So we can see there are benefits to biodiversity.
There are clear benefits to soil function.
The amount of carbon that's stored in water-stable aggregates is one of the things we're measuring,
and that increases with the regenerative practices,
especially sensitive to tillage.
We have better worm density,
so earthworms in the soil,
which are important aspects of soil health.
You're working on a research project called...
H3,
is that right?
Yes,
I am.
So a research project on regenerative farming in England.
So that's my part of it.
It's a broader project.
It's part of a program called Transforming UK Food Systems.
And the H3,
it's called because it's healthy soil,
healthy food,
healthy people.
Yeah.
It's funded by the UK Research and Innovation,
UKRI.
It's part of a big program.
So the program is wonderful in many ways because it was pushing researchers to look at the whole food system.
not just the production side,
which is the part that I work on,
but also the system of going from harvesting to processing to supply to consumption and then into healthy diets.
So the H3 project also is working on getting more fibre into school meals,
for example,
and on different ways to produce around city edges that would be taking up less land.
But our role in that project is to work on what's called regenerative agriculture.
And the reason we're working on it is because in my group,
I run an agroecology research group,
and what we're looking for is the solutions that are emerging anyway from the farming communities around the world.
And we want to just evaluate them and find out whether there's often solutions being put forward,
more sustainable farming systems that come with a lot of storytelling around them about how brilliant they are.
Often from individual farmer experiences who've tried it and they've really loved it and it's worked really well for them.
And this gets translated into kind of,
what's the right word?
I don't know what the word is.
A narrative,
I suppose,
that is very positive.
And that's how you drive change.
So
I'm really pleased that that's going on.
And we have to do that.
We have to have a narrative that drives a really big transition if we're going to save the nature we have left.
But I do want to check as a scientist that those stories are right,
that I'm looking for the farming systems that do actually deliver on the promise.
And regenerative agriculture is one of those.
It's something that's emerged from the farming community.
There are some wonderful farmers who are brilliant at promoting it and sharing the knowledge and telling the story about how much better it is and how they've moved from degrading their soils to regenerating their soils and they've got just as good food production and they've got loads more wildlife and they're much happier as a result and everything's fantastic and their business is doing better.
This is the story they tell.
So we have set up a study.
We work with farmer clusters because we're working on a farmer-led system change.
We're working in communities of farmers,
some of whom are already doing that and some of whom are not.
And we wanted to set up a co-designed experiment with those groups of farmers.
So we did do that and we have a group of farmers who are regeneratively farming for at least three years.
And we've got a group who are not.
and we've got a group in each...
cluster of farmers so two different landscapes we've got a group who are transitioning from not doing regenerative farming to doing it during the course of our study and we've been doing loads of survey work looking at the effect of that on on soil health on biodiversity on on crop production we've also been measuring their their management in quite a lot of detail like what what do they actually do with the crops which crops do they plant how do they manage the soil what
inputs do they put in fertilizers and insecticides and herbicides so we've got loads of data
We're four years into this project and it's been a fantastic experience working with the farmers.
Regenerative farming is quite difficult to define and that's one of the issues for incentivising it in policy is that it's a little bit difficult to define because people say,
well,
it's just about soil health.
And soil health is at the centre and you start working with your soil to make it more healthy.
And there's some practices.
but people do it slightly differently.
So there's some principles that everyone agrees to,
which are things like keeping the soil covered,
minimising disturbance,
having more different diversity of crops.
And so keep this,
I can't remember though,
living roots is one of the principles.
So you always have roots alive under the soil.
So you have these principles and different farmers do different things and interpret them in different ways.
And this is why it's quite hard to define.
So in the process of...
doing our experimental study,
one thing that we found early on,
because we got all the data on what the farmers were actually doing,
is that they don't fall neatly into these groups of control farmers and regenerative farmers.
In fact,
every single farmer in the
Farm is quite unique.
If you look at the practices that we've identified that reflect regenerative farming,
none of the regenerative farmers are doing all of those things,
and none of the control farmers are doing none of those things,
and every single farm is doing its own separate set of those things in different intensities.
So we ended up producing what we call a regenerative score.
Which kind of quantifies the consistency with which you've been following these five principles based on the practices you have over the last five years.
So you have a rolling five year average and it changes according to what you've done in the five years previously.
And that works really well.
That allows us to see,
first of all,
we have this really nice gradient.
We don't have three clean groups,
but we have this gradient of regenerativeness in both of our landscapes.
and then we can see what the effects of that combined system change are on...
All the things we're measuring.
So we can see there are benefits to biodiversity.
There are clear benefits to soil function.
The amount of carbon that's stored in water stable aggregates is one of the things we're measuring and that increases with the regenerative practices,
especially sensitive to tillage.
We have better worm density,
so earthworms in the soil,
which are important aspects of soil health.
We have more spiders and better pollination.
We've measured the pollination in the hedgerow plants,
which is what's producing the berries,
for example,
in hawthorn.
But not everything changes.
Some of the aspects of biodiversity we've measured,
numbers of pollinators,
strangely,
doesn't clearly change.
Numbers of beetles doesn't change,
although spiders and wasps do increase.
