Steady Isn't Safe

This summer was a dry one. July was the driest on record in England and Wales, and by August the West Midlands was in drought, the rivers low and the ground baked hard. We spent much of it preparing the land for next year, marking out new beds and, in places, digging up more brick than soil. Now the first crops are going in to overwinter for spring, and the forecast is turning the other way. This is the Severn Vale, and here a dry summer is often followed by a wet winter. Somewhere between the dry ground and the coming rain, one word kept returning to me: resilience.

I want to start somewhere further back than this summer, though. Further back, in fact, than anything human.

Every handful of soil began as bare rock. That is easy to say and almost impossible to picture. Before there was soil there was stone, rain and sunlight, and then there was life. Bacteria, fungi and lichens settled on the rock and began, very slowly, to take it apart. They did not do this by force but by chemistry and patience: secreting acids, holding moisture, trapping dust, dying and leaving their bodies behind as food for whatever came next. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi describe how the presence of soil bacteria, fungi, lichens and plants "vastly increases the rate of rock weathering". Life, in other words, is a geological force. Fungi were probably helping plants onto land as much as 500 million years ago, trading water and minerals for sugars in partnerships that still run beneath every hedge and field. The Food and Agriculture Organization reminds us that "it can take up to one thousand years to form just one centimeter of soil". The ground we are digging is the work of millions of lives over tens of thousands of years. And it is still alive. Recent estimates suggest that soil may be home to more than half of all the species on Earth.

What strikes me most about this story is not its age but its character. Life did not turn rock into soil, and soil into forests and meadows and gardens, by following a plan. It did it by experimenting. By trying things, combining, failing, trying again, and keeping what worked. The biologist Lynn Margulis spent her career showing that some of the greatest leaps in evolution came not from competition but from partnership: whole new forms of life emerging when separate organisms moved in together and became one. She and Dorion Sagan put it in a sentence I come back to again and again: "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking." The biologist Humberto Maturana went further, arguing that "living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition", true even for organisms with no brain at all. A root sensing water, a fungus finding the gap between grains of soil, a seed waiting for the right warmth: this is a form of intelligence. Capra writes that "the creativity of life expresses itself through the process of emergence". Every species that has ever lived is one of life's creative answers to the question of how to thrive in a particular place.

That is how I have come to understand biodiversity. It is not a list of species, or a box to tick in a grant application. It is the visible expression of life's creative intelligence: the sum of billions of years of experiments, each one a different way of living, each one connected to the others through what it eats, what it feeds, what it shelters and what shelters it. And this is where resilience comes from. Not from any single species being strong, but from the relationships between many different ones.

The evidence for this is remarkably consistent. In 2015 Forest Isbell and an international team pooled the results of 46 long-running grassland experiments from across Europe and North America. When a climate extreme hit, wet or dry, the most diverse plots changed their productivity by about a quarter. The plots with just one or two species changed by about a half. The ecologist Carl Folke explains why: in a diverse system, different species do overlapping jobs and respond to stress in different ways, so when one falters another can step in. "Species that may seem redundant and unnecessary for ecosystem functioning during certain stages of ecosystem development may become of critical importance," he writes, once conditions change. Diversity is life's insurance policy, written over evolutionary time.

The ecologist C. S. Holling, who gave the word resilience its modern meaning in 1973, saw the other side of this. A system can look perfectly steady and still be fragile. His example was the Great Lakes fisheries, harvested for decades at their "maximum sustained yield", with a steady catch year after year. Then one small extra pressure, the sea lamprey, arrived, and the fisheries collapsed. When the fishing eased, the fish did not come back. "The precondition for the collapse," Holling wrote, "was set by the harvesting of fish." The very thing that made the fishery look stable, an even, maximised output, had been quietly eating away at its capacity to absorb a shock. Steadiness is not the same as safety. Holling and Gary Meffe later described monoculture farming as the epitome of this loss: the deliberate removal of variation, and with it, resilience.

