From Red Deer to Regenerative Farming: Rethinking Agricultural Science

If you are interested in nature and conservation, you may have heard of the name of Frank Fraser Darling. He was one of the first people to study the life and social habits of Red deer in the Highlands of Scotland, and published a significant book on the subject ‘A herd of Red deer’ in 1937.

Fraser Darling was a graduate of the Midlands Agricultural College, and started his working life as a dairy hygiene adviser. Prior to WW2, he lived for a season on the remote island of Rona, studying the life cycle of the Atlantic Grey seals, described in ‘A Naturalist on Rona’. During the war he lived on Tanera Mòr in the Summer Isles, trying to make a living from farming, detailed in his book ‘Island Farm’. Later, he produced newspaper advisory articles for farmers of the West Highlands, which were ultimately collated in a book, ‘Crofting Agriculture’.

If you read, or re-read Crofting Agriculture, you might be surprised at how many of the basic principles of farming practice were understood back in the 1930s. They didn’t have the technology to measure nitrate leaching or gaseous emissions, or unravel the complexities of organic matter breakdown in soils, as we do now. But Fraser Darling understood, for instance, that the fertile machair soils in the coastal regions of Scotland were formed from a combination of wind-blown shell sand, effectively lime, being deposited on peat (acidic soils) with organic matter being built up from the dung of the crofters’ cattle over generations. Doesn’t this sound a bit like regenerative agriculture now ?

From agriculture to ecology

Towards the end of the 60s Fraser Darling became an advocate for ecology, then a new discipline. What is interesting is that one of the founding fathers of ecology came from a background of farming and dairy hygiene, his understanding and interpretation of animal behaviours, came not simply from studying biology in the lecture room, but from living with, and depending on a close relationship with large farm animals.

The progressive farmer

When I started on a dairy farm in North Nottinghamshire before heading off to university, there were four of us students. A mix of pre-Uni students like me, and day-release students from Brackenhurst Agricultural College. Grandad, as we called him, was still active on the farm, and would proudly tell anyone who asked, that he had once met the then principal of the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester who asked him, “Mr K., why doesn’t a progressive farmer like you take on some of my best agricultural students ?”.

Of course, this reference to being a ‘progressive’ farmer was designed to massage his ego, and it obviously worked. Every year he took on another group of students or school leavers, cheap labour as we could be paid 75% of the AWB minimum wage at the time, but undoubtedly a lot of hassle for the family to manage a new group of feckless 16-18 year olds every year, and try and knock us into some sort of shape.

Meanwhile grandma told me how she had gone to the old Midlands Agricultural College to study poultry production in her youth. As she said then it was a ‘little college’ not like the institution I would be going to at the end of the year, the University of Nottingham with its School of Agriculture at Sutton Bonington.

Nothing stands still in farming

Sutton Bonington (or SB) has been in the news recently because of the University’s decision to close, amongst others, its BSc Agriculture course. Unsurprisingly, this has created disquiet amongst alumni of the former School of Agriculture (now School of Biosciences). I know that in writing this article, I will have no impact on a university which has to consider rationalising its courses in the face of cuts in public funding. And in this, Nottingham is not alone as most of the university sector are under similar pressures. And if you are an agriculture graduate of Plymouth Polytechnic, the University of London, or the University of Edinburgh, you will probably be resigned to the fact that you’ve been here, seen it all before.

And if you aren’t an ex-student of SB, or even an agriculture graduate, this may not seem relevant to you either. So does it matter if we lose another agriculture course in the UK ? Are there bigger questions we need to ask about the nature of agricultural education and research, and what the farming sector needs for the next seventy years. Let’s state at this point, you don’t need an agriculture degree to be a good farmer, and there will also be people with agriculture degrees who would make poor farmers. But that isn’t really the point of studying agriculture at university.

