Landsmart E-Book

Tom Heap

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A terrific book' Michael Morpurgo 'Excellent' Helen Czerski 'A clear, concise and accessible guide to the pivotal question of our age' Guy Shrubsole How can we get more from our land and meet humanity's growing needs of food, renewable energy, carbon storage and housing? In Landsmart, BBC Countryfile's Tom Heap tours the British countryside showcasing the innovative farmers whose yields feed four times the global average, the soil scientists upending the limits to crop growth, and the conservationists and industry leaders salvaging habitat, harnessing solar and radically reimagining land use to provide a hopeful blueprint for a better future.

Leseprobe

LANDSMART

‘A terrific book. Every page is a challenge to how we think about the good earth about us, our climate, our soil, our food and how we live our lives. Landsmart is a call for positive change that we must not ignore’

Michael Morpurgo

‘We all know about being climate smart, but as Tom Heap shows in this remarkable book, if we really want to save the planet we’re going to have to be land smart too’

Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees

‘A brilliant weaving together of surprising facts and charming encounters. Tom Heap, a world class broadcaster, combines an infectious curiosity with a no-nonsense determination to get at the truth of what really works and what doesn’t. Essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of energy, food and nature, which ought to be all of us’

David Shukman, former Science Editor BBC News

‘Rising demand for food, energy and carbon capture all place increased pressure on land, in the process reducing that available for nature. It’s a huge issue, yet how to use land in smart ways is one of the least discussed questions of our times’

Tony Juniper CBE, environmentalist

Tom Heap is a regular presenter on BBC One's Countryfile, specialising in the more investigative films, and has made many BBC Panorama documentaries on food, energy and the environment. Tom is also the presenter of Radio 4's Rare Earth series and was the anchor of The Climate Show on Sky News. He was the creator and presenter of BBC Radio 4's flagship climate change series 39 Ways to Save the Planet.

LANDSMART

A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Countryside

TOM HEAP

First published in hardback in Great Britain as Land Smart in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Tom Heap, 2024

The moral right of Tom Heap to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-339-3

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For Caroline Drummond,who repeatedly outsmarted the prevailing wisdomto prove that Farming and Natureare not inevitable enemies.

CONTENTS

Introduction

  1. The Home and Garden

  2. Energy, Part One: Solar

  3. Energy, Part Two: Beyond Solar

  4. Farming, Part One: Arable

  5. Farming, Part Two: Livestock

  6. Peat and Carbon

  7. Woodland

  8. Nature

  9. Science

10. Behavioural Change

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

‘I’ve got people battering down my door, offering money to use my farm as “solar land”, “battery land”, “carbon storage land” and “biodiversity net gain land” but I am genuinely torn because I want to grow food.’ These are the words of a Hertfordshire farmer.

It used to be so simple. Land was there to provide space for us to live and somewhere for our food to live too. Whether hunted or gathered, that nutrition needed a dwelling place. However, as time went on, food became less chased and more grown: that way our meals were more reliable. Shelter became permanent as we farmed and increasingly robust as we wandered north into colder climes. Those buildings demanded wood for walls and as fuel to heat the space. We learned how to ‘grow’ clothing, too, with wool, leather and cotton. As our settlements expanded, we used land to link them. And as our wealth grew we needed more land to make stuff, and as our population grew we used yet more land to feed us. We found energy below ground; at first coal, then oil and gas kept us warm, moving and powered. Many more of us lived long and prospered.

All the while, wild land – forests, meadows and wetlands – shrank, gobbled up by the plough, the cow or concrete. The animals that dwelt there vanished and the carbon locked up in the land was released to combine with oxygen and increase carbon dioxide, CO2, in the air. This joined forces with pollution from all those fossil-fuel furnaces, dangerously overheating our atmosphere.

That is where we are now – one in four species are facing extinction and the Earth’s atmosphere is perilously close to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average. Fires, floods and storms are worsening and the world’s fundamental geography is changing as ice shrinks from peaks and the poles. How we use land is pivotal to our success or failure in tackling these existential problems, and smart people are waking up to this.

Our use of land is a lever we can pull either way. Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, sums up the problem: ‘As a finite resource and our most valuable natural asset, we can no longer afford to take land for granted. We must move to a crisis footing to address the challenge and make land the focus.’

A series of thoughtful and influential bodies in the UK have joined the chorus:

• In January 2023 the Green Alliance (an influential UK-based environmental think tank) published ‘Shaping UK land use: priorities for food, nature and climate’. They argued that ‘Land use must change to restore nature and achieve net zero globally. Instead of being a source of emissions, it must remove carbon from the atmosphere, while also making space for nature and food production’.

• In February 2023 the Royal Society (the UK’s pre-eminent scientific academy) published a report called ‘Multifunctional Landscapes: Informing a long-term vision for managing the UK’s land’. It states: ‘Now is a critical moment for land use policy globally, but especially in the UK. A confluence of environmental and geopolitical drivers necessitates a strategic rethink of the way decisions are made about how landscapes are managed’.

• In July 2023 the House of Lords published a report entitled ‘Making the most out of England’s land’, arguing for a land use commission and a land use framework to help make the ‘best decisions for land’.

