Here's an article from Professor Dick Godwin which will appear in the Talking Point slot of Farmers Weekly (issue September 9):

What on earth have we been doing over the past 30 years to allow our soil and water management expertise to become as badly eroded as some of the world’s most denuded landscapes?

Much of the progress we made in boosting yields and productivity in the 1970s and 1980s was down to well-researched improvements in soil management and drainage.

Since then, however, our world-leading R&D capabilities in these vital fields have been all but lost. Practical soil and water management courses have virtually disappeared from our universities and colleges. And ‘joined-up’ drainage and soil conservation advice for farmers and growers has dried to a trickle. There’s no doubt about it, we’ve really taken our eye off the ball.

Soil remains our most vital asset. Modern rotations and machinery – not to mention the effects of climate change – are putting it under more pressure than ever before; pressure that’s clearly evident in increased compaction, reduced biological activity and less capacity to buffer extremes of drought and flood.

Under these circumstances, we have to manage our soils very much more effectively than we’ve been doing recently if we are to have any hope of a more sustainable agricultural and environmental future.

To do this we need more, not less, home-grown soil and water management expertise. Unlike so many other things we acquire from overseas, in this case the relevant knowledge simply isn’t available. So we’ve got to do it ourselves. As I see it, our task is threefold.

Firstly, we must nurture a new generation of specialists to replace our world class authorities – most now well into retirement – while starting to plug important gaps in our understanding of soil management under modern production systems.

Secondly, we must build on the pockets of valuable applied soil and water management research, training and extension that still survive, despite serious funding limitations, within Rothamsted and North Wyle Research, Cranfield, Nottingham and Reading Universities and Harper Adams University College.

And finally we must develop better ways of transferring our existing knowledge and new understanding to those managing the land; ways which complement the valuable but uncoordinated advice currently available.

Having examined the whole subject in depth in our benchmark review of the Current Status of Soil and Water Management in England for the RASE in 2008, I and my colleagues concluded that we can recover the expertise we’ve lost since the ‘1970s and re-direct it to address our pressing food security and environmental sustainability needs.

But we can only do this if we take the initiative and act boldly as an industry, without further delay and with determined and decisive action, bringing together all the resources at our disposal.

* Richard Godwin is Emeritus Professor in Agricultural Engineering at Cranfield University and a Visiting Professor at Harper Adams University College.

You've really put your finger on it Professor Godwin. The biological activity of so many of our soils really isn't what it used to be. Far too few earthworms, root runs and good old-fashioned humus. We've got to find ways of getting more of these essentials back into our ground if we're to improve the sustainability as well as productivity of our farming. Our soils are suffering from a surfeit of physics in the form of a variety of tines, discs, subsoilers and ploughs. And a series of dry springs are underlining just how vulnerable this is making us to climate variability. We simply must balance this with more attention to soil biology. Where's the expertise that can really help us do this as part of our modern, high pressure regimes ?

Soil science was an important part of our college course in the 70's, profiling trenches to asess structure, contour ploughing and contour ridges (earthern terraces) to reduce erosion discing soil rather than inverting with mouldboard ploughs, min till and using livestock to reduce stover and clean up spilt grain were all processes at the disposal of our farmers,especially with the harsher conditions of a tropical climate. 

I write in support of Dick Godwin’s appeal for a new generation of soils specialists. We want knowledgeable young people who can translate the enormous amount of research available into simple actions that farmers can actually take on their farms. So often we hear, “avoid compaction” but I always find myself asking, “Yes, but how?” Waiting for drier conditions is not always an option – if there’s no crop in the ground, then there’s no income next year! Since the eighties the main change we’ve seen in tillage practice is a bigger power unit on the front! This has been for a whole range of reasons, not least of which is higher labour costs and cheap fuel, but certainly not for the good of soil – we’ve just got more capacity to damage it! New technologies now allow us to do things very precisely and we need to match that with a fundamental understanding of how to better manage soils for the good of crops, soils and the environment. Confining all traffic to the least possible area (controlled traffic) is one option and this allows us to liberate around 80% of the soil from damage (and therefore repair!). But, how do we optimise soil management on the trafficked and non-trafficked areas? We need to learn more and yet we are losing the very expertise and funding we need to do this. This situation should be reversed, so let’s take up Dick on his challenge and create an industry initiative!

I did allot of soil science and soil management at Uni and have got my BASIS Soil and Water Management Cert (though S&WM wasn't exactly taxing).

