Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

by George Monbiot

Dilapidated buildings slowly disappear into the ground not because they sink, but because the soil, continually squirted from the surface by worms, rises around them.

Scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have found that as much as 40 per cent of the rainfall in parts of East Africa appears to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, between 4,000 and 6,000 kilometres away.

Had the global financial system been allowed to cross a critical threshold in 2008, its collapse would have triggered cascading failure across human society. Only a global bailout amounting to trillions of dollars pushed it back into a safer state. Even before hysteresis occurred, far more energy (or money) was needed to stop the collapse than was needed (via the US subprime crisis) to cause it. Mass extinction events appear to be another example of contagious collapse. When one ecosystem or Earth system topples, it can pull down the systems that interact with it.12 While

Globalization grants people and nations greater reach, but it destroys modularity and sweeps away circuit breakers.

It seems to be an inherent property of the systems we create that over time they become more complex, more connected and less comprehensible to the human mind. Even

Since 1900, the world’s crops, according to the UN, have lost 75 per cent of their genetic diversity.43 This genetic narrowing can make crops more susceptible to diseases,

The measurement of heat at 100 per cent relative humidity is called the wet-bulb temperature. Human beings die of heat stress beyond a wet-bulb temperature of roughly 35°C.

In reality, most of us would die before that point. A 35°C wet-bulb temperature can kill a fit and healthy person lying perfectly still. During the heatwaves in southern Europe in 2003 and Russia in 2010, many people died, though the wet-bulb temperature never rose above 28°C.115 Already, at two weather stations in the Persian Gulf, wet-bulb temperatures have exceeded 35°C several times. Many

If people are unable to migrate, one-third of the world’s population could be confined to places with an average annual temperature of 29°C: in other words, as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara are today. Among them will be 1.2 billion people in India, nearly half a billion in Nigeria, 185 million in Pakistan and 150 million in Indonesia.

Even if rising yields can be sustained, experiments and modelling studies show that a combination of higher temperatures and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air will greatly reduce the amount of minerals (such as iron, zinc, calcium and magnesium), protein and B vitamins that crops contain.131, 132 The reason seems to be that plants grow faster in these conditions, and have less time to absorb nutrients.133

investigated further, I discovered something that shocked me. The major cause of river pollution in the UK is no longer industry, and no longer sewage outfalls, harmful and poorly regulated as these are. It’s farming.24, 25 Overwhelmingly, the worst farm pollution

Around 75 per cent of the antibiotics sold in the European Union and the US are used for treating not human beings but farm animals.

This is commonly described as a wicked problem, almost impossible to solve. In truth, almost all these fibres and other microplastics are removed from wastewater by modern sewage treatment works: one study reports a recovery rate of 99 per cent.74 So far, so good. But – and at this point you may decide whether to laugh or cry – having screened them out of the water supply, the treatment companies then release them back into the wild, in the sewage sludge they sell to farmers.

Though soy is just one ingredient of chicken feed, there can be more of it in chicken than in tofu: one report estimates that it takes 109 grammes of soy to produce 100 grammes of chicken breast.

The pesticides used on these and other crops threaten much of life on Earth. One study suggests that farmland in the United States has become forty-eight times more toxic to bees across twenty-five years.

Dead zones are areas of sea, mostly close to estuaries and coasts, in which oxygen levels fall so far that scarcely any living creatures can survive. There are now several hundred of them around the world,

One paper reports that ‘there is no correlation between agrochemical use and productivity or profitability’.127 What this means is that the farmers in the study who used extra herbicides gained nothing as a result.

One calculation suggests that if England and Wales became entirely organic, our land footprint would grow by 40 per cent.

The greenhouse gas emissions from organic produce tend to be similar, or worse, per kilogramme to those of conventional food.149, 150, 151 Organic beef farms – as the animals

take longer to raise and need more land – lose twice as much nitrogen per kilo of meat as conventional beef farms.

