.
Simple, but also very importantly…. natural.
While the cows are feeding, they break up the soil with their hooves, fertilise it with their manure, and water it with their urine.
This creates rich and diverse habitat for countless countless insects, bugs and worms, all of which help to break down the trampled grass and manure, enriching the soil microbiome in the process, which itself helps to capture more carbon.
All this helps to feed the grass of course, which grows ever more lush on the added nutrients and captured water, providing more nutritious, taster food for the cows.
Not only that, but all this happens without the need for pesticides, herbicides or artificial fertilisers, which in turn result in a greater diversity of wildflowers and other plants germinating and growing with the grass, attracting more insects and invertebrates, which in turn attracts more birds.
To put it simply, rearing livestock in this way gradually creates a highly biologically diverse habitat in the form of a natural meadow or pastureland.
So far, so good, but what about all that methane which these animals burp into the atmosphere? Well it turns out that regenerative agriculture takes care of that too, because the methane produced by the cows is part of a ‘closed cycle’. The methane is released by the cows, it rises up through the atmosphere, and then over the course of seven years it breaks down into Carbon Dioxide and water… the exact same things absorbed by the grass that the cows feed on.
Does the grass absorb the same amount that is released by the cows? No, the grass and soil on which it grows actually absorb more carbon dioxide than is produced from the methane which cows produce, because as the microbiome of the soil improves, it sequesters or captures carbon dioxide in the soil for as long as that soil exists. The more soil that is produced, the more carbon is captured.
Now you might think that after I’ve explained it here, there is little point in watching the documentary or reading the book, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sacred Cow covers so much more, including an exploration of the morality, health impact and sustainability of eating better meat.
Of course, this isn’t how all livestock are currently raised, its still very much a tiny percentage of farmers who have heard of Regenerative Agriculture, let alone been persuaded of its merits.
In addition, the cynical side of my nature will also suggest that this model of farming just isn’t something that the huge mega-corporations that dominate so much of our modern life would be interested in, because it focuses on quality rather than quantity, and it allows farmers to just get on with natural farming, rather than forcing them to buy expensive fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, and none of those thing are compatible with bigger corporate profits.
Despite these obvious and perfectly legitimate issues, there’s still some part of me that finds this model of living with the earth to be so simple and so obvious, that eventually more and more farmers, large and small, will move over to do things this way.
Then again, perhaps it’s just the foolish optimist in me.
The Urban Englishman – March 2022