Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.
—WENDELL BERRY, “THE PLEASURES OF EATING” (1990)
The train takes two hours, London to Swindon, then the taxi driver “thinks” he knows Bishopstone. “If we get lost, we’ll just call, mate,” and off we go. It’s not as if I have come to the middle of nowhere, just to the rural English countryside, the kind of place Americans imagine when we imagine England—fields with hedgerows and loads of sheep. But, as I learned in London at CPRE, a lot of that England has been lost, paved over with housing and highways. Even the countryside that’s left isn’t the countryside as it was; many of the hedgerows were torn out in the 1960s and 1970s to consolidate farms and make fields larger to accommodate an increasingly mechanized style of agriculture. It’s a style that depends on chemicals to fertilize crops and to kill unwanted creatures, a style that America knows well, one that relies less on farmers and farms than on “producers” and computers and oversized, air-conditioned, cushy-seated, stereo-equipped, GPS-guided combines. It’s a style of agriculture that separates us—whether we actually farm or not, and almost no one does anymore—from the ecosystem on which all life depends: soil.
But I am heading now to a farm that follows a different style—Eastbrook Farm—and I see the sign before the driver does: “The Royal Oak,” the pub associated with the farm, and her name, “Helen Browning,” owner of said farm and pub, the woman I have come to see. “Well-kept ales, great company, fantastic organic food,” says the sign, “using local organic, foraged, wild and seasonal ingredients throughout.” And then, as though that isn’t already enough to make anyone happy, it concludes, “Enchanting beer garden, roaring log fires.” I believe I have come to the right place. Relieved to hear me say so, the driver gives thanks for the too-generous American tip and hurries away, leaving me to wander toward the one-story headquarters of Helen Browning’s Eastbrook Farm.
“I have no idea why you’re here.” That’s the first thing she says after bestowing a smile. Our connection has come through a friend of a friend telling me about Helen’s work, how she not only runs the business of Helen Browning’s Organic but is also CEO of Britain’s Soil Association. She readily agreed to have me visit the farm, but she has a point. I mean, what more is there to say about good food and eating well? Michael Pollan has done three books on the subject so far, and he’s just the tip of that spear. But what hasn’t been covered quite so much is the very basis for all that good food and eating well. In fact, while I can’t wait to try the Royal Oak’s “fantastic organic food,” I am really here to talk with her about dirt.
Dirt—or, more precisely, soil—is quite literally the foundation for human life on Earth. Yet around the world, we are degrading and depleting soil at a reckless rate. One recent study estimates that if we continue our current pace of soil abuse, we have only sixty years of harvests left. Our lack of attention to soil is hard to overstate—there is no human life without it, we are in the process of wasting it, and almost no one aside from specialists seems too concerned. It turns out that soil—the living entity beneath our feet—is the most amazing world that we know almost nothing about.
After nodding her understanding that I have indeed come to her for a reason, Helen suggests walking the farm before supper, while we still have light. It sounds like the perfect first step. And if there will be a roaring log fire when we return, all the better.
With short brown hair and sharp facial features that remind me of the pop star Annie Lennox, Helen pulls on tall Wellington boots, leaves the blue Subaru wagon unlocked after our short drive to the trailhead, and calls her greyhound named, apparently, “Dog.” As in, “Here, Dog! Dog, Dog, Dog.” (“Yes, we call the dog ‘Dog,’” Helen tells me later, “though his given name is Digby.”) And we are off, marching up the hillside at a pace that quickly has my shins and calves screaming. At the top of the hill, we head out into a field of spongy ground with gaps between deep green tufts of grass and clovers, nothing like the carpet of turfgrass that makes up most American lawns. This is grass that supports a menagerie of sheep, cows, cattle, and pigs, and plantings of wheat, oats, and peas. All this life supported by what some call “the skin of the earth”—soil, or, as Helen describes it, “six inches of black on top of chalk.”
The terrain slopes and slants like ocean swells in shades of brown and yellow—and green in all directions. Hedgerows divide fields, and trees bunch close here and there. In early spring, the breeze keeps us company; the only other sounds are our footsteps and the faraway bleating of sheep. In the distance stands a small mansion owned by pop star Pete Townshend. Otherwise, the only lodgings visible are at the far end of the fields, the small “arcs” that the farm’s pigs call home.
