Lettuce sprouts, wildflowers bloom and buzzards hover over a meadow on a sunny spring day at Huxhams Cross Farm near Dartington, Devon. From the top of the hill, Marina O’Connell can explore most of the 15 acres (37 acres) she has dedicated to the last six years of transformation.
When she took over the management of the farm in 2015, she recalled that the farm contractor called it a “miserable piece of land”. Fields and hedges are now alive with wildlife, and young farmers are chatting while sowing carrot seeds and planting early spinach. Further down, the chickens peck around polytunnels full of vegetables and soft fruits.
This idyllic place has been completely redesigned and truly revived, as it was purchased by the charity for the benefit of the Biodynamic Land Trust in order to create a sustainable and “regenerative” agricultural system.
Regenerative agriculture usually refers to an approach that involves improving soil and water health while reducing cultivation, growing a diverse range of plants and products, and preserving organic matter in the soil to support crop growth.
Although such farms are still few and far between, more and more food producers are considering whether this is an idea whose time has come, as many are being stifled by headwinds, loss of subsidies and rising costs. The “Three Fs” – manure, animal feed and fuel – have all risen in price since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Unlike regenerative agriculture, other modern agricultural systems rely on synthetic fertilizers to restore nutrients and pesticides to rid plants of pests and diseases. Farmers will soon pay much more for these raw materials amid the biggest shake-up in agriculture in a generation, as the EU’s agricultural subsidy scheme – known as the common agricultural policy – was replaced after Brexit.
The soil in Huxhams Cross. It took two years to restore the soil biome on the farm using regenerative methods. Photo: Karen Robinson / The Observer
The government’s new environmental management schemes will focus more on the impact of agriculture, as farmers are increasingly encouraged to take into account climate, biodiversity and their nature management.
“Right now we have real-time climate change, and I think farmers are also aware that the weather is changing,” O’Connell said. “The increase in nitrogen fertilizers has just woke everyone up to the urgency of it. So the transition, which was going to happen in maybe 10 years, suddenly accelerated. “
Prior to 2015, Huxhams Cross was nominally part of a dairy farm owned by the Dartington Hall Trust; barley is grown on half of the fields for livestock feeding, while wet meadows are virtually abandoned. The new owners have called on O’Connell, a farmer in the 1980s, to challenge the creation of a financially independent farm and restore health to the land.
She and her family moved from Essex to continue the project. “It was grown with chemicals and the soil was essentially dead,” O’Connell said. “We spent two years repairing the soil biome,” she added, an ecosystem of plants, animals and microbes living below the surface.
As an illustration, O’Connell offers two plastic food containers. One contains a pale, hard, dried ball of soil that she collected on arrival at the farm, while the other is full of soil now: aerated, dark brown, and composed of particles of various sizes.
One of the first tasks for O’Connell and her team was to plan the work process on the future farm and the layout of the crops, to plant rows of trees across the sloping ground, and to install a rainwater collection system.
Lettuce grows in Huxhams Cross. Photo: Karen Robinson / The Observer
They planted legumes and clover, which fix the nitrogen in the ground to begin rebuilding the soil. These “green manures” are grown for several years before the crops can be sown, ideally grazed by animals that add their own feces. At Huxhams Cross, the chicken coops move across the field every week, while the two cows on the farm, Narcissus and Daisy, act as “giant mowers.”
Such a time-consuming process can frustrate farmers who are looking for a quick solution to get rid of rising fertilizer costs. “It’s really a two-year transition phase in my experience,” O’Connell said. “It must be planned. If you have a large farm, you would probably want to transition one block at a time, not the whole, because that would cause a cash flow problem.
This is a critique of regenerative agriculture that O’Connell acknowledges: on farms where the fields remain empty for perhaps a year or three, yields are lower than those grown in more industrial ways with crops fertilized with synthetic fertilizers. . If all food was produced this way, critics say, people could starve.
In fact, the global risk of food shortages has raised its ugly head again, especially after Russia’s invasion of key agricultural producer Ukraine. The dangers of a hasty agricultural transition have been highlighted in recent months in Sri Lanka, following last year’s sudden and unexpected ban on all chemical fertilizers by the country’s president, leading farmers to warn of financial collapse and reliance on foreign food imports.
“If you switch from one system to another suddenly, it will create problems,” said Jules Pretty, a professor of environment and society at the University of Essex. However, he is convinced that regenerative agriculture must be taken seriously: “Taking a mix of old principles, having a diverse and captivating system with many elements and modern design components to work.”
Regenerative farm workers at Huxhams Cross in Dartington, Devon. Photo: Karen Robinson / The Observer
The fruits, vegetables, eggs and wheat grown at Huxham Cross now fill the plates of 300 families each week and are sold mainly locally at the Totnes Farmer’s Market. The farm is financially self-sufficient; food production is profitable and employs six people along with three apprentices, and its finances are supported by a welfare center that provides child therapy, run by O’Connell’s husband, a psychologist.
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Proponents of regenerative agriculture believe that such systems could feed the UK without problems if people ate a diet high in fruits and vegetables and less meat, especially from cows fed grain rather than grass.
The National Farmers’ Union has ambitions to reach zero zero food production by 2040 and said its members are working to do more to cultivate the land in a climate-friendly way. Currently, according to Pretty, there are only about 2,000 farmers who practice the technique in the UK.
Back at Huxhams Cross, O’Connell takes stock of everything they’ve accomplished in the first five years. “We are what they call carbon-negative, so we emit five tonnes of carbon a year, more than what we use. Our biodiversity levels have risen, we have 400% more worms, 30% more bird species. “
And the word seems to be coming out: O’Connell is now taking courses on regenerative farming methods and proudly recounting how a local dairy farmer in the 1950s had just made the change. “Much of it is just having the confidence to understand how it works and make the leap.”
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