Last week I discussed how things were changing locally. Now, the sun is shining and the lockdown is pretty much total. It's like we are in a post-apocalyptic movie; there's hardly any traffic, the buses are still passing our house every ten minutes or so, but this time they are almost always empty. On the other hand, I have never seen so many walkers. Carefully spaced out into family groups, dodging into the road rather than risking getting too close, they have occupied the peri-urban lanes and paths like nothing we've seen before. 

It makes sense. Why not explore your locality in the 1 hour of exercise outside the house you are allowed. You can't go the gym, can't go shopping, the tourist attractions have all closed - even the RSPB nature reserves. I wonder, will people get to like this, will there be more support for traffic controls, and more desire to open up the peri-urban areas with more paths and green spaces? And will these ideas start to feed into regional planning?

How quickly things can change. The country is starting to shut down. The University essentially shuts down its campus tomorrow, but will try to keep going through online resources. Schools will also close tomorrow, and sports events are winding down, while we are advised not to go to pubs, cinemas and restaurants. Overseas holidays are done for now, and the cruise business may struggle to recover as some of the larger ships have turned into mobile disease incubators. And for us, we are in self-declared isolation, as one of our friends just may have been infected when Helen saw her at the weekend, and my aged mother routine of shopping, teas with friends and family, has come to a crashing halt.

And yet. Our neighbours in our tiny part of north Leeds have set up a WhatsApp group, and are collecting prescriptions on our behalf. While the big supermarkets are struggling to keep us supplied, more local companies are stepping up. Our dairy produce is being delivered from a farm just a few miles to the north. One of our local cafes is providing a general grocery delivery service, as the cafe business goes on hold. The food shortages in our local shops now extend to flour and veg, as the opportunity for more home cooking presents itself.

Are these tentative steps towards the more local, sustainable, community-based food system that we've been talking about? 

As I write, I get the impression we are moving rather bumpily towards the new world order that will come with climate change.

The status quo is one of increasing international travel, increasing globalisation of supply chains, decreasing regulation and lighter touch government. It's estimated that there were 1.4 billion international tourism arrivals in 2018. We have neighbours who are taking 3 intercontinental holidays this year alone. My sons are hoping to be working in South Korea or New Zealand this year, and there are lots more trans-national romances among young people. This is a different world from the one I grew up in, where we seemed to range over around 10 miles, and international travel was the object of TV shows, but not reality. The carbon footprint of flights is around 2.5% of global emissions, but was expected to grow rapidly, a situation clearly not compatible with reducing our carbon footprint. But the coronavirus outbreak is slashing the number of flights as demand crashes. My own forthcoming trip to EFSA in Parma, in northern Italy, has been replaced with web conferences.  Will we see a smaller, leaner, less polluting travel industry? And if so, will the environmental benefits being brought through eco-tourism be lost? 

The last time I was in China (well before the virus outbreak), a new factory had swung into production. I was told it was going to make all the automatic gearboxes for Volvo. Some of our food supply chains are incredibly complex. Such globalisation of supply chains brings benefits in terms of cost, but risk being disrupted in there are major problems in transport. Then what? We can wait a bit longer for a new car, but what about the risks to our food supplies?

One proposed solution is the re-localisation of food supply chains. This can easily sound like a return to digging for victory, the re-focussing on local food. But local food production is suffering from climate change now. We have a smallholding near Leeds, and the land is far more waterlogged than ever I have seen it. Many farmers in our area have been unable to plant their crops, or watched them rot in the fields during this winter of mild, stormy, wet weather. And even if we could figure out how to maintain production, the population is far larger than it was, expectations of quality and variety are higher, and of food prices are far lower than in the past. There are real risks to food safety if we shift to novel supply chains, and investment is needed to make them operational at a meaningful level. In other words, the shift towards more localised food systems may be a sensible response to the climate emergency, but needs proactive governance.

