Earth Talk: New directions with Dr Rupert Sheldrake

good evening i'm tim bolton head of programmes here at dartington and on behalf of everyone at schumacher college in dartington i'd like to welcome you to this our fifth talk in series two of our online joy of six schumacher college earth tools and thank you all so much for supporting the work of schumacher college we've been holding earth talks for a number of years face to face in the old boston and the great hall at dartington it's a fundamental part of our learning community and we look forward to doing so again hopefully as soon as september however schumacher college has a very long history of leadership debate and research around our ecological and environmental catastrophe and it feels important in this moment of global crisis that we reach out to our community and those in search for new normal as in previous talks the audience appears to be joining us from across the globe so although most of us are in some form of lockdown the world feels increasingly interconnected and all of us increasingly interdependent this talk is the fifth in the series of six which take place every wednesday evening which i hope you'll also want to attend if you're new to the online earth talks then all the previous talks are also available on the schumacher college website as is an archive of talks from the last few years this series of talks are formed around the overarching theme seizing the opportunity for radical transformation over the last four months we have truly stepped into uncharted territory simultaneously tragic terrifying and exhilarating through covid19 and more recently the murder of george floyd and the international black lives matter movement we have witnessed both some of the best and the worst that mankind has to offer and the divisions in our society have never been in sharper focus indeed many of the world's governments have responded with the speed and agility to protect the economy and the well-being of their populations which completely invalidates their previously lackluster slow and cautious responses to our ever-present societal injustice and environmental degradation this moment feels like almost anything is possible almost anything so how do we resist squandering this opportunity and just return to normal or worse what ideas exist that we should rush to embrace so first a few words about the format of the evening in a moment i'll hand over to rupert sheldrake to present his talk at the end he'll then be joined in conversation for five to ten minutes with colin paulson we do want the session to be as accessible and interactive as possible so please do use the chat button on the bottom of your screen to share thoughts with us and your fellow audience members and we'd welcome questions throughout using the q a link again at the bottom of the window rupert and column might respond to some of the questions as we go along and i'll have a chance to put other questions to them during and at the end of the conversation in total we anticipate the session to last about an hour so let me start by introducing colin rupert colin paulsen initially studied geography and has spent the last 17 years working in agriculture specializing in horticulture he's worked on various different projects in wales in the southwest including establishing two market gardens one in glastonbury and another in monmouthshire wales he joined the college in 2018 and has recently been appointed head gardener and leads the horticultural programs at schumacher college dr rupert sheldrake is a biologist and author of nine books including the science delusion freeing the spirit of inquiry which is called science set free in the us he was a fellow of claire college cambridge and a research fellow of the royal society he was then principal plant physiologist at the international crops research institute for the semi-arid tropics in hyderabad india he's a fellow of the institute of noetic sciences in california and a fellow of schumacher college so it's with very great pleasure that i hand you over to rupert hello good evening everyone it's a great pleasure to be part of this series of earth talks i've given quite a few live earth talks um in dartington and at schumacher college um this is the first time i've done one in a virtual form um and i'm talking this evening about agriculture as tim just mentioned i used to work in agricultural research i was um the principal plant physiologist at ecrusad the international crops research institute for the semi-arid tropics in hyderabad india and so agriculture is part of my background it's not something i often talk about in but it's um very much part of my being and i think a lot about the future of agriculture and i just want to share some thoughts this evening about several aspects of that because as tim said we have to make the most of this extraordinary opportunity that we have at the moment the first thing is we have to change the kind of food we eat because agriculture is about producing uh food but um the that's about the supply but there's also the question of the demand the population of the world is increasing climate change is happening there's general uh degradation of soils on a large scale in some parts of the world there's a loss of biodiversity we can't just go on as we are at the moment it won't work so one of the things that we need to do is change the way we eat and many people have pointed out that the present system is extraordinarily inefficient we grow huge amounts of grains and things like soybean to feed to animals in intensive animal factory farms like battery chicken farms or intensive raising of beef and pigs and other animals and only about a tenth of the food that the animals have fed ends up as human food in the form of meat nine tenths is just wasted as part of the inefficiency of this process if we reduce enormously meat consumption and if we have meat stick only to meat that's grown with animals living outdoors in grass-fed pastures where in areas where not much else can be grown except grass for animals then we'd free up a huge amount of land and food resources for human consumption and it's interesting that there's already growth enormous growth in vegetarian and vegan systems of eating which are largely a response to this crisis the fact that many people have realized we need to reduce our meat consumption if not eliminated secondly food might be produced in completely different ways in the future and george monbio who is a visionary uh ecological thinker has gone much further than most and certainly much further than i would do myself in suggesting that most of it should be and will be produced in factories in huge fermentation bats or in other industrial processes rather than on farms the land freed up would then be re-wilded in monbio's vision but even if we grow say mycoprotein in vats which is already happening of course on a limited scale particularly in the product corn even