Natural Capital of the Land

by Carolyn Cowell

Founding The Field and Farm Alliance.

I appreciated it as implementing a medium to long term goal which emerged from uncertainties and then developed into more uncertainties. I had questions about organisational structure and psychology along with work life balance when I had very little formal rural education, and yet plenty of past experience with living in the countryslde. I could ride horses, work in an estate office, converse about accounts, and had a few adventures with sharing a rota delivering farm teas. 

Thinking there are no crops and pasture is being restored, this can be introduced piece by piece and liaising with the proposed agent and deciding on a financial resolution to the LLP or similar, estate office planning etc. Now I am a little jumpy about it all, wondering why I could not get trees planted or tree planting events started, wondering why I heard in my visits that the land would soon be wanted once more, when the UK is short of food and still not seeing what might be the truth.

i became interested in approaches to Natural Capital in the context of Prosperity but in fact had seen it in reverse and became interested in how neither are in opposition to each other but can be part of the same philosophical dialogue. People rethinking diversification as natural assets to be bought and sold was not so much my focus on finance. My approach to estate and land management was coming from the thought that prosperity might be a holistic word and not entirely monetary if it is about what benefits us as humans. I was interested both economically and philosophically to find a balance between having both natural assets as qualities and values, and to accept prosperity at the same time and how to have these more evenly distributed through the medium of diversification of agricultural and land practices.

Within this dialogue I see the possibility could be to include more people in the the food chain as producers whether that be domestically or in land cooperatives or urban spaces. There is something healthy about families sitting down to a home produced fayre of food or using a few garnishes from an aromatic herb garden. 

Here are some further questions and comments:

Listening to a recent CUSP discussion (the link can be found on the FFA reader page), and coming from a perspective where I have not experienced this signing up to commitments for extended periods of decades, I am not sure that I would be keen to enlist or sign up to something that I could not change for a hundred years or more unless it was to enlisting in a scheme to plant trees which have to stay for at least that time as an area of woodland then it seems logical, or there would be no point in planting them. Perhaps it would encourage committing only what i could plus a little more than that. Even more so if it could safeguard the trees.

Responsibility of Legislation

If we are talking responsibility for human impact and general environmental protection and management then legislation should be enforcing, protecting and supporting the most efficient and optimum practices as well as initiating change that was not going to happen without legal enforcement. Can subsides become benefits when there is a universal benefit from engaging in climate and biodiversity friendly initiatives and actions? Perhaps we want to be involved in food production on various levels and commit to subsidising any kind of ecological improvement. 

What of Agricultural Technicians?

Any other kind of technician in a science career would be able to expect to receive learning and development in their area of practice. How much is this available to farmers, the people actually engaged with working on the land and harvesting the crops? Is it that we only hear of statuary training and not for skills and career development? Is there a requirement for health and safety at work but not personal self worth and social networking?

The past and recent present might have been too much of an imposition, a requirement to follow instructions by government to get the crop and harvest out and harness power in the community and in the food chain.

Anxiety and Mental Health

Responding to risk factors in the process might be inter challenged by mental health needs arising from anxiety and depression in uncertain times. That is not to undermine risk management as an executive tool to access what are in real terms risk factors, how does anxiety about change manifest itself, and what might be chosen as a set of guidelines for what healthy practices are?

Questions of Language: Eco Tourism, Eco Metric; Eco Policy; Eco Volunteering

There seems to be a lot of mileage in terms like ecotourism where people are encouraged to leave the environment at least as well as they found it, to protect diversity by keeping to paths etc. and other terms which have become like an economic power tool, financially orientated income building terms, eco this and eco that, to label anything that refers to the environment although we can applaud the overall blanket outcomes we think. Is this really changing our habitation and travelling habits?

What are Natural Assets and What to Do With Them If Anything.

On a piece of commercial land or private residential land there are mostly the same things. Hedges, trees, soil, water, water quality. talk about the environment, places to walk, indigenous population, evolution, trust, lack of trust, spiritual experience, values and aesthetics, cultural lives, biodiversity, ecology, flora and fauna, habitats. They are not necessarily concrete (or empirical) financial assets in fact they are natural assets of the land and exist in both the foreground and in the background; aspects of the seen environment draw attention, others are camouflaged and there are the layers of life that are hidden because they stay out of sight and underground or are too small to be seen without a microscope. 

