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🌱PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE - ARE WE TREATING THE SYMPTOMS AND NOT THE CAUSE?
Written by Netty Palliser
🐄 Last week, I attended LandAlive at The Dairy Show, organised by the forward-thinking, dynamic team at Ark Consultancy who, as always, seem to have their finger firmly on the pulse when it comes to putting together an agenda that is both relevant and thought-provoking.
Sessions covered food supply chain security, the frustrations of policy reform, nature preservation and restoration, and the importance of nutrient density in our food – something so closely intertwined with soil health. Throughout, farmers and their livelihoods remained firmly at the heart of the conversation.
We heard how farmers were adapting to increasingly extreme weather patterns, using now-familiar regenerative strategies such as herbal leys, changes to grazing management and agroforestry, all whilst carefully assessing whether these approaches could deliver the same financial returns as more conventional systems.
What surprised me, perhaps naively, was the extent to which some farms were having to adapt their management practices to accommodate these challenges, sometimes making decisions that didn't necessarily align with their longer-term aspirations or values :
🐄 Importing forage
🐄 Moving from spring to autumn block calving to better match forage availability
🐄 Significant purchasing of additional supplementary feed
🐄 Reducing herd numbers to match forage output.
All entirely logical and understandable responses to the challenges faced. But I couldn't help feeling that, in some cases, we were still treating the symptoms rather than addressing the underlying cause.
We cannot change extreme weather patterns single-handedly, but perhaps there is a simpler way of mitigating the impact, using something much closer to home?
I was privileged to be invited to join the LandAlive panel discussion,
“Enabling the Transition: Solutions Driving Resilient Dairy Businesses.”
Amongst the many topics discussed, I raised the concept of Preventative Medicine – something every farmer in the room would be familiar with.
In recent decades, there has been a noticeable shift in the approach to livestock disease management, with many farmers and vets frequently investing in preventing everyday diseases such as mastitis rather than relying on the quick, and often expensive, fix from a tube or bottle once the problem has developed.
It struck me that perhaps we should be applying exactly the same principle to our soils.
Do our underground 'livestock' – the extraordinarily valuable community of organisms that make up the soil biome – deserve the same investment in preventative care?
If we provide the right soil environment, endogenous and any exogenous biology can both survive and thrive. An open soil structure, percolating with air and water, enables the "trade agreement" between plant and its biological partners to flourish and the need for compensatory inputs and actions to reduce.
When the chemistry, physics and biology are working in harmony as nature intended, increased home-grown forage production, taking advantage of these "weather resources", can become a reality. Soils with improved water-holding capacity help sustain forage production through periods of drought.
Improved rainfall infiltration and drainage during wetter months provides better ground conditions for livestock, potentially extending grazing opportunities and reducing housing and supplementary feed costs
Emerging data from our ongoing AerWorx grassland trial, suggests that creating a soil sponge that can capture and retain a deluge of rainfall will help during periods of drought, with a synergy observed when certain biostimulants are then used to “recolonise” those "open" soils.
Of course, soil health alone cannot eliminate the challenges posed by increasingly unpredictable weather. But perhaps we should be placing even greater emphasis on strengthening the very foundation of our farming systems.
Preventative medicine for the soil, rather than continually treating the symptoms above ground.
After all, rainfall, sunlight and the biological processes that underpin soil fertility are resources nature provides freely.
Perhaps our greatest opportunity lies in making better use of them when they are available, building resilience for the times when they are not.
