What if drought wasn't the problem?

Looking Beyond the Gateway

We Can't Save Farming If We Don't Save Soil

Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS

If anyone had told me thirty years ago that I would eventually spend a sizeable part of my working life staring into holes, I would have politely suggested they found someone else to talk to.

Back then life seemed rather simpler. If I'd managed a bacon roll before heading out to walk the Angus cattle, the day was already shaping up quite nicely. But I don't remember spending quite so much time wondering why one root carried on down while another decided it had gone far enough and turned sideways. These days I can often lose a surprising amount of time doing exactly that, although whether it counts as experience or simply getting older remains open to debate.

The strange thing is that I never set out to become interested in soil. What interested me, and still does, is why two similar fields can behave so differently. It sounds simple enough until you spend long enough trying to answer it. Over the years I have found that the answer has an irritating habit of leading me back beneath my boots.

From the car, crops can look deceptively respectable. That's often where the trouble begins. There's usually enough green to keep your hopes up and enough crop cover to disguise what is really happening underneath. Still, once you leave the gateway, push the plants apart and put a spade in the ground, the conversation changes. You stop asking what the crop looks like and begin wondering what has, or hasn't, been supporting it.

I have stood in more than a few fields that looked tired rather than disastrous. Nothing about them looked dramatic. The crop simply never looked entirely comfortable. The rooting was shallower than I would have liked, the ground beneath was beginning to tighten, and the plants appeared to be relying on whatever moisture remained within easy reach. There may well have been more further down, but much like someone with short arms and deep pockets, getting hold of it was proving another matter entirely.

Normally, one field like that would not have meant very much. What stayed with me was how often I found myself looking at the same picture. Different farms, different crops and different management, yet familiar patterns kept appearing often enough that they became difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

It would have been easy to blame the weather. Crops hurried through their growth stages, grass slowed or stopped in places, and harvest seemed impatient to arrive. Yet the longer the dry spell continued, the less convinced I became that drought was creating all the problems I was seeing.

More often than not, it seemed to be exposing things that had been quietly developing for much longer.

Thinking back to the winter, there had been no shortage of water. In some places there had been rather too much of it. Fields sat wet, drains ran hard, and plenty of rainfall found its way out of the field altogether. At the time it simply felt like another wet winter. A few months later, standing in those same fields with the ground drying beneath my boots, I found myself looking at it rather differently.

Water that has already left the field cannot support a crop months later, however much we might wish it would.

The same thought kept returning whenever I looked at roots. Dry weather did not suddenly make them shallow. If they stopped exploring the soil, turned sideways or confined themselves to the top few inches, that decision had probably been made long before the rain stopped falling. The dry weather had simply removed the season's generosity. The crop now had to rely on whatever the soil had managed to build, capture and retain before conditions became difficult.

That was when the questions began to change.

I still wanted to know what the crop needed. Increasingly, though, I found myself asking what was preventing the soil from doing more of what it was already capable of doing.

Years ago, if a crop looked disappointing, I was quicker to settle on an explanation. It seemed hungry. Establishment hadn't quite gone to plan.

The weather had been against it. Sometimes those explanations were perfectly sound, but they were rarely the whole story. I rarely found myself thinking, This is what drought has done. More often I found myself wondering whether it had simply exposed something that had been quietly developing for much longer.

Perhaps that's why I still find myself stopping in the middle of fields for no obvious reason. Someone driving past would probably look and assume I'd forgotten what I was doing. In reality, I'm usually trying to make sense of something that doesn't quite fit. Something where I didn't expect it or a patch that's held on when the rest has started to struggle.

At some point I made the mistake of opening social media to find the usual arguments about inheritance tax, supermarkets, imports, subsidies, government policy and, inevitably, Jeremy Clarkson. Farming has become part of the national conversation again, which is no bad thing after years of attracting attention mainly when a tractor delayed someone on the way to work.

What struck me, though, was how little of that conversation had anything to do with the ground everything else depends upon. I couldn't help wondering whether we naturally spend most of our time talking about the things that make the most noise.

Soil is different. It quietly gets on with its job. It doesn't announce when it is working better, nor does it warn you when it isn't. Most of the time it simply carries on until a difficult season asks a question it can no longer avoid answering.

These days, whenever someone asks me what the future of farming looks like, my mind doesn't immediately jump to machinery, chemistry, genetics or politics. It wanders back to a field, a spade and a crop that looked perfectly respectable from the car.

The most interesting things in farming are rarely the things you notice first. More often than not, they're waiting just beneath your boots, in the first hole you're prepared to dig.

Perhaps that's what these observations have changed most in the way I approach soil and plant nutrition. I'm less interested than I once was in immediately deciding what needs to be added or changed, and more interested in understanding what is happening beneath the crop first. Quite often, I find the better I understand that, the less obvious the original answer becomes.