• In November 2023 the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the UK’s pre-eminent global policy think tank) published ‘The emerging global crisis of land use’, warning of a ‘land crunch’ as ‘Competition for productive and ecologically valuable land, and for the resources and services it provides, is set to intensify over the coming decades, as growing demand for land for farming, climate change mitigation and other essential uses deepens.’

• The UK government’s own, long delayed, land use framework is still awaited at the time of writing.

We need land to do many things for us now:

• to absorb CO2 with trees, new marshes and managed pasture

• to grow more food for a growing population

• to provide clean energy with biofuels, solar panels and wind turbines

• to grow trees for building materials and natural fibres

• for recreation and beauty to nurture our physical and mental health

• to give space for the creatures that share our planet.

Where is all this land to come from? After all, we don’t have another Earth to colonise and, with the exception for a few new holiday islands off the Gulf states, we’re not creating new ground from the sea. The sad truth is that we are still stealing it from nature: since the year 2000, an area one quarter the size of Australia has been taken, the vast majority for farming and some for building.

In 2019, the first report from an international organisation called IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) was published, which marshalled research and put forward arguments to make policy makers care as much about the nature crisis as the climate crisis. Among a sackful of alarming statistics, they found that 75 per cent of the world’s land surface had been significantly altered by human activity, 85 per cent of wetland area has been lost and around one million different species face extinction. The overwhelming driver of this loss has been the growth in farmland, and the chair of IPBES, Sir Bob Watson, told me in an interview: ‘We must not extensify and cut down more pristine forest or [destroy] grassland or wetland’. But we still do.

In the richer world of Europe and North America, much of the wild land was cultivated decades, if not centuries, ago. The way to fill more bellies of a booming population was to grow more food off the same area of land – a process known as intensification. This green revolution went global and, in avoiding hunger terms, was a great success as the world population grew yet famine diminished. Research from Our World in Data shows deaths from famine in the fifty years from 1920 to 1970 were nearly ten times higher than in the following fifty years: 70 million shrinking to 8 million. Since the global population was growing so steeply, as a proportion the drop was even higher. This was amazingly good news for humanity, but our natural environment paid a punishing price. The pursuit of productivity pushed farming to grow less variety, while using more fertiliser and the pesti-herbi-fungi-cide cocktail. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring warned of chemicals muting nature’s song, with farmland becoming solely used for stock or crops and a no-go zone for anything else. It proved an accurate prophecy across much of agriculture.

But then we discovered that farming’s environmental footprint is even bigger. It is a giant hose of greenhouse gases: CO2 from cleared forest, degrading soils and manufacturing chemical fertiliser, nitrous oxide from the fertilised fields themselves and methane from rice paddies, sheep and cows. Around one quarter of human-made climate change results from farming and land use change.

Faced by the fact that farming is a major driver of both nature and climate crises, the overwhelming reaction from environmental groups has been to pressurise agriculture itself to be more wildlife- and climate-friendly. In the UK alone we have the Nature Friendly Farming Network, LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming), Organic Farmers and Growers, the Soil Association, the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group and many conservation groups besides. The UK’s Climate Change Committee has estimated that just over 20 per cent of agricultural land must either be rewilded or converted to bioenergy or other non-agricultural crops in order to achieve net zero by 2050. All this pressure is bearing fruit: new English and Welsh government subsidies will pay farmers for the promotion of nature or other ‘public goods’ and not the production of food, while some landowners are opting for complete rewilding of their estates. The European Union-wide ‘Common Agricultural policy’ is more production focused than UK strategy but the direction of travel, both in shifting funds and strengthening rhetoric, is towards nature- and climate-friendly farming.

The business world is pushing land use in a greener direction too. Companies can now offset their greenhouse gas emissions from their transport or energy used on the production line. They are paying for the ‘right’ to continue polluting and make net-zero claims, by having that pollution absorbed elsewhere. These so-called ‘carbon credits’ often pay landowners to boost the carbon uptake of their plot by increasing soil organic matter or planting trees. There is a similar market evolving for nature with biodiversity credits. From the start of 2024 developers in England will be obliged to show that their new building project will lead to an increase in natural abundance of at least 10 per cent. This is called ‘Biodiversity Net Gain’ (BNG). But it doesn’t have to be on the same site; damage can be offset by gains elsewhere and these BNG credits can be traded.

Campaigners, government and commerce are broadly agreed on the menu: hungry for bees, bats and birch trees but with less appetite for food. Even the war in Ukraine, triggering food security fears, hasn’t fundamentally weakened this strategy. But there is an inconvenient truth: traditionally, land that delivers more abundant wildlife will yield less food, yet the world needs more food, not less, as we are expecting about two and a half billion extra mouths to feed by 2050. So where will the new food come from, especially as similar farming policies are gaining traction across Europe and North America? The answer could be an accelerated worldwide land grab from the natural world. Our well-intentioned green farming policies could increase the destruction of wild habitats, loss of species and rise of carbon emissions elsewhere. Other countries’ ‘Edens’ may become farms so we can keep our bellies full and our local wildlife off life support. I recently asked one of the architects of England’s farming and nature strategy if they examined the effect of any policy change on land use overseas? ‘Errr, no,’ came the reply.

