The Case for Diversity - Flora & Field Stewardship

What the buyers could see

Ours was a mixed patch of the old kind - many plants, many roots, and a soil that was plainly alive. It showed in the health of everything that grazed it. A buyer at the market could read it in a coat and a condition without being told, and our animals sold the better for it.

The lesson stayed with me. Diversity is not a fine extra a farm can take or leave; it is the quiet machinery that makes the whole thing work - above the ground and below it.

Four ways a mixed farm pays

The same principle runs through the soil, the pasture, the hedge and the herd. Open each to read it.

Grow one crop across a wide field, year after year, and the ground pays for it. The same plant draws the same few nutrients until the soil is thin and tired. Pests and diseases, meanwhile, find a feast laid out exactly to their liking, and multiply. And the wild things - the bees, the birds, the small quiet animals of the field edge - lose both their homes and the varied food a single crop can never provide. Uniformity looks efficient; in truth it is fragile.

An animal turned out onto mixed pasture eats the way it evolved to eat - grazing a little of this and a little of that, taking clover and wild herbs and native grasses as well as the sward. From that variety it draws a fuller range of minerals and, it seems, a stronger constitution: stock raised on diverse ground tend to be hardier, and to doctor themselves, browsing the very plants that keep them well. It is the difference between a diet and a feed.

We are too quick to pull the weed. Wild plants flower in succession through the season, so that as one nectar source fades another opens - steady food for bees and butterflies from spring to autumn. Their deep, various roots break up hard ground and draw minerals up from below the reach of shallower plants. And a margin of tall, mixed growth is shelter itself: safe cover for the beetle, the vole, and the ground-nesting bird.

Beneath a diverse planting lies a diverse soil. Different roots feed different bacteria and fungi, and that underground crowd is what makes good earth: it holds rain through a dry spell, turns dead leaves and roots back into fertility, and locks away carbon as it does. Feed the soil variety at the surface and it repays you with life below - loose, dark, living ground that resists both drought and disease.

How it was done here

None of this was new. Before the war, farming across South Shropshire - the hills and the broad dales like the Corve - was mixed almost by necessity. The steep, awkward ground never suited large-scale arable, so a single holding kept livestock and grew crops together: the animals manured the fields, the fields fed the animals, and very little was wasted or bought in.

Hardy native stock - the Shropshire sheep among them - grazed unimproved pastures thick with clover and wild herbs. Oats and barley were grown mainly for feed, not for sale, and fields were rotated with clover and turnips to put the goodness back into the soil without a bag of chemicals in sight.

Around every small, irregular field ran an ancient hedge, and those hedges were far more than boundaries. They were living corridors: they sheltered stock from the hill winds, held the soil on the slopes, and housed the insects that kept crop pests in check. It was a whole interlocking system, built up over centuries.

Then, from the late 1950s and through the 1960s, much of it was taken apart - fields thrown together, hedges grubbed out, machinery and chemical fertiliser brought in. What we are doing on our own small patch is, in part, an act of remembering: putting a little of that old, deliberate variety back.

Local farming and landscape history drawn in part from Shropshire Council’s Historic Farmsteads Characterisation Project.