Watching “A Farm for the Future” Again

Posted by admin on Jul 26, 2010 in Permaculture | 1 comment

Watching again recently Rebecca Hosking’s excellent BBC documentary “A Farm For the Future” drew me back again to the one haunting image that stayed with me for many months after i watched this documentary last year. Is it just me, but why do i find this one image in the documentary so arresting? It was briefly shown.
But it bothered me for days. The one image I am talking about is the picture of the farm tractor twenty years ago – tilling the soil with thousands of birds behind it feeding on the worms and soil life that was turned over by the plow and then strangely enough – years later we see another tractor a few moments later doing the same thing on the same land but oddly not a single bird feeding behind it.

Why is this so? Have the birds just disappeared? Wrong time of year?

Clearly there is life in one shot but not in the other?

Why is this so? A propaganda photo? A bad day of birds not feeding? What caused heaps of what looks like seagulls to suddenly not bother feeding?

Is it fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers? Who is to blame?

Clearly the BBC seems to think its to do with synthetic fertilizers. They lay the blame at NPK. Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphate. The three ingredients that have caused much of the wealth and prosperity of the modern age to flourish – has caused the death of natural soil organisms to cease flourishing. But something is clearly not right if the appreciative birds are not present. Where have they gone and where is the life in the soil?

The filmmakers seem to imply that the soil is dead. Nothing for the birds to feast on. There is no life in the soil. Why would the birds flock behind a tractor that had nothing to attract them?

This is a very thought provoking documentary that seems to turn to Permaculture in the closing second half of the film to provide some of the answers for the future of farming in Britain.

A riveting documentary.