Our food system is a Great Lakes fishery. It is often called efficient, but it is efficient at only one thing: putting cheap calories on a shelf, fast. Measured any other way, it is extraordinarily wasteful. Around 13% of the world's food is lost between harvest and shop, and a further 19% of what reaches us is thrown away. More than a third of the calories the world's crops produce are fed to animals, and only about an eighth of those come back to us as meat, milk and eggs. The food sector uses around 30% of all the energy humanity consumes. And it runs on chemistry the living world keeps outwitting: more than 600 species of insects and mites have evolved resistance to the pesticides aimed at them, and weeds have learned to survive 21 of the 31 ways herbicides work, so each new product buys a few years before the next is needed. That is not efficiency. It is a system that has optimised one variable, the price at the till, and quietly paid for it everywhere else.

Above all, it is making us ill. In 2021 the National Food Strategy found that poor diet contributes to an estimated 64,000 deaths a year in England. In 2024 the economist Tim Jackson, working for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, put a price on it: unhealthy food costs the UK around £268 billion a year, in healthcare, social care, welfare, lost productivity and years of life lived in poor health. That is almost as much as the country spends on all of its healthcare, and more than three times what we think we are paying for our food. Cheap food is not cheap. We pay for it twice: once at the checkout, and again through the NHS, through our taxes and in our own bodies. Jackson's team estimated that if everyone ate the healthy diet the government already recommends, it would add around £57 billion a year to the nation's food bill, a fraction of the £268 billion we are already paying. Real food, grown well and eaten fresh, is not a luxury. It may be the best value health care there is.

We are told that without this system we could not feed the world. But it does not feed the world now. In 2024 around 673 million people went hungry and 2.6 billion could not afford a healthy diet, on a planet that already grows more than enough calories for everyone. As the agroecologist Jahi Chappell points out, most of the world's hungry are themselves farmers and farm workers. Growing more was never the answer. And a large share of what the world eats is not grown by this system at all. Farms of under two hectares produce around a third of the world's food on roughly an eighth of its farmland, with far more food per hectare and more of their harvest going to people rather than to animals or factories.

They also hold something the industrial system has spent a century losing. Around six thousand plants have been grown for food; today just nine crops make up two-thirds of all crop production. Much of the seed diversity that remains is kept alive not in gene banks but in the fields of small farmers, many of them women, who save, swap and replant it every year. Small farms hold more wildlife too. Across more than a hundred studies, smaller farms were richer in wild species, both on the farm and across the landscape around it. In Europe and North America, simply shrinking fields from five hectares to under three did as much for bees, birds and spiders as returning a tenth of the land to the wild. Diversity in the field becomes diversity in the landscape. It is the same creative intelligence we started with, given room to work.

Nor is the industrial system resilient. The government's own food security report describes a "prevailing 'Just in Time' model and low stock approach". Only 56% of the fresh vegetables eaten in this country are grown here, and almost a third of our fruit and vegetable imports come through one short stretch of sea at Dover. In February 2023, a run of bad weather in Spain and Morocco was enough to put rationing signs on tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in British supermarkets. Nothing broke. The system worked exactly as designed. The design simply has no slack in it. It has been built to do the opposite of what life does: to simplify, to standardise, to strip out every redundancy and call it waste, while producing real waste on a scale no ecosystem would tolerate. Many of us have been taught to expect, in the words of one research team, "a wide variety of cheap food to be constantly available". That expectation is not resilience. It is the steady catch before the collapse.

So resilience cannot mean bouncing back. Back to what? To the thing that just failed? The researchers who have spent fifty years on this question describe three capacities, not one: to absorb a shock, to adapt to it, and, when the old way no longer works, to transform. Brian Walker and his colleagues called that last capacity "the capacity to create untried beginnings from which to evolve a new way of living". That is exactly what life did on the bare rock. A team at ETH Zurich, writing about food in 2015, put it in a way I find more useful than any slogan: a resilient food system is "more of a safe-fail food system than a fail-safe food system". Not a wall that holds until the day it doesn't, but many small parts, each able to fail without taking everything else down with it. A meadow, not a monoculture. Bouncing forward, not back.

This is what we are trying to build at Norton, and it is why the work this year has been about the ground before the crops. Digging brick out of the beds is a reminder that the first task is the oldest one: to get life working in the ground again. And the weather we are preparing that ground for is already clear. The Met Office projects hotter, drier summers and milder, wetter winters. A summer as hot as 2018, once less than a one-in-ten chance, could be closer to one in two by the middle of this century. On heavy clay, that is the same problem twice over: too much water in winter, too little in summer. The industrial answer has been to drain the winter water away as fast as possible, then pump it back in August. Life's answer is different: slow the water down, spread it out, and let it soak in, so that the ground itself becomes the reservoir.