For the same reason that people want to buy their eggs: the chickens are allowed outdoors. While this is better for their welfare, it means they lay a scorching carpet of reactive phosphate across the fields on which they roam, often at far greater concentrations than any farm would spread manure.

Tree seedlings are highly nutritious, so sheep, even when they are few in number, selectively browse them out.fn10 Over the course of centuries, by preventing young trees from replacing the old ones as they die, sheep have turned forests into pastures or heather moorland, both of which sustain a smaller range of species.

There are more trees per hectare in some parts of inner London than there are in the ‘wild’ British hills where sheep graze.

My estimates suggest, conservatively, that some 4 million hectares of hill and mountain in the United Kingdom are used for sheep farming,163 or 22 per cent of the entire farmed area.164 This is roughly equivalent to all the land used to grow arable crops in this country.165 It is more than twice the size of the whole built environment (all the towns, cities, factories, warehouses, gardens, parks, roads and airports),166 and twenty-three times the area we use for growing fruit and vegetables.167 But, in terms of calories, lamb and mutton, across both the uplands and the lowlands, supply just over 1 per cent of our food.

Thanks to the team at Oxford University who run the website Our World in Data, we can make quick and easy comparisons between the foods we eat.175 Its charts show that, to produce 100 grammes of soy protein, eaten by humans in the form of tofu, requires just over two square metres of land. To raise 100 grammes of egg protein requires just under six square metres. Chicken protein needs seven, and pork ten square metres. Chickens and pigs need more land than tofu does because they cannot turn everything they eat into meat, as they have to sustain themselves and build other body parts. Milk, the website reports, requires an average of 27 square metres, beef 163 and lamb 185. Lamb protein, in other words, requires 84 times as much land to grow as soy protein. There

The climate costs of farming mirror its land costs. Raising a kilogramme of beef protein releases 113 times more greenhouse gases than growing a kilogramme of pea protein, and 190 times more than a kilogramme of nut protein.

This is because of the lower efficiency of converting grass into protein, and the slower growth of pastured animals: the longer they live, the more methane is released from their stomachs and nitrous oxide from their dung. Both are powerful greenhouse gases.212 Peas and nuts cause less global heating than chicken, which causes less than pork, which causes less than lamb and beef.213 Switching from a diet that’s high in meat to one entirely based on plants would cut the greenhouse gases from your food by 60 per cent.214

An analysis by Our World in Data shows that even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100, food production alone would bust the entire carbon budget two or three times over, if we want to avoid more than 1.5°C of global heating.

A study of carbon opportunity costs published in Nature found that, while the global average cost of soybeans is 17 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide per kilo of protein, the average carbon opportunity cost of a kilogramme of beef protein is an astounding 1,250 kilogrammes.

If your crop is being attacked, it’s because there’s an underlying problem. If I see a pest problem, I don’t want to know what nature’s done wrong to me. I want to know what I’ve done wrong. If you’ve got it right, your plants will defend themselves.’

They’re a gain. They raise our total yield. ‘Your biodiversity has to be integral to the whole operation. It’s not something you bolt on. Biodiversity is the driver of the farm.

‘People look at the nettles round the polytunnels and think “What a mess!” But those nettles keep the aphids alive, and the aphids keep the ladybirds alive. As soon as we need them, they move into our crops. If you look in the polytunnels now, you’ll find a ladybird on every leaf.’ I later

It turns out you don’t need a huge lot of nutrients to grow a crop – you just need them in the right place at the right time. And for that to happen, you need the right soil biology.

Green manure is a confusing term, as we think of manure as something applied to the land. But it means plants that are grown after a crop has been harvested, not to be eaten but to maintain or enhance the soil’s fertility.

growers look at what I’m doing and break into a cold sweat. That’s because I don’t mow these plants until the flowers are over and their seeds have set. The birds eat some of them. The rest fall into the soil. People have nightmares about the seedbanks in their soil. They think weeds are bad and want to eliminate them. But at many points in a crop’s life, if the soil is fertile and healthy, weed competition is not a problem at all. They are the crop’s understorey. They keep the soil covered. Eliminating weeds isn’t possible and isn’t desirable.