The climate emergency is not just something to be endured, it is an opportunity to reframe our ideas about quality of life. To enjoy a community event, to reclaim our local heritage and culture. Never let a good crisis go to waste, as someone once said. I am hopeful about the coronavirus outbreak, that it will bring about much more detailed and timely responses to the climate emergency at the level of families, communities, towns and cities. 

 

I was privileged to have visited on organic farm as a guest of Prof Shiwei Guo,  Nanjing Agricultural University. It's well understood that organic farming needs an holistic approach, but this one integrated marketing and added value in ways which I found inspiring.

The farm itself is in a good, but not ideal, location. It's in a hilly area not far from Nanjing, famed for tea production and tourism (there is a major lake nearby). There is money around; think of the Cotwolds in England as a more local equivalent. The brand is very modern; slightly kooky with strong visuals, with a strong focus on value and quality. Much of the produce is sold via the web. The products are high quality; for example, the main crop is rice, but this is sold as specialist products (including brown rice, rice spirit and rice vinegar, the equal to balsamic vinegar from Italy. Outside, the main rotation is rice - green manure, grazed by incredibly cute but high value pigs, with free range chickens wandering about, and new fruit trees going in. It looks pleasantly chaotic but is anything but, and the quality is recognised by the collection of awards and certificates. Interestingly, part of the reason why this works is that there are no foxes to take out the chickens.

I have just come back from holiday in Australia accompanied by a brand new acoustic guitar. In itself, not really worth a comment on an ecological blog, but bear with me. I was incited to visit the factory where the guitar in question was made by Cole Clark, in Melbourne, Australia. I learned that many factors affect the sound of a guitar, including the choice of wood. Different combinations of wood on the guitar face, side and back, neck and fretboard, all influence how the guitar sounds, to a far greater level than I had appreciated. 
The challenge is that some of the woods traditionally associated with guitars are no longer as widely available as they once were. There are stories of new finds of the right woods turning up in the bottom of a swamp, or from a secret hardwood planting by the British Empire in years past. But ultimately, there's just not enough of some of the high quality woods around. Rosewood has now been put on the CITES list of `species that can be traded internationally only under strict conditions, and ebony is expected to follow suit.
Cole Clark have anticipated this challenge by moving to timbers that are, in their words, more sustainable. This means avoiding trees that are under threat, focusing on Australian timbers. Interestingly, they consider Australian plantations of trees that are under threat in their native habitats (e.g. Sequoia plantations) as being perfectly acceptable - a position I agree with. This move to new wood sources involves a good understanding of the key sonic properties of different timbers. My selected model is made of Bunya top, Australian Blackwood back and sides, and Black Bean finger board. It looks good, is a delight to play, and sounds great. 
Of course, this is not just an issue for guitars, but applies to furniture, and this issue is likely to grow as demand for quality wood. And this reminds me of a visit I made to a group of poor farmers in Thailand back in 2003. These farmers transformed their degraded land into productive smallholdings, capable of providing their own  needs for food with some extra. But also there on many farms, growing slowly, stood a mahogany tree, to pay for their children's education. 

It's July in Yorkshire and I'm typing this in shorts and teeshirt. I'm looking forward to the last of the World Cup matches, and relieved that Trump has not actually started a war while in the UK. So not too bad.

But, unnoticed by the national media, the weather is making me very nervous. We have a smallholding, and so get to see what's happening out there on a daily basis. The winter was long and wet, and in mid May it was finally dry enough to apply lime. The lime is still clearly visible on the surface, as it has hardly rained since. Our grass has stopped growing, and the horses and sheep are wandering across pasture that is increasingly parched and bare. At least we got a low-yielding hay crop. Of course, it's not just us. At the Leeds University farm, the cereal crops (see the photo of barley on the right) have nearly all gone yellow, but the grain has barely filled. The oil seed rape looks as though it is being dessicated as usual before harvest (see the photo above), but it's just drying out. It's looking a poor year for crop yields, and word on the street is that yields of hay and silage are down, after the long winter which depleted feed stocks for livestock. 
Globally, the situation is not good. The FAO reckon that world cereal production is going down this year, and stocks are due to fall. But this assumes normal weather for the rest of the cropping season, and our experience of long, hot, dry weather is being shared by many across the world. If the recent periods of longer, more stable weather patterns are what is ahead, our agriculture and food systems will have change pretty rapidly if we are to cope. 

