SEDA Land – curvedflatlands

Corn and Stone

Part 1. Origins and arrival in the north

An invitation last year to contribute to a series of online discussions about Stone in Scotland’s history [1] rekindled some previous enquiries into the long association of corn crops and the stone tools used for cutting the crop and grinding its grain to flour [2].

Introduction

This first article in a set of three explains why corn needs stone, briefly covers the 100,000 year old practice of growing corn and grinding seed for food and relates the journeys of corn from over the world to what is now northern Europe.

Topics in future articles include:

Arrival of corn crops in Scotland after retreat of the ice
Change in the type of corn grown and its uses for food and other products
Stone grinding in Scotland – from querns to powered mills
Corn and stone – their importance to civilisation and folklore
End of a partnership? Is there a future for corn and stone.

A note on the word – corn is used here to refer to the seed or the crop of those plant species of the grass family that are commonly known as cereals – including rice, maize, barley and wheat. Their seed is also referred to as grain. These cereals were not present for most of human history, when at various times in various places, people wild-harvested or farmed other grass species. The seed from these wild plants is also referred to as grain.

Figure 1. Rice fields in Bangladesh (left), Hyderabad, India (upper right), and northern Laos. Fields in Bangladesh and Laos are in the rainy season, fields flooded and prepared for planting; that in Hyderabad is in the dry season, irrigated. Images: Squire @ curvedflatlands.

Of the cereals grown today, rice and maize dominate agricultural land in much of the world’s tropical and subtropical regions (Figures 1 and 2). Wheat and barley, and to a lesser degree oat and rye, also attain global coverage, but in temperate or cooler climates. Millets and sorghums are adapted to hot, dry conditions as in sub-Saharan Africa.

Figure 2. Maize out of the Americas (upper left c’wise): in Mulanje district Malawi, young plants; in Brittany, showing male flowers at the top of the stem; maize cobs drying on a wooden balcony in northern Laos; and maize in contour strip farming, Romania (lower left). Images: Squire @ curvedflatlands.

While rice, maize and wheat provide much of the carbohydrate for people and livestock, their rise has been gradual, a tale of trial and error, a sequence broken when civilisations collapse. They have journeyed for thousands of years, across oceans and continents, repeatedly adapting to new environments. More on that below, but first …..

Why corn needs stone

The benefit to people of both wild and domesticated corn crops lies mainly in the seed, which is highly nutritious. Other parts of the crop are also used in various ways, including stems for livestock feed and for thatching. But when dried and preserved, the seed can be carried as societies move around, or stored to be eaten through times of adversity.

The problem is that hard, dry seed is difficult to process, to turn into food. Some such as certain varieties of maize, can be cooked ‘on the cob’, but the seed of most cereals has to be removed from its protective coverings. Dry seed can be softened by wetting it to a state that can be eaten or turned to a drink, but once wetted it soon deteriorates. The only material generally hard enough to remove the coverings and then smash and powder dry seed into meal or flour is stone.

The sequence is much the same today as it always has been. As illustrated in Figure 3 for bere barley [3], plants produce seed on ears held at the top of flowering stems. The ears are harvested when mature and seed separated from the ear by threshing, using variously hand-held implements or complex machinery. The awns – the long, protective bristles seen in Figure 3 (left) – are removed, then the seed is then ground between stones, or sometimes between stone and wood.

The grinding first removes the seed’s outer covering or husk (when it exists) and then converts the seed to a meal or flour. The flour can be stored then made into food by baking or boiling it.

Figure 3. Mature ear of a bere barley crop (left) from which grain (upper right) is threshed, the grain de-hulled and ground into flour (mid-right), and the flour baked into a flatbread (lower right). Bere is a local type of barley once grown widely in Scotland [3] – the background is a field of Orkney bere (Images: @ curvedflatlands).

The procedure in Figure 3 is far from simple. It takes time and skill just to separate clean grain from the crop [4], but the crucial step is using stone to turn grain to meal or flour.

The ancient association of corn and stone

Archaeological studies, for example in East Africa, Australia and Europe are providing more and more evidence that grasses and other plants with hard seeds or roots had been cooked and eaten long before modern cereals appeared, And from the beginning people used carved stone to turn hard plant matter to food.

The map covering Europe, Africa and Australasia in Figure 4 shows dates from some studies that have revealed the early use of stone tools in the preparation of food [5, 6]. (Related work, not shown on Figure 4, has been carried out in the Americas and eastern Asia.) Many different plant species were used for food, notably wild grasses that had the same characteristics of storable, hard seed as the later domesticated cereals.

