SOWAP Media Release - Farming Today Transcript


	Farming Today Transcript	Media

Finding and Demonstrating Ways of Better Managing the Land

SOWAP Media Release - 9th October 2003

Programme

Farming Today

Station

BBC Radio 4

Date

09-10-2003

Time

05:50 hrs

Duration

7 min 50s

Mark Holdstock: Presenter

Well, you may not be aware of it, but the land beneath our feet is actually fast disappearing. Soil erosion has the potential to become one of the biggest problems to face the countryside in the future. And it’s not just a problem for farmers. As we tramped across the freshly ploughed Leicestershire countryside, Mike Lane, a soil expert from the agribusiness company Syngenta, told me how it can affect all of us.

Mike Lane: SOWAP Project Manager

It’s estimated that something like 15 per cent of all flooding events caused in this country come to some extent from mismanagement of the land; in other words, erosion wash-off and the water that comes with it. It’s costing the country something like about £115m to clean up this… the ramifications of this. Now you can’t stop it all, and I’m not even suggesting that you can, but what we’re trying to do is work towards better practices with farmers, and I need to stress with farmers, not trying to tell them how to do it but work with them to devise strategies to actually reduce this and also reduce their costs at the same time.

Mark Holdstock:

Fundamentally in layman’s terms, though, what’s happening?

Mike Lane:

When rain falls hard, it splashes onto the soil and it causes the surface to break up. And when it breaks up the water picks up the soil that is… comes off the ground and carries it down the hill. Now if you can protect the soil by some sort of cover, and I like to describe it as an umbrella for the soil, you protect it from that crashing process of the rain on the soil.

Mark Holdstock:

Is it happening more than it used to?

Mike Lane:

It’s happening more than it used to on two levels. First of all, there’s a lot more arable around. It’s also because we’ve got much larger equipment, much larger ploughs, and actually what we’re doing every time we plough is we’re fragmenting the structure of the soil, so it can’t hold itself together as well.

Mark Holdstock:

If we actually get down here and pick up a handful of this soil, you can see it’s almost like gravel, isn’t it?

Mike Lane:

That’s right.

Mark Holdstock:

It’s little… tiny little chunks, probably about a quarter of an inch, an eighth of an inch across. It’s not dust, but it’s very small pieces of soil.

Mike Lane:

That’s right, and when you get rain hitting this, especially later on the year when it’s much more moist – it’s very dry at the moment – that will actually fragment and turn into basically a slurry of soil and water, which will go down to the drains at the bottom of the hill here, and of course they will then flow down into the streams, and that’s where you… why you get brown-coloured streams. If you get a pastureland, for instance, and you get a heavy rain, the streams tend to stay very clear. But if you’ve got this sort of tilth on the top of your soil and you get a heavy rain, the streams will turn brown, and of course that has ramifications then for the aquatic environment in terms of those things… those animals or fish that live in water systems.

Mark Holdstock:

I was going to say why does it matter if this soil is running off?

Mike Lane:

Eventually it’s not sustainable in terms of loss of topsoil. Topsoil is what contributes most to our yield, so we need the topsoil. But secondly, of course, it’s the ramifications of the site with flooding and all those sorts of issues.

Mark Holdstock:

Why does it cause more flooding, then?

Mike Lane:

Because you’re taking the soil and you are actually filling up ditches and streams and watercourses so they can no longer draw… drain as much water as they used to. If you get huge great events… I mean, we’ve had some events in the last year in southern France where we’ve lost something like 100 tonnes per hectare of soil in a single rainfall event. That’s an enormous amount of soil if you take it on a European scale.

Mark Holdstock:

Well, also with us we’ve got a man who knows this landscape intimately. Alastair Leake is from the Allerton Research and Educational Trust, who actually own this experimental farm here.

Alastair, where are we? What kind of countryside is this?

Alastair Leake: Allerton Research & Educational Trust

Well, you’re right in the heart of England here on the Leicestershire-Rutland border on a typical heavy soil type.

Mark Holdstock:

You’ve known this farm for years now. How much has the soil here eroded?

Alastair Leake:

Well, we don’t get serious erosion here, but I think our concern is that we have what we call diffuse erosion taking place all the time, and we are at the top of the catchment, and so anything that leaves our land here enters watercourses and goes down and ultimately ends up in a reservoir.

Mark Holdstock:

So that’s the situation in Leicestershire, but it’s an issue right across Europe, and that’s why a European-wide project called SOWAP, the Soil and Water Project, is to be launched today to try to find ways of changing farm practices to reduce erosion in the future. Mike Lane is managing the project.

Mike Lane:

It’s a pan-European project. We’re working mainly based in the UK, two sites here, one in Leicestershire where we are today and another one down in west Somerset near Honnicot [phonetic spelling] on National Trust land, in fact, we’re co-operating with quite seriously. We’ve then got a site in Belgium and a series of co-operating farmers there, and last but not least, we’re over in Hungary. And the whole reason for spreading it across those three countries is to look at very different types of agriculture and also very different types of soil and climate so that we can look across all the different risks that are posed by different types of agriculture.

Mark Holdstock:

So what kinds of things can farmers do differently which will make a difference to soil erosion?

Mike Lane:

The one that we would promote quite heavily is the use of minimum tillage approach right down to zero tillage.

Mark Holdstock:

Now what does this term “minimum tillage” mean?

Mike Lane:

Well, one of the biggest problems with the plough, as I said earlier, is its capacity to destroy soil structure and strength.

Mark Holdstock:

Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do.

Mike Lane:

Yes, exactly, but the problem it then results in is when you leave the soil bare after that process, it is then vulnerable to erosion. Now there are ways of actually sowing crops directly without the plough into stubble fields, and you can see an example just over there of exactly what I mean. And this is the sort of thing we’re promoting. But what this product does not pretend is that somehow that is the sole answer for all situations.

Mark Holdstock:

Why should people who are not involved in farming, why should the man in the street have any interest in what you’re doing here? Why should they care about what you’re doing here?

Mike Lane:

Well, I think first and foremost that has to be down to the flooding issue, and a lot of… if you go down to west Somerset, for instance, they get a lot of flooding in villages, and it is caused by excessive tillage around… in the catchment and the sediment of water rushing down the hills and flooding the villages. But secondly, of course, if we don’t produce a sustainable agriculture which will go on for the next however many hundreds and thousands of years, I think we critically will start to lose the capacity to feed ourselves. And so it’s a longer-term thing, and I appreciate that maybe not many people in the street might view it that way, but I strongly feel that that’s an important point that we need to get across.

Mark Holdstock:

If we do adopt these measures that you’re looking at on a wide basis, how will it change the look of the landscape? Presumably autumn will be quite different.

Mike Lane:

Yes, it will. It’ll be much greener. Instead of seeing fields full of brown bare soil, you will see litter on the surface, you will see green material sitting on the soil, and it’ll only be knocked back when it’s actually necessary to do so. So you will see a much more – very nice word of it – green environment, if you like, and I think that’s something to be cherished.

Mark Holdstock:

Mike Lane, the project manager for the Soil and Water Project based here in Leicestershire.

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