Regenerative farming: Profits, people and Purpose
Bradwell Grove’s Charles Hunter-Smart explains the benefits of his farm’s transition to organic farming.
Can a farm transition from a conventional, chemical-oriented approach to an organic, chemical-free one? Matthew Phan investigates the experience of Bradwell Grove, a UK farm, in dealing with the challenges and implications of just such a transition. Yes, the transition is worth doing, but there are many systemic challenges ahead.
Modern agriculture evolved partly to meet challenges of food supply and affordability. Yet its use of chemicals has depleted the land and its biodiversity. Add in the growing challenges of climate change, as well as failing farms and sick farmers. Farming must change. One farm that has successfully moved from the methods of industrial agriculture is Bradwell Grove, a 1,200 hectare farm in the Cotswolds of southwest England. To understand this transition, we spoke to Charles Hunter-Smart, who manages the Bradwell Grove farm.
First, to knock off a common misconception: that switching from a conventional, chemicals-oriented farming approach to a chemical-free, organic one is financially infeasible. In the last fifteen years, Bradwell Grove has made more margin under an organic approach in most years – the exception being when world cereal prices spiked - compared to a conventional approach. That is good news for farmers considering just such a transition.
Bradwell Grove grows primarily oat, wheat, spelt and barley and transitioned to an organic approach in 2005. This was chiefly for financial reasons. In the early 2000s, oil prices – and thus that of nitrogen fertilizer, an oil by-product – had rocketed, while crop prices were low. Revenues failed to cover high running costs, largely due to the substantial cost of herbicides, for which efficacy had also fallen by half over the years. The idea to turn organic came from a nearby farm, which was trialling an organic approach in order to reduce production quantity. High yield under conventional farming required sizable investment in new grain storage facilities, and the farm wanted to avoid the financial risk of major costs which failed to pay off. Bradwell Grove had similar concerns.
Transition in practice
In the first two years of transition, crop rotation meant land used for growing cereal cash crops dropped to 40%, before recovering to 60% in year 3 and beyond. Further, lower density plots and a switch from chemical fertilizer to livestock manures meant crop yield was halved. Imagine output falling four-fifths before one has started!
Mitigating this, costs fell as the farm spent less on chemical herbicides and fertilizer. To manage the halving of yields, Bradwell Grove successfully doubled its price per ton after obtaining organic certification. What about the 40% fall in cropped land? Here, Charles notes that profits depend highly on how an organic farm manages the land in the ‘fertility-building’ phase (under a grass and legume fallow). For Bradwell Grove, this means grazing beef cattle and sheep, and now a new enterprise using herbal leys as the sole feed for an outdoor mobile dairy; the natural manuring and walking arising from grazing activity also mixes nutrients into the soil. Dung from livestock in turn nurtures bugs and beetles, which can feed poultry, another potential side revenue line, as well as attract wild birds, which improves biodiversity and resilience. Creative circularity is critical, both in terms of ‘business stacking’, with outputs of one business becoming inputs to another, and in ecological terms. They run in parallel.
Subsidies continue to have a large role. The farm transitioned without financial sacrifice in the first two years thanks to government payouts that made up for lost output during its organic transition. Those specific pay-outs have ended but subsidies today still include a base land subsidy and another for managing the land in environmentally friendly ways. The only subsidy expected to fully continue after 2021 is the environmental payment, amounting to just under £2bn annually across the UK While profits are higher and less volatile than before, the continued dependence on subsidies raises the question of how much organic and conventional food prices would have to rise (a German study suggests up to 71%) for farms to run as viable businesses in the complete absence of subsidies.
Source: Bradwell Grove supplied data
The ecological benefits are manifold. Organic crops are more spaced out and often taller than under a conventional approach, creating a cooler, more disease-resistant crop micro-climate and naturally healthier plants. Reducing the size of individual crop plots and arranging different types of crop next to each other, rather than having large, mono-cropped fields also increases farm-level disease resistance, as many diseases are wind-borne and plot variation reduces the chance of infections blowing and catching across the entire farm. Trimming the hedgerows that delineate fields only every two to three years means wild fruits can grow, which attracts winter birdlife. 6 to 8 metre grass or flower margins reduce farmed acreage, but provide wildlife corridors and habitats for butterflies, ground birds and beneficial insects, such as ladybirds, which naturally prevent aphid infestations.