if we grow other microorganisms or other or tissue cultures of animal cells they have to be fed something they don't just grow by magic so they're still going to have to be crop production to produce a feed even if food production becomes more industrial in this benign way that george monbio envisions but what i want to do now is talk more about the starting with actual agriculture rather than the possible phasing out of a lot of it in the future and look at several issues that i think could help the first is something i became aware of when i was working in india most small-scale indian farmers don't grow monocultures of crops like we do we're used to the idea of enormous fields full of oil seed rape or wheat or barley or other crops but that's not how it works in most traditional agricultural systems what people have is mixed cropping they grow several crops together in the same field at the same time i was very surprised when i arrived in india and found that this was what was happening and some people who were engaged in agricultural aid programs in the 1960s and 70s from the west thought that indians and everyone else ought to be taught taught how to grow crops like we do their vision was of large fields with monoculture with automated machinery in fact quite a lot of tractors were sent to india as part of this version and i saw them some of them just rusting in fields they they didn't send the spare parts and the whole thing was rather misconceived most of the fields are very small in traditional family farms and they're traditionally farmed using bullocks or other ant draft animals and it's not easy to get tractors into them and the whole land tenure system um would be disrupted by that so there's a lot of manual labor people farm in fairly small farms traditionally and the harvesting is done by hand and if you're harvesting by hand you can easily harvest a mixed crop one of the most common mixed cropping systems is growing a legume crop like pigeon pea which is um produces peas that are usually eaten as dal as split peas grows into a bush about six feet high that's usually planted in alternate rows with a cereal like sorghum or maize and the cereals they're planted together at the beginning of the monsoon in many parts of india in june um the cereal crop grows and matures in three or four months it grows quickly the pigeon pea grows quite slowly it's shaded by the cereal but it gets established and then when the cereals harvest harvested the pigeon pea has much more space much more light and it then rapidly grows fills out the space and gives a crop several months later this turned out to be an excellent system we actually did experiments on these mixed cropping systems and showed that they're more productive they make more efficient use of the land and they also reduce the risk because if there's a drought at a particular stage uh in in this season it might damage the cereal crop but then the pigeon pee can come on later or if there's the droughts later in the season the cereal might material and the pigeon pea might not give much yield but it's a kind of insurance system which is extremely important for small farmers who rely on the food they produce if they don't produce the food then they go hungry so mixed cropping has many advantages as part of traditional systems but we don't see very much of it here the only example i can think of on a large scale is is the use of grass and clover mixtures in low input pasture there we have the same principle a grass mem a member of the grass family and a legume crop which fixes nitrogen growing together but it's possible to devise mixed cropping systems which could be suitable for mechanized agriculture which is what we have here people are already experimenting with growing mixed crops of cereals mixing wheat and barley for example possibly oats and and if you have a mixed crop of different species mixed up together they're all growing the seeds are mixed before planting so they're all jumbled out together this has several advantages one of them is that it's much less susceptible to pests and diseases because a disease of one crop may not affect the others and also the plants are more further apart the susceptible plants are further apart so it's harder for the disease to spread the same is true of pests and the same is true also of environmental stresses some of these crops may be more drought resistant than others and fare better in drought years of course for this system to work it's important to have crops that mature more or less at the same time but people already worked out mixtures which can do this and you might think well what's the use of a mixed cereal crop well there's a lot of bakers now produce multi-grain loaves which are made of mixed cereal so instead of mixing them after harvest you can have them mixed before sowing and then you harvest a seed mixture it's already mixed um another way of growing mixed crops is to have different varieties of the same crop say wheat of a similar maturity time and again these different varieties will have different susceptibilities to diseases and pests and therefore it won't be susceptible in the way that a monoculture is and therefore there'll be much less need for the use of pesticides or fungicides or other poisonous sprays so mixed cropping is something that i think has a big future here and it's only just barely begun to be explored there's another point i'd like to make in relation to mixed cropping the reason that we have such enormous fields and such huge pieces of agricultural machinery in europe and north america is because of labor costs in the past farms had a lot of people working on them but as wage levels rose farmers tried to reduce labor costs so you can now have enormous farms with just one or two people working on them operating enormous pieces of machinery uh which cost half a million pounds or more um this means that agriculture is extremely capital intensive uh because of reducing labor and the reason the machines are so big is you want a machine that one person can control if you had lots of little machines you'd need lots of people however with the advent of self-driving cars and automated technology and smart mechanized agriculture it's possible now to have artificial intelligence controlling what machines do you can even have machines that pick ripe fruit they look at the fruit on a tree and see which ones which apples are ripe for picky and which aren't and pick the right ones these are small scale machines not huge gigantic combine harvesters or enormous machines that you see in fields today you can make small self-driving cars as well as big ones and it would be possible to make smart small agricultural machines that would enable mixed crops and the selective harvesting of some of crops at particular times to be feasible even in a high labor cost economy there's no reason why these automated machines have to be big if they're automated you could have lots