All types of farming, including ‘regenerative’ systems like organic, are a “radical simplification of wild nature” – and most will need to be replaced by new high-tech food production systems if we are to prevent the “collapse of our natural life support systems”.
That’s the uncompromising view of environmentalist and Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, which he has elaborated on in a discussion with the founder of the Sustainable Food Trust, Patrick Holden.
Holden had invited Monbiot to expand on comments about what he sees as the advantages of ‘land sparing’ over ‘land sharing’, made during a fractious panel discussion at the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC), where the Guardian columnist restated the argument made in his recent Channel 4 documentary Apocalypse Cow of the need for an “end to the agricultural era”.
Holden began the conversation by challenging Monbiot’s assertion that all farming is a technological intervention. “I’d agree with that up to a point, but the interventionist role that human beings took in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture was as ecosystems managers”. The second big transition in farming into chemical agriculture had radically altered that balance, with catastrophic consequences for wildlife and the countryside, Holden added. It was this which had “driven” him into agriculture himself over 40 years ago, inspired by the idea of farming in harmony with nature – an approach, he remains convinced, is both possible and desirable.
Monbiot however believes that hugely changed circumstances, in particular the existential crisis posed by runaway global warming, necessitate a radical reimagining of food production which displaces ideas of ‘farming with the grain of nature’. That is why, he says, he supports a ‘land sparing’ approach, in which large tracts of land are set aside for nature’s exclusive use, while simultaneously intensifying food production using new low-impact technologies.
Monbiot told Holden: “There is a huge amount of science now to show that land sparing offers a lot more ecological restoration – richer wildlife, a richer food chain, more complex ecosystem. The aim of an environmentalist, which both of us would see ourselves as being, is to have as much land and sea as possible for wild nature because there is nothing to compare to the complexity of a natural wild ecosystem.”
Radical simplification
He added: “All human food production systems are simplified human food chains – extremely simplified, by comparison to the complex systems in nature. Land management is simplification. That’s why management is done – to turn something that is complex, with loads of different species, loads of different stages, into one kind of food, or possibly two kinds of food from that piece of land. In ecological terms, there is radical simplification in all viable food production systems.
“All human food production systems are simplified human food chains – extremely simplified, by comparison to the complex systems in nature”
“So my interest is in saying, let’s spare as much land as possible, and have as few of these simplified farming interventions as we can. Because this way we can stop the sixth great mass extinction of species is it tracks, stop the collapse of biodiversity and wildlife, stop the collapse of a life support systems.”
Monbiot claimed that “profligate use of land” (he cited as an example sheep farming in the Welsh hills, where animal density is as low as one sheep per 5 hectares) was more damaging to nature than than the pesticides and chemical fertilisers used in intensive farming. Livestock farming, which Monbiot claims accounts for 51% of the UK’s total surface area was “where we can make a massive difference – if we spare most of that land.”
Holden also tackled Monbiot on his enthusiasm for high-tech food production – giving as an example the process featured in Apocalypse Cow that produces protein from ‘thin air’ (or more specifically, from soil bacteria fed on hydrogen split from water and electricity). Aside from the question of whether such early research and techniques would “remain intact”, Holden cited doubts raised by the writer and food campaigner, Joanna Blythman (a fellow panellist on the ORFC debate) that the nutritional bioavailability of such foods would be good enough. He suggested that Monbiot had “an exuberant optimism” about the new technology.
Optimism…informed by pessimism
To that, Monbiot replied: “Well, it is optimism, but it’s informed by a pessimism on the prospect of where we stand without it. When you look at climate breakdown, water stress, the loss of aquifers, loss of dry season rainfall, soil loss, pollinator loss – put all that together and it just does not add up.”
Holden wanted Monbiot to recognise the environmental benefits of more climate-friendly regenerative and holistic farming systems (and when talking about livestock to acknowledge differences between “meat that is part of the problem, and meat that is part of the solution”, invoking ideas developed by Allan Savory about increasing meat production using ‘holistic management and planned grazing’ and the ‘regrowth of carbon sequestering grasslands’).
But Monbiot questioned the basic premise of regenerative farming, which he said was now “a label that is being attached to almost all types of production”. There was, he argued, little science to support such ideas, while there was “a huge amount of science on whether livestock production sequesters carbon or not – and in the vast majority of cases it doesn’t.”
Main image: George Monbiot speaking at this month’s Oxford Real Farming Conference (Hugh Warwick/OFRC).
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