So it's a slightly complex picture.
It's slightly different in the different landscapes,
but there are definitely benefits of the regenerative transition.
And what we value ourselves about the way we go about this research is that we're not measuring it in a kind of experimental trial setting.
These are real farms.
This is how it's really happening in real farms that are commercial businesses.
That makes the experiment quite hard to do as a scientist,
but for me much more valuable.
Because if you want to know whether a system change is effective,
what you need to know is how it's actually manifesting in the real world.
So that's the kind of research we try and do.
And it's a positive story.
It is.
Loads to talk about here.
You already mentioned as a negative that pollinators don't seem to increase.
that's yeah i may hear that i'm curious to understand better why do you think that is so we we don't know is the answer so actually we do we do have an idea why we think it is it's um it might there there might be some increases in some times of the year we actually what we think is that in the
there's a there's a more important effect on the pollinator communities which is the uh agri-environment scheme practices the small habitats that the farmers have and the surrounding habitats in the range of a pollinator are
probably more important than what's actually going on in the field so the system isn't changing those and so we can't see what there's an overriding effect of of landscape structure and habitat availability which which is well known for pollinators but we wanted to see whether the the regenerative farming system also had a had a signal and
but the the really vexing thing is that the pollination of hawthorn in the hedgerows is better in the regenerative farms and we suspect that that's
It's fruit set we measured.
We didn't measure the actual delivery of pollen.
We just measured fruit set.
So we just think that the soil,
there might be a link between a better soil and better fruit set.
And it's that the fruit set is not limited by pollination in these systems.
Right.
So that because the soil is healthier,
the fruit in the hedgerows are also healthier.
That's a proposal.
That's a proposal,
yeah.
We don't have any way of knowing that.
Logically makes sense.
We'll wait to find out.
Yeah.
What about something,
you know,
very positive something that you you measured and that really impressed you let's say um so i think that my experience the most positive thing for me is just it's just the the commitment and the the um openness of the farmers we're working with not
just to work with researchers but to talk to each other i think there's been a real change and and partly it was driven by uh it's i don't like saying this because i was not a
fan of Brexit when we decided to leave the European Union but one thing that is possibly good that is could come out of it is that we changed the way we that we changed our agricultural policy very dramatically and and we moved from and we have we have just fully moved from supporting
farmers just for farming to supporting farmers financially for the public goods that they deliver many of which are environmental public goods and and at the time when we set up this project and
began to run it and so there's been a seven year transition from being supported just for farming to not which which which was laid out in the agriculture act in the uk and uh that that got farmers working together and thinking about how they might do things differently and note and thinking about natural capital and and just
you know if we if we're being if we're only going to be subsidized or paid by
government to deliver environmental public goods we're going to do that and they'll be really good at that so i've been really enjoyed watching the the transition and i'm also really impressed by the the drive and the enthusiasm of the regenerative farmers they tend to be uh people
who are slightly younger more more uh sometimes new to farming or they're coming into farming from having had a career in something else and they just bring a a new way of thinking i think agriculture has it's it
It has been in the UK somewhat locked in a sort of old system of doing things that was very successful for a long time and is looking less successful now because it's degraded the environment so much.
And I just think there's been a loss of knowledge and a loss of enthusiasm and a lot of people have left farming for reasons that come from the wider food system actually.
So as a kind of a culture of its own,
it was probably,
I would say,
quite degraded.
I don't want to upset people.
I think some new energy is great.
And that's what I see in the regenerative farming movement.
Not everyone's on side,
but I also see that some aspects of it are through rose-tinted glasses,
I think.
Farming is difficult.
Farming is really challenging,
and increasingly so with climate change.
To make a profit is tough.
And so farmers are an amazing,
they're a very varied group of people,
but they're also an amazing group of people.
to work with because they're so kind of they're all running their own independent systems and things and they'll they'll they're they're very innovative they're very ingenious and they can fix and sort and they'll just do it because because they are just the farmer out there on their own so i don't know if you've ever had a had a breakdown or some kind of hideous fall in the ditch in a car or something but it's usually a farmer that comes out and helps you right there's always a farmer around and they've always got the kit to
to pull your vehicle out the ditch or save you from...
some kind of horrible situation.
And that's the sort of people they are.
They're just fixers and doers and wonderful people to work with.
And I love that about farming.
Yeah.
I'm curious to learn a little bit more about these new farming policies that you mentioned since
Brexit, because a lot of our audience is in the European Union.
And we have the next cap budget that is being negotiated and discussed at the moment.
And maybe we could learn a lesson or two from what you're doing here in the UK.
I hope so.
Yeah,
I think you could.
So one of the things we've done is scale up the payments to a larger scale.
This is one of the reasons why farmers have started working together.
So we split the payments.
We've got all the,
it was originally all the budget from what we were spending on the cap.
I don't know the numbers of where it's got to.
But we split it into sort of three ways.
One was called the Sustainable Farming Incentive,
and that's a lower level thing.
I should say at this point,
it hasn't been entirely perfect the way it's,
because it's quite a difficult transition to make.
And we've had a change of government and yeah.
Agricultural policy is challenging and farmers,
especially when their businesses are quite dependent on it,
they have quite a tough time with the regulators and the policymakers here.