Figure 4. Locations of some archaeological finds revealing the use of stone tools for preparing grain in Europe, Africa, western Asia and Australia [5, 6]. Numbers show years before the present time. Plant remains at sites before ca. 11,000 years were of wild or semi-cultivated species rather than domesticated cereals such as wheat and barley.

The natural bounty of these plants sustained human life for tens of thousands of years. Their grain and tubers could be stored, then eaten during migration or when fresh food was scarce. The term semi-cultivated as used in Figure 3 is based on evidence – both archaeological, and from today’s indigenous practices – which suggests some of these wild species were ‘farmed’: although the plants were ‘wild’, land was prepared, seed was sown, competition reduced by clearing away other vegetation and produce was harvested [6].

The archaeological evidence shows clearly that prepared stone was used in some cases as a sickle to harvest the plants, but primarily to grind the seed to flour. In Australia, for example, grinding stones have been found at several ancient sites (Figure 5) and many plant species have been used for food. “In Central Australia, for example, native millet (Panicum) and spinifex (Triodia) were commonly used, supplemented by wattle-seed. Elsewhere pigwig (Portulaca oleracea), prickly wattle (Acacia victoriae), mulga (Acacia aneura), dead finish seed (Acacia tetragonophylla) and bush bean (Rhyncharrhena linearis) were mixed into flour.” [6].

Figure 5. A pair of stones for grinding seeds, from Floreck (2014), on the Australian Museum web [6].

And then today’s main cereals appeared …..

Then came one of the main events in human history – the ‘domestication’ of modern cereal crops and their cultivation in settled farming.

Several cultivated species of wheat and barley arose roughly 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, east of the Mediterranean Sea, including einkorn (Triticum monococcum), emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), spelt wheat (Triticum spelta) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). All are still cultivated, but while bread wheat and barley are globally important, the others are more restricted in area, grown for specific products.

Over a similar period, maize was domesticated in the central region of the Americas and rice in eastern Asia. Maize moved overland north and south, and with the advent of sea travel in the last few hundred years, migrated across oceans to other warm climates, often replacing locally adapted species such as millets and sorghums. Modern genetic lines supported with high inputs of fertiliser and pesticide can produce some of the highest crop yields.

And rice moved from eastern Asia across to Europe, and then by sea to the Americas and Australia. Today, rice is mainly grown in rainy seasons on carefully flooded land (Figure 1), but it can be grown irrigated in dry periods, whereas some varieties prefer to be in soil, un-flooded on hillsides.

The evolution of farmed cereals for food, both in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere, was not a sudden transformation. The archaeological evidence referred to above shows the much earlier use of grain from wild or semi-cultivated plants. Even in the Fertile Crescent itself, people had been using stone sickles to cut and harvest wild grasses well before the cultivation of wheat and barley [5], and nearby, in what is now Jordan, evidence was found of bread-baking 14,000 years ago [5].

Migration across Europe

The crops and the knowledge of how to grow them and turn them to food moved slowly, over several thousand years, from east of the Mediterranean Sea across what is now Europe. People travelled north-west across central Europe and west by the Mediterranean and then northwards. The security given by the corn enabled some of the world’s greatest civilisations to grow and flourish.

One example from Ancient Greece shows how corn became embedded in language, beliefs, wealth and commerce. The museum at the archaeological site of Ancient Mycenae in the Peloponnese shows that food crops were given their own ideograms in the Linear B script [7], one of the world’s first writing systems (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Scenes from Ancient Mycenae on the Peloponnese, and ideograms for (right inset, top to bottom) wheat, barley, olives and figs, contained within the Linear B system of writing [7]. Images taken on site 2013: Squire @ curvedflatlands.

The ideogram for barley (second from top in Figure 6, right inset) looks like two glumes or bracts that surround a grain, but that for wheat above it is a little more fanciful. Ideograms such as this represented the word for an agricultural commodity in trade and commerce.

A few miles from Mycenae lies the massive archaeological site of Ancient Messene. The site held a granary and evidence of an additional use of stone in the processing of corn. Tucked away in a corner of the site is a Mensa ponderaria a large stone table in which were cut basins of different volume (Figure 7). These tables were used to define measures, not to aid preparation of food, but to act as official standards for people buying and selling grain and other small-seeded produce.

Figure 7. Scenes from Ancient Messene on the Peloponnese with insets showing the measuring device called a Mensa ponderaria (images taken on site 2013: Squire @ curvedflatlands) and (lower left) another example from Assos recorded by FR Tarbell [7].

