I feel a movement coming on

Movements are funny things and I’m not talking about a movement brought on by syrup of figs, I’m talking about a movement of thinking, of enlightened souls carving a new path, casting out the old with the new, capturing the zeitgeist of the moment. I’ve been caught up in a few movements in my time including Punk, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and then the Organic one.

But there’s a new one, and they’re sealing all our words like, soil health, mycorrhiza, green manures and allelopathy. They are called Conservation Agriculturalists.

There are several different types of Conservation Agriculturalists. The lowest of the low are those who have just given up the plough for a cultivator, the zonal tillers. Next you get the strip tillers, they do a little bit of tilling during seedbed preparation but only where the seed is placed and they look down on the zonal tillers. The Mothers of Conservation Agriculture are the no-tillers, who would rather cut off their right arm that move a particle of soil to place their seed and they look down on everyone. 

But the farmers that all Conservation Agriculturalists look down on are those of us who use the plough. That’s me, but I’m trying to stop, I promise.

I say that movements are funny things, they are actually not funny at all, they are earnestly serious but they do start off fun. Converting to organic agriculture in the 1990’s was a blast for me. I was no longer wedded to my sprayer receiving orders from my agronomist with his better-spray-it-just-in-case attitude, buyers were beating a path to my door as the market grew in double digits amid food scare after food scare and villagers hailed me as a local hero as barbecuing on a Bank Holiday in the Parish was now possible without me adding a cloud of free pesticide to their carbonised burgers.

Then It got serious when I discovered that I was in fact the lowly zonal tiller of the organic movement. I was stockless and arable. I also made other serious errors in attempt to win favour. Firstly I had too many acres to be properly organic, secondly I admitted that I had converted for financial gain, but the worst error I made was the fact that I was from East Anglia, the home of the Range Rover driving, shotgun swinging Barley Baron. Stamp Duty means that moving could be costly, so where should my practical aspirations lie? 

Should I set my sights on the mixed organic farmer who looks down on the stockless arable farmer due to his lack of natural fertility building beasts, jealous of his ability to lie in at the weekend, merrily turn on his straw chopper when a single dark cloud appears in the sky at harvest time or mercilessly cuts and mulches perfectly good fertility leys only to plough them in? Or should I aspire to the organic God, the grower, the he/she with soil underneath their fingernails, the digger and harvester with their bare hands and purveyor of muddy vegetables directly to their customers in a rustic box? I am afraid that I will never be able to wear the crown of grower, but my recent livestock purchase has elevated me up somewhat and I now call myself, “Arable, with some sheep”.

It’s also not fun when you realise that your movement doesn't necessarily have all the answers, like when the Sex Pistols brought out The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, having a nuclear deterrent did and still does actually work and my inability to spray my beans with a fungicide means one year in five they do get chocolate spot, defoliate and die as bean-less stalks.

Having said all that, movements are incredibly important and no meaningful change has ever come about without a radical beginning usually started by a lunatic, tempered by diplomacy and delivered by compromise. 

We have to recognise that just because our neighbours are doing something different to us doesn't mean that they are necessarily right or wrong, they are possibly trying to find alternative solutions to challenges that we all face which is to produce food profitably and hopefully impacting positively on the farmed environment. As farmers we need to stop looking over the hedge and start talking over it. We have so much to learn from each other.

To be sitting on a panel at the recent Organic Farmers and Growers National Organic Combinable Crops event with equal representation from the Organic and Conservation Agriculture movements was a first for me and it felt good. I suspect that we will always have points of difference in our production systems but that's a good thing for farming because it challenges us and gives our customers choice. 

I am happy to give Conservation Agriculturalists some of our words, as long as we can have some of theirs.

For the National Farmers Union Organic Forum blog, July 2017

Organic No-Till

The concept of no-till organic or non-organic with cover crops ticks pretty much every box. Lower fixed costs, lower variable costs, less time spent on a tractor, better soils, more efficient water infiltration, more earthworms and if you practice it right the chance of more stable and higher yields. Fitting neatly into the “Conservation Agriculture” bracket it even sounds a bit sexy and something that the average shopper might want to pay a little more for, so we could be adding higher prices to the list of plusses. What’s not too like?