The map on the next page shows the UK split according to how (not where) its land area is used.* By far the biggest chunk is related to animals as pasture or crops for feed. The hexagonal islands to the right show the amount of land needed to grow the food the UK imports. It is roughly equivalent in size to another UK.

Current land use policies will enlarge this offshore island and grow the expectation that somewhere else and someone else will grow our food. Similar pressures and policies are strengthening across much of the richer world. It’s no wonder that every day since 2010 we destroyed on average more than 20,000 hectares of tropical forest – an area about half the size of the Isle of Wight or twice the area of Paris.

We are faced with two ethical paths – duties, if you prefer – that appear to be in conflict: either ‘we should restore our own natural habitats and do what is in our power to halt climate change by becoming net zero’ or ‘existing farmland should grow as much food as possible to avoid promoting the global biodiversity and climate crises.’ Both of these are sound environmental arguments, but the second is one that many environmentalists still reject. However, high yield from each field should be welcomed not scorned. We have a finite amount of land on Earth and other creatures share it, so confining food production to as small an area as possible is good. Intensive farming – the enemy of green campaigners for years – needs to become an ally.

Environmentalists’ hostility and suspicion of intensive farming have plenty of justification, though, as traditional intensive agriculture has a lengthy charge sheet. Firstly, in the field itself, it can lead to impoverished soil, eliminated wildlife and greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, there is a wider footprint of water pollution, air pollution, fossil-fuelled fertiliser production and, in livestock systems, tonnes of imported animal feed and exported dung. In fact, given these broader effects, it’s reasonable to suggest that far from being intensive (as in concentrated in one place) traditional intensive farming has an extensive impact overall, tarnishing much of the world.

However, this isn’t just a question of farming vs nature. There are many other demands on land – green energy production, carbon storage, business parks, housing, commercial forestry, flood alleviation and leisure – and they all want a piece of the world’s dirt pie. Luckily, they don’t all have to be separate. In many cases, with the right management, land can do more than one thing at once: the space around wind farms can grow food and store carbon; forests can provide habitat, commercial timber and recreation; homes and warehouses can be roofed with solar; farmland can fight climate change and yield a rich harvest. Elsewhere a laser-like focus on one activity might be preferable, such as dedicating an area to the survival of an endangered species or reaping bumper crops from rich soil.

This plays into a lively debate that has taken place in farming and environment circles in recent years. Which approach to land use is the best for humanity and nature: sharing or sparing? A typical ‘sharer’ might be an organic farmer with more wildlife per hectare but who yields less food. A ‘sparer’, on the other hand, would balance maximising food production or energy generation in one area but demand total protection for nature elsewhere. I don’t think either strategy has the monopoly of virtue or villainy.

So now we need to think about this: how do we get the most out of every scrap of land without the damaging side effects of pollution or expansion? Intense, huh?

The answer lies with the best farmers, land managers, scientists and conservationists who are working today and those yet to come. When it comes to their land, the people in the pages of this book share a common raw material: intelligence. They have all thought deeply about the land crisis facing the world and come up with a solution.

But there are other critical players in this game: us. The consumers of food, energy and living space make choices that are then written in the land. And, given that farming is still the world’s dominant land use, food and diet is where we can make the biggest difference. Roughly one third of food grown is never eaten but wasted in the field, supply chain and home. If we cut waste we cut pressure on the land. We could also just eat less. More of the world’s population eat too much than eat too little. Obesity, and the health problems often worsened by it, is affecting a growing proportion of the population. We eat on average nearly 3000 calories per day whereas the requirement (an average of men and women) is 2250. If we all ate the recommended daily calorie intake, we would reduce food consumption by one quarter. Eating less meat would ease the land squeeze too. Animals aren’t very efficient in converting the calories and nutrients from what they graze into the flesh on their bones.

It is plausible that if we reduced waste to just 10 per cent of food grown, reduced overeating and lowered meat eating by half, the fall in demand for agricultural produce would leave sufficient space for nature and carbon storage across the world. But recommending behavioural change and delivering it are worlds apart.

A real stumbling block for so many environmental narratives in books, media articles or academic papers is that gap between prediction and reader experience. All the authors, in various ways, are saying: ‘Things are getting worse because of our abuse of nature and we risk going to hell.’ But the problem is that the bulk of the audience are not feeling even close to hell yet. Sure, we have observed the decline in wildlife and the temperature graphs rising, but this isn’t enough; more people are living longer, healthier and wealthier lives (although in recent years the income inequality gap has been rising). We continue to do so well from our exploitation of nature that convincing us to stop is really hard.

Relying on behavioural change betrays a common weakness of environmental advocacy: dreaming of a world where people think and act like you, rather than finding answers in tune with real and current popular motivations. Hoping that future populations will want different things has a place, but it is no panacea.

Climate change, nature depletion and food supply are quite obviously international issues, and land use is at the heart of all of them. So should this book have a worldwide scope? There is no absolutely right answer to this and my solution is, I hope, an elegant fudge: land use examples principally from the UK that acknowledge their international context and could be applied elsewhere. The arguments for ‘going global’ in this book are to do with the planetary scale of the issues, the fact that decisions made in the UK have repercussions elsewhere in an international market, and the choices made in other countries – especially the massively populated India and China – are probably more impactful than those made in the UK. But there are big drawbacks to this approach. Firstly, it would be a massive undertaking that would risk either superficiality or absurd size. Secondly, there is a strong risk of hubris – always there to an extent with writers or journalists – but I simply don’t have the same experience of the land issues in India or Peru as I do of those options closer to home.

