Episode 133: The Power of Companion Planting with Ian Gould

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating soil landscapes and human health and everything that connects the dots between those. I've been looking forward to the conversation today for quite some time. I have with me Ian Gold from Oak Bank Game in the uk and Ian has done been doing some fascinating work with COVID crops and with ecological restoration from a slightly different perspective than the one we commonly are exposed to here in the US and here in North America. And so, Ian, thank you for being willing to be here today. You know, there are, there are so many things for us to talk about. I'm hoping to get into some of these conversations. Over the last several months I've been studying and have been thinking about plants and seeds as microbial inoculants, seeds as vectors of a microbiome. And from this perspective, what we've been learning from Christine Jones and from James White and others is that rather than thinking about individual varieties, we should, or perhaps even individual species, we should be thinking in terms of plant families. But you've had some experiences that actually go in the other direction of that, that describe how individual varieties can be very unique from each other in the way that they show up in an ecosystem. So I want to get into some of that conversation, but why don't you give us some context for the scope of your work. What has been your journey over the last couple of decades and what's the scope of the things that you're working on today?

So the thing that really set me off on sort of this journey that I've been on around regenerative agriculture and using plants to solve problems in agriculture was completely my visit to the first groundswell show that happened about, I think it's about 10 years ago and now when you think the scale that it's got to now, whether it's 8,000 visitors over two days, back then it was about 300 people in one barn. And my first, my first job in agriculture was involved in plant breeding of new cereal varieties at what was the old Plant Breeding Institute. And it was sort of opened up my mind to the possibility of some of the things we'd learned doing habitat creation in terms of using teams of plants together to deliver different benefits, could also maybe be used in this space. And the work that people like Gabe Brown and Alan Williams and particularly I think they were following the work of Adamir Cagliari from Brazil on multi species cover crops, it really was a fascination. And so anyway, I went away from there. And we've been an exhibitor at Groundswell ever since that first year. And it's been a fantastic community of people from all over the world that have visited and also connected. And then it's kind of also created an interest from myself to go to events like Notil on the Plains and the ACRES Conference in the States, which is where I met you. Both of those events for the first time. The community now and the ability to speak to people online from all over the world has really opened up. And this whole regenerative community is such an open sharing place that, you know, you might have had an idea that someone else has been doing or you're listening to people. So I actively speak to people in the us, in Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, all over Europe, pretty regularly finding out what's going on, you know, feeding back and that kind of thing. So, you know, the knowledge exchange is hugely valuable and I think it'll help people get better faster, which is the most important part, because we really don't have time. I was at an event in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago and it felt like groundhog Day from 12 months ago. @ the same event, it felt like no progress had been made. It's like all these big companies still talking about piloting things. We don't have time to keep piloting stuff when we know the fundamentals of what needs to be done. We just need to get it done at scale. And, you know, unquestionably, money is what will drive that.

Change. But yeah, Ian, you, you described your beginnings, your shift into the agricultural space and your background in seed breeding. Can, can you elaborate a little bit on that and also bring us forward to what is the scope of the work that you are doing today? You started with, with Gamelands, but you're, you're doing work today that is very different or much broader than.

That. Initially, a lot of our work was confined to the perimeter of the field, the edges of the field or the non productive areas of the farms, because that's where the farmer could get money from the government to compensate them from taking the land out of production. And this kind of goes on from. It's something that I want to discuss a bit later maybe, which is if you're trying to incentivize something, make sure you're incentivizing the thing you really want. And so initially our work was, you know, strips around the edges of fields, in the corners of fields, that sort of thing. But now it's very much Broad Acre looking at soil health. So some of the options in the countryside stewardship and what's called the environmental Land Management Scheme is looking at soil health on a wider scale. So farmers are now being incentivized to use multi species herb rich grass lays instead of just rye grass pasture for their cattle and sheep. They're being offered money to grow legume fallow crops. So instead of growing what they found to be unprofitable break crops, they're using the option to grow a largely legume based mix to, you know, to avoid putting more inputs on the soil and to start trying to rebuild the soil health. But you know, some of that stuff that you were talking with Rick Clark from Christine, about legumes not being entirely positive, it's very interesting. So there's all of those things. So now we've gone from the edges of the fields, from the extremities, right into the middle and the heart of the agricultural production system and looking at how plants can be used to improve productivity as well as environmental.