of little ones um even small farmers could have them and this would lead to a completely different way of thinking about what's planted and how it's harvested so that's one point mixed cropping i want to talk next about the soil microbiome in chemical agriculture where inorganic fertilizers have poured onto the soil the soil microbiome is greatly impoverished it's also impoverished through not having enough organic matter the importance of the microbiome was highlighted by the early pioneers of organic farming notably sir albert howard who worked in india and who was one of the founders of the soil association he was one of the first people to highlight the importance of mycorrhizae in agriculture mycorrhizae are fungal filaments which grow in the soil they plug into the roots of plants or wrap around them the plants supply them with food with nutrients sugars principally the mycorrhizae are like an extension of the root system and enable the plant to take out minerals from the soil that their own roots wouldn't be able to do very efficiently they can mineralize phosphate from rock they can also mobilize nitrogen from the soil so the mycorrhizae extend and make much more efficient the absorptive mechanisms of the roots however as soon as you add chemical fertilizers the activity of the mycorrhizae is suppressed the same is true of the symbiotic bacteria rhizobia which live inside the root nodules of legume crops and fix nitrogen those two are suppressed in their activity if you add nitrogen fertilizers so uh sir albert herd found not only in organic farms with uh high content of organic matter in the soil through adding compost um not only uh are the mycorrhizae much more active they make the plants much healthier and they're able to take up much more uh from the soil than they would without the mycorrhizae so how do we enhance the microbiome of the soils well adding compost is one way reducing or eliminating the use of chemical fertilizers is another but one of the problems that crops up is weeds and in organic agriculture the way it's commonly practiced here at least in britain uh is uses ploughing as the pre as the main method of weed control that's the main reason people plow the soil to turn over the soil to bury weeds the trouble is that applying the soil greatly disrupts the whole soil ecosystem it's a massive disruption of the all the microbiome the mycorrhizal threads that are established within the soil so from that point of view a better system is minimum or zero tillage where crops are planted without plying the trouble there is that the main systems of minimal or zero tillage involve the use of ronda glyphosate a chemical weed killer which uh in small doses uh it can eliminate weeds from fields and it can be very useful in these minimum tillage systems um which also save on the fuel for the plows the the carbon used up in the plying so those can greatly help and some people see them as ecologically beneficial even though they involve applying chemicals the trouble is glyphosate uh is toxic to some mycorrhizae maybe to all and so is not an ideal treatment so there needs to be research on finding optimal ways of reducing tillage and preserving the soil microbiome without using very much glyphosate or without using any at all that's a research frontier which um is completely open at the moment and some people in the organic and conservation agriculture movements are looking at this uh quite seriously um but it's not easy there's no simple one-size-fits-all answer but we've got to do this and we've got to find better ways of improving microbiomes and one model is from fecal transplants um as everyone now knows we have a microbiome in our guts and sometimes deficient microbiomes lead to digestive problems even mental health problems um and so fecal transplants are basically transplanting a whole mixture of micro organisms from one person's gut to another there are different methods of doing this and i'm not going to go into them here now um anyway the point is it's about a mixture it's not a purified single uh bacterium and i think for inoculating soils especially when new crops are being grown that haven't been grown before um the in the past we've had people think you have a single strain of rhizobium or of a mycorrhizae but it's much better i think to use the fecal transplant model and have an effective mixture because these things occur in mixtures not in pure strains the next point i want to discuss is the use of human wastes um when i was working in india i worked for a while up on the frontiers of tibet in lahore district of himachal pradesh and it was a very remote village on the border of tibet and i was staying with the tibetan speaking family the culture was tibetan there and the people spoke tibetan there was nowhere else to stay i was we were doing was on chickpeas and that was the one of the few places that we could grow them in the summer they normally grow in the winter in the plains of india i had to stay in the house over tibetan family um in the farmhouse and i found that their lavatory arrangements were very remarkable they had a a kind of extension to the house and we went on to kind of platform and there was a hole in the floor and all human waste dropped down into straw it didn't smell particularly badly um and all the human waste from everyone in the family went into this straw compost manure area and then that was added back to the land every year so their human wastes were completely recycled in china travelers in the early 20th century i said how when you approach cities there were little booths by the side of the room which were basically public toilets and there were people there inviting travelers to use their toilet they were providing a free service and the reason they were doing that was because they were collecting this human waste it was a very valuable resource for fertilizing the fields what we do by contrast is flush human waste down lavatories with huge quantities of water and flush them all away and then they could have to go to surge farms and create sewage disposal problems sometimes the raw surge goes into rivers or the sea meanwhile we make urea the main nitrogen compound in urine that's why it's called urea we make that in factories using enormous amounts of energy by fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and that's used as a chemical fertilizer in fields this is completely crazy we're throwing away all this human waste wasting human waste and making synthetically things to replace it i think that one thing i mean composting toilets one possibility using urine is the simplest possibility especially for men a lot of men pee in their compost heaps i do myself and this is a small scale way of dealing with it but another way would be to use the human waste in biogas digesters together with kitchen waste many london boroughs and i'm sure boroughs all around the country now collect kitchen waste on a weekly basis is put