Yet one must recognise the planetary scale of the problem. The World Resources Institute (WRI) is a global research organisation dedicated to delivering practical solutions to improve people’s lives and ensure nature can thrive. In recent years, they have been preoccupied by this land crisis. They report that a little over two thirds of land surface is or has been used for some productive purpose: mainly grazing, cropland, forestry and the built environment. The remainder – truly wild space, if you like – is divided between vegetated natural ecosystems and the area that is barren sand, rock or ice, which is just over one tenth of the surface. The need for food has driven this land grab, with croplands and pasture now taking around half of all the vegetated area today. The expansion is continuing and the WRI estimates that between 1962 and 2010 almost 5 million km2 of forests and woody savannas were cleared around the world for agriculture – equivalent to about two thirds the size of Australia. And here’s another verse from the WRI songbook: since the start of the twenty-first century, 1 million km2 – an area the size of Egypt – has been converted to cropland, some taken from pasture, some from previously virgin land. So more land is being taken for farming whether it’s under the cow or the plough.

Pretty much the worst thing you can do for nature is enslave it to our demands, in other words: farming. Its bounty shrivels. The number and variety of life forms plummet. IPBES says one million species are now threatened with extinction, some within decades, and that is more than ever before in human history. The primary cause is change in land and sea use; the secondary is ‘direct exploitation of organisms’ (such as fishing or hunting, both of which serve our appetite for food). The IPBES chair, at the time, Sir Robert Watson summed up why this matters: ‘The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment presents an ominous picture. The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.’

Boom.

And then we get to climate. With very few exceptions, changing land from a wilderness to a farm releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Most obviously this happens during deforestation, where the trees themselves are burned and the great majority of their stored carbon goes up in smoke. Then you have the disturbance of the soil, accelerating the rotting of plant material through greater access to oxygen, which again pumps up the amount of CO2 released. In a typical forest 44 per cent of the carbon is in the plants, roughly the same in the soil and the remainder in dead wood and leaf litter. All of this is vulnerable and much will vanish once the land is cleared for agriculture. The farming frontier also advances into wetlands and, as we’ll see in the chapter discussing peat, this also releases huge amounts of carbon.

Land use change within farming accelerates carbon emissions too. The soil beneath pasture holds more carbon on average than that beneath a crop, yet across the world in the first two decades of the twenty-first century about 1 million km2 of pasture and abandoned agricultural land was transformed into arable fields – an area about twice the size of France. Overall, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land use change contributes 14.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, whereas the actual practice of farming activity accounts for ‘only’ 8.5 per cent. Leaving wild land alone is one of our biggest climate change solutions.

Let’s roll out the map again because gobbling up fresh land for food is not seen everywhere. According to Global Forest Watch, deforestation and farmland expansion are most rapid in South America and particularly Africa. In North America tree cover is roughly stable, whereas in many parts of Asia, Eastern and Northern Europe, including the UK, it is actually increasing. It should be remembered that replanted or regrown forest does not have the same natural richness as virgin woodland and takes time to build up similar carbon storage. Overall, in the first twenty years of this century, we lost 2.5 per cent of our forest cover.

So how do we halt our continuing invasion of the natural world? The WRI has delivered some robust and shocking studies on how, in the competition for land, nature continues to lose. Its solutions rest on four pillars, paraphrased here:

•Produce: sustainably produce more food, animal feed and fibre from existing farmland

•Protect: shield the remaining natural world from exploitation

•Reduce: produce less waste and consume less meat especially in rich countries

•Restore: give poor agricultural land and degraded ecosystems back to nature.

I think this is a pretty admirable list but I would add one more:

•Combine: where possible and without big side effects, get your land to multi-task.

There are so many jobs for soil out there. The chapters that follow are divided into the different spatial demands such as farming, energy, forest, nature – but, given that many of the solutions involve combining land uses in the same space, there is obviously some overlap.

I am not trying to compete with the grand academic reports mentioned earlier in the introduction with modelling analysis and policy recommendations. I want to investigate the real-world pressures on our planet and take you on a guided tour through the UK to meet the thoughtful innovators in fields, labs and even parking bays who are using space smartly to avoid the land crunch. So let’s go and see who’s putting our land to good use.

* With thanks to the UK National Food Strategy 2021 but apologies to Orcadians who seem to have lost their island status!

1

THE HOME AND GARDEN

Smart use of the world’s land is a head-spinningly massive project, so let’s start small – very small. The area I look after – my house and garden including the allotment – is probably a little shy of 1000 m2, or one tenth of a hectare. The world’s land area is 13 billion hectares, so clearly the direct impact of my choices will be modest, but the thought process and trade-offs that go into my decisions are relevant to the wider world, and everyone’s personal plot adds up to a sizeable footprint. The amount of land given over to gardens in the UK comes to about 433,000 hectares: roughly the size of Somerset or one fifth of Wales. Within different settlements, the proportion of land that is garden space varies; in Edinburgh about one third is garden, whereas in Leicester it’s close to half.