Bradwell Grove’s staff have also benefited. Organic farming does not require longer hours or even – thanks to GPS, optics and robot technology – more manual work, but does ask for more thoughtful, adaptive management. The farm kept all three staff, and each has learnt new skills, such as how to use machinery designed for organic farming. There may be long term health benefits from reduced contact with chemicals. Psychologically, too, Charles is revived - the years leading up to the decision to go organic were difficult and he had considered leaving farming, to allow a younger, more energetic manager to take his place. But under an organic approach, the last fifteen years have instead become “the most interesting years of my farming life”, he says; “the farm is alive, when you think you’ve got it, it changes, and you have to do something different”.
Systemic issues
Overall, Bradwell Grove’s transition experience is positive but hints at system-level challenges, which are worth exploring as food for thought. In no particular order:
Research and Support
Chemical companies fund much current research into effective farm practices, such as how much seed or fertilizer to use and the mix of herbicides to use against disease. In contrast, it took Bradwell Grove 7-8 years to find entities willing to fund similar organic farm research. Support is better now in the UK, thanks to Innovative Farmers’ field labs set up by the UK’s Soil Association/The Princes Trust, while in the US, the Rodale Institute is a pioneer, whose work is helping consumer food brands, such as Danone or General Mills, reshape their supply chains. More generally, farms exist in context of existing institutional networks, and going organic may mean unplugging from these supports. A systems-approach to regenerative agriculture needs to consider how to build or facilitate new support ecosystems.
Distribution
Sales and marketing is another challenge. When Bradwell Grove went organic, it tried to continue dealing with a big co-op but was eventually forced to sell directly to flour mills. A lot of time was spent rebuilding these marketing channels, as a small organic market meant competing farms preferred not to share customer relationships. Prices were also easily disrupted by cheap organic imports, such as from Eastern Europe. Getting produce to market in a cost-effective manner may be even more of a challenge in larger countries like the US or developing countries, and farmers may need more support on that front.
Subsidies
What would food cost in absence of subsidies? The German study cited earlier suggested up to 70% more; using Bradwell Grove’s data, wheat prices might need to be 25-30% higher per ton to substitute the subsidies the farm receives. Subsidies in the UK are designed to transfer resources from tax-payers to consumers, but in other parts of the world, subsidies go to agrichemical giants. Are subsidies the best way for policy makers to make sure the positive ecological and public health externalities from organic farming are priced into farmers’ incentives? If subsidies were removed, and food priced at an appropriate level given real cost of production – including ecological externalities – would it be affordable? In that case, might some form of income support enable a more socially beneficial, economically efficient, alternative? What is politically palatable?
Land and Weather Constraints
Farmers may face structural constraints in terms of land, soil, water and weather conditions. Certain crops from warmer climates, like quinoa, are not always viable in the UK under an organic approach, as they mature late in absence of chemical desiccants and there is insufficient time to harvest them before the UK winter sets in. Less fertile land or shallow topsoil may preclude commercial farming of high-margin vegetables. Small farms may not get economies of scale. But there are ways forward. A small 200-acre sheep farm in Devon also runs a very efficient, highly technical operation supplying organic chicks to egg-producing farms, a treehouse, a wedding venue business, and has reinstated an old cider orchard. Organic farming is not a one-size fits-all formula; a successful organic farm is highly adapted to local conditions.
Trade-Offs
No-till methods, successful in other parts of the world, may be unworkable in the UK, as wet weather means the previous crop will not die off, and if chemicals are not used to kill it, ploughing or tilling is necessary to achieve the same. Innovative Farmers is trying overcome this dilemma, but it still suggests possible trade-offs – is limited use of chemicals justified in certain circumstances? On the global scale and over a long time horizon – given the serious negative impacts on public health, plant and animal biodiversity, land degradation, etc – it may be that compromising on a single farm reinforces a broader system negative.
Output
If organic farms prove difficult to scale, is it technically possible to achieve, under a regenerative approach, current levels of world food production, at costs affordable to consumers and prices amenable to farmers? Would attempts to farm organically at scale re-encounter challenges the industrial food complex evolved to solve - food security, sufficiency and price? Production is only half the puzzle – various studies suggest consumers have a serious role to play in what and how much we eat.
Scale
Small farms may be at a disadvantage even outside of economies of scale. In parts of the world, small farms may not easily access subsidies, or at all. Smaller farmers may also rent, rather than own, the land. This reduces incentive to replenish soil, as the farmer does not benefit from increasing land value.
Financial structure
Financial engineering to align farmer, land owner, and societal or eco-system benefits, may help. Bradwell Grove has an owner aligned in terms of values and willing to take on the financial risk and management burden of a transition, but not all farmers have amenable owners, investors or lenders. Landlords, equity investors or lenders to farms all have a role to play via their influence over farm production methods and business strategies.
“If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
But the real products of any year’s work are the farmer’s mind and the cropland itself.”