We head toward them, Digby the Dog leading the way. When we pass the herd of black cattle, they come trotting over to greet us, the happiest cattle I have ever seen. The sheep, some 350 ewes, are next. Helen’s daughter Sophie and her fiancé own and tend the sheep. The ewes are less gregarious, backing away warily as we pass. But I probably would too, if I were one, as they are “about to pop” says Helen, and so have had their backsides shaved to make the birthing easier. Easier on the humans helping them along, I’m guessing. “Indeed,” she says with a laugh.
I am laughing too, walking this farmland with its lush grass and soft ground and obviously happy animals. I muddy my shoes and snag my sweatshirt hood on barbed wire crossing through the fence, and think I love this! It reminds me of skinning my knee, that happy feeling of being a little kid again, wearing his scrapes and cuts and tears as little badges from a day well spent outside. Yet I also sense that I am just a visitor and that the ground here feels foreign, as it would to most of us now.
How many of us ever set foot on a farm? The grounds from which nearly all our food comes, do we know them well? I don’t. Farmland: what does that even mean? And anyway, this is not what most American farms are now—somewhere distant, forgotten, awash in corn. Those are not places where you’re invited to walk the land. But here—send Helen an e-mail and she will happily hike the grounds with you as she does with me.
There’s knowledge that comes from walking the natural ground, and she has more of it than most of us. “When you walk the ground, which I do a lot, you get very used to feeling it,” she says. “There’s the old saying ‘There’s no such good fertilizer as the farmer’s boot.’ I don’t think you can farm from a car or from a tractor; you have to get out and walk it. Because it’s when you walk it you can feel what’s going on.” She nods back toward the hilltop we first walked. “To me that feels very different to walking a field where the organic matter is gone or the structure is gone. So that sense of feel through our feet, it’s not something I think about, because it’s instinctive. I would never talk about it, but I’m very aware that that’s what I’m doing.”
She looks toward the horizon. “And the other thing I’ve always done,” she says, “is I love to lie on the ground. It’s a very different sensation to lie on earth, a different level of connection… you feel like you’re part of it at that point.”
Helping visitors understand that we are “part of it” feels like the whole point of this farm. Aldo Leopold described “it”—the creation, the life of the planet—as “the stream of energy which flows out of the soil into plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never-ending circuit of life.” From dust we came and to dust we shall return, as they say. Or, perhaps more appropriately, from microbes we came and to microbes we shall return.
I began this book with the idea that the oldest spiritual traditions and the newest science both tell us the ground is alive. But I had much to learn. In the past few years there has been an enormous expansion in our knowledge about the microorganisms below ground that are the foundation for life above ground. In fact, simply in terms of numbers, the wilderness below ground blows the world above away. For example, a teaspoon of healthy soil might hold a hundred million to a billion individual bacteria. That sounds like a lot to me, but also like a number that doesn’t mean that much. Perhaps more startling is the fact that every living being depends on the bacteria and other microbial life in the ground. As one wildlife biologist told me, “If everything else is eliminated, and only microbes are left, there will still be life on this planet. But not the other way around. You take away microbes, we’re all done.”
The ground—at least where it’s not covered in concrete or asphalt or saturated in chemicals—is very much alive, the soil an ecosystem full of creatures about which we have almost zero knowledge. Plant roots, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, algae, mites, nematodes, worms, ants, insects, and grubs all make their homes in the soil. You want diversity? A single square meter of forest soil may hold more than a thousand species of invertebrates. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that “a typical, healthy soil might contain several species of vertebrate animals, several species of earthworms, 20–30 species of mites, 50–100 species of insects, tens of species of nematodes, hundreds of species of fungi and perhaps thousands of species of bacteria.” They use that word “perhaps” there at the end because it’s estimated that “we have identified fewer than 1/10th of 1 percent of the microbes in the soil.”
As I walk with Helen on the soft six inches of living soil separating us from the dead chalk below, I think of my visit with Noah Fierer, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and how he compared the state of his field to early-nineteenth-century botany, saying, “Basically we’re just trying to figure what’s out there.” It reminds me of Thomas Jefferson sending Lewis and Clark off with the hope they might find mammoths still wandering the vast unknowns of the American West, and with instructions to bring back one of every plant they found. “There are so many knowledge gaps,” Fierer had told me. “The questions we have are like, What’s out there? What influences them over time? It’s really just basic natural history.”