But the big picture is we split it into three where you have the sustainable farming incentive is a smaller scale sort of in-field measures that individual farmers can take and be paid for.
And that's so things like things you would do to look after your soil health and field margins with flowers on,
for example,
that we might talk about later.
They're involved in the sustainable farming incentive.
There's also one that's about not using any insecticides.
And then there's a countryside stewardship,
which tends to be a bit larger scale and is targeted to places where there's already good biodiversity.
And then there's this thing called landscape recovery projects,
and they are larger.
And you need to have a group of stakeholders from including,
often including farmers,
but not always,
the landscape scale.
And it's about kind of restoring nature and natural capital at much bigger scale.
So some of the money went to that.
And that's really,
so there's the combination of the splitting.
So you've got large scale,
mid scale and small scale.
And then we also have a biodiversity net gain policy,
which provides developers have to demonstrate that they've offset any biodiversity loss.
There's a scoring system called the biodiversity metric and the biodiversity net gain metric.
And you have to,
when you build like a housing development or something,
you have to calculate how much biodiversity you've destroyed and you have to offset and add a 10%
gain onto that.
So that
creates an income stream for for farmers for example or any landowners who are actually restoring nature and a lot of the farming communities were thinking about how they could benefit from that because they have natural capital and nature on their land so they they for them it's a different income stream so there's a diversification that happened as well all
of which is playing out not perfectly it never is I think that's going to...
And it's changing all the time,
as policy often does.
Yeah,
yeah.
One of the things you mentioned here is the landscape scale approach.
I think I'd love to discuss.
Okay.
Why is it interesting to sometimes...
look at the whole landscape or a bioregion or a watershed to act on nature conservation or on regenerative agriculture and things like that,
rather than just on the single farm scale.
I think that's a really good change in the way we view nature conservation in this country.
Why is it important?
So one thing to say is that even the smallest animals,
so take a wild bee,
for example,
especially if it's a bumblebee,
its life is not a single field.
It's operating on a sort of one kilometre kind of scale.
It has a colony.
It's foraging around that colony,
500 metres to a kilometre in every direction as a colony,
all the workers.
So what matters to those animals is not what's happening in this field,
but what's happening on that larger scale.
Can they actually get all the flowers resources that they need at the time when they need it?
Is it there?
And it's a bigger scale thing.
And the same with kind of if you're...
caring about the natural habitats in a landscape you need to make sure that they're connected in some way or close enough to other patches of natural habitat to allow some natural dispersal to allow animals and plants to move through the landscape between or if you've got if you're if you're caring about migratory birds for instance they actually have to fly across what
i would call hostile landscape in order to move between the patches of good so the landscape scale is really important in conservation Thank you.
And the exact scale depends on the animals or plants you care about.
But there are more that need bigger than farm scale,
I think,
than that need just within farm.
That may not be true,
but I bet it is.
Do you have any specific examples to use to illustrate all of this?
Because I'm wondering how,
first of all,
how do you decide which landscape to work on?
How do you get the different stakeholders within that landscape to collaborate?
How do you finance that?
Do you have any?
examples well so so one thing that i've i think is really good about the landscape recovery projects is that they're they're bottom up they there is there's some uh selection of the ones that that win that get the funding and the funding in this case is coming from the government um
but they they're organized on the ground by people in landscapes who care about the landscape and that's how for me
Nature conservation is never going to work unless it's actually being done by the people who live there,
valuing the nature that's around them.
Otherwise,
if it's someone else coming in and saying,
oh,
you must protect this,
and the people who live there don't care about it,
it's not long-term go to work.
It will be overthrown by people whose livelihoods are more important to them than the nature.
You need to have people who live and...
in that landscape,
have a livelihood in that landscape,
and actually care about the nature in that landscape.
Then nature conservation works on its own.
I'm not sure everybody would agree with this view.
Some people think,
well,
we need to protect all these rare species,
and people don't necessarily know about them.
But I feel that at least a good proportion of all the nature conservation needs to be led by people connected with nature in their landscape.
So I'm delighted about the bottom-up approach.
Who's going to do this?
He's going to work here and protect this that you have here.
And there's a lot of emerging understanding,
I think,
in communities about how ecosystems actually work,
how rivers are connected and how water flows in and out of them and that kind of thing.
All of the concern in this country about sewage outflows and terrillas,
it feels a bit like an awakening to me.
I mean,
it's probably not the first time it's happened,
but it's good.
that people are connecting.
I think people need to connect.
People need more connections in general.
We need more sense of community.
And with each other.
And that's a great way to do that,
to get behind a project where it's the place we live in and talking to our neighbours or fellow citizens in the area we live in and get behind something positive,
something bringing back.
Something positive.
What I found in my community recently,
there's a lot of people getting together and protesting as a community about a solar farm that's coming,
which
Which they're very angry about indeed because it's very large.
I think that's happening in a lot of places.
So as an environmentalist,
that's quite a vexing problem because obviously we need an energy transition and it needs to be big scale.
But I'm also delighted that the people in my landscape,
where I live in South Cambridgeshire,
care about their landscape that much that they're angry.