I live in a four-bedroom cottage in Warwickshire with a surrounding garden about the size of a tennis court and a separate building consisting of a workshop, guest bedroom, bathroom and home office. The allotment is just 150 metres away on a southwest-facing slope and has clay soil. So what is my patch delivering both for me and the wider world?

Shelter

I sleep, eat and mooch about here with my wife, Tammany, and (until recently) three sons. Not being in a block of flats, I am not stacking occupants for maximum dwelling space per square metre.

Recreation

The house and garden provide space for exercise and relaxation for both mind and body. Tammany is a skilled gardener whereas I’m what footballer Eric Cantona called ‘a water carrier’ – a necessary but somewhat dull-witted stalwart. This is literally true in my case as we are lucky enough to have a well on the property, which avoids the use of tap water in the garden but involves many watering cans.

Nature

We make a deliberate effort to encourage wildlife. The south side of the plot is fringed by bramble thicket and nettle beds, while the roadside fence wears a hefty crown of ivy at one end and runs alongside a dense hawthorn bush at the other. These provide shelter for birds’ nests, as do the somewhat rotten eaves, and both teem with starlings. Most of the plants are native so local creatures, be they birds or bees, are more likely to find them a good food source. We have two tiny wildflower patches, each a little bigger than a double bed, that hum with insects in the summer. (I always think the term wildflowers is a total misnomer. It implies less human intervention, whereas no other part of the garden requires as much time per square metre. Tammany patrols regularly to be sure those fragile meadow beauties aren’t bullied out of existence by tougher invaders.)

Industrially produced chemicals are largely absent. The small lawns get a fertiliser hit from so-called ‘nettle tea’: stingers left in a tub of water for at least three weeks to produce a horrifically stinky organic fertiliser. An allotment neighbour refers to it as ‘Tom’s evil brew’. Thankfully the smell fades after a few hours and the growth promotion lasts for months. The hardest wildlife to embrace are the slugs and snails as their appetite for lovingly nurtured seedlings almost has me reaching for the chemical weapons. However, those blue pellets are harmful to birds too, so our assault on garden molluscs is limited to throwing them as far as possible, beer traps and the occasional squishing.

We have a pond in the shape of a semi-circular trench about 4 metres long and 60 centimetres deep that is rich in plant and bug life. We’d love it to become a home to frogs or newts. A friend in London has a thriving colony of newts and such great pond lighting (he is a cameraman) that the amphibians’ nightly forays play out like a shadow ballet cast on the water surface. We scoured the local puddles for newts and looked for frog spawn but our part of Warwickshire appeared to be amphibian-free. Thankfully, a ditch in Hampshire provided the goods and a few weeks later we had some froglets emerging from our pond. Tammany and I fondly watched the growth of our new brood (did I mention the boys had left home?) and imagined the crazy frog antics to come. The truth was a rather different wildlife triumph: a grass snake appeared, which looked beautiful, and returned regularly to our ‘all-you-can-eat buffet’ until it had scoffed the lot. Or so we thought. But a year later some more tadpoles have appeared. It is impossible to say if these were the offspring of snake dodgers or a new population but, either way, they are very welcome.

Energy

In an effort to cut carbon emissions from our house and a willingness to see more clean energy on the grid, we have installed enough solar panels on the roof over the years to generate nearly 8 kW (kilowatts) and a battery to store 8 kWh (kilowatt-hours). We’ll look at this in further detail in chapter 2, but it has changed our behaviour, as we now try to wash dishes and clothes when the sun shines and we have reduced our electricity bill and generated income from generous tariffs. As a shared land use, in my experience, it is a complete winner.

I wish I could harness the wind. We live on a hill that faces south with a fetch in the direction of the prevailing wind of more than 8 km (5 miles). I listen to gales at night and think of all that energy whistling round the eaves and buffeting the flower-beds. I want some of that feeding my battery, heating my water tank or warming my walls. Small domestic wind turbines had a brief flurry in the early 2000s with even the then prime minister, David Cameron, fitting one on his house in London. But they were over-hyped and underperforming. Turbulent city winds delivered a fraction of the claimed potential wattage and losses were amplified by the inverters required to turn this wildly varying direct current (DC), which is delivered by a turbine, into stable useable alternating current (AC) that flows from your sockets. The results were generally so poor that it came close to a mis-selling scandal and certainly tarnished the reputation of household turbines. Fifteen years on there are only around 125 domestic turbines installed across the UK (compared to around half a million domestic solar arrays). Some basic problems remain: solar panels with a similar power output are cheaper; turbines are not expected to last as long as photovoltaic (PV) systems as moving parts don’t help longevity; they make some noise; and I would expect the neighbours to be more concerned about the sight of them than the existing solar panels.

Food

Homegrown food has been part of my diet all my life. Where I grew up, near Cambridge, we had a big garden with a vegetable patch and the gnarled remnants of an orchard: mainly a popular variety of cooking apple called Bramley. There was one ‘Beauty of Bath’, which gave a poor yield but excellent support for a rambling rose. The trees were my climbing frame throughout the year and in autumn I loved the challenge of reaching the biggest, highest fruit before lobbing it down to my parents below. We always had far too many to use at home despite baked apples and crumble being a staple dessert. Some were stored in an old concrete air raid shelter, where massive walls ensured stable temperatures; others were offered free at the gate, while the remainder fed hungry bees, drowsy wasps and the soil. As a boy I was less excited by the vegetable plot – it lacked things to climb – but I remember good yields of potatoes and beans. I lived in London for about twenty years and for most of that time found space for growbags and a few window-ledge seedlings.