Delivery. One of the pieces that I found interesting in having conversations and just observing conversations as well with growers from the UK is that there, there seems to be a lot more. There's a lot of innovation happening in the US in terms of relay cropping and intercropping and so forth. But one of the things that I don't see happening here as much is a combination of varieties of the same species. Planting five wheat varieties together, for example, what have you been observing and experiencing with the combination of different.

Varieties? Let's talk about the pros and the cons of this. So the idea of doing that is to increase the diversity of both yield and quality potential amongst those different varieties, but mainly to extend the range of disease resistance and pest resistance. So that if you got particularly fungal diseases, if you had some species in there that were highly resistant to those diseases, the ability of that disease to spread across the whole crop would be reduced. And that certainly has been seen. But equally, when you do the numbers, there's no doubt at all that in a standard, typical agricultural production system, the application of a fungicide is one of the highest returns on investment you'll get in a disease year. Like we just had a really wet winter and a wet spring, cold spring. So if you didn't get your disease control right, and I mean that in a chemical way, it cost you a lot of money. You know, there's no, there's no doubt about that now. It could well be said that if you start to go down this regenerative path and you start to build your soil health and you start to get your nutritional balance in the soil better. That, you know, the thing I know you believe in that you can, with nutrition you can make plans, plants resistant to these things without the use of fungicides and pesticides. And, and I, I'm sure there's a lot of truth in that, but you have to, you have to deal with people where they are and, and at the moment they're in a situation where if they didn't use Septoria fungicide in the UK this year, it was, it was really bad news. But going on to the positives, we've, we've done some work and my company is part of a group called Velcour Group and they're very large scale farmers in the UK. They farm about 55,000 hectares in the UK across the whole country from the southwest to the northeast and up into Scotland on a huge range of soil types and farm types and so on. And we farm other people's land for them. So we're all about delivering on whatever the objectives are for the, for the landowner. And I know in the work there they've done where they trialed mixtures of four different wheat varieties in a field and the results have been quite widely spread in terms of the results, but in general there was absolutely a measurable yield increase on average when nothing else changed. So this, the only change in that was the, was the mix of varieties as opposed to growing the individual varieties on their.

Own. Do you, do you have any hypothesis about why that might contribute a yield response? I mean, you would. My, my, my first reaction as well. These are very, this is the same plant species, they're competing with each other for water and nutrients and so forth at the exact same stage of development. So why, why a yield.

Response? Yeah, it is possible that the different varieties are going through slightly different maturities and things in their growth cycle at slightly different times. There clearly are some differences, although they're very marginal. Whether they would be significant or not, I'm not sure. But in a population variety of one, everything is competing for the same thing at the same time. Everything is. So whether that's part of it, I don't know. Whether there's some degree of the, the different plants helping and, you know, affecting the impact of diseases and pests in that population, we'll have to wait and see. But, you know, as I say, the range was quite wide, but on average there was a significant yield increase from simply using a blend. Now the problem is from a practical point of view, that there's also quite a significant cost to the seed provider in order to provide the seed blends to the farmer. Because we have. I don't know what you call it in the US but we have a thing called seed certification which is where seed has to be produced to certain quality standards and disease standards and that kind of thing. The only way to certify seed is an individual variety one at a time. So that process has to be done and then it's like an aftermarket thing which is to mix the varieties together. So it's a time and cost thing which obviously cost the grower money. Now, a number of farmers I know here who are members of this, an organization called BASE UK which is a sort of regenerative farming, no till farming group. And a lot of those farmers are now producing their own seed on their own farms and cleaning them up on the farm. So they're actually growing these blends and harvesting the blends and using them that way. And we can go into the benefits of having your seed and this hollow bionton, all this sort of thing on. On the seed from your soil and making it more adaptable to your particular environment. But initially they're largely trying to save money by producing their own seed and doing it that way. So there is some resistance from the seed trades to do this because it is quite a lot of extra work at a very busy time of year and it does make the whole thing more expensive. But in our experience there is some benefit to be gained from.

It. Yeah, I think this is an interesting question to explore is to attempt to understand why we are observing a yield response. It's another one of those cases where one plus one doesn't always equal two, which is. Which is intriguing. So one of the. So I immediately jumped to this conversation around wheat and combinations of various varieties. But tell us a little bit about some of the things that you've been doing with COVID crops and with various plant species in the field in addition to just in the hedgerows and on the field.

