In Southwest Wales, at the very edge of the Gower peninsula, is a National Trust-owned plot of land known as ‘the Vile’, clinging to the edge of the cliffs which look out over the Bristol Channel and Irish Sea. The land is divided up into what might look, from above, like strips of green and yellow carpet. Each strip is a tiny, cultivated field, around 1-2 acres, with the Vile as a whole resembling how this very promontory would have been farmed since before the Norman conquest, more than a thousand years ago.
Mounds of soil known as “baulks” separate one strip – typically named for a feature, such as ‘Bramble Bush’ – from the next. During the warmer months, the peripheries of each strip, and the baulks themselves, are awash with clover, campion, linseed and thrift, drowning the landscape in pinks and blues.
The Vile is an example of the ‘open-field’ system of communal agriculture – once the archetype across Europe – in which a variety of farmers operated in a single subdivided plot, each tending to his or her own strip of land, and coming together to cooperate and plan the cropping and harvest; perhaps sharing the cost of seed and equipment, as well as the burden of labour.
In recent times, farming has often been characterised as the enemy of biodiversity. Where one flourishes, the other withers. But it was not always like this, and medieval farms like the Vile show how one can pursue food production whilst supplementing biodiversity. The baulks act as natural corridors or bridges for small mammals, and the vegetation which clings to them offers cover for vast numbers of ground-nesting birds. Bees, but also moths, butterflies and even birds are drawn by the wildflowers and stay to pollinate the crops. Apiculture – or beekeeping – can be managed in conjunction, for the immediate benefit of the crops but also producing saleable honey.
So why is all farming not done this way? The most obvious reason is efficiency. A single field, cultivated by machines, will – all other things being equal – produce in the short term a far greater yield per acre than the same space divided up into multiple strips, farmed separately and manually. It was for this reason that in Britain’s postwar era, miles upon miles of hedgerows were ripped up, creating larger fields, and across which the cost of advanced farming machinery could be amortised.
With the world population as it stands, it would be catastrophic if, over night, every farm were transformed into the ecologically far friendlier medieval model of agriculture. The flipside is that the same population is doomed if modern farming practices continue, unimproved.
It has been said that in some parts of the world, including the UK, there are only 60 harvests left, referring to the pace at which soil is eroding and degrading, and the point after which yields will fall away to nothing. Based on two crop cycles per year, this would suggest that in as little as 30 years, humanity as a whole could face acute starvation. Scientific studies, including by researchers at Oxford University in 2021, have demonstrated that this claim is overblown, and that more than half of the world’s cultivatable soil has more a ‘lifespan’ of more than one thousand years, but that, nevertheless, urgent action is required to address soil health, by using methods such as cover cropping, minimum or no-till farming and contour cultivation – all of which can be found in farms like the Vile.
The lesson is less about turning the clocks back a thousand years or more, or undoing the various Agricultural Revolutions (the only reason we are here at all, frankly!) but by enabling our farmers to adopt such methodologies, confident in the support of its consumer base. Farmers are, on average, amongst the least wealth and financially resilient in our society, and yet they play a critical role in our health and the health of our planet. We cannot demand they toss away their ploughshares if we continue to buy from maximum tillage factory farms. We must also push governments to ensure farmers – and indeed any land stewards – have the ability to monetise natural capital assets, such as carbon and nutrient sequestration and biodiversity net gains, from which we as a society benefit but which the farmers and land stewards alone must labour to produce.