A scientific training should bring a man to know how things work, or if he does not know something new to his observation, how to find how it works. Training in science should also so raise a man’s powers of observation of natural phenomena that he gets into the way of finding problems which need a solution

- Frank Fraser Darling, Island Farm, 1943

As I started work in 1984, the farm hosted an ADAS open day called ‘Sandland 84’ showcasing all sorts of irrigation kit and new (well, pre-digital) technologies. I then spent much of the first summer doing basic tasks like pulling fat hen out of sugar beet fields by hand. It was a testing year, and I timed it perfectly arriving on the farm just as milk quotas were imposed, demanding the culling of the growing 150 cow dairy herd (small now, but a decent size by the standards of the time). As a consequence, the son who looked after the dairy herd was in a bad mood for most of the year and we students bore the brunt of his wrath. This was an early introduction to the vagaries of life in agriculture, and the direct impact of political decisions made many miles away, on a family business.

The development of agricultural science

Bearing in mind that the University of Nottingham took over the old Midlands Agricultural College after the war, when teaching, research and advice in farming was re-organised, did the impact of the lecturers who trained Fraser Darling carry on after the war, influencing its teaching and research into the 1970s and 80s ? That’s a question for the historian, but when I started as a student, Prof JD Ivins was still operating as head of the Department of Agriculture. He had started at SB as a lecturer in 1948, and no doubt there was a connection with the advisers and practitioners who had been before, their research interests grounded in practical agriculture.

 At the same time he has developed and encouraged an effective school in the Department of Agriculture, where he has initiated two lines of research. The first, which arises logically from the theme of the Nottingham School, is the effect of cultural practices on the growth of the potato crop. The second, which is more peculiarly his own, is an attempt to bridge the gap between crop and animal husbandry by a study of the utilization of grass by the grazing animal. His use of small balanced herds of identical twins has given a precision to measurement that has not hitherto been possible, and the more critical evaluation of pasture productivity that results affords interesting potentialities for the future

- On JD Ivins appointment as Professor of Agriculture in 1958: Nature No. 4529, July 1958

By the time I got to Sutton Bonington in 1985, crop husbandry was known as agronomy, somewhat to the displeasure of Prof Scott who took over from Prof Ivins. He disliked the general use of the term ‘agronomist’ because, back in the day, an agronomist was effectively someone who sold agrochemicals. Rather than someone who tried to apply the science and principles of crop physiology in order to understand crop growth and development, and manage crops more effectively. Meanwhile animal husbandry had been renamed ‘animal production’ to the chagrin of one of the management lecturers of the time who felt that ‘husbandry’ was better, maybe implying we had lost something in the sense of animal welfare.

Big hitters

Other big hitters were still operating at the time, John Monteith was still active, he of ‘Penman-Monteith equation’ fame, which will be familiar to anyone involved with irrigation scheduling, and Eric Lamming, who famously authored the report on anabolic growth promoters in cattle, which was ignored by the European politicians of the time. Lamming would terrify first year students by striding into the lecture theatre and singling out some poor individual to ask them if they knew what brown fat was. Which of course they invariably didn’t.

One of the major features of SB was the hosting of regular Easter schools in Agricultural Science which started in 1955. These didn’t impact directly on undergraduate students, but perhaps subliminally, they underscored that our teaching was based on the new research, and that in turn, the school was connected with the best of researchers in other parts of the world. Much later, I was lucky enough to be involved with a meeting on Yields of farmed species which was probably the last of the Easter School series, held in 2004.

The thinking on the yields of individual crops which came out of that Easter school, and the reasons for apparent yield plateaux, led to the development by my former colleagues at ADAS, of the Yield Enhancement Networks (YENs). Aiming to understand variation within and between farms which ran for over 10 years until 2025, recently the YENs have been highlighted by an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture as one of the few initiatives in recent years to connect researchers with farmers and to indicate how we might increase yields on farm. 