That is what most of our work is really for. No-dig beds, so we stop breaking the fungal threads and worm channels that let water move down through the clay. Green manures and living roots in every bed through the winter, so the soil is never bare, never sealed by rain, and its nitrogen is held rather than washed out. Paths we keep to, so we never trample wet ground into something water cannot pass through. And hedges, tree rows and perennial strips, because deep roots open the soil like nothing else can. Under hedgerows, researchers in Yorkshire measured water soaking into the ground at around 102 millimetres an hour, against 3 in the arable field next door. Every drop that soaks in rather than lying on the surface is a drop that feeds the soil life, and that is still there, held in the ground and the water table beneath it, when the dry weeks come. Even the borehole that fills our tanks draws on that same water underground.

The trees need this resilience as much as anything we grow. Our twenty heritage fruit trees need a run of cold winter days to wake properly in spring, and studies of fruit-growing in Britain show those cold days are already becoming fewer, most of all in the south. Too little chill and the blossom comes patchy and uneven; too mild a spring and it comes early, into the path of a late frost and ahead of the insects that pollinate it. We cannot give the trees colder winters. What we can do is plant many varieties that flower at different times, keep their roots out of standing water, mulch them against the summer heat, and fill the margins with early flowers so the pollinators are there whenever the blossom is. Alongside them come the wildflower margins, which give predators, pollinators and decomposers a home all year round, and the ten acres of alley cropping within agroforestry still to come. None of these is a single fix. Each is a way of inviting life's creativity back in, of letting it do what it has always done, and of building a field that can take a dry summer and a wet winter in the same year.

But the network does not stop at the field edge, because people are part of it too. In the spring of 2020, as supermarket shelves emptied, veg box sales across 101 UK schemes rose by 111% in six weeks, and 82% of those schemes had to start waiting lists. The community supported agriculture farms barely grew at all. Their members were already there, already committed, already sharing the risk with their growers. A box scheme, an allotment, a children's growing club, a membership that owns the decisions: these are the human equivalents of the fungal threads under a hedge. They are how a community trades what it has for what it needs, and how it holds together when the supply chain doesn't.

I keep thinking about the brick we dug out this summer. What lasts, if we let it, is not what we build but the slow work going on beneath the spade: the fungi, the bacteria, the roots, the endless experiment of life turning rubble back into ground. We cannot stop the drought or the rain. What we can do is join in with that work. Build soil that drinks, plant trees that shelter, grow many crops with many hands. Not back to normal. Forward, into something that holds. The first crops for spring are going into the ground now. Come and help us grow what comes next.

In the next post I want to follow this thread out of the field and into the economy our food system sits inside, and ask what bouncing forward might mean there.

JEHAN- BASIL GIBSON - THE AGROECOLGY PROJECT

Sources

Isbell et al. 2015, Biodiversity increases resistance to climate extremesFAO Director-General, 2012 soils speechUNEP Food Waste Index 2024, via UN NewsCassidy et al. 2013, Redefining agricultural yieldsFAO, Energy-smart agriculture (2011)International Herbicide-Resistant Weed DatabaseArthropod Pesticide Resistance Database figures (Mota-Sanchez)FFCC, The False Economy of Big Food (Jackson, 2024)SOFI 2025 hunger figuresFAO 2021, small family farmers produce a third of the world's foodRicciardi et al. 2018, how much food do smallholders produce (TABLE)Sirami et al. 2019, crop heterogeneity and multitrophic diversity (PNAS)Zimmerer 2015, crop diversity on small farms (Penn State)‍

‍Books and papers: Capra & Luisi, The Systems View of Life (2014); Margulis & Sagan, Microcosmos; Maturana & Varela; Holling 1973, Resilience and stability of ecological systems; Holling & Meffe 1996; Folke 2006; Walker et al. 2004; Tendall et al. 2015, Food system resilience; Chappell 2018, Beginning to End Hunger.
UK figures not linked above (food security report, Dover imports, 2023 shortages, hedgerow infiltration, chill decline, veg box sales, fertiliser costs, Lea Valley) are referenced in the resilience research notes in this folder.