Suzanne Campbell

Philip Matty in Northampton.

Well, that is good in so far as it goes, but it is very expensive and it won't be any use in the fields doing silage cutting, ploughing, slurry spreading and so on.

But there is a battery-powered answer to both of those questions coming up a little bit later on in the programme.

If our theme this morning is weaning food production and farming off fossil fuels, the thing that needs to be looked at most closely is chemical fertiliser.

It takes the equivalent of six barrels of oil at $95 a day, a barrel, to make a tonne of urea.

And a tonne of urea will get you around one field between 15 and 30 acres, depending on how rich you're feeling.

So when the price gets up to €1,000 a tonne, you can see why it is that it makes farmers wince.

There are, though, ways of farming without any chemical fertiliser, and there are plenty of people doing it.

Yes, they lose a little productivity, but they make massive savings on their fertiliser bills.

Suzanne Campbell went to Leash to talk to Brian Meredith and his father Keith, organic beef and tillage farmers who do what they do with zero fossil fuel based synthetic fertiliser.

Looking at this grass, it's absolutely fabulous.

You're not using any artificial fertiliser.

So what's your routine with your grass growth?

Because we're organic now, we probably have twice as much dung as we had when we were conventional.

Then Dad, they had a dairy farm before, so there was a lot of paddicking.

So it kind of allows us to control the rotation a bit and allows us to grow more grass.

I guess paddicking and all that grassland management is even more important when you go organic because we haven't got the option to accelerate grass growth with synthetic fertiliser.

There's no short-term fix.

And the first year, when you stopped using synthetic fertiliser, was the grass growth, was it lower than it usually is?

How many are in this bunch?