Calls for the banishment of ploughing are becoming ever louder and more sonorous, with just about everybody who has an anti-farming cause to pursue jumping on this latest bandwagon.
Ploughing, it is said, is a devilish practice that has no place in a world that is supposedly dedicated to reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
The question of carbon content
Leaving aside the various questions that are still outstanding as to the effect that greater carbon sequestration will have, if any, on the atmosphere, it needs to be decided just what exactly is meant by ploughing, as opposed to cultivation.
During the latest flare up, the headlines were of a total ban on ploughing. Later, it emerged that the EU was proposing a ban on cultivating carbon-rich soils, yet just how these are to be defined is still a matter of debate, there are no agreed standards for measuring the amount of carbon in a soil.
The concern amongst farmers is that this will prove to be the thin end of the wedge and that the scope of any such legislation will increase as time passes to encompass not only the carbon content, but also the method of cultivation.
Ploughing reduces chemical inputs
How are cultivation methods to be assessed as to their potential for releasing carbon from the soil?
The act of ploughing is usually pointed to as being the absolute worst-case scenario, but total inversion of the soil helps reduce the need for those other great evils: Pesticides.
Ploughing is said to bring up reserves of soil carbon and expose them to weathering, which releases it into the air, conveniently overlooking the fact that it may also bury large amounts of carbon in doing so.
However, if the greens are determined to have their way then they will need to come up with a workable outline as to just what the objective is and how that is best served while maintaining food production levels.
Where is the science?
To simply ban ploughing is nonsensical and hugely unscientific. Should researchers come to a consensus on how to measure the carbon content of soils then maybe a scheme might be devised with regard to cultivation depth, but certainly not technique.
Whatever legislation is drawn up it is bound to be worked around by manufacturers; that is their job, to provide farmers with tools that allow them to continue in business legally.
One recent example is the Kverneland Ecomat, an honest attempt to design a plough that goes some way to meeting the objections of the environmentalists.
Shallow ploughing perfected
The Ecomat works at depths as shallow as 6-8cm and down to 18cm, a range of 3-7in approximately. How does this fit into the idea of ploughing as digging up buried reserves of carbon?
It doesn’t, so the bureaucrats will need to come up with a form of words that targets whatever the latest bogeyman is, while, hopefully, still allowing farming to continue.
The job of the farmers does not get any easier though, in fact, it gets a lot more onerous as further rafts of legislation are bought in to control their activities.
So much so that many might start to ask what the point of it all is and leave food production to those who think they know better.