School of Sustainability

Fertile ground was built by hand, not inherited

Ask where good farmland comes from and the usual answer is the luck of location. Some regions sit on prairie loam or black steppe earth and some do not; you are born onto generous ground or you are not. History mostly reinforces the gloom. Wherever people have farmed intensively, the ground has tended to give out beneath them — washed off the slopes, baked hard underfoot, spoiled by the very water meant to feed it. Good soil, on this account, belongs to geography's lottery winners.

Yet the record has a quieter strand running through it. Scattered across centuries and continents are places where communities raised fertile growing ground on land that would not previously carry a crop at all. The excerpt published by Regeneration International sketches this only in outline — the full account continues in a longer essay on Acres USA — but even the outline unsettles the assumption. In these cases, rich soil was not found. It was made, deliberately, by the people who needed it.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. If fertile ground can only be received and never made, then most of the world's farmland is on a countdown and the only variable is speed. If it can be made, then soil is less like a bank balance and more like a building — slow to raise, quick to wreck, and always the work of whoever is standing on it.

Regeneration International · Read the source

The asparagus they planted will feed people they never met

The slate was the worst of it. The Centre for Alternative Technology sits in a disused quarry above Machynlleth, so rebuilding the beds in its two polytunnels meant barrowing in load after load of compost made from the site's own food waste and leaf mould, then sieving the slate shards back out. Charlie Whale arrived last winter as one of four residential volunteers, joining a gardens team that had gone some time without winter help. The tunnels have since given grapes, squashes, cucumbers, borlotti beans and chard by the barrowload.

The bigger job was Roger's Field. Alongside staff gardeners Nick and Veronica, the volunteers brought the field and the Whole Home Allotment back into cultivation, including two more polytunnels, a restoration that Charlie says plainly would not have happened without CAT students turning up to volunteer weekends and putting in, in her words, mammoth efforts. The produce now goes into the site's kitchens and onto the plates of visitors, students and the volunteers themselves.

Not everything was digging. Under Nick's guidance the group learned to work coppiced hazel and willow from the site's own woodlands into hurdles, baskets, plant supports and towering pea-stick fences, though patience for the finer weaving reportedly thinned as Friday afternoons wore on. Charlie has resolved that her money will never again go on bamboo canes. Twice every week, whatever else was happening, someone processed the site's food waste through the composting systems, the unglamorous rotation that keeps the whole loop closed.

Before they left, the outgoing crew put in a twelve-metre asparagus trench and thirty globe artichoke plants, crops that take years to come into bearing. They also saved seed from this year's tomatoes and other crops so the next intake starts with something in hand. Neither the trench nor the seed jars will do much for the people who prepared them. That, as much as the harvest, is what a year here is for.

Centre for Alternative Technology · Read the source