The Carbon Fields [Kindle Edition]

Graham's book opened my eyes to what is wrong with our agricultural system: A strong reliance on grain, fertilisers and oil has meant that the majority of our food is expensive, tastes like cardboard and contains few nutrients.

By simply changing to a different farming system we can solve problems such as the food crisis, the greenhouse effect and ill health.

I'll certainly be eating grass fed from now. Once you've read this book you'll want to as well.

Graham's style of writing means that even someone with no knowledge of food science and farming (like myself) can understand. The nice bitesize chapters make easy and enjoyable reading.

It is hardly surprising that environmentalists like Jonathan Porritt have endorsed this book. There is much here that anyone who abhors the systematic depredation of our planet can agree with. However, I have some reservations, beginning with that subtitle. Why just Britain? Why not the world? Britain cannot isolate itself from the rest of the world and its problems, including climate change and the world food crisis, which can only be addressed on an international scale.

However, Mr Harvey, winner of the BP Natural World Book Prize and current Agricultural Story Editor for The Archers, (go figure) confines his crusade to the UK. True, he cites pasture farmers in the USA and elsewhere, but they are marginal, serving only an `in the know' minority of mostly middle-class customers who are prepared drive considerable distances to buy their produce. As the cover blurb says: "No breakthroughs are required, no "fad" diets. You won't have to throw away the car keys or give up real butter and juicy steaks."

Another `beef' I have with this book is that it is really just a blown up pamphlet. It is like a series of press articles, all on a common theme, stitched together. In true journalistic style the author first tells us what he is going to tell us, then he tells us, then he tells us what he has told us, over and over again, as if he believes that constant repetition wins the argument.

That aside, Mr Harvey does get some things right, like how the established root system of pasture land helps it resist drought and flooding and how it acts as a co2 sink by removing carbon from the air and storing it below ground.... He describes how the ploughing, planting and rearing of monoculture cereal and grain crops with regular doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides reverses this process by releasing the trapped CO2, and destroys both the flood/drought resistance and the fertility of the soil, resulting in erosion through drought and flooding.

Of course, this is something the Cubans were faced with when denied oil, fertilizers etc. by the US blockade. It took around four years to replenish their ruined soils with compost and the use of oxen instead of tractors. It is odd that Mr Harvey chooses not to mention the outstanding success achieved by the Cubans, using the methods he so passionately advocates.

I was quite taken by the lyrical names of the wild flowers, grasses, herbs and plants growing in the pastures (bird's foot trefoil, burnet saxifage, meadow vetchling and yellow rough hawkbit to name just a few) and he appears to have an in-depth (no pun intended) knowledge of what goes on beneath the surface of the soil. He speaks of grassland root systems forming symbiotic links with a group of soil fungi called arbuscular mycorrhizae. Apparently, these soil fungi help build up the stores of soil carbon, in the process regulating atmospheric carbon, thereby counteracting climate change.

He rightly condemns the present intensive agricultural methods and the multi-national corporate entities that impose their collective will on the farming community via the national government. He rails against the development of cereal and grain monocultures nourished by chemical fertilisers and dosed with pesticides and weed-killers, as do all environmentalists. He condemns GM, its developers and advocates, refuting the lie that it is the answer to world hunger.

However, to use a current cliché, there is an elephant in the room, which he studiously ignores. The windmills he tilts at, i.e. the villains of the piece, BASF, Monanto, Bayer, Syngetta, Dupont et al are all part and parcel of the worldwide economic system which is the source of their wealth and power and which affords him a comfortable life-style

For the measures the author proposes to have an appreciable effect in halting environmental destruction and climate change we would need a worldwide revolution in agriculture and food production, and not just in the UK as the author suggests. I am pretty certain that such a revolution is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.

The real object of this book in fact, is not to challenge the world economic status quo so much as to persuade us all that a diet of meat and dairy products is not only desirable, but good for our health and the environment, as long as the animals are free range and pasture fed. Assuming that this is true, would the form of pasture farming the author advocates feed the world? I seriously doubt that it would. Mr Harvey's solution is to turn the clock back to what he sees as the golden age of pre-war agricultural production. In this he is like Canute trying to reverse the tide.