I think that's a good thing.
I love that people care and they really care about the views they have when they walk their dogs.
They really care about that,
which is good.
I wish they'd also be more open to the idea of solar energy.
But there are different ways to do it,
I guess.
You do a lot of research on ecology and biodiversity and all of this.
And the question I want to ask is,
How do you get all the information that you collect to the people who need it the most,
the farmers,
the people on the ground who work,
and making sure that that data,
that information is available for them to use?
That's a great question.
So one answer is we do collect a lot of data.
And so,
for example,
in the H3 project or,
for example,
in the project that one of my students has been working on in India.
There's a load of samples that get taken and there'll be insect samples from pan traps or just data collected through transit walks and it all gets processed and it goes away.
And I think the level of detail that we care about as ecologists wouldn't necessarily be of interest to everybody.
But one of the ways in which we make sure the information reaches people is by working with those people from the outset.
We do this thing called co-design with farmers particularly.
We go and talk to them about what we're going to do and what they might do and what experiments we might put in place and what we might measure.
And we obviously need their permission to go and measure on their land anyway.
And then we'll talk to them.
With farmers,
we always write individual reports for each farmer that tells them not just what we found on their farm,
but also how it compares with what we found on everybody else's farm in the study in an anonymised way.
But that's something that's really important to us.
And the farmers really appreciate that.
They like to see their own data,
but they also like to see how they're doing compared to everybody else.
So it's quite a bit of effort from our part to do that.
But we always do that because we think it's really important for them to see the information.
And so they'll get a species list of it.
We don't give them species lists,
I think,
necessarily of all the animals because some of them don't even have common names.
And it's just a load of Latin.
But we'll tell them how many species and if there were any particularly interesting species,
we'll tell them about that.
That's one thing.
But then beyond that,
how do we get the information out to the wider public about what we're doing?
I mean,
it's things like talking to people in interviews like this is really important and videos and anything.
It's quite hard to find the time to do it well.
But we try and do as much outreach as we can with all sorts of different outlets.
to explain what we've been doing,
which I haven't really done any of yet in this.
Do you see technology potentially helping translate all of that data and information into usable form?
Because farming is very context specific,
so it must be quite difficult for a farmer to find information that is very specifically going to help him or her on his farm or her farm.
Yeah,
so there's definitely an important role for technology in all of this.
So there's different,
so sampling of environmental,
sampling of environments is moving very fast in the technology that's available to do it with remote sensing from satellites and also with kind of apps and things that you can identify plants and animals.
And there's just loads of that happening.
And I think that it could be really useful,
but not always.
You know,
it's about what information.
Take a farmer,
or I mean anyone who's doing land management or conservation in their own context,
but I work mostly with farmers at the moment.
So if you're a farmer,
you're interested in what nature you have,
but you're also most interested in the products that you're producing,
I would imagine,
and in the health of your soil and its ability to produce those products.
So you particularly want to know about the pests,
whether there are pests.
that are going to cause you some trouble and how many of them there are you want to ideally farmers would want to really know what natural enemy communities they've got that might help them control those pests i think there's a long way to go with that and you want to know about the health of your crop how it's doing and the health of your soil and i
think the technology is coming to put that in the in the hands of like in the phones of farmers but i don't think they'll all want to use that some of them and probably a good proportion of them will just want to use their own knowledge of the system.
They'll want to just pick up the soil and crumble it in their fingers.
And they'll know how healthy it is because that's what they've always done.
And they'll know which animals they should look out for.
I think that some farmers like technology,
not all.
And it can work really well in some contexts and not all.
It's definitely a tool that you can sometimes use.
There's a common perception that biodiversity and productivity are incompatible.
that we cannot care for nature and feed people at the same time.
What do you think about that?
And what does the science say about this?
Okay,
so...
I think it's a it's a so we know that agriculture is really bad for wild nature that's the starting point so if you want to have nature and biodiversity in the same planet sorry if you want to have biodiversity or nature and and feed
everybody in the same planet you have to be very careful about how you do this because you need to keep the nature you need to keep natural habitats so there's there's a number of things you can
there's a number of principles,
I suppose.
There's like a plan of how to do this.
One of the things is that you need to,
in the places,
because there's so many of us on earth,
in the places where we grow food,
we need to do that as efficiently and as productively as possible.
That's one of the things,
to minimise the aerial footprint,
you know,
how much area it takes up globally,
so that we're not unnecessarily using land for farming.
So we need to make the most of the farmland.
That's principle one.
We also need to do the farming in a way that doesn't degrade the farmed ecosystem,
which we haven't been very good at in the 20th century.
We've done a lot of degradation of soils and general pollution of the farmed environment.
And we need to not do that because that's not sustainable in the long term.
So that is principle two.
We also need to,
as well as not degrading it,
looking after the biodiversity.
So some of the biodiversity that lives in farmland is...
part of the production system.
Not all of it,
some of it's pests,
some of it is very destructive.
But if you have a good thriving farmed ecosystem,
you also have quite a lot of animals in there and microbes and things that are actually delivering part of the production.
