It’s sixty-one years since Pete Townshend of the band ‘The Who’ sang about his generation. He was twenty-years old back then, and people of the age he is now, judged the youth of the nineteen-sixties as being degenerate. Roger Daltrey – Townshend’s bandmate – has been a farmer since 1971 alongside a continuing rock career, which certainly defies any accusations of degeneracy. Apart from a herd of over two hundred cows the family owns a trout farm and a brewery, which is now run by Jamie, the forty-year-old son, who also has a band of his own.
In 1965 The Who sang; ‘Hope I die before I get old’ (which clearly has not happened to Townshend and Daltrey), and a new generation is raising concerns about the degeneracy of the social media platforms which have proliferated after the launch of Myspace and Facebook in 2003 and 2004. For those under the age of sixteen it seems unfair that they are to face a ban from using media invented by older generations, and the most dangerous content is created by their elders. There is some truth in the counter argument that when they reach the age of sixteen, users will fall victim to exploitation having had no prior experience from which to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of modern technology.
There is a lot of talk nowadays featuring a new usage of the word: ‘generative’. In particular, people are beginning to speak of generative Artificial Intelligence, which is often considered a threat to jobs, but there’s also another new coinage amongst farmers which is much more optimistic: Regenerative Agriculture. You’ll see it becoming increasingly common on retail packaging, indicating a positive shift in farming practices. Funnily enough, far from being entirely new, there’s a lot about regenerative agriculture which seems to hark back to mediaeval methods!
Summer droughts, spring floods and extreme changes in weather, including strong winds threaten to cause the type of damage to the land which led to the dustbowl conditions in America during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Soil blew away, having lost fertility and new deserts were created. In America the techniques used to recover lost arable land were a combination of avoiding aggressive ploughing and similar activities which contributed to turning soil to dust, the use of cover crops where roots would help anchor the earth, and agro-forestry to create wind-barriers. Chemical fertilisers were added, but since that era scientific approaches to soil health have discovered that diversity of soil constituents is better than artificial fertilisers.
Recently some horticulturists have recommending burying cotton underwear in the soil and digging it up again after three months. This is not ‘degenerative’ but provides a way of assessing the fertility of the tilth. Ideally the cotton should rot away due to the richness of the ground as a seedbed. Where we have Cotswold brash it can be quite difficult to bury clothing, but the fact that a key aspect of regenerative agriculture is to avoid aggressive digging, the main advantage is that roots can be left in the ground and crops rotated as was traditionally the mediaeval practice.
The three-field system meant leaving one field fallow and cultivating the other two, rotating the use of each every year. Where livestock provides manure it helps to overcome the rising prices of manufactured fertiliser. A return to mediaeval ideas makes scientific sense, leaving farmers to focus on growing feedstuff for stock, food for the population and even fuel for energy production.
Regenerative agriculture is not just a passing fashion. The future role of farming has ever been more vital.
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