Natural World: A Farm for the Future
Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family's farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key.
With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family's wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year's high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is.
Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future. (Excerpt from bbc.co.uk)
This is one of my favourite documentaries. I always come back to it to remind me that there is progress happening in some farming families.
This film inspired me to take up farming in 2011. Watching it again in 2021 ?
What has happened in the 10 years since this documentary was made? ...and, what can we as individuals do to avert disaster?
no marriage, no children, no starvation!
@Brian - "increased supply" of oil is fallacy. We've been using it faster than it's formed for decades. We'll likely run out eventually...so let's update the farmer's numbers to maybe another 10 or 100 years and it still holds true. No sense in splitting hairs when the root issue remains.
Fuel prices are still insanely high in many parts of the world; it doesn't just affect agriculture, either. It's reflected in just about everything you buy and the paycheck you take home.
Brian's comment has me concerned.
I learned to map ground water tables in college. I've learned a very small amount about fracking, but enough to know that the chemicals that are pumped into the ground have a very good probability of making it into the ground water. To my knowledge, if we destroy our ground water, there is no fix for it. Maybe that's why T. Boone Pickens (oil billionaire) said in his autobiography, that water was going to be the next big commodity.
The law of unintended consequences is going to come back to bite us.
So crazy watching this in 2018. Fuel prices crazy high nine years ago. Lady in the video is like "...it doesn't matter if it's 2 years or 10 years away...the decline in the supply of oil....blah blah blah". Fast forward less than a decade and fracking technology has us with well over 200 years worth of oil on hand, prices low, and demand predicted to fall significantly in the future as more and more electric cars come online.
Increased supply of oil with falling demand. She was worried about nothing.
What is wrong? The elephant in the room is the SCALE UP OF FARMING! Back in the horse drawn days, farms fed locals mainly and there were farms across the land to do so. They did it organically as well! When we mechanized and profitized the process, we ruined our "Earth Friendly" lifestyles and culture. It was far healthier food back then and COULD be done again if we allow it. We must go back in time to survive!
What a fantastic documentary, that i can honestly say. Saw the documentary for the first time ever and it gave me so much to think about. I grew up on a farm in Denmark and all the time i can remember it has always been about getting more milk from the cows and producing more and more in the fields. And the farmers are working many hours every day with out making much pay from it. And i dont see a bright and shiny future for farming. But this film made me realize there is still hope. Maybe farmers could begin to rent out land to people from the cities and they can rent some land where they can grow fruit, vegetables, keep animals or other things. So over time it can look like the permaculture. It would helped the wildlife and the environment a lot
lol they mentioned it yay!!!
i suggest low intensity permiculture
Long live Fendt 1050.
Patrick Whitefield is my kind of guy- "In the natural ecosystem there's no work... and yet its thriving."
Great doc. I recently purchased just less than two acres in rural Ontario, Canada. Once plowed fields and a railway land, it was almost all a manicured lawn when purchased. One half of that is now an overgrown meadow full of bees, songbirds and worms and a variety of plants. It is awesome to watch the life return to the 1/2+ acre or so which we have let go wild. The garden has improved in unison. That is telling on its own. There is alternatives to the way it is done now. But there is a huge investment in the existing system. It is a huge endeavor to make the shift away from fossil fuels. the good news is, that the shift in mindset and thus action (this doc is a perfect example of this) is happening.
Great! I liked it very much. And wish I would be able to create this
Lots of information in it.
There's not ONE answer but will require MANY in a constantly adapting and evolving system of interrelated technologies, cultural shifts, and population changes of both size and locations. As such, I'm really surprised that neither the documentary nor anyone here mentioned the use of ALCOHOL production. In conjunction with increased permacultural practices, it can be a HUGE advantage in NUMEROUS categories. The growth of the plants reduces existing pollution, creates marketable non-monoculture crops for direct use as food and other applications, ferment the crops for further products such as clean non-petroleum renewable fuel (extract the sunlight eneragy from it to run one's own and community machinery/transportation/cooking/heating/etc), then the remaining Dried Distillers Grains (the original food crop that post-fermentation has had the starch removed but still contains all the protein/fats/nutrients so that it can be used as both:
1) significantly MORE effective feed for animals, and
2) highly effective herbicide/fertilizer (patent = #7183237) thus reducing money spent on agrochemicals.
This all improves the local economy, creates new jobs, new infrastructure, and more widely and personally distributes resources instead of bleeding them out to the giant chemical tyrants. This also increases self-sufficiency for local properties, communities, towns/cities, states, etc...
David Blume has a ton of info on his site "Alcohol Can Be A Gas" and on youtube ("David Blume - Permaculture Distillation, producing alcohol biofuel - 02 Nov 2013"), although he's not the only one doing this work.
Oh and @Alyx: Other than in actual water-splitting, generally speaking: water is NOT consumed and GONE, but just travels recycled through the various mediums/locations (drinking, elimination, plumbing, treatment, plumbing, drinking again, etc...or plant-absorption, processing/extraction, plumbing, treatment, plumbing, plants again, etc).
These systems can simply be more closed using MUCH better conservation/recycling practices than the completely wasteful nonsense we do now:
* Permaculture (grey-water separation, closed-loop systems, capturing systems),
* as well as and other products:
- NASA has long used real-time urine recycling for astronauts (Youtube "How NASA is recycling urine into drinking water"),
and long future trips (YouTube "Technology Providing Water for Astronauts Could Help Tackle Droughts")
- and commercial filtration products ("Puritii Water Bottle", "Lifestraw", etc)
I had lots of valuable links, but had to remove them. Whatever. Just search for the quoted titles.