As he records, the great American prairie that supported fifty million bison and many other species is now gone, replaced by huge areas of intensive arable crops like wheat, corn and soya beans, all cultivated with the aid of huge amounts of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and fossil fuel.

Let's just imagine that the petro-chemical and bio-tech giants like BASF could be persuaded to suspend business and forego their massive profits to allow that great expanse of virtually dead soil to revert to it's former state, that of prairie grassland.

How long would that take? Well, it took the Cubans four to five years of intensive composting and care to replenish and rejuvenate the soil of their small island. It will undoubtedly take far, far longer than that to restore the vast American prairie. And what about the fifty million bison, plus the millions of other lost species which were necessary to maintain the grassland? It took a hundred years to destroy all that. I reckon it would take a lot longer to undo the destruction wrought by generations of intensive arable farming.

Then there are the huge swathes of grassland and rainforest in Central and South America which have been destoyed to make way for the cultivation of biofuels and other monoculture cash crops, as well as in countries like Indonesia and elsewhere. All this would have to be reversed to provide enough grass-fed beef to feed the world, and how would the world be fed in the meantime?

No, let's face it, even if we were capable of challenging the power base of the multinational bio-tech giants there would not be enough pasture land or adequate water supplies to yield the magnitude of dairy produce necessary to feed the world. (The production of just one kilo of beef takes up to 15,500 litres of water, and 323 m2 of grazing land.) The State of the World Report in 1999 predicted that for an expected population of 10 billion to eat a U.S.-style diet would require 4 planets earth. On a global scale, the production of meat is totally unsustainable, yet this book gives the impression that, with careful husbandry, livestock isn't a problem and people can eat meat till the cows come home.

As stated by the World Watch Institute, as environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future: deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.

D. R. Callaghan

July 22, 2009 Read more ›

This book should be read by everyone interested in farming, food or the environment. I agree with a previous review that the style of writing can at times be a little repetitive, but for me, the messages that this book conveys are too important let this get in the way.

There is some very good information on animal health, and the relation of the animal's health and diet to human health. Also, the lunacy of growing cheap subsidised cereals (grown using fossil fuel derived fertilisers and pesticides) and feeding these to animals whose natural diet should be grass is well explained in this book.

We often hear that intensive agriculture is the only way to feed the world and its ever increasing population; surely another argument would be that the world simply cannot carry this vast population. Intensive agriculture of any type relies totally on fossil fuels, and as these become scarce, we will have little choice other than to go back to more traditional methods of producing food. Without artificial fertilisers (derived from fossil fuels) we will need grass fed animals as part of a mixed farming system to provide the fertility to the soil for growing crops.

This book contains some essential messages for the future of our food production and the environment around us, it should be widely read.

This is a great book for those of us who love the British landscape, car about the environment and rural communities, care about animal health and welfare and want to eat good food with a clear conscience. Graham Harvey should be made Minister of Agriculture and the Environment immediately. The book is written in an accessible style but well researched and documented - if you have children and you care about their health and their future you must read this book.

I have enjoyed reading this book, and there is some very interesting stuff in it. For example the information about how grazing increases carbon in the soil was new to me, and I would love to know more about how eating wild herbs in organic meadows decreases the production of methane from cattle - only I doubt there has been any quantitative research on this. (After all, monitoring gas from cattle digestion is not easy, and probably not very nice for the cattle). Mr. Harvey is obviously very passionate about his subject and that comes over very strongly.

I have read many depressing books about how the world is going down the toilet: transport, electricity and agriculture are all taking their toll on the planet etc.
So far i haven't read any books that offer any solutions bar drive less, watch less TV, eat less.
Then i read The Carbon Fields - it might not cover the first two, but it definatly seems to have the answer for the third.
Graham manages to pull together a whole world of research, makes it accesable and offers some real answers, showing how you can eat at lot of the same food, just more healthily, whilst saving the planet. How can you not be intersted in that!?!?!?
Plus his system gives us a nice pretty coutryside to walk around in, not a giant plane of identikit GM farms and greenhouses.
Read this book, if we are all lucky it might change the world for the better....