Urban Farming
Nostalgia Returning to More Natural Biological Technology in Farming.
We tend to believe that farmers used to produce food in a way that was somehow more natural. But is that true or is it romance and nostalgia?
A great website that traces the history of the countryside and agriculture - ukagriculture.com - contains an easy to digest history of UK farming developments, population changes and economic developments that had a significant impact on farming from the days of Saxon England onwards.
One small example is the fluctuation in the country's woodland from approximately 11% woodland cover during the Roman period (100AD) to 15% in Norman era. By 1350 AD it was down to around 7%, even less than today, then up to a broadly stable 10% while the total length of hedgerow continued to grow as more fields were enclosed.
Meanwhile there was from very early times an inexorable drift of population from the countryside to the towns and cities, which accelerated after c1750 and the onset of the industrial revolution.
Two more significant moments in history are the Second World War with the need to increase domestic food production and then, fuelled by a rural labour shortage, the development of the combined harvester.
Add in population growth, the search for profit and the need to increase food production and the result is so-called agribusiness, getting rid of the hedges that used to enclose our fields and the woodland that got in the way of the big machines that allegedly made farming more efficient.
It's pretty clear, therefore, that producing food – farming has always been driven by economics and by population changes.
So while in the past there may have been a better balance in the way farmland was used thinking nostalgically is something of a red herring. Farming is and always has been a commercial activity.
Urban population growth and production costs are the twin pressures to produce more from the same amount of land, especially on an island like Britain. They led in the 1960s and 70s to using more and more chemicals to get rid of pests and diseases and to increase yield per acre.
Then came the wake-up calls: the BSE and other scares, tales of hormones in our chicken, increasing evidence of chemical-induced carcinomas from our food.
A couple of decades on and we no longer tolerate the damage to people's health, to the land and threatened near-destruction of the environmental balance on which we all depend for life.
Arguably the growth in global communications and in global travel have opened people's eyes to inequalities in both food production and people's access to enough food.
There's a pressing need to balance the need for more food against the imperative to preserve the quality of the land it comes from. It's not nostalgia, it's commonsense.
Hence the growing emphasis on integrated and sustainable farming, organic and more natural methods and on such solutions as biological agricultural products such as biopesticides and biological yield enhancers that are arguably as crucial to the small developing world farmer as they are to the bigger operations in the developed countries.
It's about trying all kinds of things appropriate to the local ecology – as illustrated by this story about Zambian farmer Elleman Mumba a 54-year-old peasant farmer growing maize and groundnuts on his small plot of land in Shimabala, south of Lusaka.
Feeding his family used to be a problem and the yield was very little. "We were always looking for hand-outs; we had to rely on relief food."
With no oxen of his own to plough his field he had to wait in line to hire some, often missing planting as soon as the first rains fell. Each day's delay shrinks the potential yield by an estimated 1% - 2%.
In 1997, Mr Mumba, thanks to free training given to his wife, switched to conservation farming. It uses only simple technology, a special kind of hoe and Instead of ploughing entire fields, farmers till and plant in evenly spaced basins.
Only a tenth of the land area is disturbed. This reduces erosion and run-off and it increased his yield in the first season to 68 bags of maize - enough to feed the family and buy four cattle!
That's what innovation, sustainable farming and thinking outside the box are all about. It's about economics and what works, not about nostalgia.
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