And that's pollinators,
natural enemies,
soil.
miso animals and microbes in the soil and funguses in the soil that are doing quite a lot of the work that's creating the productivity of the environment you need to look after all of those and then on a global scale our whole food system is entirely unsustainable and that and it's partly to do with the choices that get made not necessarily by individual well it is choices by individual people but the whole food system has
pushed us into this place where most of our land being used to produce meat.
It's a crazy percentage.
In the UK,
it's 85%
of all of the used agricultural area is delivering products for meat production,
for dairy and livestock.
It's like some of that's land where livestock is actually kept,
but a lot of it is land that's under crops that is then feeding livestock.
And globally,
it's 77%
of all the land in the world is just under livestock.
And this is really inefficient use of land.
And it's really bad for our health as humans as well.
So it's just generally we need to change this.
We need to have less meat production.
There are places in the world where meat production is the only thing you can do.
And that's kind of where it starts with the specialised meat production.
But we've gone way beyond that.
And now we have this whole agricultural system that's geared towards producing meat.
So principle four,
we need to change the way that we,
the diets of pretty much everybody and have less meat and more plant based food.
because it's much more efficient use of land,
which links back to the original principle,
which is minimize the area that we have for agriculture.
If you do all those things together,
I think we can have most of that.
We've already lost some,
but we can certainly reverse the decline in biodiversity and still feed everybody pretty well.
I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about our ability to do it.
I'm not worried about there not being a solution out there.
Yeah,
okay.
What do you think about,
I mean,
I've met and I've visited a lot of regenerative farms.
for the podcast and i've met a lot of farmers who practice what they call regenerative holistic grazing management system with animals and they tend to get a little bit frustrated when we talk about meat production in general because they feel like what they do is actually not
comparable to you know intensive industrial livestock production for example so what do you think about that i think that it's it's complicated and it's not my expert area quite so
I don't know a lot of the details but...
what I do know so you can make a case that the really intensive livestock production is better for biodiversity than the low intensity more regenerative systems because of the area of lambs that you use and if you look at the way that foodstuffs have their environmental impact measured through life cycle assessment biodiversity
is just boiled down to land area how much land have you used so the intensive production looks better
I don't really agree with that I think if look across the board at all the different things we should be delivering.
including animal welfare and people's,
you know,
the state of the whole environment,
including the farmed environment,
then all farms are different.
And some farms are better than others in all of the different systems you can think of,
and there are good ways to do it.
I feel that livestock has a place in agriculture for sure.
I think probably the more sustainable systems might be mixed where you've got livestock and crop production and the livestock is a smaller part.
But there are parts of the world where livestock production is the only viable thing.
I think in the UK,
there are areas of the UK where what we have is a culturally important,
very low productivity.
Not very economically viable livestock system and we should not we should just abandon it
I feel and I think that's quite difficult for people who live there and love like in the you know The the uplands of the UK where there's a lot of sheep production it Spets of things we could do with the land It's not it's only it's left with us because it's culturally important and that's very difficult to deal with
But from a from a kind of objective scientific perspective,
we shouldn't really do that
It goes back to what you said at the beginning of the conversation about changing people's mindsets and psychology being sometimes the biggest hurdle that we have to face.
Oh,
definitely.
Yeah.
And people,
quite rightly,
are entirely attached to the culture they've grown up in.
Why wouldn't they be?
And there's loads of value to that,
you know?
Yeah,
of course.
All the things associated with sheep farming,
for instance.
the domesticated sheepdog that we all love so much and the human dog interaction that that comes with all of that that's all part of it and of course people are attached to it and feel that it's valuable and all the different sheep breeds and that you know the really hardy ones that you know there's a lot of a lot of a lot of knowledge and expertise and human
history and culture wrapped up in it all which is it's perfectly justifiable to be attached to that yeah of course i don't know if i've answered the question though i think probably not
I think so.
Okay.
I want to try and focus the conversation a little bit on nature-based solutions for agriculture.
Okay.
So how do we replace solutions that are adding mechanical or chemical disturbance or plowing or using chemical inputs?
How can we replace those with nature-based solutions and still have a...
fully functioning working farm and a happy farmer well so i think there's a lot of work to do here the the the farming system that that is very um nature-based or used to so for a period of time it was called ecologically intensified in the scientific literature but it might also might now be called regenerative you know it's not degrading anymore but regenerating the
the understanding how to do that is something that hasn't been the focus of agricultural research It is now.
more and more,
or of farmers'
experimentation.
Again,
it is now more and more.
Because we had this
20th century of chemically driven agriculture,
which seemed like a miracle,
it seemed like we could suddenly produce loads more food and the downsides became apparent quite quickly.
But there was quite a lot of profits we made.
So we just went along with that for most of the 20th century.
And now I think we're moving away from that.
The solutions,
the nature-based solutions are things like
So in my world,
I work on pollinators and natural enemies.
And it is things like very well designed strips with planted flowering species that are on the edge of fields.
And they need to be well designed and well managed so that they actually do the job that you need them to do.
So they support the right type of natural enemies at the right time so that the natural enemies live on the flowers when they need extra food from them.
And they come into the field when the pests are there for them to eat.
That takes some careful design.