Now, in Warwickshire, the garden round the house is mainly planted for beauty, nature and leisure: flowers, shrubs and grass. But a few herbs and salad leaves find a space. Then there is the greenhouse: my pride and joy. Built from stone and timber by my family and I, it yields tomatoes and chillies while leaking so badly it has gutters on the inside. The produce is delightful and keeps me in tomatoes for months while the chutneys and chilli sauces keep things zesty all year round.

It is the allotment, of course, where food is the priority. About one third of it is dedicated to different potato varieties. One called ‘Pink Fir Apple’ is a particularly tasty favourite, while ‘Charlotte’ are grown for heavier cropping. We also grow sweetcorn, beetroot, onions, courgettes, spinach, squash, peas, salad greens, globe artichokes and the obligatory runner beans. Raspberries and blackcurrants deliver the sweet course. I’ve never done the research to measure the yield but I would guess that, across the year, we grow about one quarter of the fresh fruit and veg we eat. I love the quality and satisfaction of ‘growing your own’; the food nourishes my body and the labour is some defence against indolence and heart disease. It is probably cheaper than the shops, so long as you don’t charge for your own hours.

Carbon

This is my recent obsession, inspired by farmers who are turning their fields from carbon sources to carbon sinks. Apart from what is eaten and the really pernicious weeds, everything that grows from our garden and allotment goes back onto the soil: grass cuttings, tree trimmings, old vegetables, wilting shrubs, ivy and sawdust. Kitchen waste has its own compost bin but it all has the same eventual purpose: delivering more food and capturing more carbon. I ferry it all to big boxes on the edge of the allotment in the same green bins that were once emptied by the council and there it sits for about year. In the early spring we empty the boxes and spread the contents over about one quarter of the ground before roughly chopping it up with a spade and covering it entirely with a woven plastic weed-blocking membrane. There it sits for another year, hopefully boosting both the fertility and carbon content of the soil. I now can’t think why I ever let the council take this valuable raw material away, especially as in many places now you have to pay for the service.

Another way to keep more carbon in the soil and less in the atmosphere is to dig less: the gardener’s equivalent of limiting ploughing. When the top layer of soil, which is full of carbon-rich organic matter, is disturbed by the spade or the ploughshare and exposed to oxygen it causes oxidation of organic matter within the soil, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Worms and fungi in the ground also prefer not to be sliced by steel. This presents me with a challenge, though: how to deal with compacted clay soil and persistent weeds. The spade and the rotavator have not yet been retired but they have gone part time on very limited hours. It’s a faint echo of what many farmers encounter in trying to make this change.

When it comes to land use, our house, garden and allotment offer a multifunctional space with food, shelter, energy, nature, carbon and recreation all given room. I think we are using our 1000 m2 well, by which I mean we’re not wasting the area and it is delivering a good chunk of what we need land on this planet to do. I accept that we have more room than many and more money than some, but I think there is some lesson here about engagement: my personal patch is delivering a lot because Tammany and I think about it, we care about it, we enjoy it. It is intensively managed.

However, compared to some, we are just scratching the surface. Meet urban gardening maestro Mark Ridsdill Smith: ‘From an area of about two by six metres, I grew 90 kilos of food worth about £900 and ate something fresh from it pretty much every day of the year.’ Mark didn’t even have a garden, so this was all from pots and tubs on a balcony in north London. He grew mainly herbs, tomatoes, chillies and salad veg, with some runner beans and potatoes in season: ‘It was about adding value and diversity to my diet rather than big calories. But these aren’t just frills for foodies. They are essential nutrients.’

Mark is the creator of Vertical Veg: a website, forum and book all about container gardening. It gives those without land the power to grow food. Mark recently had his book on vertical veg published in famously foodie France. (The French title is Y’a des legumes au balcon! – There are vegetables on the balcony! The tone of alarm suggested by the exclamation mark makes me chuckle: ‘There are zombies on the balcony!’)

Mark began making a career from a passion when he was made redundant from the charity sector in 2009. Living in a flat in north London with no garden but some time on his hands, his first thought was an allotment, but the waiting list for a plot in Camden was close to thirty years. Disappointed but not discouraged, his ambition sprouted on windowsills and a small flat roof: ‘I had a real desire just to grow food. It’s such a pleasure. I think of homegrown food as 3D food, not the one-dimensional stuff you get processed or wrapped in the supermarket. And it uses all the senses: the smell of earth and tomato leaves, the sound of bees or a popping broad bean pod, feeling that pod’s furry lining. I think this is something very deep within us. We have been growing and harvesting for most of our history, the disconnection of shops is only very recent.’

Strangely, he doesn’t immediately mention eating it: ‘The stronger flavours and greater variety of what I grow is great. But eating wasn’t the main reason why I did it in the first place; it was about the process and experience of growing.’ With food, as with much else, the journey enhances the destination.

