Rob: And it in pragmatic terms then what, what does that mean? How do you physically do that? 

James: Well, basically what's unique about Rothamsted is it's both a farm and a working research institute. So we've got laboratory space here and we've got all these hectares of farmland. So we can go basically from lab to field, with new varieties of plants, with different treatments for soils, different treatments for pest control, more biological pest control. We can bring all that together in the one site and really sort of get the research going in ways that will deliver our results very, very quickly.  

But we also do a number of things nationally. We work with a huge network of farmers right across the UK because farming is very location-specific. What works on one farm will not necessarily work on another one. And we need great networks of farmers in order to manage all of the various transitions that we're looking at to find out whether they're gonna work actually in-situ. That means Rothamsted primarily, actually, is about data. We collect masses and masses of data. 

Rob: I was going to say, so the soil samples here go all the way back to 1843? 

James: That's correct. Yes.  

Rob: So literally the oldest experiment in the world! 

James: The world's oldest field experiment. Yes, definitely. And of course, that means we've now got something of a third of a million samples of soil and plant material.  

Rob: That's a lot of soil. Are you gonna run out? 

James: Yeah. Well, people, people wonder why the experiments that we've been taking samples from are still at ground level and not sort of twenty foot down. But obviously soil is regenerating itself as we go. We also have a livestock farm down in Devon looking at whether we can farm beef and dairy much more sustainably. Obviously that's a big worry under climate change. That is probably Britain's most measured farm. We've collected about - in the ten years that's been operating now - we've collected about 80 million data points. So again, that's a huge challenge in terms of how you interrogate and interpret that data.  

We're really having to move into AI and machine learning to try and look for those complex patterns that are emerging from all the work that we're doing. Farming is an immensely complex system. You've got all the interactions of the soil and the plants, plus the weather of course, plus what farmers may want to do in terms of the mix of crops that they're planting. How are we gonna try and tease out from that huge complex of data what is going on and what we need to tweak and change in order to make sure that we can make that transition as easy for farmers as possible, as economically viable for farmers as possible, but delivering all the public goods that we want from the countryside as well. The wildlife, the flood control, the continuation of biodiversity across the UK where most of our farmland is already heavily depleted. And we've now got to build that back up, make sure we restore those natural processes that frankly underpin nature, yes, but underpin farming as well. 

Rob: And how receptive is the farming community to those kind of changes these days? You know, is it, what direction is the process going in? Are you kind of driving things in a direction or are you reacting to what farmers want to happen? How does that work? 

James: Well, it's a partnership. We're only one part of the piece. Of course, you know the data and the technology and the evidence that we are developing here can help inform the process. But this is a much bigger picture than anything Rothamsted can do. There's a social science picture. We do some social science around farmers’ attitudes, and the barriers to change, but obviously it's a much, much bigger picture than that. It's about consumers’ behaviour. It's about policy. It's about where we're gonna target subsidies in order to to drive these changes... 

Rob: ‘Cause there's a real, you know, sort of balance to be struck, isn't there, between making sure that we grow enough food for us to eat. It's essential that we have that. But by the same token, we don't throw the baby out with the bath water and end up with the countryside that's completely devoid of anything other than agricultural crops.  

James: We do think there are approaches that can address both. I mean we're now about 60% food self-sufficient in this country and the NFU wants that up to about 80%. But the UK has not been self-sufficient in food since about the 1780s, something like that. We've always imported and obviously we always will need to import – things like coffee and bananas obviously will not grow here. So it's a difficult trade-off. We do believe there are many things we can do to actually bring more nature onto farms. You have these two philosophies of course, land sharing and land sparing, land sparing being the nature reserve - there where nobody goes and nobody farms - and land sharing being what we do mainly in this country where much of our wildlife has evolved to be on farmland. 

Rob: So you're talking about plastics, aren't you so 1920s we had Bakelite and then all sorts of other things that came on... and so you just didn't need commercial Willow in quite the same way- 

James: Not so many baskets in the Second World War, of course, much more sophisticated but, you know, obviously there was still a demand for basketry. So I mean that kept going, but in more recent times we started to get very interested in willow as a biomass fuel and it has a number of advantages over other systems that you might have seen. So obviously if you're planting maize and developing that into biodiesel, it's not that productive in terms of your carbon footprint. You've got a lot of inputs into getting that maize and then you burn the fuel, there's probably, you know not a lot of gain. Willow, it's very different because basically the root system stays in the ground, it's perennial. So we've got about a year's growth of Willow around us at the moment.  

Rob: So this is from the ground up to - what was that, ten foot, something like that? 

