Fringe message should be heard

THE farming establishment always turns out in force for the Oxford Farming Conference. At last week's event, there were more consultants, lobbyists, agri-businessmen, accountants, researchers, lawyers, politicians, PR people, bureaucrats, quangoists and NGO-dwellers than you could shake a stick at.

What there weren't very many farmers. I counted just over 100, out of an attendance of 450, and quite a few of those were there as the expenses-paid representatives of organisations, rather than in their own right.

This isn't exactly surprising, given the cost involved. I worked out that a farmer travelling up from Devon or Cornwall wouldn't see much change out of £750, by the time they'd paid for admission, accommodation, dinners and travel. So, it is probably just as well that, this year, we got two Oxford farming conferences for the price of one.

The main event was held as usual in the Victorian splendour of the Examination Schools; the alternative, Oxford Fringe, in an ancient, draughty annex of the University Church just up the road. The one was sponsored by the big names of the global food industry; the other organised by a retired biologist called Colin Tudge, who has set up a website with the modest ambition of "taking charge of the world's food supply".

But for all their many differences, the two events did have one thing very much in common, and that was their theme: how do we feed the world in the looming shadow of climate change?

The main conference took its cue from Hilary Benn's Food 2030, in which Britain's farmers had been set the challenge of "producing as much food as possible, as long as it is responsive to demand and recognises the need to protect and enhance natural resources".

No specific targets are given; the mostly unwritten assumption being that market forces – reflecting an ever-tighter balance between demand and supply – will provide the necessary incentives in the shape of higher prices. Precision farming, increased yields and, above all, new varieties of nitrogen-fixing, drought-resistant genetically engineered crops would provide the necessary technological fixes.

The view from the alternative conference could hardly have been more different. Food security would be achieved as much by people (in the rich countries) eating less – especially less meat – as by their farmers producing more.

Commodity agriculture had failed and the world's food supplies were precarious, so the priority should be to "de-carbonise" agriculture and end its dependence on nitrogen fertiliser, even if that meant accepting a halving of cereal production in the UK. It was no use expecting market forces to achieve these outcomes.

"The market system is not functional," insisted the chairman, Sir Crispin Tickell, incidentally, one of Prince Charles' most trusted advisers. The strategy should be for each country to achieve self-sufficiency through a mixture of production subsidies, import controls and rationing (that last bit wasn't actually spelled out, but I'm blowed if I can see how else you are going to persuade people to eat less).

Surprisingly, given the air of well-padded complacency at the main event, and hair-shirt doom at the Fringe, it was a speaker in the marbled halls who provided the starkest assessment of where we stand. Dr Andrew West, chief executive of AgResearch in New Zealand – a country that has much in common with the South West in its climate and agricultural dependence on ruminants – talked about how his country's farming might have to change.

This did not make for comfortable listening. The hill country, he predicted, would go to forestry for cellulosic biofuel production, as sheep farming became uneconomic due to carbon taxes. New Zealand would become a land of cows and trees, with the environmental footprint of cows being drastically reduced through more efficient use of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilisers, sequestration of carbon in pastoral soils and an absolute reduction in methane and nitrous oxide emissions from ruminants and pasture. Increased use of grazed grass and legumes would have a crucial role to play. There would be a drive towards veganism and what meat and milk was produced would need to be sold to high-value markets and a use found for every part of every animal.

But all may not be lost. Up the road at St Mary's, two Westcountry champions of grazing livestock, Graham Harvey and Ben Mead, were talking about a technique called mob grazing, developed in the USA.

This is based on the grazing habits of the vast herds of bison which used to roam the prairies of the Mid West. Rather than spreading out over the entire available grazing area, they would concentrate on one patch at a time, eating it down to the roots, literally almost trampling it into the dirt, before moving on and allowing the pasture to recover.

By using fencing to mimic this grazing pattern with cattle, US researchers have found stocking rates are increased, soil organic matter content is raised to as much as 20 per cent, vastly more carbon is stored and both absorbency and drought-resistance is improved.

Now, as a mere observer, I am not qualified to comment on how valid these claims may be or what contribution mob-grazing may be able to make to the enormous challenge of producing more food, more sustainably. But I do believe the divide which is emerging between the mainstream and the alternative is neither valid nor helpful and that, rather than being preached by the green converted, as at the Fringe, alternative ideas like this should be debated at the main conference alongside the more conventional solutions.

Farming needs all the ideas it can get, and the OFC would do the industry an even greater service than it does already if it broadened its outlook to become a forum for the whole of British agriculture.

Anthony Gibson is a freelance writer and may be contacted at anthony.gbsn@googlemail.com.