These examples from one of the greatest civilisations are a statement of the central importance of corn. Its travels continued across Europe, finally reaching the Atlantic shores and crossing to Scotland 5000-6000 years ago. The date of the neolithic village of Skara Brae on Orkney on Figure 4 shows how recently is Scotland’s experience with corn and stone compared to their use in many other parts of the world.

Figure 8. Remote image of Europe with Scotland contained in the oval, the arrow representing the journey of corn crops from the Fertile Crescent; other words represent the external forces that have shaped corn growing and food processing over the millennia.

Adaptation to local conditions – the formation of landraces

The journeying of corn (and stone) was not a single major push. There were waves of migration, each resulting in much trial and error at every traversed and settled locality. Could a corn be grown here? Would it yield enough to feed the people? Could some be left for trade, to make money?

Gradually, over time, each of the corn species diverged into many local forms known as landraces. Seed was saved from one year to the next and gradually became adapted to the climate and soil of a locality and also to specific needs of food and livestock feed. Whether originating in the Fertile Crescent or on the other side of the Atlantic, all corn existed as landraces for thousands of years. Where are they now?

Today, farming buys most of its seed from specialist companies that select, breed and propagate named varieties using highly technical methods to ensure uniformity, resistance to disease and high yield potential. Over the last 150 years, modern crop varieties have ousted landraces in much of agriculture.

Figure 9. Collection of maize cobs from different landraces still grown in the Maramures region of northern Romania (left) and a landrace in an Italian field. Links to work by Elaina Bitocchi, Roberto Papa and colleagues at reference [8].

Are they all gone? No, landraces still exist in 21^st century Europe, where they are commonly grown for highly valued local food, and hence retain cultural links to past centuries. For example, surveys in a EU-funded project published 2008 found many landraces of maize (Figure 9) were still grown in more than fifteen countries of south and central Europe [8]. More than half the landraces were grown for human food and the rest for livestock feed and several other products.

Not all corn has fared so well. In contrast, only one barley landrace is grown in Scotland, and that until recently in only a few fields in Orkney [8].

The story continues

The arrival of the various forms of wheat, barley, rye and oat in the north-east Atlantic region had lasting impacts on the development of land use, agriculture and wider society. The migration of corn is one of many external forces and influences on the region that include distant cataclysms bringing tsunami, volcanic eruption and radioactivity, also diseases harming people, plants and livestock, and not least the vagaries of trade due to war and blockade. Yet corn cultivation has enabled the people to withstand and recover from all such external forces.

And of course the weather, in Scotland ….. which tends to come from somewhere else, out of our control …… and which gets a bad name for being so changeable and unpredictable. But when compared to most other agricultural regions of the world, that weather is ideal for the cultivation of corn crops – as will be considered in next article in this series.

Contact: curvedflatlands@outlook.com

Part 1 first published in February 2026 then extensively revised in August 2026.

Part 2. The arrival of Corn (and Stone) in Scotland; developments in grinding stones from querns to water powered mills; developments in corn crops, their yields and products up to the last century.

Sources | Links

[1] Thanks to Magdalena Blazusiak of Robert Gordon University (RGU) for the invitation to contribute to Stone Futures 4 – Stone Stories, held online 2 February 2026 as part of a series of talks titled Stone Futures, organised by the Chartered Institute of Architectural Technologists (CIAT), Scottish Ecological Design Association (SEDA), and Historic Environment Scotland. Geoff Squire joined Amy Wilson (RGU) and Magdalena Blazusiak to give presentations and discussion at lunchtime on 2 February. Further information on the session is given at the CIAT and SEDA web sites, where there are also links to the recording.

[2] The author of this article, Geoff Squire, has a long interest in various forms of corn and their influences on the world’s managed ecosystems. He worked in the 1970s and 1980s on the tropical corn crops – millet and sorghum, and a lesser degree maize – and also our local wheat, then continued from the mid-1990s to investigate barley, oats, maize and wheat mainly in Scotland but also in other parts of the UK and Europe. Recent open-access papers covering corn crops in the ecosystem include: Squire, Hawes (2024) Biodiversity for agriculture: the role of integrated farm management in supporting agricultural production through biodiversity. Book Chapter BDS Publishing: link to free download; and Squire, Young, Banks (2023). Post-intensification Poaceae cropping: declining soil, unfilled grain potential, time to act. Photographs in Figure 1 and 2 were taken during work and travelling in various parts of Africa and Asia between 1973 and 2010.