For organic farmers like me there is one stumbling block. Glyphosate. We can’t use it. 

From what I am being told the key element for no-till success is the ability to kill your cover crop with glyphosate pre-sowing, but not according to Jeff Moyer who published “Organic No-Till Farming” in 2011. The trick is to get your cover crop to anthesis when it’s just about used up all it’s energy reserves and then bruise it to death with crimper roller. So no excuses for us soil moving addicted organic farmers then?

I know two organic farmers who are dipping their toes into the concept but I am taking a rather more cautious approach and have signed up to an Innovative Farmers project with Anglia Farmers and am one of the fools giving it a go with some trial work starting this autumn. As harvest 2016 wasn’t particularly kind to us, for the first two years I am going to try and achieve my part of the trial with equipment I already own. The plan goes as follows:

Year 1: spring oats. The preceding crop is spelt and by the time you read this article we will have under-sown into the spelt, in half hectare strips, buckwheat, phacelia, mustard and berseem clover. They will be sown individually and in a mix. Under-sowing the cover crops in May should mean that after harvest they should be well established and get to anthesis before winter when I will roll them with my Cambridge rolls. If that fails to kill them I will have a second chance of cover crop death through frost action over the winter. The best outcome I am hoping for is a thick mat of cover crop to smother weeds over Christmas and then an easy spring for me to slot in the spring oats with my low disturbance Cameleon drill. The worst outcome doesn’t bear thinking about. 

Year 2: winter beans. Again, the intention would be to under-sow a cover crop in the previous year’s oat crop in April/May with the most successful option or a mix of what did best in year one. However, to sow the beans I am considering putting some low ground disturbance Sabre tines onto my existing Cousins sub-soiler (not very no-till I know) and dribble the bean seeds down the back of the tines. Will it work? Will we actually get a frost? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Year 3: spring barley. Beans are a notoriously dirty crop for organic farmers, but having not disturbed the soil (much) over the preceding two years and under-sowing a cover crop in the winter beans, maybe, just maybe we might get away with a weed free entry into a spring barley crop  which itself will be under-sown with a two year diverse grazing ley.

Year 4 and 5 will be the fertility reset button for the rotation and provide grazing for my sheep before going back into a spelt crop in year 6 and the whole malarkey starts again.

But, how will I terminate the ley and start cropping again?

This is where I put my Jeff Moyer No-Till New Testament down and pick up the Zonal Tillage Old Testament of Gary Zimmer. Conveniently Reverend Zimmer still falls under the religion of “Conservation Agriculture” but he does allow zonal tilling with cover crops which enables me for at least one part of my rotation to “dig” (do you see what I did there) either my ageing Horsch Terrano or Gregoire Besson out of the nettles and mineralise a bit of nitrogen. Phew! 

And that’s it. Obviously, there will be howling errors in this ridiculous plan and I would be extremely grateful if you would email me (jpawsey@mac.com) with your thoughts and advice. At least I will be able to blame someone else if it all goes horribly wrong. Just before you do write though, I may have made a mistake with the berseem clover and the frost idea, so don’t remind me.

I have no idea how I will be farming five years from now, but what I do know is that it won’t be how I am doing it now. I also know that to farm organically and get enough yield to make a profit we have to mineralise some nutrients. Given that our organic matter has gone up since I started farming organically I am pretty sure that we are headed in the right direction with our existing system of using cover crops and leys and that has involved a lot of ploughing and tillage. However, we can always do better. 

In reality, if we continue to rely on legumes and animals to build fertility, a biological approach to weed, pest and disease control we will always have to adopt a managed approach, which will include no-till, zonal tillage and (I haven’t mentioned it yet) the plough.

Written for Groundswell Event, June 2017