soil

The farming industry is now looking seriously at soil health – quality of the soil isn’t up to scratch – something like 40% of arable land in Wales. Grasslands a little better off. One farmer has just taken on 80 acres in Anglesey PH was so acid is was almost not there. Its probably not that bad here, but the land isn’t being used.

Did you see the colour of the streams and river after that last lot of rain [February 2020]? It was all cloudy and dark - its the soil being washed down. i’ve never seen it like that before. What has changed though? is it just much more rain? Or is it changes in the cover or the way we are using the land? I think someone should look into it.

People seem to think these days that soil is dirty, its horrible, you catch things off it. But no, you only catch things if you haven’t been exposed to it when you were young. My kid is 15, he’s only missed 4 days from school. He never picks up the bugs and from a young age, and from when he was really little, we just said go out there, get dirty, no problem.

Every year I do a little archaeological dig. Last year in the woods up above Cwm y Glo looking for remnants for how the village got its name – from charcoal burners, 500 years ago. And yes, we found it, the charcoal burning camp. But what amazed me was I’d opened up a trench before the first guy, who was a 6th former, a big rugby player guy, joined me. And we were leaning down and working at the trench and I said to him ‘oh just work on this bit, take that away’. And he said ‘what, I have to lean down there, in the trench. In the soil? Yeah I said. ‘Can I have some gloves please’. Ok, so I got him some thin gardening gloves. And he was scraping away at the soil as if it was toxic. As if it was sort of radioactive. He was this huge guy, and he was just tickling the soil. I asked him if he was alright. he says ‘I don’t like soil, its dirty. I’ve never been allowed to go anywhere near soil.’ But you play rugby. ‘Oh but that’s different’.

A week later we had another guy the same. So we are in the middle of the forest. There’s no one around. No public footpath, nothing. Half way through the morning he said ‘hwere’s the toilet?’. I said ‘oh just go behind the tree over there’. He went as white as a sheet, his mouth gaped and he was like I can’t do that. So I had to drive him down to Cwm y Glo every time he needed a pee. And that’s when it really hit me, these people are losing touch with all this.

Digging Down finding and moving trysor (3 of 57).jpg

I think there is more awareness that the health of the soil is important. That’s my impression anyway. [Laughs]. Maybe I’m just being optimistic? If you look here [pointing at depressions in the ground] you can see the cattle have compressed the soil. That’ll be a solid layer underneath. There is just less rotation of cattle and sheep than there used to be - all the little fences and walls and hedges have been removed to make big fields, or farmers just let their livestock wander through the fields rather than rotating them. And maybe its too many cattle and sheep, more than the ground can cope with. But if you left it for a year or something, the plants would break that up. Some of those slopes, if you poured water on them, it would just run off, or on the flat bits, it would puddle but not soak into the ground. Then that causes flooding, doesn’t it.

I heard something about us being able to sort all the carbon that’s floating about in the atmosphere by getting the carbon back into the soil. That’s what organic farming does, it looks at how to get organic matter back into the ground. Its not rocket science. Improved grassland is a real problem - it uses artificial fertilisers to keep things going, without returning organic matter into the ground. It makes the soil more acid, and that means more soil will wash away and less things can grow on it. I think they said something like 30% of the world’s carbon - no, maybe 80%? - could be absorbed if ALL the soils in the world were restored to health. That’d be something quite easy to do wouldn’t it? I mean relatively?

We’ve got 10 acres at Llanrug and we’ve divided it up into three, for three different members of the family to try different ways of working with the land, and seeing the effect on the soil/what happens. The soil is quite compacted, but we’ve been told that after 4 years or something like that, that plants wil break it up. So one of us has rotivated it and planted on it. Another of us is not using any machinery, spreading manure by hand (she’s studying regenerative agriculture). Another spreading manure using machinery. It’s too early to know the results yet. We’ll have to put horses on it though by the end of the year, but hoping to rotate them around…

We’ve got a bit of land behind our house, and we don’t do anything with it. We’ve been wondering what to do for the best. How do we find out? What should we do? Sheep get in, at the moment, so should we stop them doing that? If we did, where would they go?

We’ve started wondering what if we look at what we do with this land - some of it we own, some of it we rent - from the point of view of soil health? What if we take a view of say 100 years from now, and look back and say ‘what should we do with the land for future generations’? Everything comes from the soil. But how to make it work financially? Or maybe we don’t look at it financially, but how do we make it work? Do we carry on producing beef? do we do something else?