I try to make soil management the first priority when talking to new, and existing customers. If the soil issues aren't corrected then crops can't perform to their potential, and if they don't perform, it's invariably the agronomists fault. Best to get the basics right from the start!

I think Professor Godwin is right, we have started working soils a lot less at home and there are more worms in the soil, it also has more tilth, the profile is better and it smells nice. There is too much weight in high horsepower tractors even with low ground pressure tyres or tracks, they all pull cultivators that work too deep and wreck the soil structure because they have to pull out the compaction that they have caused.

Three cheers to Prof Godwin, he's made my day - at long last real focus on our most important asset -soil. He is spot on - too much 'soil management' is done with the no real consideration to the damage most modern cultivation systems do to the land reducing worm numbers and organic matter (which is tilth & fertility) whilst at the same time causing more panning of the soil. There are though a handfull of leader farmers doing their own R&D into soil management and direct drilling which is/are producing fantastic results so anything Prof Godwin can do to help the greater scientific community focus in these areas has to be good

We are bloody idiots running about with increasingly heavier machinery. Ok we all think about the soil but having convinced ourselves we have no time off we go again. Please stop and think, dig a few holes look at what is happening and try to at least repair the damage.

Better still try to adopt a strategy to minimize damage, CTF is a great first step its a proven system that works, its not for everyone but at least have a look at it.

There are moves afoot to form a centre for soils this should have all our support and I believe is vital for all our futures. Well done Dick Godwin and others for bringing this to our attention.

Soil and Water Management clearly a vital intiative for all of our futures, I want to add my support to this project.

Is soil science still taught at universities? Did it as one of my three specialisms as part of my ag degree, but that we a few years ago.

 Yes it is - at one or two.  the Royal Agricutlural College now has a degree in Agricutlure with Soil Science (with a prize awarded by the British Society for Soil Science) and will shortly have an MSc focussing on Sustainable Soil Management

 there are plenty of options to improve management of soil - but the reality is that it is often site specific, dependent on local weather patterns, soil type and indeed your preferred choice of farming.  "Wait till its drier" is good advice but if its impractical - use lighter machinery and avoid the problem - if that's impractical use lower ground pressure - and so on.  Ultimately, face up to the possibility that you shouldn't be growing that crop!

 

I too want to agree with the comments made by Professor Goodwin. I agree that soils and water management often seem to be over looked, I’m a drainage contractor and I find time and time again a new client asks us for a quotation to drain a poor performing field, often they ‘um and ah’ for a while and finally take the plunge, next year they’re back asking for more drainage.

I don't know how long it is that i have been faffi ng around on Fwispace a year or two now. This is a most inspiring thread and what I came to this place for.

Wonderful to see positive comments and open minds about soil management. It would be a prize indeed if the industry did put some money down for soil research to bring along new blood as has been suggested.

The proverb of successful farming 'a farmer should live as if he is going to die tomorrow but farm as if he is going to live for ever'.

I love words penned by the Great George Ewart Evans: " Between the farmer and the soil there was a bond that amounted, on his part, almost to veneration: the sooil was something to be nursed and treated with utmost consideration....and so on

indeed why is it mother earth?

 

I agree absolutely with "Motley", we should stop treating our soils like dirt. I recall my first lectures on soil from Gordon Spoor at what was then the National College of Agricultural Engineering at Silsoe. He did not want any of his students calling soil "dirt". Dirt he said conjures up the idea of something that is worth nothing. And I got this impression at Agritechnica some years ago, when carrot harvesting was shown with two tractors pulling a single trailer just to get it across the field. One got the idea that the soil was just a darned nuisance and got in the way of the harvesting operation!

Soils have had another plea for their care and understanding in the article by Professor Mark Kibblewhite of Cranfield University (http://tmm.codecircus.co.uk/assets/1578/6410_CRA01_Future_Soil_Science_02.pdf ). In his statement about soil systems, “to simplify the system is to misunderstand it” Professor Kibblewhite highlights their complexity and our need for experts that understand the linkages between the biology, the chemistry and the physics of soil systems. Equally his plea that research must be transferable and appropriate to different stakeholders underlines our requirement for an industry led initiative. Such an initiative must work closely with the research community to understand and to carefully interpret and communicate their results to practitioners. Our industry is a major stakeholder in soils and it is in ours and everyone’s interests to make them a prime target for improved management.

What a load of management-speak tosh! And it's all thinly disguised propaganda for giving money to hard up professors.

Farmers are not idiots, they don't grind to a halt if they don't have some important fellow with a string of letters after his name telling them exactly what to do. There is a wealth of knowledge out there on farms on how to best manage soils, and it is far more complex than one university research department can describe.