James: Yeah. 

Rob: So it really shoots up, doesn't it, literally.  

James: And within three years it's gonna be about, what, 18-foot high and you can cut that back right down to the ground and it'll sprout again immediately. So it's very, very hardy. And what's happening of course when you're doing it is you've got a very big and very robust root system. Now that's sequestering large amounts of carbon, stabilising the soils, very good for flood control as well in terms of stabilising riverbanks. So if you're- 

Rob: Yes because willow, it will grow virtually anywhere, won’t it? That was a bit of a boggy field.  

James: That's another advantage that you have with willow of course, which is one of the objections to growing crops for biofuel is that you're using up productive land that could be used for producing food. Willow will grow pretty much anywhere that it can get a hold. So you don't have to use prime productive land. It could be on the margin of a farm. We often think about it in terms of maybe there's a university campus that could be surrounded by willow, then you can harvest that every three years. You've got a really good crop of pellets, burn those pellets, you probably get your fuel more or less in a net carbon manner. So we think there's great potential. It's not gonna work in every situation. Britain is not gonna be powered on willow pellets in the foreseeable future, but in certain systems where there's a small area that you could plant up and that might be enough to just run us a small facility of some kind, we think it's got great potential. There's a big project across the UK called Biomass Connect at the moment, which is looking at willow and things like miscanthus, which is elephant grass, various other crops that we can grow that could potentially be a biomass fuel and help us on that transition to net zero.  

Rob: You get quite excited about all this, don’t you? 

James: Well, it's exciting, exciting stuff! Not only are you producing a biomass fuel, you've got those biodiversity benefits as well. So that's a classic example of how we can use land more productively. We're gonna get a benefit from the land, we're gonna get the biodiversity benefits; you'll see trees, you'll see birds in these trees in the spring, sort of flitting about, making use of, of the resources they provide. We're looking right down at the genetic level of the willow, seeing if we can get better varieties, more productive varieties. We're also looking at the biochemistry of willow. Willow’s very interesting in terms of what goes on inside its leaves and its bark. You probably know that aspirin originally came from willow - salicylic acid. In the Middle Ages, people would chew the bark for pain relief. I don’t recommend it. It's not particularly tasty. 

Rob: OK. You've given it a go, have you? 

James: Ohh. I'm not gonna go into my personal relationship with willow, but obviously from that, developed aspirin which came in tablet form. We've been bioprospecting the willow, we’ve found other actives. There's a chemical that we believe may be very active against cancer and we're now working with pharmaceutical companies to see if we can develop that. That's a double benefit for us because basically for a farmer willow on its own as the biofuel, economically it's probably marginal. You need equipment in order to harvest and plant this stuff and it grows very, very easily. By the way, any cutting you stick in the ground, it'll just shoot up. I'm sure people listening to this will know that willow is very, very easy to propagate. If you have just the biomass fuel, economically marginal - if you have another product that you could get out of the willow, then you've got a double benefit that makes it much more economically viable.  

Rob: And in sort of wildlife terms, obviously finding natural solutions and natural products that actually will allow you to have greater biodiversity on a farm site, that's a good thing in its own right.  

James: Yeah. I mean, we're increasingly beginning to realise that the natural systems provide all sorts of beneficial services to farmers. The most obvious one obviously is wildflowers, bringing insects onto the farm. And those insects can basically be predators on some of the main pests that we've got. We've done a lot of work, for instance looking at wildflower strips running through fields. Typically you have wildflower margins around a field. That's fine, but the insects are only going to get in a certain amount. If you stripe them like a deck chair, you're actually providing these superhighways for insects to get into the centre of the field. So we've been doing a lot of work with the big the biggest carrot grower in the UK which is Huntapac, looking at whether we can use wildflower strips in their fields to deliver the kind of beneficial insects into the centre and seeing what that benefit does for the crop. 

It's quite hard to measure; it takes a bit of a while before the population of insects get bedded in. But we do think it's a partial solution to pest control, getting away from chemicals and bringing in more natural services that can do the work for us. And I think that's a really important underpinning philosophy for Rothamstead. How can we get nature to do the work for us? How can we make sure the soil microbiome is working for us? How can we make sure the plants are working together, bringing the insects that we want on to site - the pollinators, the predators, all of that - working together? So we get that natural services boost for farming that can make us hopefully farm in a far more sustainable manner. 

Rob: James Clarke from Rothamsted Research there. 

Find out more about Rothamsted Research here and, if you’re interested in nature-friendly farming, be sure to check out our related blogs below.