And with flower strips to support pollinators,
again,
you need to have them so they're flowering at the right time,
not competing with the crop,
supporting the right kinds of insects.
So it's almost like some people say,
well,
that's just gardening,
that's not nature conservation.
And kind of,
yeah,
it is.
It's managing the environment to boost the natural services.
So I did a piece of work I was involved in in China,
which was peanut production in peanut fields.
And there...
The flower strip had been very carefully designed with a plant species that also is used for traditional medical uses.
And it's like a wild carrot type flowering plant,
like an umbel,
like tiny white flowers in a sort of umbrella shape.
And it was designed because it supports the natural enemies of the peanut aphid,
which is one of the major economic pests of peanuts.
So there were natural enemies like ladybirds and...
predatory bug that eat these aphids and what what the research showed is well so it's really detailed research putting the flower strips alongside the peanuts or comparing with peanuts without flower strips alongside and then the team was led by a chinese collaborator called kanju
And her team were looking at what the natural enemies were eating by sequencing the gut contents.
So to see whether they were actually eating the aphids.
And they were,
which is good.
And then she was counting the numbers of natural enemies in the flower strip and in the peanuts and counting the pests and measuring the peanut yields with and without the flower strips.
And the results show that there is an increase in peanut yield when the flower strips are there.
But really importantly,
it's not just...
an increase when the flower strips are there it's an increase that's sufficient that you you account for the fact that you've taken out a bit of the land to put the flower strip under so if you if you spread that yield across the whole area including the flower strip you still it's not any different from not having had the flower strip i'm just putting peanuts there and that's really important you need to be able to show that not only do these if these if these mechanisms like nature-based solutions that are going to deliver some boost to the productivity to.
If you need to be able to show that they boost the productivity sufficiently to allow for the fact that you've taken some land out of production.
And that's why they need to be really carefully designed.
If you don't get them right,
they won't do that.
Because that's actually quite a tall order for a flower strip to deliver such a boost to the peanut production that it more than takes account of the land that the flower strips on.
Yeah.
But in that case,
it works.
We did.
So that's amazing.
That's great.
And I guess you also need to look at it from an economic perspective.
perspective there is an extra cost and extra complexity the seed management but on the other hand you you have all these other benefits and you have potentially reduced costs in inputs and so on so what does the the data say about
the the economics for the farmer the data we really need we haven't we haven't looked at the numbers on on that on the economics of that one because it was an experimental trial at field scale we we will be looking at the numbers in the h3 project for the economic costs.
Not as clearly as we would like to.
So it's the main question,
I think.
What we can see with the regenerative farmers in the H3 project is that they are using fewer inputs.
They use less fertilizer and they use less insecticides overall.
So it's very likely that they're making savings,
cost savings there.
But we haven't looked at the numbers yet.
And it's the main thing.
I mean,
it's super important.
The farmers will tell you,
the good regenerative farmers who've been doing it for a long time will tell you they make more profit.
And there is a study in the literature from
May's Farms in the US from Jonathan Lundgren's group,
which showed a really clear profit increase or lower costs,
more income from the farms that were regenerative.
But some of those were organic and they're getting a price premium.
So there's a the economics of complex was if we can put a price premium on regenerative farms,
which is hard because it's hard to define,
then that would be part of the calculation as well.
It's about the cost of and the cost of energy as well as important here,
the cost of fuel.
If you're doing regenerative farming,
you're plowing a lot less,
if at all.
And so you're just using a lot less fuel and that helps when the prices are really high.
So I think generally these more sustainable approaches like regenerative farming are more profitable.
And you have increased resilience as well to future shocks because you're less dependent.
Very much so.
Yeah.
So we've done a piece of work,
a PhD student who's just finished in my group called Iris Berger.
did an amazing study in southern India,
in Andhra Pradesh,
looking at an agroecological system called zero-budget natural farming,
which,
again,
it's a similar thing.
It's arisen from the farming community.
It's something that was,
and it's been very heavily incentivized by the government of Andhra Pradesh because it removes the reliance on chemicals,
which is something that they were quite keen on for their local economy.
And it's very culturally appropriate for there.
So the way it's described is not the way that regenerative farming is described at all,
say in the UK,
for example.
But actually,
when you look at the details of the practices,
it has some similarities.
It's about looking after the soil and not relying on synthetic inputs and increasing the diversity of crops that you grow.
But it tends to be a kind of community level activity.
So they would make inoculums for soil at kind of village level and use that in these farms.
So it's called...
It's called a community managed natural farming or zero budget natural farming.
Anyway,
so
Iris did a two year study and looked in a lot of detail at pollinators and birds.
And she also looked at the yields that were being produced and the profits.
And what she found is that the birds are slightly better.
Nothing like as good as the bird communities in natural forest,
but slightly better in the natural farm farming systems.
The pollinators are much better.
The pollinators,
the insects that are visiting cashew flowers are much increased in the natural farming systems and the yields are similar but the profit is much higher in the in the zero
budget natural farms it's more than doubled which is uh because of the much lower input costs so it's from a livelihood perspective it's it's a win-win you get more biodiversity you get the same yield so you're not reducing the amount of uh yield per unit area of the farmland and therefore you know causing a problem for biodiversity elsewhere but
the farmers do much better because they get more than double the profit and this was so that that uh economic data comes from the farmers that are growing the the
systems dominated by rice in Andhra Pradesh.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
When we can get a little bit of,
you know,
optimism and hope,
much needed.
