Modern agriculture isn’t working. Two energising books come up with contrasting solutions
here was one day in each of the springs of my childhood when we moved the ewes and lambs from the fields around the house to land at the top of the farm. Neighbours, friends and sheepdogs as well as us kids were called on to help – the lively lambs would sometimes escape through fences or take wrong turns, needing to be rounded up or caught. Birds called all around us – bubbling curlews with their long-legged chicks running in the verges, a colony of arctic terns swooping above.
“My grandfather Peter,” Langford writes, “was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is considered a villain, blamed for ecological catastrophe and with a legacy no one wants.” From Langford’s immediate family we move around England, meeting dairy farmers crushed by the low price supermarkets pay for milk, disillusioned pig farmers turning to mixed agriculture and small scale organic farmers.
Regenesis conveys a sense of urgency about these challenges, and has a huge scope. Monbiot thinks globally, looking beyond these shores to poorer nations that feel the impact of climate changes and the economic pressures most keenly. Instead Monbiot looks at growing vegetables using “green manure” – cover crops and woodchip – instead of livestock dung. Other new ideas include robot weeders, alternative grains and the use of bacteria grown in vats to meet our need for protein and even fat. “Much of our food supply could be farmfree,” he enthuses. The book ends with a call for farm abolition, which, after a lot of meticulously evidenced thinking, feels like a risky leap.
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