Edge. If we. If we go on from combinations of species in. In terms of crops being harvested together in the kind of. In the circles that I. I sort of tend to spend to my time in the uk we're sort of talking to people like Andy Howard who I believe, you know, who did a nuffield scholarship in. In around by cropping, intercropping, companion cropping, that sort of thing. So I've been very interested in what he's doing where he's growing crops actually together in a similar way to some of the people like Jason Mork in, in the US is doing, and that's to impart more diversity in the field, but also perhaps with things like growing peas and oats together. The peas are held up by the oats and actually it seems that the oats help with some of the weed control as well, because peas are quite a sparse crop at times and it allows space for weeds to grow. So if you put something into that space, it can certainly appears to help with some of the weed ingress and it certainly can help also with holding the peas up off the ground, making them easier to harvest. Clearly then you've. You've probably got a cost of separating them, but separating a nice round product with a long, straight product is pretty straightforward and fairly easy. And, you know, that's not. Not proving to be a huge challenge to people here. Other things, oats and beans have been quite successful. We're trying in amongst the elm scheme, so that there's a scheme in the. In England now called the Sustainable Farming Incentive, and farmers are able to access 55 pounds a hectare to grow companion crops in their other crops. Now, a companion in our terminology is generally something that provides a service to the cash crop or to the wider environments of the soil and so on, but it doesn't go to harvest. So it's something that's either killed by the frost or is killed by herbicide later on. But it's there to help the crop maybe get established or provide some other service. So the species that most of that was done initially was with oilseed rape or canola, as I believe you call it. So we have a particularly bad problem here with a pest called cabbage stem flea beetle, which is potentially completely devastating to crops at that emergence time. And there was some work, I believe initially it came out of France, where they were using other crops with the oilseed rape establishment to disguise the rape both physically with, you know, physical hiding the plants and also chemically through smell. Because the theory was that the flea beetle found the fields through a mixture of color and smell. I don't know where the evidence for that came from, but that was certainly the feedback we had. So we were using species and continue to like buckwheat, which grows extremely quickly. It germinates when it's quite dry, which is really helpful at that time of year. And it generally gets growing faster and above the crop and it physically hides the rake plant so the crop doesn't look like a rake crop. We also use species like berseem or Egyptian clover, which roots Very quickly, and the rape roots seem to follow those roots down and get established better. And also we're using fenugreek, which we know as the curry plant, to provide that chemical smell. So the emits a smell to the environment and that seems to disguise that. So whilst in no way do I think this is a magic bullet that solves the problem by itself, I think in combination with things like nutrition, timing of planting long stubble, which I think also helps, it does seem to be providing a benefit. And the government here have recognized this opportunity and they are basically taking the risk away from the farmer. So the pound 55 more than pays for the cost of the seed and doing the job. So I think a lot of people are trying that. And now we're also trying companion cropping with other crops, like wheat, for example, where the, in hard sort of economic terms, 55 pounds doesn't cover very much yield loss. So if you thought using a companion was going to have a negative impact on yield because you couldn't use a robust herbicide program, for example, because we do have big problems with grass weeds in particular. But we found a couple of species which are beans and linseed, which allow the farmer to use a typical herbicide program on their crop and still keep those plants alive and doing what they do. So beans are obviously doing something for fixing nitrogen and by helping biology. And linseed, I found personally, linseed's a wonderful crop for improving soil structure. It's got really deep vertical roots and we find a lot of worms in fields where we put linseed in the past. Or flax, I don't think. Is that your experience too.

John? Yeah, we also see a lot of positives from flax as well. But the. I want to make sure I'm understanding it.

Correctly. Are.

You. Are you using the. The beans and the flax as a companion crop with the.

Wheat? Yes, we are exactly.

That. Okay, let's tell us a little bit more about that. What types of application rates or seeding rates are you using and what is the timing, seeding timing and so forth? Are they being planted at the same time as the.

Wheat? Yes. So this is part of the challenge, and it's certainly something that we're learning quite a bit about as we go along. And actually, vetches are another species that we've tried which have worked quite effectively. So if we start with beans, obviously the bigger challenge to plant beans and wheat is the relative seed size is enormously different. So there are a number of ways around that. The first is to plant wheat into a field that has previously had beans in it. So there's a lot of volunteer beans. And instead of doing what farmers have done for years, which is make them germinate and spray them off and kill them, we. We simply don't kill them. We leave them where they are. So there's a fairly large population of what we call volunteer beans that you then plant the wheat into, and that, that would be a perfectly acceptable way of doing it. There are some drills now that have multiple hoppers and they could perhaps put beans down one set of hop, one set of coulters at one depth and the wheat at another. But a lot of people have found that they need to basically do two processes. One is to plant the beans and then you plant the wheat over the top. Now, as soon as you start doing that, 55 pounds a hectare doesn't go very far. So you have to, you have to believe that there's some other value from doing it, which clearly I, I do believe that, and I'm sure you would as well. But at the moment that, that sort of level of confidence that there's a value, people need to see evidence of that, and I understand that completely, and that's perfectly.

