Some farmers are looking towards older practices in a bid to enhance the standard of the meat they produce, boost the soil health in their fields, and help to mitigate global climate change .
The cow pats on Peter Grieg’s farm are “the real deal”, he says. Squatting during a field, he examines dozens of holes excavated by dung beetles in only a couple of hours.
“Inside that cow pat there’s an absolute industry. There are billions of bacteria, many species of life, working away at what real farming is about.”
His farm, Pipers Farm, nestles beneath the wilds of Exmoor, within the fertile Devonshire hills, where his herd of native breed Devon Red Rubies graze fields rich in wildflowers and clover. The cows are outside all year round, grazing unsprayed land.
Peter and his wife have been working on this land for the last three decades. They farm regeneratively, an approach inspired, he says, by the wisdom of pre-war farmers, when hedgerows were wild, livestock mingled within the fresh air, and industrial chemicals were a thing of the longer term .
Common sense
He describes it as the engineering of food production. Well-fertilised soil produces good quality grass, which feeds the cows and successively humans, who eat the nutrient-rich meat.
He believes modern, intensive farming, with its use of synthetic chemicals, antibiotics and processed animal feed, all work to destroy this delicate balance. Agriculture has moved far away from the “basic common sense” of acting consonant with nature.
“It produces massive quantities of an industrial commodity, which is so destructive to the wildlife and doesn’t deliver the essential building blocks of human nutrition.”
The basic principles include not disturbing the soil by avoiding ploughing and reducing the utilization of chemicals. The world is often shielded from the weather by planting cover crops, like clover, and using grazing animals for natural fertilisation. Nature will do the remainder , proponents say.
Companies like Nestle, McCain, Unilever, PepsiCo and Danone are publicly backing the approach. By comparison, organic farming may be a stricter system, with rules banning weed killers and artificial fertilisers, alongside stringent animal welfare standards.
“They had no alternatives,” he says of older generations. “They did not have the chemicals. They did not have big machines. They did not have the economic fertilisers.”
However, there are challenges. Some crops produced at an outsized scale – like potatoes and sugar beet – normally need the land to be ploughed.
For a farmer to vary to a special system would cost money – and currently farmers aren’t necessarily paid more for food that’s produced to higher standards.