Nostalgia? Returning to the more natural biological technology in agriculture

Agricultural methods may seem to modern eyes that they were once more natural, but are we being romantic and nostalgic?

A great website that tracks the history of the countryside and agriculture, ukagriculture.com, is an easily digestible history of the population and economic developments of the United Kingdom and their impact on agriculture from the days of Saxon England onwards.

A small example is the fluctuation in the country’s forests from about 11% forest cover during the Roman period (100 AD) to 15% in the Norman era. It dropped to around 7% by 1350 AD, even less than today, and then rose to a generally stable 10%, while the overall length of the hedge continued to grow as more fields were closed.

Meanwhile, from very early times there was an inexorable drift of population from the countryside to the towns and cities, which accelerated after c1750 and the start of the industrial revolution.

Two most significant moments in history are World War II with the need to increase national food production and then, driven by rural labor shortages, the development of the combine harvester.

To this is added the population growth, the search for profit and the need to increase food production and the result is the so-called agribusiness, getting rid of the hedges that closed our fields and the forest that stood in the way of the big machines. which supposedly made farming more efficient.

Therefore, it is quite clear that food production, agriculture, has always been driven by the economy and demographic changes.

So while in the past there may have been a better balance in the way farmland was used, thinking longingly is something of a red herring. Agriculture is now and historically has always been a commercial activity.

Urban population growth and production costs are twin pressures to produce more from the same amount of land, especially on an island like Britain. They led in the 1960s and 1970s to the use of more and more chemicals to eliminate pests and diseases and increase yields per acre.

Then came the wake-up calls: BSE and other scares, stories of hormones in our chickens, growing evidence of chemical-induced carcinomas from our food.

A couple of decades later, we no longer tolerate the damage to people’s health from chemicals in our food, or the threat of destruction of the environmental balance on which we all depend for life.

The growth of global communications and global travel has also opened people’s eyes to inequalities in both food production and people’s access to enough food.

It is becoming urgent that we balance the need for more food with the imperative of preserving the quality of the land it comes from. It’s common sense, it’s not about nostalgia.

That is why the increasing emphasis on sustained farming, organic and more natural farming and organic agricultural products such as biopesticides and biological yield enhancers that could arguably be as crucial for small farmers in the developing world as for the largest operations in the developed world.

It’s about trying all sorts of things appropriate to the local ecology, as illustrated by this story about Zambian farmer Elleman Mumba, a 54-year-old farmer who grows corn and peanuts on his small plot of land in Shimabala, south of Lusaka.

Feeding his family used to be a problem and production was very small. “We were always looking for handouts; we had to depend on relief food.”

With no oxen of his own to plow his field, he had to wait in line to hire some, and planting was often missed as soon as the first rains fell. For each day of delay, the potential return is reduced by 1% to 2%.

In 1997, Mr. Mumba, thanks to the free training given to his wife, switched to conservation agriculture. It uses only simple technology, a special type of hoe, and instead of plowing entire fields, farmers cultivate and plant in evenly spaced basins.

Only one tenth of the earth’s surface is disturbed. It reduces erosion and runoff and in the first season increased its yield to 68 bags of corn, enough to feed the family and buy four head of cattle! (his full story is on the BBC Africa website)

That’s what innovation, sustainable agriculture and innovative thinking are all about. It’s about economics and what works, not nostalgia.