Reasonable. So what, what are the evidences that you've observed of beans and flax and veg that, that give you confidence that this is something worthwhile.

Exploring? Well, clearly getting some more diversity into the field is good from a soil biology point of view. The beans can generate some serious quantities of nitrogen from the fixation by the rhizobia. So that would hopefully mean that at some point the amount of nitrogen that had to be applied would be reduced. So there'd be a cost saving and a sort of soil toxicity saving, if you like, from, from that, plus all the benefits to the carbon footprint of the crop, which is something that a lot of people are looking at very hard in terms of linseed. I find that just really helps with, with soil structuring. So one of the things I've been trying to look at is have a companion in the mix that roots quite differently from your cash crop. So it's accessing nutrient and water, particularly from a different place to where your cash crop is. Otherwise it could be quite competitive. So I'll give you another example. We've been using small leave white clover as an understory, and what we're trying to do with that is leave it there for a number of years. So it's like a permanent perennial understory in the crop into which you Plant your cash crop. Now, the difficulty with clover is that different sorts of clover behaved very differently. So the reason we've chosen to work extensively with the small league one is the plant doesn't get very big, so it doesn't become a problem in the crop canopy. It doesn't become a problem at combining time. It stays relatively low in the base of the crop. That has two downsides to it. One is that after harvest, a lot of people like to turn sheep out onto these fields to graze the clover down. And with the small leaf clover, you trade off less into less problematic issues with the harvested crop for lower volume of forage. And unequally, the smaller crop fixes much less nitrogen than maybe a big crop of red clover would. So very often when I'm talking to people about this, they've read that a clover field could fix 300 kilos of nitrogen per hectare, for example. Well, I'm not doubting that's possible with a big forage clover, which is, you know, 2ft tall and, you know, very lush and whatever, but a small leaf clover, which was, frankly, it was designed in an amenity setting. So for things like lawn grasses and, and golf courses and that sort of thing, it doesn't do that. But what it does do is it does cover the ground really effectively. And again, the, the issue could be that the routing of that crop is, is too similar to wheat as the cash crop. So is it. Is it causing competitiveness with the cash crop compared to something else? So there's a. There's a chap who, I don't know if you've spoken to him or met him, called Frederick Larsson from.

Denmark.

Yep. I think I might have introduced you to him. Anyway, he's doing some work with Lucerne in the same sense. And I have to be honest, when I heard he was doing it, I thought he was completely mad because we used to use lucerne and triticale as an environmental crop, so we never had to worry about combining it. But Lucerne has the capacity to grow enormously. And I just thought if you were going wheat to combat combine at some point, having lucerne in there would.

Be a nightmare for all of our North American people. Lucerne is otherwise known as.

Alfalfa. Alfalfa. Yeah, alfalfa. So I, I thought he was nuts and was causing problem for himself, but Frederick's come up with. And Frederick's a farmer and an agronomist, and he's a really, really good guy. Find him on Twitter. He's a very, very interesting guy to follow. And he comes up with the. With the concept of what he calls chemical mowing. So he uses herbicide to suppress the lucerne at key stages, so that then what he's able to do is combine. Basically, he combines the heads of wheat off the straw. So he combines quite high and he takes the wheat off. And he doesn't seem to have any problem with lucerne getting in the tank or being a problem in his wheat sample. He then goes along and he mows the straw and whatever's left of the lucerne really tight to the ground immediately after harvest. And then his lucerne crop grows like mad and he gets a forage crop off it after he's had his wheat off. So it's an incredibly productive system and it seems to be working really well. But. But he has a specific variety of lucerne that goes to sleep early in the autumn, so it doesn't challenge the wheat when it's getting established and it wakes up late in the.

Spring.

Yeah. So that it. It's as uncompetitive with the wheat as possible. And the other factor that's really important is lucerne has a really long tap route, so it's extracting nutrients from a depth below which the wheat doesn't go, so it's not competing in the same place for water and nutrient. And I think that that has got some really interesting potential, but we. We haven't managed to get hold of the right varieties of lucerne.

Yet. Ian.

You'Ve.