But there seems to be a lot of data coming,
more of it,
regenerative farming,
and it all points towards that.
It all points towards a better livelihood for the farmer,
better quality products,
very little loss of yields,
if any,
sometimes.
I think there's going to be some,
but it's about...
crop choices rather than so for example if you if you're doing regenerative farming most arable farmers who are doing regenerative they'll move a bit more mixed and they'll probably have some time out of production the fields will be put into herbal lays for a bit and so it might be that you get a similar yield when you've got the cereal crop but over the five years you're not producing as much because you're taking the land out on quite a big scale for some of the time and i i don't i don't think we should shy away from being honest about that yeah okay because it really matters
But what if you turn them into permanent pastures for a few years and have animals coming to the system?
Then if you've got animals,
then you're producing something different,
right?
So yeah,
and that's complicated to work out,
but your overall food production is then similar.
Yeah,
I think that there's a lot of thinking to do about how exactly to frame this.
I feel like if,
especially,
you know,
if governments are incentivizing particular agricultural systems anywhere in the world,
whether that's for the
purpose of economic development,
as it often is in low-income countries,
or whether it's just to support the long-term future of the farming community,
as it is in Europe,
for example.
These are the systems we should be incentivising,
not the chemically intensive systems that degrade the environment.
But we need to do it in a way that doesn't cause us to produce less food overall,
really,
I feel,
because what we're doing then is offshoring our impact,
and the vast majority of our biodiversity impact.
from the food system in a country like the UK is not here,
it's overseas.
So if we actually produce a bit less food here because we're getting a bit more of the common generalist species that hang out in farmland here,
what we could be doing is driving the loss of driving extinctions in other parts of the world.
And we really need to not do that and be aware of it.
Could also waste less food because we waste up to 50%
of what we produce in total.
Yeah,
of course.
That would help.
Yes,
yeah,
that's the other thing.
I haven't mentioned food waste.
There's a lot of it.
So I feel like there's plenty of food in the world.
We're not spreading it out very well.
It's not the right sort of food that we're producing and we're wasting loads of it.
Yeah,
as you said earlier,
it's not the solutions.
We have the solutions.
We know kind of the direction we could take.
The problem is actually getting there,
doing it.
Yes,
and there are loads of barriers to that.
These nature-based solutions like the one we just discussed,
so integrated...
pest management despite you know this growing evidence that it has a lot of positive benefits it seems like it's more like the exception than the norm at the moment so what would it take for these solutions to gain
momentum and to become more widespread?
That's a great question so
I think that the one of the issues in agriculture is that there's a kind of
quite understandable risk aversion we're sort of locked into this system that relies on chemicals they're quite they're very well designed they um they allow an individual farmer to control the thing when it causes a problem and starts when it as as you get a a big outbreak
of a pest you can just kill it so it's very appealing and controllable
Whereas the nature-based solutions are not like that.
You're not so much in control and you are going to have some losses and you're going to have to diversify in order to be able to cope with those risks.
So it's all about the way in which farmers deal with the risks and how the whole system deals with the risks.
And it's also about profit.
So one of the problems in agriculture.
It's worth saying at the beginning,
though,
actually,
there's been a recent...
big study like a big meta-analysis of studies that have been comparing the effect of using threshold-based rules or triggers for spraying insecticides compared to just spraying them regularly on a sort of calendar basis which a lot of farmers still do and
and you can and what it showed across a whole load of studies
all around the world,
126 different studies globally,
is that you can actually reduce your use of insecticides by 44%
just by only spraying in response to threshold densities of pests without any yield penalty at all,
without losing any yield.
So that basically means we could change the way we do this and monitor pests and only spray when we really need to and almost half the amount of insecticide we use.
That would be wonderful for agricultural environments.
You know,
what we know from European studies is that wild bees living in the environment are exposed to a whole cocktail of toxic chemicals all the time.
There's an average of eight different toxins that come from agrochemicals in the pollen being collected by bumblebees in Europe.
And some of those colonies have got 27 different chemicals,
you know,
so there's a massive exposure.
So I've gone off on a track of talking about the problems and you asked me not about the problems,
but about why the solutions don't emerge.
And so
I was talking about risk.
So I think it's what happens in a lot of agricultural systems,
particularly crop production systems,
is that the person who's taking the decisions about what to spray and when is not necessarily the farmer,
but the farm advisor.
And the farm advisor doesn't own the land,
but does take the risk.
And so it's about who takes the risk and who lives with the consequences.
There's not a match.
And often,
not always,
but...
Often that farm advisor is also from a company that has a vested interest in selling chemicals.
And that is something we can solve.
It shouldn't be possible for advice going to farmers to come directly from the agrochemical industry.
And yet that does happen in lots of places around the world.
And I think it still happens in Europe as well.
So that's one of the issues.
I don't think that pharmaceutical companies are allowed to provide direct advice on how doctors treat patients for the same reason.
because they would advise...
on using the chemicals,
the pharmaceuticals that they make.