in huge biogas digesters where it is used to produce biogas which then is used to make electricity now what if when people were building new blocks of flats there was a special system where the plumbing from the lavatories went into with minimum water added went into a biogas digester in the basement and there could also be a shoot whereby people's food waste went into the biogas digester you'd then have a very good mixture of a combination of nitrogen-rich human wastes with other ways from kitchens and from biological wastes which would produce biogas within the apartment building which could be used to produce some of the electricity that was needed the what came out the slurry that came out of the digester could then be used as fertilizer it would be extremely high value fertilizer and if people were worried about human waste on vegetable crops it could be used on other kinds of crops or in orchards or in even to fertilize fast-growing biofuels so i think the present system with human waste is absolutely ridiculous we're wasting this vast quantity of human waste instead of recycling it and the technologies are now readily available for doing that and it would most easily be done by as i say in new builds by plumbing the system in such a way that this could happen now the the final point i want to make is about family orchards and this is something which i think could be widely applied in many european countries and in many other parts of the world right now if you want to grow your own fruit or vegetables you have a very limited choice either you have a house with a big garden which is going to be very expensive because gardens attached to houses are expensive they're in residential areas and not many people can afford houses with big gardens or you can have an allotment which is very small and not at all private and functional and this is good and there ought to be a lot more allotments there's a lot of demand for them that's unsatisfied in many parts of the country so one of the things that should happen after this lockdown is an enormous increase in the provision of allotments both by private uh landowners and also by local authorities um but if you want to do something on a larger scale it's almost impossible at the moment if you buy farmland farms you have to buy hundreds of acres farms are large and you don't want to buy a huge farm just because you want to you have enough land to have a family orchard so i think there's a completely unmet demand here an implicit demand which could be satisfied relatively easily look at this from the point of view of a landowner if you're in land near a town or city you're not going to sell the land to people because it might get development approval and whether become and worth millions instead of about ten thousand pounds an acre the agricultural land price it could be worth a million as a development uh opportunity um so you're not gonna sell it but you could lease it and if you say divided an acre into five fifth of an acre plots which would be about 90 feet by 90 feet um you'd have an area which could be then become a family orchard there could be hedges around them they could be private people could plant heritage fruit trees they could plant pears plums peaches inside the warmer parts of the country had other fruit trees damsons and so forth soft fruit raspberries strawberries gooseberries there could be space for vegetables on a larger scale than in an allotment there could be a kind of permaculture type possibility here um and such family orchards um could be leased to people now if there were one available near you how much would you be able to pay a year to release a a family orchard where you could go with your family where your children could play where you could grow your fruit where you could have parties and barbecues well what a thousand pounds a year 20 pounds a week i think that would be a very reasonable rent i think that'd be a good starting point for this project think of it think in terms of a thousand pounds a year it would probably be by supply and demand the market would probably find a price much above that um but say it's a thousand pounds as a conservative estimate there's five fifth of an acre orchards in an acre of land each bringing in a thousand pounds a year that's five thousand pounds a year rent right now if a landowner uh leases out uh land for pasture the going rate is roughly 50 pounds a year rent and for arable 100 maybe 150. so instead of 100 pounds a year rent the landowner would get five thousand pounds a year rent and obviously if there were several more acres then four acres would bring in twenty thousand pounds the start-up costs would be rather small you'd have to provide paths there'd have to be a car parking area preferably they'd be accessible by bicycle near bicycle tracks so most people could go to them by bicycle rather than car they'd have to be access paths um hand pumps uh or possibly water supplies with taps if there's a public water supply nearby a few pieces of infrastructure would need to be put in place but basically uh if these orchards were made available um and if the leases were fairly long 10 years say renewable um i think this could be enormously attractive to a lot of families biodiversity would be vastly greater than if the field remained part of if the orchard remained part of a monoculture field growing oil seed rape or wheat or something the enormous increase in biodiversity would be enormously helpful for people's health and uh well-being uh it would create a much larger local supply of food um because these private plots would be as in the soviet union the private plots produced a huge proportion of the food they're much more productive in terms of food production per acre even than modern industrial agriculture and i think if somebody showed that the system could work that it was viable and attractive and there was a demand for it i think there'd be articles about these family orchards and color supplements and on news programs and there'd be a demand all over the country for them um and uh people would because it wouldn't require subsidies it would be profitable for landowners to supply the demand i think they could spring up all over the place very much hope that a trial run of this scheme could happen at dartington perfectly placed top ness has the perfect um okay catchment area for a family orchard scheme the dartington estate goes right up to topness it has a kind of visionary purpose always has had um not only through its educational wing but also through experimenting with agriculture and forestry and i think that this could tie in very well with the schumacher college programs in sustainable agriculture and horticulture so um this is a scheme i think that could be implemented quite quickly at very little uh cost it would be profitable so it's not going to require huge bank loans like buying a farm and buying farm equipment and i think it's something could actually