The wide variety of Tolly’s crops is likely to be a further defence against pests, as no insect that specializes in attacking a particular vegetable can proliferate for long or spread very far. His method also hampers invasive weeds: one scientific review suggests that weeds are reduced by 49 per cent in complex rotations like his.10 Because different crops are sown and harvested at different times, and compete with wild plants in different ways, weed species cannot easily hop from one stage of the rotation to the next.

to ensure it keeps cooking. Then, when it reaches the dark, slightly cooler state of the chip at the end of the row, he spreads it over his green-manure crops, twice every seven years, and leaves the worms to pull it into the earth. This, apart from seed, is the only substance applied to the fields that comes from outside the farm. Altogether, he lays down a depth of just seven millimetres of chip during the rotation: an average of one millimetre per year.

In other words, it’s a very light dressing of a material that contains scarcely any nutrients. It’s hard to believe that this thin gruel could make much difference. But it’s the revolutionary shift that has transformed his business. Tolly has kept meticulous records throughout his thirty-three years on the farm. They show that soon after he started adding the chip, the fertility of his soil soared. In the past five years, his yields had roughly doubled. How? No one really knows.

What they do show, however, is an extraordinary abundance of earthworms.

‘The woodchip isn’t fertilizer. It’s an inoculant, that stimulates microbes. The carbon in the wood encourages the bacteria and fungi, that bring the soil back to life. ‘We aren’t feeding the crop, we’re feeding the soil.

‘I’m maintaining fertility by adjusting the carbon levels. Once you find the right carbon balance, the bacteria and fungi will make nutrients accessible at the right time of year, and make sure the plants get what they need. We should let the plant choose what it needs to meet its own demands, instead of loading it with the minerals we think it wants.

and state that the nutrients they buy should ‘preferably’ come from organic sources, there is no rule enforcing these ‘preferences’: in principle, farmers could buy all their manure from non-organic farms and still qualify as organic.

But, while artificial fertilizer often releases its nutrients too quickly, manure releases its nutrients too slowly. If the crop is not to starve, the dung needs to be spread long before the maximum growth spurt. Even then, the plants are unlikely to receive all the nutrients they need to reach their full potential. This is especially true of modern, high-yielding crops, whose growth phase is particularly fast. Long after the plant has matured and been harvested, manure continues to release its minerals. If minerals are delivered when plants aren’t growing, they tend to leach away, either into the groundwater or into the rivers.

There’s a fundamental principle that should apply to all farming: release nutrients when they are needed. Lock them up when they are not.

What he seems to have done, in line with the fundamental principle, is to induce the microbes in the soil to deliver minerals when they are required, and to hold onto them when they are not.fn10 By striking the right balance between carbon and nitrogen in the soil, which plays a major role in the behaviour of bacteria and fungi, he appears to have created a self-regulating system.

A ghost acre is land in another place, on which a farm depends. The chicken farmers in the Wye Valley harvest ghost acres in Brazil and Argentina: the land from which their feed comes.

Tolly calculates that if he were a mainstream organic grower, using animal dung, his land would be ghosted by an area between two and three times as big as the one he farms.

their production. ‘You get this build-up of phosphate and potassium to ridiculous levels, and that causes big problems. I call it soil obesity. Overfeeding the soil reduces the activity of fungi and bacteria, at least on some soil types. And you can’t keep building up carbon for ever. You have to use it. Otherwise you end up with a peat bog, which doesn’t grow food.

Unless we are to complete the destruction of the world’s forests and other wild places, we need to minimize our use of plant materials.

FareShare’s figures show that a tonne of food, averaged across all lines, would cost around £1,500 to buy. It can find and distribute the equivalent in surplus food for £210.5 It