Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future

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Excellent – personal and engaging. Lymbery's life experiences make it very readable, allowing him to speak with authority and honesty [...] An important challenge to the vested interests that make our life on earth unsustainable." Through conservation agriculture, farmers can reduce costs, use fewer chemicals and rebuild biological life in the soil, making it healthier, more resilient to extreme weather and able to support more wildlife. It’s win-win for farmers, the people they feed and the environment.”

I have always been interested in soil, which in the end is the most important thing about farming,” he says. “I went to see a farm where it was being done and when you see someone who is farming without moving the soil it is mind-blowing.” An iconic book for our times that completes a powerful trilogy and achieves another ‘first’. Sixty Harvests Left will be the first book to show that, far from being ‘a necessary evil’, factory farming is threatening the very survival of our planet and that ending the industrialisation of the countryside is key to saving our children’s future.Sir Michael Morpurgo Beautifully crafted. A compelling, excoriating account of industrial farming – how it is driving the climate and biodiversity emergencies, while also undermining our health. Full of insights and encounters with pioneers of new ways of farming, Sixty Harvests Left is a call to action – to change our world from the ground up. A vitally necessary book. This whole thing is farmer-led,” says Cherry. “It is coming up from below, with farmers talking to each other and seeing the benefits, then adapting that to work on their own farms. It is a groundswell of farmers doing it – that is where we got the name.” In fact, the words they used to describe this claim were “bold”, “too Malthusian”, “hardly useful”, “almost insulting” and “I have used this in my soil science lectures to show the students to be wary of headlines!”. Ouch. Neville Fay, founder and director of the Sustainable Soils Alliance, told the Guardian there were many steps the government could take to prevent soil loss and give farmers and others an incentive to preservation and improvement. These would include requiring the Environment Agency and other government bodies to include soil health in their assessments, and making sure farmers did not lose out by restoring natural features such as hedgerows and leaving fields fallow or in rotation with non-commercial soil-improving crops. “We need the government to set milestones, so we can judge what we are achieving, and we need data on the current state of our soils,” he said. “Soil is essentially irreplaceable when lost.”

The big flaw in Lymbery’s final deductions is that there is increasing evidence we have already done great damage to ourselves by eating too many plant-based foods and not enough animal foods. The clever meat and dairy substitutes may taste similar, but they do not come close to providing the nutrients we need. We are designed to be omnivores with marked carnivorous tendencies. of all the edible crop harvest, enough calories to sustain 4 billion people, is used for animal feed’.

New research reveals US-style mega-farm numbers have risen to nearly 1,100, including 745 poultry mega-farms in England and 59 in Wales, bringing into question the country’s claim to be a nation of animal lovers. Conventionally managed soils are those which are actively farmed, without implementing notable conservation practices. These are used to represent a ‘business-as-usual scenario’. I like this book so much I have written one more extensive review, which can be found in ECOS ( https://www.ecos.org.uk/book-review-s...).

The method involves more planning, but the benefits its advocates claim are remarkable – from plummeting costs on machinery and labour to a drastic reduction in fertiliser and chemicals. This in turn leads to a huge increase in insects, birds and wildlife, as well as fewer floods and more resilient crops during droughts.In the UK, where 55% of cropland is used to grow animal feed, a third of that land could provide 62 million adults a year with their five daily Campaigners at the conference welcomed the government’s intentions, but called on ministers to ensure that the wording of the agriculture bill goes beyond vague aspirations to encode clear measures and responsibilities, on regulators, farmers, industries and public bodies. There is a groundswell of interest in this, a terrific opportunity,” said Rebecca Pow MP, parliamentary private secretary to Michael Gove. Pow was brought up on a farm and worked as a journalist specialising in the environment, food and farming before becoming an MP in 2015, and she has been an energising force around the issue of soil and sustainable farming in parliament. “I voted remain,” she said yesterday. “But nevertheless, there is an opportunity here that we wouldn’t have had before.” In this beautifully written book Philip Lymbery describes how intensive agriculture harms the environment and inflicts suffering on sentient animals. But after visiting with and talking to those on the front line – scientists, farmers and food providers, he is able to show that there are sustainable alternatives. And that they are working. There is indeed hope for the future of our planet, and each one of us can play a part. I urge you to read Sixty Harvests Left."