be transformative for people's lives and have a serious effect on food security and food production well so those are some of the ideas about new ways forward in agriculture that i wanted to share with you today and let me just recapitulate them first of all mixed cropping exploring the possibilities for mixed cropping in farms commercial farms in britain and in europe and in north america secondly looking at the soil microbiome and finding ways of improving the soil microbiome and improving organic matter levels in the soil some people have worked out that if carbon content of the soil were increased by incorporating incorporating much more compost and agricultural wastes this would actually take an awful lot of carbon out of the atmosphere and have a serious effect um there's more agricultural land than forest land would have a serious effect in reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere so this is more than just about crop production it could have a direct effect on the climate the climate change problem so soil microbiome um then using human wastes if you're not already doing it you can start by peeing in your compost heap and or using urine diluted one in ten in watering cans it's easiest for men but and not rocket science to find out ways in which women can be part of this as well and then more visionary schemes where by using new plumbing systems and biogas systems um combining human waste with kitchen waste the possibility of using this material and then ending up with a very usable fertilizer as well as using the energy that's otherwise being wasted and then finally the idea of family orchards uh with the possibility of doing something of this kind at dartington uh with possibly with schumacher college itself in the lead so that's a summary of the ideas i wanted to share and no um i'm looking forward to the chance to discuss some of this with column uh because column uh is much more experienced than i am in the practical side of running forest gardens and and gardening um and horticulture so um if columns there then um let's um let's see what what what column says so column are you there you good good i can hear you i can see you as well that's great so anyway what do you think of the family orchard idea column or any of these other ideas yeah i think the family orchard ideas is a is a blind idea i often um notice with people who come and work here with me at the student but in the college in the food growing areas how many of them talk about the inspiration behind how they got into food growing and it's often related to spending time on allotments or gardens with their grandparents or parents so i think um as well as all the other benefits we're talking about anything we can do to expose children and people to food growing and nature is is a is a good one and it's it's also links into what stefan harding was saying a couple of weeks ago on one of these earth talks he was talking about a need to resolve to fall in love with gaia in in the context of the kobe 19 crisis and i think if we're going to be able to fall in love with gaia we need to have the opportunity to to start that off and as i say children is is is the best place to start i think yeah so good i'm glad you like the idea i mean i agree i think well i think actually i'm a case in point we had a family orchard when i was a child where my father rented about a fifth of an acre um it was in the center of new york where i i grew up in nottinghamshire and we actually had an orchard and vegetable just what i'm describing which is one of the things that made me attracted to do biology in the first place and had a huge influence on my life and i thought at first this was just a kind of unique situation that i was in and it was a kind of something with these the family orchards were then bulldozed and turned into a school playing field so i thought this was just something that happened to me in the past and it was a nice memory then i realized there's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't happen on a large scale again and and and where children could be very much part of it there could be um in uh if there was a family orchard system near tottenham for example there could be one of the orchards that was used by a local school so it would be possible to take schools there for a class and they could actually do gardening most schools don't have enough ground at the school itself to do gardening there but if they had one of these family orchards it could be a school orchard and all over the country there could be school orchards where and then school children can actually eat some of the food that they've helped produce exactly and i think the other thing we've seen in the covert 19 thing is the explosion of interest in local food and while we have a great a plethora of um schemes here we just that the toughness area hasn't been able to keep up with the demand and i think anything like that that also helps people to feed themselves and also they could feed their surplus into schools and their local communities is is excellent and it feeds into the idea of resilience like you're saying with a mixed cropping system and the more diversity of supplies of food we have that the stronger the whole system is yes well i suppose that if there were these family orchards then some of the principles that have been experimented on through permaculture could be applied in them some people could run their family orchard as a basically as a permaculture system well i mean orchards are kind of permaculture anyway um so i think if if they existed on any scale i mean if there were lots hundreds of them throughout the country then i think there could also be innovation people who have them could experiment and find out what works and what doesn't work and new ways of doing permaculture type schemes within them and then share these ideas on online forums i think it could unleash a whole lot of grassroots experimentation in terms of efficient production of of food and and good utilization of the land definitely and also i think it just feeds into community as well i mean one of the things i love about working here at the college is when we're all working together or maybe not right next to each other but near each other you can share ideas in food growing and music and you can come together at the end of the day and knit your harvest and then there's a really good way of bringing people together on on a common ground as it were and and it's not just on the online forms you could be sharing ideas with each other within that individual family orchard setting and then that could spread out around your local area what do you think of the peeing in the compost idea i mean this must be something that's occurred to you oh i think it's excellent i mean we we have our compost slough where we separate out our urine and our feces here and i've actually found that um the best plant food i can make is dilute urine so um i