Old learning and new technology are creating a sustainable farming revolution, says Sarah Langford
My maternal grandmother could pluck a chicken in under half an hour. She would sit on a chair in her farmhouse kitchen with a plastic bucket at her feet as feathers flew around her.
When I was a child, she taught me about a certain kind of British cooking that some would class as comfort food. She made bread and rock cakes; pies and gravies; meat and potatoes. At harvest time she took flasks of sweet tea and egg sandwiches with butter as thick as the filling to my grandfather and his men in the fields.
My grandparents’ life revolved around food. They took on their Hampshire farm tenancy in 1959, five years after wartime rationing ended, and my grandfather’s job was to grow as much food as possible to feed a nation made hungry by war. They coaxed food from their garden, too. Little was wasted. Animal fat was saved as dripping, any leftover meat was minced for pies and scraps were fed to the chickens.
Nearly a decade after my grandmother died, I found myself in a kitchen on the other side of the country, plucking my own bird. My husband Ben and I had just started a new life as farmers in Suffolk. Plucking the bird took hours and made my fingers cramp. Ben gutted it, a job our sons loved but which made me turn away. When I cooked it the steam escaped and the meat tasted stringy and disgusting.
After an adult life spent buying rather than growing food, as a farmer I finally began to understand the work that went into what so many of us take for granted.
RESPECT FOR FOOD
My grandparents’ generation spent a third of their income on food. We spend less than a tenth. In the United Kingdom our food is the third cheapest in the world. Now we produce enough food globally to feed over three billion people than currently exist, although 40% of it is lost or wasted. Food is no longer seen as a public good, but as a public given.
The ecological cost of this progress is now clear. The health and nutritional costs are starting to be noticed. But until I began talking to the farmers around me, I had not understood the human cost faced by those asked to produce milk sold for less than bottled water.
Then I came across a farming revolution that sought to change this system. Called ‘regenerative farming’, it was being driven by a new generation of farmers trying to find resilience in the face of loss of public subsidies, climate change and rising fuel and fertiliser costs.
MORE PROFITABLE
Old learning and new technology helped these farmers grow a diversity of crops and livestock that worked together to restore the soil’s fertility. They kept living roots in the ground all year round, building up the soil’s biology and sequestering carbon. Research has found that regenerative farming does not just benefit the land; profits can be 78% higher than conventional farms.
My grandparents’ respect for the food they made and ate is reflected in the regenerative farming movement. So perhaps it’s time to think of comfort food differently. Maybe the preparation and eating of food that is nutritionally and ecologically valuable, and where the farmer has received fair payment, will prove to offer the greatest comfort. My grandmother would, I think, approve.
Sarah Langford is the author of Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution (Penguin, £16.99).