Soil Still Has To Come First
I’ll be honest, I’ve been putting out a weekly piece for over 18 months now, and most of you probably will not read this week’s blog.
You might be busy. You might be one of the hundreds who hits delete before clicking through. Or I might already be sitting in your spam folder, quietly wedged between a machinery sale, a market update, and an email promising you cheaper printer ink from a company you are fairly sure you have never dealt with.
But whether you read it or not, you all have something in common.
And that is soil.
Farming couldn’t be the industry it is without working soil. Some of you might call it mud; others might call it something less polite, usually when it is stuck in your cab, blocking a drill, refusing to dry out, or somehow managing to be too wet and too hard at the same time. But whatever name you give it, we all know it needs looking after.
And by looking after it, I do not mean giving it a bloody good beating and rolling it back down just because it is “that time of year” and it makes us feel like we have done something useful.
I mean getting soil to do what we actually need it to do, without it constantly causing problems, holding the crop back, and making the crop more dependent on whatever we can throw at it later on.
That is probably why soil health has crept further up the conversation over the past decade. Not because everyone has suddenly gone soft, or because farming needed another label to argue about; I think it is because input costs, weather, crop pressure and common sense have all started pointing in roughly the same direction.
There has been a genuine shift in how farming thinks about resilience. But there has also been another driver, and it would be naïve to pretend otherwise. Money talks. When there is a cheque attached to doing something that sounds environmentally positive, there will always be a sudden rush of people becoming very “soil aware”.
But away from the schemes, the headlines and the fashionable language, most growers have seen the more awkward truth. Crops that did not perform, even when the test results said things looked okay. Fields that should have done better on paper, only for the crop to quietly disagree in practice. That is the bit that really interests me.
For me, soil health has been about helping the system work properly.
Ten years ago, mostly by luck, I ended up at SFS.
Not because I had a burning desire to talk soil or products to farmers;
I needed a job. That is probably not the polished origin story, but it is the honest one.
I took the position because I could see real enthusiasm around a belief, and if I am honest, I wanted some of it too.
What started as a job slowly became a mindset, and I realised very quickly that talking to farmers about anything other than fertiliser was still seen as slightly odd.
Different, almost.
Sometimes even a bit suspect, as though discussing biology, soil function and plant health meant you were only one step away from turning up with a crystal ball and a cape.
After all, N, P and K had been a farmer’s key staple for years. The holy trinity gave growers the yield they craved; it made them money, and fitted neatly into a system everyone understood. So, for a long time, the question of how the soil itself was functioning was pushed into the background.
It was there, obviously, but not always listened to until something went wrong.
The exception was usually found with the growers who were already looking a bit deeper. The ones beyond the curve, the “mavericks”, the slightly awkward ones who were prepared to step further than “the norm” and ask what was happening beneath their feet.
And that is where I first started to properly learn. Quite often, that raised more questions than answers, but that was the point. That was where the learning came from.
To my mind, the strange thing is that farming often says it wants innovation, but it does not always know what to do with people who are actually being different.
It will revere the guru, especially if they come with a confident headline, a good photo and a neat story to tell. Yet it will often challenge the person quietly trying something in a field, simply because it does not quite fit the accepted way of thinking.
That has always seemed backwards to me.
Today, it feels like there are pseudo-gurus around almost every corner, all keen to share their lessons, their systems, their rules, and their step-by-step guide to better soil.
Many of them talk with absolute certainty, which is impressive in itself, especially when soil has never shown much interest in giving anyone absolute certainty.
And perhaps that sounds bitter. It is not meant to. I am not knocking success, and I do not think farming should ignore people who have built something useful. But I do think there is a difference between sharing what you have learned and turning soil health into a performance.
That is where, for me, many of them miss the point.
Soil does not tend to give neat answers.
What you learn today may need adjusting tomorrow.
What worked well in one field may not work the same way in the next.
If you get the same answer twice, it might not mean you have solved it; it might mean you need to go back and look harder.
And that is where I think the industry sometimes gets ahead of itself. We are dealing with something complicated, local, changeable and often inconvenient, yet we still seem very keen to turn it into something tidy.
I hear plenty of talk about carbon markets, certification for good soil practice, and badges for those who follow the latest initiatives. I see soil champions getting awards and articles written about them. I see plenty of congratulations, plenty of photos, and plenty of people being recognised for being on the right side of the conversation.
What I do not see enough of is proper progress and the desire to truly understand.
Pockets of innovation, yes.
Industry-wide progress, no.
Unfortunately, there is still a tendency in the industry to favour awards over learning. Far more comfortable celebrating the finished story than supporting the messy bit where people are still testing, questioning, failing, adjusting and learning. But that messy bit is where the real change happens.
It is not always neat, and it does not always make a good headline, but it is where confidence gets built. Not the polished confidence that comes after everything has worked, but the slower, more useful kind that comes from trying something, watching it closely, and being honest enough to change course when it does not behave as expected.
And perhaps that is part of the problem. Soil health still is not at the front of every grower’s mind.
In many cases, it comes in as a poor relative behind yield, cost, weather, workload, machinery, paperwork and, on some days, whether there is time to stop for a sandwich.
The early adopters will often tell you the same thing. Soil started out as an interest, then became a passion, and before long became an obsession. Expecting the wider industry to think about soil in that way might be a tall order, but we cannot keep treating soil as the thing we stand on while everything else gets the attention.
Because whether we like it or not, soil is still where most of the answers start.
So, is there a solution?
For me, it starts with the first small step.
Not a blind leap of faith, not throwing away everything you already know, and definitely not selling the sprayer and moving into a yurt.
It is about taking a sensible step into something slightly different, with enough support around it to learn properly from what happens next. (possibly a yurt)
That is how I started. I was shown things working, I made my own mistakes, and I slowly learned to ask better questions.
As a wise man once said, “he who holds the chalk learns the lesson most,” and I think there is a lot in that.
You learn more by doing, questioning and adjusting than you ever will by simply reading someone else’s biography.
A simple step is to start small and dream big. Pick an area you can learn from, try something different, watch what happens, ask why, and then ask why again because the first answer is rarely the whole answer.
SFS offers free trials and advice to help growers get started. Not because one trial suddenly gives you all the answers, but because it gives you a place to begin. It gives you something to compare, something to question, and something to build confidence from.
And who knows, you may just surprise yourself.
Thank you to those of you who made it to the end of the blog this time.
Your support is genuinely appreciated.
And for those who deleted it earlier, I will assume you agreed with every word.
Steve Holloway
Technical Manager
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