There was one day in each of the springs of my childhood when we moved the ewes and lambs from the fields around the house to land at the top of the farm. Neighbours, friends and sheepdogs as well as us kids were called on to help – the lively lambs would sometimes escape through fences or take wrong turns, needing to be rounded up or caught. Birds called all around us – bubbling curlews with their long-legged chicks running in the verges, a colony of arctic terns swooping above. In the earth of one of those fields, Dad found a sharpened stone tool, evidence of land worked for thousands of years.
Those days come to mind reading two books that challenge us to think again about farming – what it has come to mean and how it could be transformed. Sarah Langford’s Rooted, with its case studies of agriculture over the last few decades, makes me thankful I grew up on the type of mixed family farm far less common than it once was. George Monbiot’s Regenesis takes as its subject no less than the entire world’s food production system and dares to imagine a world largely free of farming as we have known it.
“My grandfather Peter,” Langford writes, “was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is considered a villain, blamed for ecological catastrophe and with a legacy no one wants.” From Langford’s immediate family we move around England, meeting dairy farmers crushed by the low price supermarkets pay for milk, disillusioned pig farmers turning to mixed agriculture and small scale organic farmers. The stories are often frustrating and heartbreaking: tales of falling incomes, BSE, foot and mouth, and Covid. Langford is brilliant at explaining how complex economic forces impact on individuals. The book is absorbing, compassionate and should have a galvanising effect.
We follow Langford as she unexpectedly finds herself managing her husband’s family’s arable farm in Suffolk. They replant hedges, reclaim old field names, go organic, introduce new crop rotations, plant trees and wildflowers, extend field margins and bring in grazing animals. They see the land begin to flourish and meet other farmers doing similar things. This kind of “regenerative agriculture”, she writes, “is more than just growing food … it is a movement which can cure not just ecological ills but social ones too”. Here, grazing livestock can be beneficial to soil health and biodiversity – and to communities.
Since my childhood in the 1980s, the curlews have declined in number and the arctic tern colony disappeared completely. As a farmer’s daughter and an environmentalist, I find myself in the middle of what is often a fierce culture war about how to respond to climate change and biodiversity loss and what that means for the future of our land. Langford and Monbiot represent two different sides of this battle. However, they are in close agreement about many of the main problems, such as soil depletion and the market pressures and industrialisation that cause suffering to livestock, wildlife and farmers alike.
Regenesis conveys a sense of urgency about these challenges, and has a huge scope. Monbiot thinks globally, looking beyond these shores to poorer nations that feel the impact of climate changes and the economic pressures most keenly.
His well-researched arguments are frequently eye-opening. He makes startling connections between, for example, soya grown in South America and the British chickens to which it is fed, illustrating the concept of “ghost acres” – the area, outside its own land, that a farm requires in order to function.
The cost per calorie of meat in terms of land and carbon is compared unfavourably to that of vegetable protein. In this context, there is no place for livestock and the land would be better rewilded. The problem with the regenerative farming movement, Monbiot says, is that despite its beauty it is “yield blind” – using too much land and energy to produce relatively little food.
Monbiot is not a farmer, which frees him to have an outsider’s perspective. At the same time, he gives little consideration to the cultural side of farming, the realities of rewilding and its impact on rural populations. He criticises “conventional organic farming” and “foodies”, which do not feel like the most important enemies. The ideas that we should eat “less and better” meat or that food should be more expensive are vividly challenged in the passages where he meets users of food banks.
Instead Monbiot looks at growing vegetables using “green manure” – cover crops and woodchip – instead of livestock dung. Other new ideas include robot weeders, alternative grains and the use of bacteria grown in vats to meet our need for protein and even fat. “Much of our food supply could be farmfree,” he enthuses. The book ends with a call for farm abolition, which, after a lot of meticulously evidenced thinking, feels like a risky leap.
Despite it being hard to stomach for many of us from the countryside, Monbiot makes a convincing case. In desperate times, a shift to plant-based and even lab-grown food makes simple mathematical sense. Monbiot’s arguments take account of the needs of everyone in society, not just those who can afford premium meat, and not just those of us in the UK. Regenesis aims to be a gamechanger, and indeed it already makes ideas once thought radical seem tame.
But although the statistics in Regenesis are persuasive, the experiences described in Rooted counsel caution. As we must know from the last 50 years, new technology doesn’t always deliver and can be dangerous. Livestock farming is not about to disappear, so regenerative methods have an important role to play. Both Langford and Monbiot admit there are no easy answers, and it’s clear that we need a biodiversity of methods and thinkers, just as we need different plants and crops. A balanced diet for the world could contain efficient lab-grown food and well-managed pasture-fed meat.
The way forward can been found in the many places that these books agree. Both explore the wonder and complexity of soil. They strike on several of the same solutions, including the “no-till” method of growing crops without ploughing, or the use of perennial grains. Both see the benefits of organic methods such as planting wildflowers as a means of controlling pests.
At this time of crisis and change in farming, when government subsidies are shifting and agricultural colleges are fuller than ever, we are lucky to have Langford and Monbiot leading the conversation, thinking seriously about answers and exploring both old ways and new.
• Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution by Sarah Langford is published by Viking (£16.99). Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copies at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