Mark now lives in a suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne and has a garden. He invited me to see his new plot and, when we step out of his back door, I expect be greeted by a food forest. But no: there is an overgrown lawn surrounded by an abundant flower-bed. The front yard, though, which is entirely paved, is a vegetable Eden. ‘What’s going on?’ I wonder. Does he feel actual earth is too easy? Does he have some kind of horticultural Stockholm syndrome where he’s compelled to behave as if still confined to a flat? ‘It’s a deal with my wife, Helen. She didn’t want to live in a veg patch so the lawn and surrounding flower-beds are her domain.’

As with my home, compromise delivers shared land use: beauty and recreation alongside food and shelter. But let’s get back to that slabbed front patio. It’s just about big enough to park a car and open the doors to get the grocery shopping out, and doubtless it once did just that. But no longer. Everything is in containers and Mark gives me a potted botanical tour:

‘Coriander. Incidentally grown on from live herb pots from the supermarket. Purple raspberries, orach (which is a kind of purple spinach), rhubarb, Scots lovage, blackberry, blueberries, sorrel, peas, strawberries, lettuce, courgette, rocket, runner beans, fat baby achocha, mint, society garlic, chocolate mint, chives, marjoram, oregano, Japanese wineberry, blackcurrant sage, garlic chives, parsley, thyme, plum, three-cornered leek, cherry fennel, apple tree, one I can’t remember, radishes, Chilean guava, nasturtium, sunflowers, pea shoots, hardy ginger, Jerusalem artichoke. But it faces north, so I do have some space on the south side for sun-lovers like chillies, rosemary, tomatoes, mulberry, sage, loganberry, lemon verbena, tarragon, savoury, lemon thyme and a hardy kiwi that has never produced fruit but it has lovely flowers and I remain hopeful.’

That is nearly fifty foodstuffs and there is still room for food for pollinators like aquilegia, allium, cosmos: all growing without direct access to the earth. Stunning. His front yard is a head-turning cornucopia of fresh fruit and veg, making the rest of his street seem rather barren. But he can’t live on it as, with a few exceptions, these are not staple crops that deliver the baseload of protein and calories. Mark and Helen have two children and he reckons the garden is providing less than 5 per cent of their calories across the year: ‘I was thinking about focusing on growing calories just for an experiment. I’d grow potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, runner beans, tomatoes and keep the fruit trees. But it would be a pretty boring diet.’

Mark is not trying to make a fundamentalist point about being self-sufficient and he says that farmers are best placed to grow staple crops. He is growing for joy, nutrition, variety and health. And, because much of what he harvests at home is expensive in the shops, he reckons he’s shaving around 20 per cent off the weekly food bill.

I visit Mark’s home garden in May and nearly everything is looking healthy and verdant. His front door is becoming obscured by foliage but I wonder where all this fertility is coming from. I suspect Mark is not the type to reach for the chemical fertiliser: ‘The main thing is worm compost. Let me show you these two wormeries.’

Mark lifts the lid on two homemade wooden crates, revealing a surface of rotting green matter that quickly transforms into friable brown compost as he digs down. Worms trickle through his fingers with every fistful: ‘All our food waste goes in the top, along with prunings from the vegetable garden and occasional helpings of nettles, comfrey or manure. That is the main engine of the garden and it delivers so much to the plants: nutrients, minerals, but the really brilliant thing is the microbial life, which activates the soil and makes food available to the plants.’

Elsewhere buckets full of nettle or comfrey ‘tea’ are brewing away to make pungent liquid fertiliser. Mark then lowers his voice and checks who’s in earshot: ‘More and more I’m trying to make homemade things. Helen doesn’t know about it but I’m trying a new brew, which is fish and sugar. She might think it a bit too committed. I get fish scraps free from the market, and when you add the sugar and a little water it ferments to a nice-smelling liquid root drenching or foliar feed.’

When it comes to helping his plants grow, he has a hierarchy: garden waste, kitchen waste, somebody else’s waste and, only when the waste streams are exhausted, organic fertiliser. I say ‘exhausted’ but Mark says there is a big waste product he is not using: what four humans flush down the loo. The property and lifestyle don’t permit a compost toilet option, but he would if he could. (In chapter 9 we’ll look at the enormous, yet under-used, potential of the sewage system to help our plants grow.)

Aside from growing food, Mark’s other passion is spreading the word about growing food, hence the website and book. He also ran projects in the neighbourhood where they went door-to-door and offered the occupants free microgreen seeds and a tray. Of those who answered the door in the most recent campaign, 80 per cent said yes, which Mark thinks is a pretty good return from cold-calling. Most of them had grown something two weeks later, which he hopes will provide them with the encouragement to try something harder. He called the project ‘Random Acts of Greenness’.

Random door-knocking is one way to overcome the emerging middle-class bias in homegrown food. Mark has seen it at every stall he runs, at every talk he gives, even in the gentrification of the allotments, and considers it an especially unwelcome trend. It is usually poorer urban areas that contain ‘food deserts’, in which accessing healthy fresh food is very difficult, and therefore are places where people would benefit the most from growing their own. The socioeconomics of our food culture deserves a book of its own, but Mark does acknowledge some real barriers for those on lower incomes: ‘Gardening goods tend to be heavy, you may not have a car, and there are few role models, but the biggest impediment is lack of knowledge and confidence. If you have managed to scrape together £20 one month, are you really going to risk it on growing something that may die and not feed anyone? Freezer food or takeaways are reliable.’