So we could have independent advice that was not,
and that would go some of the way.
But there's also,
you know,
this is a big transition away from something that's very controlled and very simplified to something that's more complex and diverse and doesn't always,
sometimes you're going to have issues.
Nature is relatively regulated.
And if you have a diversity,
you don't tend to have so many big pest outbreaks.
But what you then have to do is deal with the complexity of the environment you've created to reduce the spikes and the outbreaks.
I think if we'd thrown all of our human ingenuity and engineering prowess at farming in a more complex,
diverse way for the last hundred years,
we'd be in a very different place.
But the money isn't so quick to come if you do that.
It's quicker if you simplify and mechanize and scale up.
Yeah,
sure.
We need to sort of get a grip and develop the economy in a way that's not going to destroy us all.
Yeah,
I love the idea of sort of investing in a body of independent agronomists,
because obviously we keep talking about the complexity that regenerative farming adds for the farmer that already has to deal with so much.
And so having people who are trained specifically to understand the complexity of nature and farming and who are staying up to date with the latest science and so on and who are independent.
So they have...
their interest is the the farmer's well-being um socioeconomic health yeah um it feels like it would be a great place to focus yes so it would on the the the agronomic advice and my personal feeling is that it probably should be government funded the
the advice but the other the other aspects of this is is education agricultural education i think that it's changing now but but certainly in this country the the way in which people who ended up as farmers
what they learned about in their agricultural degrees,
which they have to do,
was not ecology and ecosystems and complexity and regenerative farming.
It was chemical treatment of things and simplification and productivity.
And it was the 20th century agriculture.
And I think it's been quite,
I hate to say this because I'm not in an agricultural college and it feels very critical,
but I do think it's been a bit slow to respond.
Because there's a long lag when you're training people to do agriculture.
And then those people go out and do their agriculture and they do it for another 40 years.
So we really need to introduce more complex ecology and regenerative techniques into agricultural education at degree level.
And I think the agricultural colleges and universities are doing that now.
Yes.
And that will make a difference.
Yeah,
for sure.
and I agree with you that it should probably get
funded by the states.
We spoke in a recent episode,
we spoke a lot about the true cost of farming and the hidden cost of farming and what it costs to society and what it costs to governments,
to economies.
And it feels like it would be such a tiny investment to make with such huge returns if we take the true cost of food into account.
Yes.
Yeah.
It would make food more expensive,
which is politically quite hard though.
isn't it?
But would it though?
Because the idea is that instead of spending more money on healthcare,
on cleaning up the mess,
you would spend a fraction of that money on the solutions at the source.
Yeah,
okay,
you're right.
If you take into account the wider costs of cleaning up,
yes,
it probably would make economic sense.
Well,
it certainly would make economic sense.
You're right.
So hi Lynn,
glad you're getting to speak with Rafael.
Here's my question for you.
As a biodiversity expert,
there are many conversations at a policy level about valuing biodiversity.
In the EU,
there's talk of developing so-called nature credits.
In the UK,
we have already the so-called biodiversity net gain system where property developers need to pay for biodiversity improvements.
So my question is around these different attempts to monetize biodiversity improvements.
In your view,
for whom does value...
of on-farm biodiversity really accrue?
Who benefits from improvements in biodiversity on-farm beyond the farmer themselves?
And therefore,
who should pay?
That's a great question.
Hi,
Andrew.
Thanks for the great question.
So besides the farmer,
but everybody,
we all benefit.
We're talking about natural capital here.
We're talking about the aspects of nature that actually underpin our economy.
Clean water,
soil that is still able to produce food 100,
200 years from now,
a climate that's regulated and vegetation that's absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Everybody benefits from this.
And also there's the cultural joy that you get from nature,
from having a butterfly in your garden or just walking in the countryside and being able to hear a bird song.
I noticed that in,
In the Gare du Nord in Paris,
I've been through there twice in the last month,
and they are piping birdsong into the station,
which for me feels very jarring and strange because it's a very busy station with loads of other human noise,
anthropogenic noise.
But there's a wide recognition that the birdsong has a value that's not really about any kind of economic value.
It's a mental well-being and cultural value to people.
So we all benefit from that,
everybody,
everybody who eats food.
Everybody who lives here,
everyone who has a job,
everyone benefits from having healthy ecosystems in all the farmland.
And so the question was,
then who should pay?
If everyone benefits,
who should pay?
We should.
So we should all pay.
And that means that means governments paying through through their tax revenue.
And it means businesses paying and people paying the cost of it needs if there is a cost.
And maybe there isn't.
You know,
maybe if you do it well,
it actually saves money.
and you you
you there isn't really a cost which we've shown with the the the farmers i was talking about in in south india who are doing the zero budget natural farming their income increases more than doubles when they when they reduce their inputs and farm in a more sustainable way without
losing any food production so that there actually is no cost to it it saves us money thank you so much lynn honestly love this conversation from start to finish it's been amazing thank you so much for giving us your time and
your amazing experience and expertise.
Thanks for the conversation.
I've really enjoyed it.
It's been a pleasure.