usually tend to use it at home not so much here but it's um the seedlings that i raise on under urine are the healthiest i've ever produced and it's free and like you say i'm using a source that's uh not otherwise be thrown away yes well i think there's a i mean i don't know how many people are doing this anyway it's not the kind of thing people usually talk about no um but um i was once having dinner at cambridge college with a a colleague of mine and i i just for some he was talking about his garden and his compost heap and i said do you pee in your compost and he said well he'd look trans if anyone was listening he said well yes i do actually and then someone heard him he said well i do too [Laughter] so there's probably a lot more going on than we i think i myself was got the idea in in in most graphic form when i visited the center for intermediate technology in the countless in wales and they had a demonstration thing they had a straw two straw bales side by side one of them was just the straw bale the other one was where male members of staff peed on it when they were passing on and the the difference but couldn't have been more stark one wasn't virtually undecomposed straw bale and the other one was a pile of black humors like material where the straw had broken down so much more quickly because it had this nitrogen supply we've actually recently changed over our urine separation so that urine gets pulled onto a straw bale for that reason and also to get the carbon the nitrogen balance right quite a few people were commenting on the chat about um sort of pharmaceutical drugs and so on in the in the human waste do you know much about that and whether whether it's an issue if you're using on food i don't know obviously this is a point that has to be looked into i mean a lot of pharmaceutical drugs would decompose over time i mean most most one would have to look at which ones might be a problem and people who are having drugs that are a problem would be asked not politely asked not to pee on the straw bales or into the urine separation system um i think that a lot of common drugs you know aspirin steroids paracetamol all these kinds of things would biodegrade fairly quickly there might be antibiotics too would probably biodegrade um as well and so i think that well that's the kind of thing one needs to research on but it's very unlikely they'd be so persistent that they'd survive the composting process survive being in the soil for months and survive and be taken up by plants and and it's possible some might but um again this is something we'll have to look into but and and and you and ask people who'd taking huge amounts of medications you know not to take part in the scheme but for the majority of people i think it would be absolutely fine yeah and i mean i've also seen systems where people are using it to fertilize crops that aren't being eaten by humans so there's a place called ragman's lay in gloucestershire where they they use the overflow from their septic tank to fertilize willow beds and then they they harvest the willow for firewood so it doesn't just have to be used for food does it and then of course then the ash could then be fed into the food system but there are ways of using it in an intermediary crop that wouldn't go for human consumption and you eradicate all the issues yes well exactly that would be the safest and simplest but you know i'm sure that research would be able to show whether germs i mean e coli which can be pathogenic and it's in feces uh i mean it's not going to survive composting and in the soil for long i mean i think this is the kind of applied research that should be going on in universities and you need to find out just how much possible survival of pathogens there are how much danger there is i suspect it'd be very little but as you say using for biofuels like willow would be uncontroversial and that was certainly a good place to begin well maybe we should um open up two um questions yeah thank you thanks uh both of you so much there's been an awful lot of chat in the box about everybody having a quality of opportunity for peeing in the in the compost deep and clearly a number of people enjoying it and also with recipes of how to do it so um so that's great i think it's interesting and quite a number of the questions that we've had so far have been exactly around the issue of pharmaceuticals in um urine and or in feces the the way in which you might be able to eliminate that or not and i think it's quite interesting that notion of taking a side route so going through a reed bed and perhaps um being able to recycle your material through that but i wonder particularly at the moment with covid um thinking to the future and this being unlikely to be the only time when we have something like a virus or or whatever which creates this kind of scam around the globe where would kovitz sit in a situation like this would we be desperately needing to shut down the pipes that went to our fields are there additional issues that come from viruses and from bacteria that we we aren't thinking over this stage well i don't think that viruses um survive very long outside the human body i mean the the the identity you know covid's supposed to linger on plastic for a day or two or something uh the idea that it would actually survive for weeks in in composting systems and in in the soil i think is very very unlikely i've never heard of anyone catching a virus from the soil or from food grown in the soil and after all viruses are everywhere all the time it's not just covered i mean i've never had anyone catching flu from compost or you know the the means of transmission is normally through the air or through hand contact all the things we've been hearing about so i don't think that's going to be a problem and i think the other thing is that one could find out you know what happens in parts of the world like china and tibet where they've done this for centuries [Music] we're squeamish about these things i mean the british i think invented water closets and flushing away all the wastes before that they went into pits and they were collected as night soil and that was used on the land i mean until relatively recently that was happening all over europe so there's an enormous amount of experience from different parts of the world including past the world where they're still using human waste um it's not a very glamorous research topic but it's one where um it should be quite possible to do research and and find out useful answers quite quickly um thank you rupert a number of questions are around um i think you're suggesting about round up and so on um in no tillage systems and i think a number of points about um monsanto and and the amount of compensation there they're due to pay out in relation to things like roundup so i suppose i'd be interested to hear more about other solutions to notiligen maybe also column you might have some suggestions here others um solutions