Others share his sentiments. In late 2015, in papers published simultaneously in the prestigious journals Science and Nature, dozens of scientists called for a major initiative “to better understand the microbial communities critical to both human health and every ecosystem.” Echoing da Vinci, one coauthor of the Science paper wrote, “It’s like we’re looking up in the sky with a refractive telescope for the first time and saying, ‘Wow, it’s amazing what’s up there. What is all this doing? How does it work?’” Fierer explained trying to understand the microbial world to me this way: Imagine you were somehow able to grind up a forest into a tablespoon. Now try extracting from that tablespoon of grounds a picture of the forest based only on DNA sequencing. “It would be like trying to describe a forest to someone who had never experienced a forest,” he said, “using only a list of the species that were found there.”
Fierer and his colleagues realize that in order to help people understand how important soil life is for humanity and the rest of life on Earth, they need to better explain the amazing biodiversity in the ground beneath us. The fact that we live in such a visually oriented society, and that we usually can’t see with our own eyes the life in the soil—besides occasional charismatic megafauna like earthworms—makes that a challenge.
In the summer of 2012, a team of scientists led by Fierer and Colorado State’s Diana Wall, a world-renowned authority on nematodes (a microscopic soil animal of which twenty-five thousand species have been classified so far), came up with a novel way of grabbing the public’s attention. First, they thought, they would need to find a good location, and then they would need to explore. “We were like, all right—Central Park’s ideal,” Fierer explained, “because everyone knows Central Park. You can look at an aerial picture of it, and you know when you’re in the park and you know when you’re not.” On a hot July day, with a team of volunteers, in the middle of the nation’s largest city, they set out to sample the biodiversity of the soil.
The results? Even they were astonished by the incredible diversity of soil organisms they encountered—as diverse a group as they might have found in a tropical rainforest or boreal forest. And almost every organism they found was previously unknown. “I think that project highlighted a point that if you’re looking for novel organisms, you don’t have to go to a deep-sea trench or the middle of the Congo,” Fierer told me. “You can just go to Central Park and look at the soil.”
We are only just now beginning to understand the vast life in the soil, what it does, and how our activities on the surface may affect it. That scientists like Fierer and Wall are today raising the alarm about the impact those activities have on the life in the ground makes the founding of Britain’s Soil Association more than seventy years ago all the more amazing. Even then, in 1946, the Soil Association’s charter members were concerned with “the loss of soil through erosion and depletion, the decreased nutritional quality of intensively produced food, the exploitation of animals in intensive units, and the impact of large intensive farming systems on the countryside and wildlife.” Today, those at the Soil Association believe, “in the face of climate change and a growing world population, business as usual in our food and farming system is not an option.” They identify themselves as “the UK’s leading membership charity campaigning for healthy, humane and sustainable food, farming and land use.”
As you might imagine, most of this language comes straight from their website, along with plenty of information about their campaigns on behalf of bees, seeds, antibiotics, and more. To actually be with their CEO, walking her farm, I can see how these values are being put into action.
The 1,350-acre Eastbrook Farm has been in Helen Browning’s family since the early 1950s. Soon after assuming control in 1986, Helen began transitioning to organic production, and in 1989 established Eastbrook Farms Organic Meat. By 1994, the entire farm had gained organic status, and Helen began to increasingly focus on the connections between healthy treatment of the land and animals and the resulting health and happiness of the humans who ate the food.
As we continue our walk, I can’t help but grin as we hear squeals from piglets and see them racing around like packs of puppies. The pigs here are British Saddlebacks, with black heads and hindquarters and a white stripe over their shoulders, their long ears folded forward almost like blinders. At any one time there are around three thousand pigs here, aged one day to ten years. We stand a long while as the piglets run to and fro, rummage the ground, tumble over one another, and pester the sows for milk. The sows are so much larger than the piglets, they could easily kill one if they laid on it, and so I’m impressed by how the sows lie down on their sides ever so slowly to avoid crushing them. For the growing number of city and suburban dwellers—including me—being in the presence of farm animals is nearly as beguiling as being near wild animals. I can almost imagine a future “English Farm National Park” where people will lean from their electric cars to photograph cows and sheep and ducks and chickens. So exotic! I find myself chuckling as we watch. They don’t seem at all like trapped beings to be rescued but like happy farm animals doing what they do.
