Greens and blues

I'm like a fish out of water, down here on the farm

Can we save the planet? Can we feed an expanding population without the world’s ecosystems collapsing? How can we do this in a smart way without relying on untested dogmas and feel-good slogans? This week, I’ve been thinking about these questions, prompted by two unlikely soulmates, who at first sight might not share much more than both being located in Oxfordshire.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been watching the third series of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Video over the last couple of weekends. I’ve also been reading the book Not the End of the World by

Hannah Ritchie

(whose Substack is a must-read).¹

It’s fair to say that Clarkson is an extremely polarising figure. Of course, someone’s public image doesn’t always match their real life character, but over the years of insulting foreigners, vegetarians, cyclists, Meghan Markle and many others, he’s built up a fairly blokeish following of petrolheads.

There have been hints of a more thoughtful side (for example his advocating for Brunel in the BBC’s 2002 100 Greatest Britons series) and Clive James, who helped propel him towards fame, remarked that “he was that rarest thing in England, the articulate bloke”. And despite what you might guess, he has repeatedly declared his opposition to Brexit. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that Clarkson’s Farm is a bit of a departure.

Of course, none of us are naive about this form of television. Just as we know that it’s maybe not just a happy coincidence when the camera is in exactly the right place to capture some driving mishap on The Grand Tour, it’s reasonable to wonder quite how many of the fiascos on the farm are somewhat planned in advance, and how many more than the core team of five or so people are involved in farming when the cameras aren’t rolling.

Nonetheless, it’s still interesting to see the image Clarkson that chooses to present through this programme. There are many slow-motion shots of deer and rabbits hopping across his fields. A large part of Series 1 involved plans to rewild his farm by building nestboxes and beehives. So while he might seem like an unlikely naturalist, he’s certainly happy to project the image of being a committed one at least.

In contrast, Hannah Ritchie’s environmental credentials are much clearer. As she describes in her book, she studied an undergraduate degree in Environmental Geosciences at Edinburgh University. She has an MSc in Carbon Management and a PhD in GeoSciences. She works in Oxford, both for the Oxford Martin School's Programme on Global Development and for the invaluable Our World in Data website.

But what I find interesting is that as a result of all this, she’s not ended up in a position of gloom and doom about the state of the world. Instead she holds a rather more nuanced view, some of which may not even be so far away from a Clarksonesque view. This is not to say that her book is purely Panglossian, but rather it identifies problems, tries to calibrate the seriousness of them using data, and uses similar methods to consider the right solution to them.

For example, rather than damning palm oil due to its role in deforestation, she argues that its high yield means that less land is required to cultivate it than to produce equivalent amounts of oil from other plant sources. As a result, she argues that we shouldn’t stop using palm oil altogether, but rather ensure that the oil that we buy comes from certified plantations, and stop using it in biofuel (as is apparently done in Germany). In a similar spirit, when Clarkson is traumatised by many of his piglets being crushed to death by their mothers, he helps design a technological solution to protect them.

While Ritchie’s book covers many topics, including climate change, overfishing and plastic pollution, the topic with most commonality with Clarkson’s Farm is that of food supply. Overall she provides a thoughtful and well-argued riposte to the obvious (but likely flawed) idea that we should all eat locally-grown organic produce farmed on smallholdings.

There’s a nice illustration of this in the TV show, where Clarkson seeks to sell nettle soup, cooked by hand from nettles growing wild and foraged on his land. He and we are shocked to discover that (largely due to the wages of the foragers) the breakeven cost of this soup is somewhere around £10, for an amount that Tesco can sell for under £2. Like it or not, modern industrialized farming and supermarket supply chains are insanely efficient. If we really are to continue to feed the UK and the world’s population, it seems very hard to come up with a viable wholesale alternative overnight.

Of course, this is not to say that the system is perfect. An obvious issue is that modern agriculture is heavily based on the use of fertilizers. Ritchie describes how this, as well as Borlaug’s Green Revolution, helped stave off Paul Erlich’s prophecies of doom and prevented more widespread famine. However, it’s natural to wonder if this can go on forever.

Indeed, Clarkson himself is aware of the issue - one subplot of the new series is that he allows musician and soil advocate Andy Cato to experiment with low-fertilizer methods on one of his fields. Clarkson even quotes figures about degradation of soils which Ritchie calls into question at the start of her Chapter 5, where she questions the idea that there might only be 30, 60 or 100 harvests left. In that sense, it’s pretty funny that the Top Gear presenter and petrolhead is more worried about this aspect of the environment than the academic researcher in the field!

But in general, it seems clear from the show that economic factors are likely to prevent the worst excesses of fertilizer overuse among farmers. The numbers are very stark: in one year the farm spends £57,834 (close to its annual overall profit) on fertilizer alone, representing an extremely steep recent increase in price. In the current economic climate, you’d have to assume that no farmer is using fertilizer for fun, and will do whatever they can to reduce its use. Indeed, as Cato’s field underperforms, the key issue seems to be to find the sweet spot in greatest yields achievable at the least overall cost.

In a similar spirit, Ritchie identifies that protein supply (and particularly beef and dairy farming) is an extremely significant contributor to climate change. She is realistic about this, arguing that meat eating is unlikely to go away completely, but suggests ways in which the impact of its production and consumption can be reduced. In that way, it seems hard to look at Clarkson’s pigs foraging in previously unused woodland, and not think that this kind of incremental idea can be a step in the right direction, along with the crazy yields obtained by his early attempts in mushroom growing.

Of course, Clarkson’s Farm is entertainment, not a scientific paper. But it’s entertainment with its heart in the right place, and anything that makes people more aware of the issues and challenges associated with our food supply seems like a valuable contribution. And as the phrase goes, if you do want to learn more about some of the issues raised in this programme, you could do a lot worse than read Not the End of the World afterwards.

1. For purposes of full disclosure, Hannah and I follow each other on Twitter. The two of us were on a panel together at the Royal Statistical Society discussing COVID communication. I’ve never met Jeremy Clarkson, done a powerslide in a Lamborghini or caused a diplomatic incident with the people of Argentina.