that don't involve some form of pesticide herbicide in order to be able to clear the ground well i'm i haven't come i've been reading about this subject recently and i haven't come across many i mean obviously wonderful if there was something like that one system i came across was somebody who's growing organically old heritage varieties of quite tall cereals they all cereals used to be tall um and one advantage of tall cereals is that they shade out the weeds they overgrow the weeds and shade them out we now have dwarf cereals because if you add nitrogen fertilizer to tall cereals they grow even taller and fall over lodging is the name for that um and so tall cereals are hardly grown now but under organic conditions this chaps growing tall cereals and under sowing them with clover and so what's happening is it gets ground cloud cover with the clover that suppresses the weeds and the taurus cereals as they grow shade out the clover which then dies and um you then have a system where you you've got weed control by uh understanding something now that sounds a really good system and but i've not heard of many people doing that um and it does rely on on on relatively low fertility and relatively low yields i don't know column do you have ideas on this well yeah in the horticulture context there are various techniques we use at the college i mean one of one of which is you can use black plastic or obviously to block out the light and then kill anything off but obviously that has the disadvantage of using lots of plastic and if you can keep on top of your perennial weeds then you can um and you're just growing annual crops and and trying to grow annual free manures then there are other ways of terminating those like hoeing or very shallow ploughing which doesn't disturb the soil quite so much i mean the other thing that we also do here is that we have an agroforestry system so we have permanent um pieces of ground with grass and and mixed wildflowers and fruit trees in so if we do disturb the soil as banks of mycorrhizal fungi and so on that can very quickly come back into the soil so i think there's there's lots of different techniques there's no one's still a bullet but if you can try and reduce the amount you turn the soil by looking at the cross you go and how you manage it and but also having banks of ground that can then help to recreate good soil i mean we're also experimenting with um making our own mycorrhizal inoculants here as well so that's another thing you can do is you can add those when you plant your plants to try and make up for any damage you do when you when you disturb the soul well i i mean i i myself quite passionately against glyphosate use and i think one of the other questions in the the chat box was talking about how um some the companies often say that the the chemicals will will disappear very quickly but they're just looking at a very narrow part of the overall spray so a lot of chemicals within the spray still persist in in the water table for a long time afterwards but because the active ingredient that kills the plant off does break down quickly they can then say well it doesn't matter because it's breaking down within a very short amount of time but that's not really being honest with the truth no well i'm not pro glyphosate either but in fact i was dead against it until i got into a discussion with an agricultural colleague who in someone i used to work with in india who's very very keen on the conservation agriculture system which does use glyphosate in limited quantities just to clear the soil at the beginning and then use minimum tillage and he's passionately in favor of that because of preserving the structure of the soil and saving all that fuel that's used in playing so you know he he makes a good case for it and he rather persuaded me that um used in very limited way it could be if not a good thing at least not that bad what's really bad is when people drench the standing crop with glyphosate and especially when they uh spray crops just before harvest to make them die so they dry up and they can be harvested more promptly then of course you've got the crop itself is drenched in it and glyphosate residues get into the grain and um who knows what health effects they have um whereas his argument for conservation agriculture is just just at the moment of saying one application only at the beginning before the crops develop before you um say the crop um so i mean there are people who make that case and the reason i mentioned it is because he persuaded me that um the general use of deep ploughing or quite deep power applying in organic agriculture to control weeds is is not necessarily a good feature it's many many good things about organic agriculture and i buy organic food myself because i think it's so important to support it and avoid poisons in the food but it does have that downside yeah the in terms of the the mixed cropping um opportunity that you were talking about and certainly the agroforestry which i've seen it at some dartington at schumacher are there examples of that being scaled up um to points where it is providing large food systems or are they nearly all small um you know relatively low acreage systems well there are examples of of mixed cereal cropping um going on in in in farmers fields and um in agricultural research stations um you know i've actually seen serious fields of of mixed cereals so people are actually doing that but i don't know how widespread the use of that is um as i say the the area where it's always been traditional is uh in when you sow meadows uh if you're saying pasture without high nitrogen inputs then mixing in clover with the grass you can actually buy commercially um mixed seed for selling those kinds of uh pastures so that's happening on a large scale um but um i don't know how large scale the use of mixed cereals is um or other mixed crops here in britain i've i mean looking as i travel around the country i sort of always looking to see what's growing and how people are doing it i've seen very few examples of it um agroforestry on the arches now so um maybe it's about to go big but it's interesting how it as a system it does actually increase your overall yield if you have the trees separate and the crops separate on the same amount of land you'd have a lower yield so it makes economic sense so i think i'm i'm sure it will get bigger it just takes time yeah and perhaps some of those some cropping systems that you talked about earlier on might be the way julian parfit asks some since your time in india looking at mixed cropping systems there's been immense change in agri systems and net migration to cities has the importance of mixed cropping been maintained in some of those systems given its importance uh in the face of climate stresses well i can't answer that because i haven't been in indian villages for you know 10 years and so i just don't know what's happening today there's certainly been a large migration