Can we build resilience before we need it?

The Optimistic Sceptic

Looking for resilience without looking for miracles

Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS

Anyone of a certain age seems to remember the summer of 1976. I don’t particularly. I was one at the time, so if I have any memories of it at all they’re unlikely to be much use to anybody. Mention it to farmers a little older than me though, and you rarely need to explain what you mean. It became a sort of agricultural shorthand for a summer when it simply stopped raining.

For years, every dry spell seemed to be measured against it. Things were either getting close or, more often than not, nowhere near as bad.  The slightly uncomfortable part is that the summer so many people still use as the benchmark no longer looks quite as exceptional as it once did, and that made me think.

I’m not particularly interested in joining the argument about whether every hot day or dry field is evidence of climate change. There are plenty of people far better qualified than me to have that discussion, and plenty more who seem perfectly happy to have it anyway. I’m far more interested in things closer to home. If hotter, drier and generally less forgiving summers are going to turn up more often, what does that mean for the fields we’re asking to cope with them?

In the previous piece, I wondered whether difficult weather actually creates all the problems we see, or simply exposes things that were already there. Perhaps the next question is what we can do about that before the weather arrives.

My naturally inquisitive brain has become interested in resilience, and so far I’m not convinced it’s one thing in particular. I suspect it’s more likely to be a collection of mundane things working well enough together that, when conditions become difficult, the crop has somewhere else to turn.

Water is an obvious place to start. We pay plenty of attention to rainfall when there isn’t enough of it, but perhaps less to what happened to it when there was plenty. Neighbouring fields can receive exactly the same amount and make remarkably different use of it. Some disappears down drains, some runs across the surface, some evaporates and, if things are working reasonably well, some gets into the soil and stays somewhere a root might actually find it later.

I can’t do much about how much falls from the sky — not yet anyway — but what happens once it reaches the field is another matter. A soil that allows water in, holds a useful amount and has roots capable of following it down is in a rather different position when the surface begins to dry.

None of that makes a field immune to drought. Leave almost any crop without rain for long enough and eventually it will run out of clever ideas. To me anyhow, resilience isn’t about pretending those limits don’t exist. It’s about wondering whether they can be moved a little.

There’s always going to be “the next best thing”, and agriculture does seem rather fond of revolutions. They usually arrive with a new name, a conference and somebody explaining why most of what we were doing previously was wrong. I’m doubtful that resilience will be quite that exciting. I suspect it will come from smaller things: water getting into the soil when it arrives, roots having somewhere useful to go and the soil continuing to function when conditions become less helpful. None particularly remarkable on its own, but perhaps rather more important when the weather stops being generous.

Roots are probably the easiest of those things to see, although usually only once you take the effort to look for them. By the time a crop begins showing obvious signs of stress above ground, quite a lot of its fate may already have been decided below it. A root that met tough resistance early on, turned sideways, or simply never developed much depth cannot suddenly decide halfway through June that another foot of soil would be rather useful after all.

That’s why we need to pay more attention to what happens earlier in the crop’s life. When moisture is plentiful near the surface, differences in rooting can seem relatively unimportant. Take that moisture away, and they become rather more interesting, particularly when one crop has managed to reach the parts of the soil profile other roots cannot reach.

Some of the work I’ve been involved with has made me look at this more closely. I’ve seen enough differences in establishment and rooting to keep my curiosity going. I choose those words deliberately, as a better-looking root system in April doesn’t prove that a crop will cope with drought in July, and as a sceptic I’m increasingly wary of agricultural claims that travel considerably further than the evidence supporting them.

What interests me is the possibility rather than the promise. If I can encourage a crop to explore more soil before conditions become difficult, it seems reasonable to ask whether I’ve given it access to more water, more nutrients and ultimately a few more choices when the easy ones disappear. It isn’t particularly glamorous, and “gave the crop a few more choices” is unlikely to make much of a marketing slogan, but perhaps that’s closer to what resilience actually looks like in a field.

There is a considerable difference between trying to rescue a crop from stress and putting it in a better position before the stress arrives. The former gets our attention because the problem is already visible. The latter is easier to overlook because, when it works, there may be nothing particularly dramatic to see.

One of the harder things to see is what is actually happening around those roots. A soil can contain everything the analysis says the crop needs and still somehow fail to hand it over when required. Water, biology, chemistry and roots are all involved, which is slightly inconvenient because none of them seems particularly interested in keeping to the separate boxes we use to make sense of them.

That probably explains why biology keeps creeping into my thinking. I don’t expect it to perform miracles, and I’m certainly not suggesting it can make the weather irrelevant. I’m simply seeing enough to keep asking questions, which, slightly annoyingly, is how most of these things seem to start.

It makes me wonder whether a more active soil might continue doing useful things for a little longer when conditions become less favourable. Could it keep cycling nutrients more effectively, could roots continue exploring, and could that relationship between plant and soil keep functioning as water becomes limiting? I don’t expect a straightforward yes or no, but I’ve seen enough to think the questions are worth asking.

I’m less interested in finding something that makes a crop drought-proof — I don’t believe such a thing exists — and more interested in removing some of the reasons it struggles earlier than it needs to. Those reasons are rarely confined to one place. Structure, chemistry, biology and some of our own decisions can all play a part, which is slightly less comfortable to admit. Improving several of them a little may ultimately matter more than trying to perfect one.

Perhaps the danger is that resilience becomes another one of those words agriculture uses so often that eventually, it can mean almost anything. I’m probably guilty of using it myself without always stopping to think about what I actually mean by it.

The more fields I look at, though, the simpler my definition becomes. I don’t think a resilient crop is one that never struggles. I’m not even sure that’s a particularly sensible ambition. I’m more interested in whether it can keep going for a little longer before it does.

That might mean roots reaching slightly deeper, water hanging around for a little longer or nutrients remaining available when conditions become less helpful. The differences may be small enough to go unnoticed in an easier year, but in a difficult one I suspect they begin to matter rather more.

The awkward thing is that much of this has to happen before you know whether you’re going to need it. By the time the crop is rolling its leaves, the grass has stopped growing and everyone is looking hopefully at a weather app that has changed its mind three times since breakfast, quite a few of the opportunities to influence what happens next may already have passed.

I certainly don’t have a recipe for getting all of this right. If anything, the more I look, the longer the list of questions seems to become. But I’m becoming increasingly convinced that waiting for the difficult season before thinking about resilience is probably leaving things a little late.

And that brings me back to 1976. Those summers become landmarks because they were unusual enough to be remembered decades later. What has been playing on my mind is whether it still makes sense to think of them as quite so unusual.

I have no idea what next summer will bring. It could be another dry one, or I could spend half of it standing in a field complaining that it hasn’t stopped raining since March.  British weather has always had a fairly reliable way of making anyone who predicts it look foolish.

I can, however, keep looking at what might give a crop a better chance either way. What happens to water when it arrives, where roots are able to go and how well the soil continues to function are things I can at least try to understand and influence.

Perhaps that’s where resilience becomes useful to me. Not as another system, label or promise, but as a different way of looking at the problem. Rather than waiting until the weather turns against a crop and wondering what I can do about it, I’m becoming more interested in what could have been done while the weather was still on its side.

Given my track record, I suspect that means I’ll be spending quite a bit more time staring into holes.

At Soil Fertility Services, resilience is seen as something built through several parts of the system working together. There isn’t one product that creates it, but there are tools that can support rooting, nutrient access, biological activity and soil function. For growers interested in building more resilience into their system, some of the SFS products may have a useful part to play.