Love
Watch: Amy-Jane Beer talks about love for the natural world during a time of multiple crises, and the need to move away from point-scoring and argument. She ends with a question to the farmers in this group: what do you need?
"The Earth is our cradle and it will be our grave, and in between it furnishes us and feeds us, physically and emotionally, so how could we not wholeheartedly love it back?"
Press play then click for subtitles
Listen to Nikki Yoxall’s response to Anna Jones
In response to Anna Jones' article, Nikki Yoxall talks about how we might step back from highly intensive agriculture. "I worry that when people like me talk about agroecology or regenerative practice, that they think I want us to go back to a time when everyone used horses and carts, and cut their hay with a scythe."
Nikki Yoxall on loving her animals
Nikki Yoxall raises the challenging subject of loving your animals in the business of farming.
“Is it right, is it appropriate to raise livestock for consumption? And the question then of how can I, as somebody who is doing that, love my animals?"
Amy-Jane Beer from Castle Howard
Amy-Jane Beer provides some beautiful morning shots from the Castle Howard estate whilst discussing her fears around Curlew protection. “It is heart lifting to come and hear [the curlews], but also, I’m wary of celebrating it too much.”
Mary Colwell’s response to Amy-Jane Beer from Castle Howard
Amy - thank you for your post, and for letting us hear the call of curlews in the background. I have to say I had a short sob when they called through the mist. I attended a meeting of the Curlew Forum last night - an informal gathering of the lowland curlew groups in southern England. Together they look after around 400 pairs below Birmingham. Some of the stats made my heart break. 100 nests in Northern Shropshire, only 1 nest fledged in 2020. Only a maximum of 5 pairs left in North Wilts. Fewer than 5 pairs in Worcestershire. One pair in Rutland have produced one chick in 12 years. Only 1 pair left on Dartmoor - that region has produced 3 chicks in 20 years. These beautiful birds live a long time, they keep coming back, they keep failing. You are right. One day they will not come back and the spring air will be silent.
Harriet Fraser responding to Amy-Jane’s video about curlews
Harriet Fraser discusses her experience of curlews just outside Kendal and provides a thoughtful response to the point Amy-Jane raised about curlew protection. “I totally get it. That feeling of joy when you hear them. and the nervousness about what is going to happen."
Contribution from Emily Diamand
Listen to the relaxing sounds of the river and birds near her village in North Yorkshire while Emily discusses issues surrounding rural living and how people from both sides of the debate “are walking together”.
Read: a question by Emily Diamand
I grew up in a house surrounded by arable fields. What happened in those fields – the plough-dark stripes, green stitches of new wheat, trundle of combines and hellfire of stubble burning - was my calendar and playground. The gleam of chalk in tilled soil still feels tattooed onto my bones. At about the age of ten I developed an interest in wildflowers, and so my mum gave me an identification book she’d received as a school prize. “Just go out and look for them,” she said, but between her childhood in the 1950s and mine in the 1980s, a change had taken place - the fields now stretched unbroken to the horizon, the hedges reduced to a few hawthorn scraps. For all my searching, I only found pineapple weed and the odd poppy, and I can trace ripples throughout my life from this heartbreaking moment, when I realised that the landscape I loved so much was a wounded thing.
Perhaps you feel recognition, or perhaps you feel this story is unfair to the farmer who tilled those fields, but I'm telling it because Love + Soil places the language of emotion at the core of discussion. Beneath arguments about pesticides, payment schemes or rewilding, we all know there are undercurrents of love and hurt. Love for the notes and rhythms of the farm, for the wide or narrow landscapes that contain us, for animals domestic and wild, for a single plant or the pulse of an ecosystem. Hurt from harsh accusations against a way of living or harm to the natural world.
This is the conversation I am curious about. What do we mean when we talk about love, a word we stretch to fit around endless possibilities? What are the roots of the many kinds of love that we feel for farming, landscapes and nature in its diversity? Will understanding them lead to better ways of working together, or is this the source of the conflict we so often encounter?