We can learn so much from stopping to witness the land around us. Whether you are noticing a certain species of bird that you’ve never seen before, the return of dung beetles to cowpats, or that your legumes’ roots are growing red coloured nodules to indicate nitrogen fixing, taking the time to investigate and log changes is hugely beneficial to support an understanding of your actions and their influence on the soil and land’s health.
We’ve collated some of our thoughts on observation at Soilmentor, as well as from farmers, agroecologists and practitioners that we admire.
Observation connects us with our intuition
Observing the changes that are taking place on your land is a way to bolster your own knowledge and intuition as a farmer. In stopping to notice and log your own reflections, you can remind yourself of what has come before; how has this field behaved in the past? What can you experiment with to resolve a problem? How might you further encourage the return of wildlife here?
We spoke to dairy farmer Stephen Temple at Groundswell this year about what observation means to him. Stephen uses observation to track his soil health metrics across different areas of his farm; he has specifically taken an interest in recording infiltration rates, finding that there are significant disparities in infiltration between his pastures and cutting leys, and his direct drilled or strip tilled arable fields.
Noticing the differences between his infiltration rates has got Stephen thinking about what he can do to improve water absorption in his fields; a good starting point is to keep monitoring infiltration rates in his fields to observe how they change over time with each harvest. By practicing these observations, Stephen is building an intuitive knowledge of his land’s needs.
’Either side of a hedge, there’s that much difference – It’s an absolute revelation! We know now we’ve got to do something about infiltration.’
Observation re-connects us with ecosystems
The practice of observation helps us to understand the natural systems that contribute to the health of our farms. By building a deeper awareness of your farm’s wildlife, you can begin to notice how your management decisions impact positively or negatively on them, and therefore on the rest of your land’s biology.
At Groundswell this year, we spoke to Charles Paytner, an arable farmer from Bedfordshire, about his relationship with observation.
Charles noticed this year that he had more aphids in his fields than his neighbours due to his decision to omit insecticide sprays; he also noticed many insect predators that arrived to feed on the aphids. Later, he witnessed a flock of swifts over the field, feeding on the insect life that had moved in as a result of his farming practice. Observation has taught Charles that farmers are not separate from their land or management decisions, but rather part of a bigger picture, with the ‘short term solutions’ mindset often resulting in unintended consequences on the quality of our food and biodiversity.
‘I think it’s important that we realise that farming isn’t just a single issue; it’s actually part of a holistic cycle, and it’s our job as farmers to negotiate how best to do that. We can’t just eliminate things.’
By witnessing wildlife as a holistic system that exists on your farm, you can start to learn how to best support your ecosystems, land, and soil health, avoiding ‘quick fix’ methods that focus on eliminating the problem without considering any unintended consequences!
Observation as an irreplaceable practice
Soilmentor was designed as a tool to help farmers develop an observational mindset, and therefore a deeper understanding of farming context; simple technology can be used to supplement on-farm observation as a tool, without replacing a farmer’s own instincts.
We enjoyed listening to a recent Regenerative Agriculture Podcast episode from John Kempf about the emergence of AI as a tool to support farmers. John speaks about how AI has huge potential in helping farmers to become better observers, through making sheer volumes of knowledge accessible:
‘The way that we should be thinking about developing technology is not to replace people, but to make people better, to get us to be better observers, to ask better questions, to be better informed… We should be thinking about these [tools] as an extraordinary librarian…. But simply having access to a good librarian doesn’t make us a better farmer or farm manager. We still have to be able to be out in the field and to make those good observations.’
We resonated with John on this, and agree that farming technology can be a tool for enhancing our relationship with the land and our ability to make meaningful decisions on stewardship. Ultimately, Soilmentor is a tool to support farmers to connect to their ecosystems, and we are hopeful that further technological advances can prioritise farmer-land connection too.