Yet it remains perplexing to me and it is a relatively new phenomenon. A study of the relative productivity of farms, garden and allotments produced in the 1950s suggests that, back then, it was those on lower incomes who were much more likely to grow veg. The study compared the use of gardens in suburban London and found food production in 21 per cent of the council house gardens and only 9 per cent of the private homes. It is a fair assumption that poorer people lived in the council homes. Council properties also had a higher proportion of derelict gardens, whereas the private holdings had 50 per cent more lawns, flowers and shrubs. To me the obvious reading of these stats is that not many hard-up households could afford to waste their time gardening for decoration; their tilling hours had to yield something to eat. I wonder why that has changed.

As I leave, Mark warns me not to step on what I had assumed was a weed, growing out of a crack in the tarmac beside his gate: ‘That is one of my salad leaves, Orach Scarlet Emperor. Elsewhere around here, I’ve spotted self-seeded chives, marigold, society garlic and verbena persevering through the cracks in the pavement. You can’t stop the seeds.’

Mark Ridsdill Smith is a powerful and practical prophet for urban gardening, but to what extent can individual or neighbourhood enthusiasm really fill the nation’s veg box?

In the outwardly affluent area of Oxfordshire, Dr Emily Connally founded Cherwell Collective, a non-profit organisation that works to reduce climate change and social inequality through growing food and tackling waste. She says she is growing food to meet demand from people on lower incomes: ‘With the help of food bank users and volunteers, we bring redundant spaces into productive gardens. We now look after 5–10 hectares in total in the outskirts of Oxford itself and nearby towns of Bicester and Banbury. We distribute hundreds of meals and a few tonnes of food every week.’

Dr Connally has a passion for forest gardening. The idea is that you try to mimic the structure of a woodland but with plants that yield food. When it comes to maximising photosynthesis off a given area, woods do it best and so, the logic goes, you should do that but with food. From top to bottom, this means fruit trees, vining or climbing peas, beans or squash to twist up them, fruit-bearing bushes, leafy greens, onions or leeks and then root crops like carrots, beetroot and potatoes. Herbs and even mushrooms can find their place too. And she is obsessed with putting all the dead stuff back on the soil: ‘Why does society bag up and throw away leaves and then buy compost? You are actually buying leaves and old branches. Keep your own and have a little patience.’

She grew up in the desert of New Mexico in America, where there were no nutrients in the soil and it only rained for two weeks a year. It taught her to value moisture and organic matter – principles that still serve her well in the relatively fertile Cherwell Valley. She’s been in the UK for twelve years and running Cherwell Collective for three. In that time the gardens have been getting more productive as they mature and, when we speak, it’s the middle of the early-autumn glut with a tonne and a half of surplus produce from their own gardens and tonnes more donated. The immediate emphasis is on pickling, chutneys, soups and freezing both fresh produce and whole meals. These skills are taught and spread, not hoarded in a hub.

Dr Connally believes urban gardening can really help with the staples too: ‘We have worked out that a 10 metre by 10 metre plot can keep a family fed over the twenty-week winter, from November through February. Plant a combination of broccoli, sprouts, chard, kale, turnips, beetroot, parsnips, winter salads and parsley.’ Her motivation is spelled out on the website: ‘We empower those in our community who, due to social, financial, or medical inequities and exclusions, believe that reducing our impact on the climate is beyond their reach.’ Though waste avoidance and environmental concern are her major drivers, she cuts that out in most communications with vulnerable groups, focusing instead on the cost savings and health benefits because these are more likely to cut through as immediate concerns. But the idea of using gardens to help the underprivileged and enhance our cityscapes goes well beyond Oxfordshire.

Spread out on the floor beside my desk are maps of Newcastle upon Tyne, Hackney (east London), Peterborough, Brighton, Bishop Auckland (County Durham), Vickery Meadow (a suburb of Dallas) and Domiz refugee camp in northern Iraq. They are maps of the potential for urban gardens including rooftops, park edges, abandoned land, indoor farms. They were made by urban farming zealot and guerrilla map-maker Dr Mikey Tomkins: ‘People say there is not the land available and people say you are not going to grow a lot of food. There is the land available – you have to map it, you have to collect the data. It doesn’t have to be “food vs existing land use”, it can be an inclusive conversation to include the multifunctional nature of space.’

These ‘edible maps’ appeal to my taste as a geographer who also loves food. They are maps of a possible future where our living and working realms are combined with growing space. Potential plots in each settlement are highlighted with a similar key:

•Rooftop gardens: top decks of carparks, flat roofs on retail or office space and our own homes

•Meanwhile gardens: spaces awaiting development (this can be many years) turned over to growing food or flowers and reducing urban blight in the ‘meanwhile’

•Tarmac gardens: raised beds and containers on closed roads and excessive hard-standing

•Indoor gardens: empty buildings used to grow crops under lights

•Accidental agriculture: food that grows wild in the city like herbs, plants for pollinators and trees.