Once, many years ago, I was working on a European landscape ecology project. This was about factors that influenced the distribution and abundance of species in agricultural landscapes. To me, these factors including both spatial and temporal components; spatial because species depend on how the habitats are structured now, and temporal because they may also depend on the history. The balance varies between species; some species are more mobile than others, so can respond more rapidly to a changing landscape. I didn’t think my views were particularly contentious, but it hit a nerve. The Dutch scientists strongly favoured spatial processes, whereas the Belgians strongly favoured historical explanations. I started to get it when we were taken onto a field trip to the Belgian side of the border with the Netherlands. Our host took us to an ancient woodland, and pointed out the worn down trenches from World War One. We looked beyond the border to the Dutch flatlands, reshaped many times over the generations according to need. I wondered, does the Belgian culture promote historical explanations, and the Dutch promote spatial ones? In other words, did the choice of preferred explanations reflect a cultural view of the world?

I bring this up because I wonder if something similar is happening about the land sparing / land sharing debate. And this is triggered by my recent travels in Africa and Asia. I’ve lived all my life in England, where the countryside is the product of hundreds of years of interaction between people, plants and animals, resulting in a cultural landscape that at its best can include farming, biodiversity, livelihoods and beauty. This is land sharing, where serious wild nature has long gone.

My recent trip to Hong Kong presents a very different view. My son’s flat is at the edge of the city, and fronts on to forest. This has been disturbed, sure (there are no tigers for example), but is probably still close to primary woodland. This is land sparing in the extreme. These forests are used by many people for hiking and leisure, but there is no cultural landscape as I recognise in Yorkshire. In Kenya, the situation was more complex. We travelled by road from the Amboseli national park to central Nairobi. I was expecting quite stark boundaries between nature reserve, farming and urban areas, but no. The park itself is nearly stripped of trees by the elephants, and so the landscape is wide open. At the park boundaries, the scrub appears. This area is grazed by Masai cattle and sheep, but is shared by giraffe, zebra and gazelles. We were told that big cats and elephants didn’t venture here, creating a cultural landscape that seemed to complement the national park really well. But the Masai even grazed their livestock close the city centres, using road central reservations and other patches of grass. Whether this is land sparing depends on which species you are interested in, but to me the landscape could not be described by such terms anyway.

I wonder if the terms land sharing and land sparing are as much cultural as ecological, saying great deal about the backgrounds and expectations of the people using the terms, just as the preferred explanations of species distributions by landscape ecologist were rooted in their own cultures. I also wonder if these terms encourage to mistake the metaphors of land sparing and land sharing for actual descriptions of how the world works.

Last week, Nature published a research article from China. The approach was simple; smallholder farmers were asked to contrast two farming approaches, one their business as usual, and the other farming according to a crop management simulation, parameterised according to local climate, soils, and crops. The novel system outperformed business as usual, with increased yields and reduced fertiliser inputs. Where the research becomes really interesting, is its sheer scale. The field trails were fully randomised, and took lace over a decade, giving over 13,000 site years of data, over 3,000 per major crop. This research is part of a wider campaign involving 1,152 scientists, 65,000 extension staff, 138,000 agri-business staff and over 20 million small farmers, across 452 counties. 

I led the UK Farm Scale Evaluations of GM crops, and I thought that was big. But this is REALLY big. The advantage of this study size size comes from the more local and detailed analyses, supporting the sustainable intensification of farming at the local scale without losing the national picture. I’d be surprised if it can be repeated anywhere else in the world, it relies on the availability of a lot of resources coupled with an integrated bureaucracy. Just conducting the experiment is a great achievement; getting the data in, properly validated and analysed is, to me, simply awesome. 