Natural assets may not be defined by ownership and someones garden may be a natural asset of the opposite persons garden view, for example a topiary hedge which there is not much control over but it is a pleasing thing if the neighbour is happy to keep the garden looking attractive or full of produce expressing some fertility. Boundary Meadows was the website I went to create while having these two approaches in mind, how to involve and include my children in my own plans for the future when I could not keep in contact with either nor make clear my intentions in the court settlement or outside of it in my family after my resignation from the business partnership of quarter shares. 

FFA Consortium

I had in mind the consortium and how to define the area to take on because I thought there would be a long delay before anyone but me was ready to work there and assume some leadership especially over rethinking the land and what it has meant in the past.Any leadership that has happened has been squarely not in my direction nor for including me. If only to preserve the character and diversity and prevent some sweeping event to re characterise the size and shape I felt i needed a game plan. I had other challenges in that I worked there in the past and was securely in my place as my mothers personal assistant and not a male and could only dream of how I would be and feel in my fifties to go there and have some level of maturity to treat it as my home and make a home for my sons to visit but for gatherings and events and seeing friends and as a retreat. 

Mostly these natural assets might be defined and exist whether we acknowledge and care for them or not, yet we actively, somehow mindlessly started destroying them by harmful practices and it affects biodiversity if it even if biodiversity has astronomical factors to counteract in space time and beyond. 

Driving out through the villages from the Boundary Road in a car in around 2004 on a warm summers day I was unexpectedly somehow showered with farm chemicals also inhaling the concoction it seemed from a field only at a bit of distance from my car. Sometime the car also needed recovering there. Land technicians need to be aware of their industry fallout yet it is food production and we want to think it is safe, but it is no more safe than garden pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. How might analysis be carried out to make a framework, where a field is calculated as to an employee, another to a land owner, and yet another in terms of a passerby, so fw, flo, fpb, a field to a bird of prey, etc. plus the label for the field itself. TASK?? 

Perhaps to take into account the natural elements of aggression and altruism, risk management but also the value of civility and keeping the pollution in mind as something to detoxify. 

So, to continue sharing the founding of The Field and Farm Alliance 2018 (FFA)

The following models could describe the phases of practices on the land or in general practices in preceding years and how they became diversified out of full agricultural land use to the proposed model or management plan for the FFA and collect together a group of individuals who might be willing to discuss and get involved in the project at some level and stage in phasing this in. 

The model is simple and consists of two headings:

Model 1 (past model)

commercial practices 

natural assets

Model 1 might include intensive farming and emphasis on commercial activity to get the maximum yield and with the maximum exploitation of the land with no consideration of natural assets which are interspersed between everything else that is going on, probably mainly ignored if many even survive. 

Model 2 (present model)

commercial practices

diversification from traditional farming practices to introduce other enterprises and develop business to match or exceed the original turnover with change of use and non agricultural business rates and regulations;

natural assets

use of land and landscape as natural capital, while also offset 

Model 3 (proposed)

natural assets become a higher priority than commercial practice, making an ecological assessment of the land and environment and how aspects of the current practices can be reduced and restarted in an environmentally compatible way. 

What led to thinking more uniform units would produce a same place experience? If that worked during a phase of intense visitors and facilities, then how could reverting to an earlier version free up residential garden, meadows, fields and buildings, and provide more options for living?

Restoring meadows, land, woodland and banks, to a natural state and conserve nature and diversity, It’s like not worrying so much but not in a sense so as to let standards deteriorate but rather to make things incredibly neat and to vary texture between natural and designed.

commercial practices:

Business/ Commercial Enterprises

eg ecotourism, organic and bio dynamic crop growing and marketing, scaling down of harmful use and further diversifying in a concentrated area; home business, introducing a study centre, internet businesses, health and home produce, preservation of microbiology, mosses and lichens, personal development and health. 

Wealth Generation and Enterprise remain possible but slowing this in favour of balance between what exists and what can be restored with a natural adjustment of economic wellbeing, ie what makes us happier. Being bold to effect real changes of use of land areas, opening the space and being more concise in approach to get concentrations of projects that are at the same time very simple to operate. rethinking intensive commercial practices, there might be the opportunity for a more healthy realistic balance.

To diversify in a direction not for maximum financial profit but to give full consideration to the universal benefit in terms of the project, the community, and the wider global community. So it may require the risk to try something, or find out if the activity works. 

I am proposing to integrate present knowledge with past practices; bio organics and being innovative and dynamic with the purpose of conserving and repairing the soil so we have the soil for both for now and in the future. Perhaps to devise schemes and plans to embrace the heritage of the land with its both natural and crop species that are well suited, and even challenge the land and landscape to support botanical and geological, life and vital energy and balance out inequalities imposed by human impacts.