Each soil type, each farm, each field and often within a field, there are differences in soil types which respond differently. Rather than be preached to from on high, we need to be discussing what we do and how well it works amongst ourselves. Everybody has a tale of how subsoiling or ploughing or spreading compost either improved or ruined a crop depending on what the following weather was. We might not want to take any notice of someone elses experiences, but if we all know how others are getting on, it's all knowledge we can try on our own soils.

Just look at the zero tillage group which has been formed in the last couple of years. Now, I know their methods would not work for me, but I'm fascinated to see their work and how they get on, and they're making big efforts to share their experiences. I hope they're honest enough to talk about all the problems they have as well as the advantages!!

Of course we need colleges to be trying things for students to learn from, and be taught basics and theories, but they will learn far more once they are out in the field and seeing year to year what happens, and most importantly talking to people with plenty of experience on a farm of what happened in stand out years like '95, or '87 or '76 or '58! What might work well in a very wet year can be a disaster in a drought year.

What a wonderful and carefully considered response. I do admire this level of dialogue.

Bovril: One question are our soils in better or worse shape in respect of fertility (levels of Organic matter will do - what were the leves of OM on your fam in 1980 and what are they now?), water retention, erosion and compaction ( I am sure you measure this so you can tell us) now that in the years carefully selected by you.

I don't want to hear about yields are better now than in 1930 or 1958 ( I can grow high yields on desert sand with the correct inputs) I want to know by your scientific evidence on your farm and the nations and planets soils are we in a better place now with our soils. If so does this have anything to do with Plato or other time serversd in academia who apparently know so little.

I selected the 1930s because of the magnificent use of agricultural techniques in the US of A when a million years generation of topsoil blew away, we could consider the Aral sea as another wonderful example, and before you fire off it don't happen here, it does. Oh and before I forget we can lob in the salination in Australia and ground nut scheme in Kenya as further examples of mans use of soil knowledge. I gues you will say that no doubt the dust bowl was an act of god or some similar denial of inferior use of knowledge for short term gain.

 Soils are something to be revered not used like a mine and fed chemicals and irrigation to make crops grow. We can use these tools judiciously not as a cover for bad management.

I know nothing

Motley you can sit indoors and worship data and figures and bow down to men with more letters after their name than you have if you like, I'm working soil and growing crops and want to know practically what's working for who on what soils. From my own experience I know that the moisture conservation cultivation required in '95 and '96 would mean a very compromised crop in subsequent wet years. I cocked up a bit this year by working hard to dry out sodden fields in March to take spring crops, with hindsight I would have slotted seed straight in, but a wet late spring would have spoiled that method. I know that really I shouldn't be growing spring crops on this farm, but circumstances mean that for a few years I have to, there's not a lot I can do about it, I just have to work around it.

Of course I 'carefully selected' those years, that's why I said they were stand out years! From my own pracrical experience, and by talking to and learning from others, I know they were two particularly wet and two particularly dry years here, and the problems that were encountered. I can't say anything I do now would cope better or worse than back then, I can only farm to what I can best guess the situation will be, and the normal guess is towards an average year! The overseas examples you quote are mostly extreme versions of misjudging the future weather on a grand scale! Every mistake is a lesson, some a bit more harmful than others.

On this farm the soil has changed vastly since 1980. There is no longer permanant grass and the tractors are much bigger and heavier. Consequently the organic matter is no longer concentrated in the top couple of inches, but much more evenly distributed down through the rooting area, and yes there's more of it overall, and there's no tight compaction just below the top couple of inches. I don't have lists of measurements and scientific data, it doesn't do me much good when i'm out there preparing a seedbed in whatever weather conditions are being thrown at me. Do you think that waving a book of figures at a badly performing crop would make it grow better then?!

bovril:

Motley you can sit indoors

Thank you, you are a very kind man.

bovril:

worship data and figures

Yes this is called science especially when you undertake analysis with it.

bovril:

bow down to men with more letters after their name than you have

now it is not difficult to have more letters after my name... and I certainly don't bow and scrap to anyone my friend

bovril:

yes there's more of it overall

A fine mandy Rice Davies defence of your data.

bovril:

Do you think that waving a book of figures at a badly performing crop would make it grow better then?!

No...but I do know that we can only make things better with data and sound analysis of that data.

If you want carefully selected data to suport your arguments look no further than 1968 and your fellow essex farmer Sir Nigel Strutt. 