To me, it also raises the question of the role of large scale experiments in agriculture. There is a perception that these experiments are not really needed, if we have intensive data recording over a large population of farms, coupled with some form of analytics to come up with some form of optimum management. I’m old fashioned, I tend to mistrust analytics. It’s very easy for algorithms to become misled by incomplete and biased data, it’s also very easy for them to fail to capture the key variables of value as farming and our environment changes. In other words, to me, even though the amount of data may be far larger than we have seen before, it is still subject to problems of bias and lack of completeness. But experiments were designed to address this problem; you decide what to measure and what to vary, and how to sample from a wider population without bias. This study supports my belief that experiments are still the mainstay of collecting evidence to support changes in farming. The challenge is to make sure the experiments are large enough, and conducted well enough, to be fit for purpose. 

I was never sure about how to answer this one. Is it climate change, intensive farming, pollution? But now I'm becoming more concerned about another factor. The increasing lack of awareness of wildlife. 
It really hit home to me last year, with my zoology and ecology students. Out of 160 or so, around 1/4 to 1/3 put their hand up to say they had been on safari, or had done some wildlife watching overseas. How many went wildlife watching in the UK? One and a half (I guess the half was someone show had been dragged around the countryside by the countryside). In a tutorial, I ended up asking a few students, where would you watch wildlife in the UK. There was an awkward pause. The one of them tentatively suggested, "A zoo?" 

There are other warning signs. I was in Todmorden last weekend (more to follow on this), and my host for a delightful walk around the town told me that she knew things were changing when she saw blackcurrants for sale in supermarkets for £2 a punnet. I knew what she meant. Why pay for them when they are all over the place for free? And now the loss of words about the countryside from the Oxford Junior Dictionary has prompted a new book, The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris , written and illustrated to try to keep the natural world as a real, living part of the world of children.

For without that strong emotional link, what is there to keep people caring about our living world? If plants, animals and ecosystem are just symbols, then nothing. If they are to be invoked by documentaries, well, we have loads already that we can repeat. And if it's all about going to exotic places, well they will be kept, supported by the tourism industry, while our living landscapes around can become more sterile without fuss of murmur. 

There is lots of good work being done, of course, not least through events like LEAF's Open Farm Sunday, and programmes like Countryfile, and organisations like the Wildlife Trusts. Is it enough?

​One of the big issues for all of us engaged with the UK’s agricultural environment Is what happens post-Brexit. This week, at a meeting in Brussels, we had a few clues. The meeting was a seminar intended to show off the work of the White Rose Universities In food and agriculture to the good people in and around the European Commission. I gave a talk describing the background to the White Rose Sustainable Agriculture Consortium, followed by Jonathan Leake giving some of our new results and their implications for farming, and Thorunn Helgason talking about the future of our research, with a focus on the potential value of new technologies for gene sequencing. The great news was that people came, especially Phil Hogan, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, who gave the keynote talk. There were plenty of others, too. Their presence made it clear that they still have an interest in what the U.K. Is up to, and an expectation that we will still be involved in research and policy discussions. I found this most heartening.
 
And the challenges facing agriculture policy in both the EU and UK are considerable in the coming years. There will be less money around, so spending must be better targeted. This isn't just about promoting increase in food production or environmental quality; in the EU the talk includes  promoting a circular economy approach, and encouraging young people to go into farming. More money will need to be found from somewhere to keep farmers in business if farm gate prices stay so low. Our work is starting to suggest at least one way it might happen; we are starting to get results that good management can increase soil quality and carbon, making crop production more resilient to extremes of rain or drought but also reducing the risk of flooding downstream, and capturing carbon from the atmosphere. If we can get those who benefit from these changes to help pay for them, who knows, we might get somewhere.