Everyone here has their heart in the right place in terms of intentions, but not in the right place in terms of actual practicality and foresight.
Let's say you get rid of all fossil fuels, nuclear power, electricity and everyone goes primitive. Let's pretend everyone is cool with this and unanimously works together at it. Well first of all in some countries like India they would start dying by the thousands, but let's pretend somehow we have a magic wand to fix that and all the other problems that come from just immediately dropping those energy sources right off the bat.
Okay, in that fantasy scenario we have a few decades of everyone farming and the greenhouse gas scenario should be alright as long as the methane leaking from the earth doesn't make things worse. If that turned out to be the case which isn't guaranteed, then we'd have a few more decades of mostly positive living. Humanity's population would be in a slow decline but nothing major.
But, at some point after those decades we're gonna hit sudden change and humans start dying by the billions. Not millions, not thousands, billions. Everywhere on earth that was remotely populated would start to descend into a literal Mad Max scenario with everyone murdering each other for the only resource that matters at all anymore, fresh water. The only places that would be safe from this would be areas with one of the few fresh water suppliers left on earth either man made or otherwise. And assuming they still exist by this point. While these areas might be able to avoid such a fate, it would only be a matter before outsiders to their community discovered it and began to war against them for this resource. And when I say war, I mean just came in at night and murdered everyone in their sleep or tried to. We're talking about people that are on the brink of death and have survived this long only because they others before they had a chance to do it to them. Not people that have lived in casual safety with no threat to have to defend themselves against until now. In movies these people might be taken down by the gentle hero but in real life it usually doesn't work that way, and even if you survive this is the point when your life changes when you realize any day might bring more of these outsiders to your community for that water.
The alternative to that scenario is that it the outsiders are smaller in number so there's no immediate need for violence. Instead they are given fresh water and integrate with their new community. All goes well in this scenario assuming no raiders appear. And instead small bands might continue to integrate peacefully for years. At some point though, the community's numbers would outgrow the fresh water supply's ability to give them water or simply cease to function be it a river drying up or a solar powered desalination machine breaking. Does anyone know how to fix it? Highly doubtful by this point in time since no one has had any need for education in this area in years. While the community probably wouldn't descend into violence, they would still begin to die of dehydration and be forced to leave in separate directions in search of fresh water, or maybe as a group if they feel that safe. Though that option always leaves the threat of violence over the scarce water supply. And by these points most people will start to get extremely sick from fresh water sources they do find in puddles and such. One of their few hopes will be to have a steady supply of buckets and such for catching rainfall. I sure hope they live in an area that experiences rain regularly and that climate change hasn't changed the circumstances surrounding rain at this point in time. And as people are traveling and getting sick they're going to have an increasingly hard time protecting themselves from the wild animals that by this point are probably beginning to boom in population as they find a steady water supply in the blood of Humans. You see by this point Humans are often losing access to guns or the skills to survive in the wilderness that they did not think necessary before now, so they become increasingly easy prey in most situations with a few exceptions that thrive in this time but those are very few in number, dangerously so. So even without the threat of human attackers, you will see a steady rise in predator and a steady decline in the new return to prey status of Humans.
And it goes on and so on, from there. Would all humans die? Probably not? But who knows for sure and what happens after that. It might not play out exactly as I've said but this is a very likely scenario, and I may have missed a few points, but again, that's my initial point. You think you got a problem perfectly solved when you are forgetting a world of factors that may not seem directly related to the problem but very much are. And if you haven't sat down with a room full of analysts, physicists, etc. and actually plugged the numbers on what would happen if you did X, then maybe you shouldn't proclaim it the silver bullet to solve our problems.
Just excellent.....Nature knows best, we should work with her and not against her..
An electric tractor can work an entire farm with no problems. And the batteries are charged via solar panels on the actual farm, which also power the farm, as well as anything else. Seriously... hand tools? Darling, you don't have to scare people so much with half truths. We would use battery operated power tools like the ones we use today. Powered by electricity manufactured by the sun.
They're are manufacturers building electric tractors, combines, and any other machine device that today runs on fossil fuels. So... back at ya...
Wonderful doc. Makes me want to try this permaculture thing and have my own farm!
With all of the debating going on in this forum as is usually the case - instead of building a positive co-op of knowledge so we can actually build upon it - which is what humans also need to do to survive with each other, I'd just like to say that this has been the best short film that I have ever seen - and it has changed my life for the better - regardless of what we still have to learn. What a fantastic job everyone.
This doco made me wonder about the Fema camps in America and the vast amounts of plastic coffins being stored, the ending of fossil fuel is a given, the availability of energy that is equal to that of fossil is questionable, or should I say the fossil fuel needed to make this energy available will possibly disappear before we make enough solar panels or wind turbines etc, therefore those that say 'she'll be right mate' are just burying their heads in the sand! Permaculture seems like the only sustainable way to go to maintain the planet and survive as a species, I like the idea of working with nature rather than against it!
it is very amazing farm i ever seen
For all the people trying to detract frm what this woman is trying to do, at least she is trying... Like they say, there is no "silverbullet" no single solution to our energy, climate, and population problems, she is simply offering some knowledge so other people can apply these methods along with many others to try and stimulate positive change. For society and the biosphere on he whole.