to cities but the population of the villages hasn't gone down because the population is still going up as a whole so it's not as if you've got depopulated villages in india and the last time i was there actually i was in a village about five years ago in rajasthan and i was cycled around to look at the fields and talk to farmers um and so there at least in that part of india i saw quite a bit of mixed cropping still going on and it was still small-scale agriculture you certainly didn't get didn't get the feeling the village was depopulated it was teeming with people um so um the um i suspect it's still going on uh whenever there's enough labor family farms and small family farms uh it's so much more efficient and has so many advantages there's no reason for people to give it up it's the only reason people give it up is when you have consolidation of farms in large scale farms like in africa now the chinese and others are trying to consolidate the land and have huge commercial farms which is of course displacing peasant farmers who they regard as inefficient um um but uh i just don't know enough to answer that question it's something that it would be well worth investigating in india and elsewhere that's good somebody here karen white has um has made a note in the chat about organic farming in tropical australia often used chickens and boiling water for weed control and i know quite a number of local councils are starting to drop glyphosate and they're using kind of boiling water as a means of being able to kill weeds um on the basis that it only affects the first sort of inch or something of the soil and doesn't get any further than that so the trouble is binding to create huge quantities of boiling water obviously needs lots of energy so unless there's a way of producing boiling water using solar power which you can be done by concentrating mirrors and things but it's not something you could do on every farm and have tractors with sort of tanks of boiling water i mean you can do it on a small scale i can't see this working on a 50 acre field we did have um an experiment here that didn't happen in the end but there was a plan for someone to come and demonstrate a system that involves electrocuting weeds um i don't know how much energy that uses but that's another possible alternative yeah and there's various suggestions here around vinegar killing weeds um and so on as well so i think there's um the challenge of vinegar is it doesn't it doesn't kill the the roots often so you'll you'll kill the top of the plant and then and then the plant will come back again so it's not a good solution i'm just looking through to make sure i've tried to pick out the the most um useful ones there's some great chat going on and some really useful um uh evidence-based uh research material there about the potential dangers of certain types of feces and so on there was a lovely comment here which i think is really interesting um from uh erica lewis who says when we got environmental agency consent for the compost blues at our transition home um scheme the greatest concern about the compost produced is the presence of heavy metals and she thinks it's from meat eating um and we would be required to test for it um in the compost produced regularly the plan is to use the compost on the orchard that's shared by the whole scheme so clearly there are some issues there that we really need to get the environment agency to to understand and i think your point about needing to undertake the research is incredibly important to be able to take this forward um i think we might be about at the end of the of the um discussion but i don't know if there's anything finally that you'd want to say rupert i think it's been a fascinating talk and some really interesting practical ideas well i just hope that something like the family orchard scheme will happen somewhere soon and and i really hope that it's something you'll be able to discuss at dartington and uh you know with the people who manage the estate um i know santish kumar is very keen on it and i wrote an article about it in resurgence at his suggestion um and so i think it'd be a marvelous way in which dartington could actually take the lead uh not just locally but as a model that could actually spread across britain and also to other countries i'm sure if this took off it would take off quite fast no that's brilliant well thank you so much i think it's been a fascinating talk and some some really great ideas and some some brilliant things that um we can all ponder on um i'm popping out to pee in the compass deep in just a minute but i'd like to thank you all again for joining us tonight and supporting the work of schumacher college next week's our last talk in this series and we're really delighted to have lyla june johnson with her talk uh titled mindfulness healing and racism cultivating right relations so anyone who's seen lila talk before will know that it's likely to be a combination of talk musical performance and poetry reading which i hope you'll also all want to attend live one really looking forward to it so i hope that rupert and columns talk and conversation as west to your appetite in which case i'd point you towards rupert's books and his website as well as quite a number of the links that were in the in the chat so i'll get copied some of those down and i'll leave the um the webinar running for the next few minutes if you want to note down some of those links but i'd point you towards rupert's books and his website as well as numerous talks you can find online we've also got a number of short courses and postgraduate programs at schumacher college which deal with very similar themes including rma in engaged ecology but most notably our msc in holistic science which at this moment of climate emergency they have extreme ecological and social changes questions the role of science as cause and solution to the world's problems it presents a rigorous inquiry into the methods techniques and philosophical underpinnings of science to address whether they can take us beyond mere explanation to a deeper understanding of the world and our place within it it asks if there is a way science could be done differently so please do look at our website subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on twitter for information on courses future earth talks and events this has been our 10th online earth talk and we would love to have your feedback on how we can continue to improve and also we'd love to hear about the issues topics or speakers you'd like to see in the future so can i thank you all again for your very active participation and thank once again rupert sheldrake and colin porson my pleasure thank you thank you all so much thank you everybody and good night

Channel: Dartington Trust

Views: 19,727

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Id: sqUt3RKd2M8

Length: 65min 35sec (3935 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020