Here's a letter received by FW from the RASE chief executive, Denis Chamberlain:

How right Prof Dick Godwin is (Talking Point September 9) to highlight the dearth of practical knowledge transfer operating in the field of soil and water management.
As he says, well-drained, quality soil has been the foundation on which we have built productivity in arable and livestock farming.  The demise of study, research and dissemination of knowledge on the subject is a dangerous trend.
Appropriate, too, that Farmers Weekly should carry the message. Until the drainage grants ended in the early 1980s, the FW Drainage Event was the “daddy” of technical events, moving around the country, staged annually and attracting thousands of farmer-visitors where ever it was held.
Prof Godwin mentioned the initiatives planned by Royal Agricultural Society of England to begin to fill the gap for a technical soil and water event. The Society is currently planning a Soil and Water Convention in 2012 and scoping out a field event for 2013. It won’t be a Drainage Event as we used to know it but it will seek to shine the light on a whole range of technologies, skills and practical applications which need to become common place once again. With quality land at £10,000 an acre and the need to raise productivity with a reduced environmental foot print so high on everyone’s agenda, surely now is the time to re-engage with soil science.
There is an open invitation to companies, organisations and academics not already on board to join with us as RASE goes back to its roots to ensure that Practice with Science extends to the soil. More information will be found in the next few weeks on the RASE website.

 

soil management is very poor on many farms where they are contract farmed or short term let.

there is no time or money or incentive to improve.

i once wrote to my landlord seeking approval to drain a very wet field. he never replied.

as bovril says, a good dry year method will be a disaster in a wet yr. this is not a good yr for big articulated tractors.

bovril, Your post at 10.51 on 20 Sept (can I ask yet again that FWi numbers posts on a thread???) is spot on. The original post is exactly what you say it is. Notice too the few "supporting" posts from people who merely joined to make their post. 

Unlike you, however, I do have figures to support that what I do improves the fertility of my soil and increasing the OM content, so I know that this peasant farmer, along with millions of other peasant farmers, is not only sustaining (I hate sustain and its derivatives in relation to agriculture) but improving his soil. Of course I have only been doing this for 60 years so maybe I do not know as much as the theorists who have never farmed on their own account at all, but I have also joined them and written a book about it, so they cannot even claim that they are "published" and I am not!!

A letter was published on this subject in the Oct 7 issue of FW from Andrew Richards, an agronomist with Masstock SMART Farming:

I would like to reinforce Professor Godwin’s plea (Talking Point, 9 September) for concerted industry action to improve soil and water management.
As agronomists, we know just how valuable well-structured soils with good levels of organic matter are in buffering environmental extremes. They’re far less susceptible to drought on the one hand and waterlogging on the other. They’re far better at holding key nutrients in the rooting zone and making them available to plants. And they survive traffic under less-than-ideal conditions far better than those lacking in either structure or humus.
Better soils are crucial to our ability to meet the challenge of maintaining – let alone increasing –  production in the face of the increasingly uncertain and extreme season rainfall patterns the climate scientists warn us to expect.
Recognising this, our SMART Farming work is putting increasing emphasis on what goes on below the ground alongside the industry’s traditional above-ground focus. My colleagues and I look forward to playing our part in helping to build the most productive and resilient soils so essential to all our futures.

Edit - Sorrry about the lack of paragraphing, but I cannot now fix it............There is an easy answer, and I quote myself: - “Certainly the area with only 1.3% on the Portuguese property proved to be a very difficult piece of ground. It had the appearance of a decent sandy loam when freshly cultivated, but like the rest of the place containing many stones. The topography suggests that it was the bed of the adjoining river away back in the dim and distant past, and the stones are water worn. It set very hard after rain or irrigation, water filtration and retention were extremely poor. Some weeds grew on it, but not in profusion, and very few different species. All in all the typical symptoms of a soil that lacks OM. The major part of it was in pasture for 4 years and grazed as frequently as possible with well-fed stock in order to increase the organic and soil nutrients content. It is now totally changed in character and is as good as it looks. The OM increased to 4.5% during these four years.It is appropriate to note that during the time this particularly low OM content land was in pasture, I grew eight consecutive green manure crops on the land where we planted the other new olive grove of 299 trees, and the OM increased by only 0.3% from 2.7 to 3. These crops were well fertilised, well grown and cultivated into the soil.” Simple, but not necessarily easy for those who lack fences and livestock handling facilities. The effect of using leys in this way has been known for a very long time, but that does not make people follow the system. Research can guide but not enforce.