Of course, these pigs will be killed for food, nearly all of them. The piglets get “two months with mum, then four months with their mates” in a different field, away from the sows, Helen explains. So only six months of life before slaughter. But compare this to our treatment of pigs in the United States, where we take these intelligent, sentient creatures and raise them pumped full of antibiotics, packed together between iron bars and on concrete floors, rarely allowed outside to root in the natural ground. This so that consumers can have cheaper pork and corporations higher profits. I can’t think of any better symbol of our separation from the grounds that give us our food than our treatment of pigs.
But it does not have to be that way. “As long as they’ve got soil to root in,” Helen says, “they are just happy.” And if people are going to eat meat, she believes, “then they have every responsibility to make sure it comes from somewhere happy.” Raising and killing these pigs is something she has wrestled with “a lot,” she says, “just the sense that I have the blood of hundreds of thousands of pigs on my hands.” But, she continues, as long as people are eating pork, she feels it’s her responsibility to give pigs “as good a life and as good a death as is possible to have in a farming system.” Still, killing a lot of animals is part of the job.
Then again, she points out, “We also kill a lot of animals when [we] build a new road, or when we turn our central heating on. We may not have the knife in our hand, but we are changing the environment such that a whole bunch of other stuff can’t live. And so in a way it’s a bit more honest to be killing things saying I’m going to kill you and I’m going to eat you, than it is to do it with your eyes shut, as you go about your self-indulgent life.”
What does all this have to do with our relationship to the ground? Quite a lot, actually.
First of all, pigs interact with the ground in a special way. “Yes,” Helen says, “they destroy it. I mean, pigs like to root, dig with their noses, search for worms and beetles and other buried treasure. They have a huge number of nerve endings in their snouts, and,” she says with amazement, “they just keep digging all the time.”
Second, in churning and digging, in doing what pigs like to do, they contribute to the health of the ground. “The fertility they put down is tremendous,” Helen explains, “and we always grow really good crops after pigs.”
Third, it works the other way, too—the ground is good for the pigs, she says. The microbes in the soil help them maintain their immunity. The usual argument for housing pigs in concentrated animal feeding operations—CAFOs—confined in stalls and kept inside, is “efficiency,” which means that for the amount of grain you put in the pig, you will get more meat. But should “more meat” be our main consideration? “Pigs are like us,” she explains. “If you’re running around, you might look healthier, you might be happier, but you will burn off more calories. So our pigs won’t be as feed-efficient, and that’s why organic pork costs a bit more.” That’s part of it, but organic pork really costs more because it is raised in a way that honors the cycle that Aldo Leopold identified—from soil to pigs to humans and back through our treatment of animals and the planet.
Before my visit, I hadn’t realized that the Saddlebacks were so much the heart of this farm. But everything I would soon learn about the way we are treating soil would make sense in light of my new knowledge about pigs. The way most of our food is produced is farming based on the artificial separation of soil from animal and of food from source, whereas Eastbrook is farming based on cultivating natural connections. It is farming based on walking the ground and knowing it well—its feel, its creatures, its life. The badgers and hawks, the pigs and sheep, the daughter and the town pub. “Humanity’s future depends on the way we treat our soil,” Helen says as we head back to the car. “And people are a long, long, long way from recognizing that.”
For all the movement toward an appreciation of “local” and “organic” food at our restaurants, groceries, co-ops, and farmers’ markets, we still have a long way to go in understanding the role—and therefore the health—of the local ground in which this food is grown. We can come at it from what the French call terroir, defined as earth or soil, with a specific meaning when applied to food or wine. Terroir is short for goût de terroir, meaning “the taste of place,” and has to do with the way a particular environment—especially the soil—imparts a particular flavor to whatever animal, vegetable, or grape is being grown. Terroir is a key component of what Helen Browning is selling. The fantastic taste of her bacon and sausage comes in large part from the distinctive ground on which they are raised.
Perhaps for our grandparents or great-grandparents growing up on a farm, this would seem self-evident. But for those of us alive in the first part of the twenty-first century in America, the idea of terroir is novel and speaks to a larger truth. As Rowan Jacobsen writes, “We are some of the first people in history not to have built-in connections to the land we inhabit.” In our increasingly paved world, terroir takes on a special meaning, offering us a way back into the ground. “Paying attention to terroir is one of the best and most enjoyable ways to reestablish the relationship” to the land, says Jacobsen. “It can teach us much about who we are… and how we go about living on this earth.”
But first, we have to know more about the soil.