Enough with 'local' and 'organic'. We'll begin to eat well when we farm well | James Rebanks | Opinion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/...nough-with-local-and-organic-well-begin-to-eat-well-when-we-farm-well
Sensible and thoughtful people everywhere are asking the same question: what should I eat?
It is a good question and an important one that speaks of a growing public awareness of our footprint on Earth and our wish to do less harm, individually and collectively. But as a farmer I know that that question masks another, far deeper one, that we must all ask ourselves: how should we farm?
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So, how should we farm? A sustainable and good farming landscape needs to do many things. It needs to feed us all affordably, to keep soil healthy, to provide micro-habitats such as hedgerows and field trees – and even protect what is left of precious habitats such as peat bogs, rivers, wetlands and woodland. If a farming landscape does all this well already, then it is perhaps enough for us to talk about it being “sustainable”. In practice, however, few places are like this, so we need to be way more ambitious.
We need to ask for “regenerative” agriculture, which means boosting soil health and encouraging biodiversity by working with natural processes as we grow food. More often than not, this means using grazing animals in “mixed” farming systems. Livestock, if well managed, repair soil, trample or eat crop residues and waste, provide fertiliser and control weeds. It means our uplands becoming patchworks of native habitats – meadows and pastures, woodland and bogs – and our lowlands working as rotational mosaics of fields.
We have become profoundly disconnected from the fields that feed us and it can be difficult to know, as we stand in the supermarket aisles, whether our food has been grown sustainably. We often don’t realise that, behind the misleading packaging, a lot of what we eat doesn’t come from our own landscapes, but from far-off places where animal welfare or environmental regulations are almost non-existent.
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Responding to this crisis, many people opt for a “plant-based diet”. For sure, there are sensible reasons to eat lots of fruit, nuts and vegetables. But if those plants were produced in landscape-scale monocultures, created by ploughing (which is increasingly understood to be an ecological disaster) and grown using either copious amounts of synthetic fertilisers or with industrial chicken litter and doused in pesticides – well, count me out. Such places would once have been biodiverse forests, mixed wild habitats or, perhaps, less destructive, more nature-friendly mixed farms. Yes, it takes less space, but it is the worst farming on Earth. The ethical reasoning doesn’t go nearly far enough.
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Likewise, just choosing to eat “local” food doesn’t cut it if that food is produced in ecologically disastrous ways. Even choosing to eat “organic” doesn’t necessarily meet the challenge, because organic fields are often ploughed and, at vast scale, devastate wildlife and release huge quantities of carbon into the air.
The difficult truth is that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all global sustainable diet that will solve the ecological crisis at one fell swoop. We are all local to somewhere and owning, seeing and taking responsibility for our food and how it is grown is imperative. We need to re-engage with the fields that feed us. We need to learn about and care about farming once more.
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When we find ways to farm regeneratively and in ways that allow nature to thrive around us, then we will have a range of foodstuffs to choose from. We can then take our pick and eat what we each think is right and good.