Farmer-led soil science for resilience in a warming world - 8. 9ha
Professor Andy Neal has spent years working on some of the world’s most famous long-term agricultural experiments, including at Rothamsted. This gave him access to extraordinary datasets and a deep grounding. . .
Professor Andy Neal has spent years working on some of the world’s most famous long-term agricultural experiments, including at Rothamsted. This gave him access to extraordinary datasets and a deep grounding in what happens when soil is degraded. What it didn’t give him was enough insight into what happens when soil is rebuilt — because almost nobody had been measuring that, and almost nobody had been doing it at scale, on working farms, for long enough to matter. That gap is the reason the Centre for Dynamic Soils now exists. Founded by Neal, alongside Devon farmer and meat industry insider, Andy Gray, and grounded by co-director Mel Bradley, the Centre brings together three organisations already recognised as pioneers of regenerative practice — Yeo Valley, Wildfarmed and Waitrose — into a single collaborative research platform. Rather than Neal advising three separate companies on three separate problems, the ambition is for the partners to work as a collective, sharing questions, sharing data, and learning from each other’s contexts as much as from the science itself. Beyond the glyphosate argumentThe conversation begins, as it often does with Neal, on glyphosate — a subject he has become closely associated with, not because he advocates for it but because his research has tried to move the debate away from ideology and towards evidence. His position is consistent: both ploughing and glyphosate damage soil, and the question that matters is not which one is virtuous but when each is appropriate. Direct drilling with glyphosate preserves the soil structure that builds up during periods without disturbance — structure that governs how water infiltrates, how flooding and drought are buffered, and how oxygen moves through the soil profile, allowing microbial communities to build biomass aerobically rather than working anaerobically. Ploughing destroys that structure in a single pass. But glyphosate misused — applied every year, at the wrong pH, without strategic thought — breeds resistance and eventually stops working altogether, forcing a return to the plough regardless. For Neal, the point was never to pick a side. It was to give farmers evidence robust enough that they could make an informed, strategic choice about their own ground, rather than defaulting to habit or dogma. That same instinct — evidence over ideology, and a refusal to pre-judge the answer — runs through everything the Centre for Dynamic Soils is trying to build. Why farmer-led research looks differentNeal’s core frustration with institutional soil science is structural. Long-term experiments on university land are invaluable for understanding degradation, but they say little about what innovative farmers are doing right now, and results from any single farm are always shadowed by doubt about whether the practice was implemented well. A poor result from a herbal ley might simply mean it was a poorly established herbal ley, not that herbal leys don’t work. Working directly with farmers who are already recognised as being at the leading edge of regenerative practice helps removes that ambiguity. If the Centre studies a herbal ley on a Wildfarmed or Yeo Valley farm, it can be confident it is looking at the practice implemented about as well as it can currently be implemented — which means a disappointing result is real information. Running the same management question across many different farms, soil types and climates then allows genuine patterns to emerge, rather than a single institutional plot standing in for the whole of British agriculture. Andy Gray brings a farmer’s version of the same argument. His own Devon farm has effectively become a live research platform in its own right — trials of living mulches under maize, twenty-six acres of silvopasture run with a multi-NGO partnership, AI-camera dung beetle monitoring, carbon and net-zero work with partners including the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. His conviction, sharpened by years of exactly this kind of on-farm trial and error, is that research has to be farmer-led, has to run on a fast feedback loop, and has to be honest about the fact that what works in one field this year may not work in the same field next year, let alone on someone else’s soil entirely. Gray’s route into soils research is unusual by his own admission. A thirteenth-generation Devon farmer, he built a career of thirty-five years in the meat business — describing himself, with evident relish, as a slaughterman rather than a farmer — before buying his own farm roughly two decades ago and discovering, after a few years, that he had comprehensively wrecked its soil. That direct experience of degradation is, he argues, exactly the competitive advantage he brings to the partnership: not the soil science itself, which is Neal’s domain, but the logistics, the back-office structure, and the practical understanding of what it actually takes to run a business while trying to do the right thing by the land. What the partners bringYeo Valley, Wildfarmed and Waitrose were not, by Gray and Neal’s account, a difficult sell. All three had existing relationships with Neal, had been quietly collecting their own soil data for years as part of their regenerative commitments, and already shared enough of a common ethos and existing dialogue with each other that the Centre’s proposal landed as an obvious next step rather than a pitch. Yeo Valley helped establish the legal structure; Mel Bradley set up the Centre as a Community Interest Company. The result, Neal argues, is more powerful than three bilateral advisory relationships would have been, because the partners already understood each other’s philosophies well enough to see immediately where collaboration made sense and where their questions overlapped rather than duplicated. Critically, the agreement gives the Centre complete editorial independence. If the research turns up something inconvenient for one of the funding partners, the Centre retains the right to publish it anyway — a condition Neal says both sides wanted written into the agreement from the outset, and one that speaks directly to the credibility problem facing much company-funded science. The first phase of work is less glamorous than new experimentation but arguably more urgent: making sense of the data the three partners have already collected. Soil carbon stocks, bulk density, management history, soil texture, geography — baseline information gathered over years by businesses too busy running complex operations to fully analyse it themselves. Tying that data together is, in Neal’s view, the necessary foundation for everything that follows, because it establishes the context — soil type, climate, existing management — within which specific questions such as the effectiveness of mob grazing, or the comparative value of silvopasture, can actually be tested rather than guessed at. Specific research questions are already forming. How does spraying versus ploughing affect the functional microbiology of UK soils specifically — an area Neal notes is well studied for the physical effects of ploughing but poorly evidenced when it comes to how microbial communities actually respond to glyphosate use in this country. Where does mob grazing outperform alternatives, and on which soil types. Should silvopasture be extended more widely than it currently is. Each question will be tested not on a single representative farm but across the range of soils and climates the three partners’ businesses already span. A UK problem with a global backdropMuch of the work will necessarily be centred on UK soils and UK farming systems, shaped by the businesses involved. But Neal is candid that the Centre cannot ignore what is happening elsewhere. Conditions once associated with Australia and the American Great Plains are becoming more frequent in Britain, and Neal frames the work with a real sense of urgency: soils need to reach a resilient state within a narrowing window. Soil, as he puts it, doesn’t shift on a dime — some questions will yield relatively quick answers, but others will require years of patient observation before the consequences of a management change become visible. That timeframe is, he argues, precisely why long-term, trusted relationships between scientists and farming businesses matter more than short funding cycles ever could. Farmers, funding, and what happens nextFor now, the Centre’s farmer network will draw primarily on growers already connected to Yeo Valley, Wildfarmed and Waitrose, though Gray is clear that the structure allows for wider collaboration too — the Centre has already put in a bid for Landscape Recovery funding covering Central Dartmoor, East Dartmoor and Walkham Valley, and both founders are keen that it grows beyond what Gray jokingly calls “the Andy Neal show” into an organisation capable of employing more people and freeing up scientific time for the work that actually needs a professor’s attention, rather than routine fieldwork. Whether and how farmers will be paid for their time and management input is, by Gray’s own admission, still being worked out — a question of building the financial model rather than a point of principle. Both founders describe the Centre’s approach as a departure from a funding environment they see as increasingly stretched, offering the combination of scientific rigour and industry relevance that neither pure academic research nor conventional agronomy consultancy quite manages alone: research pure enough to publish, applied enough to matter immediately to the businesses funding it, and — crucially — free to say so when the results are inconvenient. More information is available atcentrefordynamicsoils. org