If you want to learn to farm, you can go to study farming at Harper Adams, or the RAU at Cirencester. Those institutions have grown and benefited from the demise of their competitors, and they are now reaping the benefits. So it is worth asking why it is still of value to have a Russell Group university still teaching a BSc in agriculture ?

Speaking personally, although enrolled on the BSc Agriculture course, if I hadn’t had to walk the coals and study biochemistry in my first year, something that really went against the grain at the time, I wouldn’t later have been able to work in a food science lab in France. And if I hadn’t studied agronomy, I wouldn’t have been helping manage the HGCA funded work that later led to the Wheat Growth Guide. And if I hadn’t studied physiology and breeding of crop plants, I probably wouldn’t be in a vegetable growing business now, working on their plant breeding programme.

Although Fraser Darling went to SB, prior to the growth of the university sector in the UK, he exemplified I think one of the great benefits of a scientific education. The agricultural adviser who became the ecologist. At SB in the 80s, you would find the vegan food scientist having to rub along in first year lectures with someone who had worked for a year on a livestock farm, or the farmer’s son or daughter from an arable farm, who had to brush up against someone who wanted to study environmental science. If you don’t get those experiences, you end up working in silos.

On a theme of sustainability

Just about every university (well, at least 97 institutions in the UK according to UCAS) now offers a degree course in some endless variation on a theme of ‘Sustainability’. For example, in Environmental Management and Sustainability, Sustainable Development, Sustainable Futures, Education for Sustainability and so on. On the other hand, I would guess there are only about a dozen institutions that still offer an agriculture degree.

What does sustainability even mean ?

- Jeremy Clarkson, Clarkson’s Farm

 If you only have, on the one hand, farmers trained at agricultural universities, and on the other, consultants trained at universities without any agricultural research or taught courses, then it will be no surprise that there is little common ground between the land owner and the conservationist, or between the farmer and the auditor sent to monitor them.

The demise of the agriculture course at SB in part underlines the lack of research funding for work which directly helps farmers. Lecturers need to be honing their skills by engaging in high quality research and the industry needs to see that the research is relevant. For example, a huge programme of work on field beans in the mid 80s, supervised by Paul Hebblethwaite dominated my time at SB and was enough work to keep three honours students busy in their final year projects, as well as a number of MSc Agronomy students from overseas. At the same time, nutritionists were investigating the antinutritional factors in beans and their impacts on animal nutrition. There has been a dearth of research on legumes in the forty years since, until recent farmer-led work through the NCS project.

The problems of course closures are not unique to Nottingham of course. Newcastle University which I attended later, has closed its BSc Soil Science course, and it has more recently been suggested that Cambridge University close its Vet School. We have to be realistic, Nottingham University is not closing down the Sutton Bonington campus wholesale, as Imperial College did with Wye, or as Plymouth Polytechnic did with Seale Hayne. Moreover, in 2010, Nottingham invested in the first new vet school in the UK in 50 years on the Sutton Bonington campus. Animal Science undergraduate courses are still strong, and there is undoubted synergy between them and the Vet School.

It is up to the industry to argue for more applied research and the necessary public funding to support it, research which can take place both on commercial farms, and allied with institutions still involved in research and education. Otherwise, we rely more and more on spillovers in R&D, as economists call them, from other more advanced economies like the Netherlands and, the USA (‘advanced’ here interpreted fairly loosely).

So over to the new universities. It will be down to the likes of Nottingham Trent (formerly Brackenhurst), Anglia Ruskin (Writtle) and Lincoln (Riseholme) to take up the baton and produce the next generation of agricultural scientists. And let's hope there will still be ecologists who come from an agricultural background and who can balance the necessity to produce food with a respect for nature.

And with that, I'll leave it to the man himself to conclude:

I am wholly in favour of anyone engaging in farming having a scientific education in the principles of agriculture, but that education should not be designed to give him a set of ineluctable precepts on which, if he keeps them, he cannot go wrong

- Frank Fraser Darling, Island Farm, 1943