[3] Part 2 of Corn and Stone will examine the arrival and development of corn and stone in Scotland. Further information on corn growing here is available at both curvedflatlands and Living Field web sites. The link to the Bere line-rhymes with hairline leads to a range of articles on cereal species and landraces, traditional food from local corn, the effects on yields due to recent climatic shifts and wars (e.g. Global wheat – status now) and wider views of crops not grown here such as Rice.

[4] Traditional methods of converting grain to flour The steps in separating ears and stem in cereal plants, and then removing the awns and ‘hull’ (outer covering) around the grain need specialist knowledge and machinery.

The following article considers the methods and equipment for taking the hull off grains of the early cereals, emmer, spelt and einkorn. Baker, B. (2015) Dehulling ancient grains: economic considerations and equipment. eOrganic web article available at https://eorganic.org/node/13028. This study was in response to the revival in some areas of some of the first corn species to be domesticated 10,000-12,000 years ago that had fallen from widespread usage.

In the UK, Seed Sovereignty with the Gaia Foundation is active in promoting knowledge of local varieties and methods of small scale processing of corn crops. The following article is available online: Croft Scale Equipment used to process grain. A historical perspective and route to revival – PDF file. The first paragraph reads “The Gaia Foundation is an international charitable organisation with 35 years working alongside Earth’s best custodians and defenders. Seed and food sovereignty for climate change resilience is a central pillar of Gaia’s work. To achieve that work on our islands The Seed Sovereignty UK and Ireland Programme was formed within Gaia to support a biodiverse and ecologically sustainable seed system across Britain & Ireland.”

[5] Scientific articles on the archaeological evidence for the use of stone tools to process seed and corn. Most articles are available for free download from the links given to a journal’s web site. In alphabetical order of first author.

Clarkson, C. et al. (2017) Human occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. Nature Vol 547, doi:10.1038/nature22968

Maeda, O. et al. (2016). Narrowing the harvest: increasing sickle investment and the rises of domesticated cereal agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. Quaternary Science reviews 145, 226-237.

Revedin, A. et al. (2010) Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing. PNAS 107 (44), 18815-18819. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1006993107

[In progress: to be continued.]

[6] In Australia, Anthropologists are reassessing the use of wild and semi-cultivated plants before modern cereals became dominant. Here are some links to that describe archaeological sites, indigenous practice, plant species harvested, and stone grinding tools to convert seeds to meal or flour. The first two papers below give reference to numerous publications which draw attention to the wide range of plant genera and species that have been and still are used as food.

Drake, A., Keitel, C., Pattison, A. 2021 The Use of Australian Native Grains as a Food: A review of Research in a Global Grains. Rangeland Journal 43, 223–233

Jenifer, J., Bell, T.L., Khoddami, A., Pattison, A.L. (2023) Panicum decompositum, an Australian native grass, has strong potential as a novel grain in the modern food market. Foods 12, 2048. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods12102048

The following are shorter reads from Australian Museum web sites. Articles generally give pointers to further reading.

Floreck, S. (2014) Food culture: aboriginal bread. Australian Museum web site: https://australian.museum/blog-archive/science/food-culture-aboriginal-bread/ The quote above Figure 5, describing wild species used for food, is taken from this article.

Australian Museum (2021) Wailwan grindstone. https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/unsettled-introduction/wailwan-grindstone

Wheeler, H. 2022. Grindstones. Australian Museum web: https://australian.museum/learn/cultures/first-nations-collections/cultural-objects/grindstones/

[7] Ancient Mycenae | Ancient Messene | Linear B | Mensa ponderaria Wikipedia gives much information on the two ancient archaeological sites of Ancient Mycenae and Ancient Messene. Both are UNESCO World Heritage sites described on the UNESCO web at Mycenae and Messene.

On Linear B, the Wikipedia web gives a history of the script and lists the phonetic signs and ideograms, the latter, like wheat and barley, indicated items for trade. For the Mensa ponderaria: more photographs and links on the Living Field web at Grain measures in Ancient Greece.

[8] Maize landraces. The work referred to on maize landraces in the text and Figure 8 was by Elaina Bitocchi, Roberto Papa and their colleagues at Universita Polytecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM), Italy, as part of the EU-funded SIGMEA project (workpackage coordinated by GS). Elaina was a doctoral student at that time. Thesis reference: Bitocchi E. 2008. Genetic diversity and introgression in maize landraces from central Italy. PhD thesis, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona (UNIVPM).

[9] Scotland’s bere barley landrace is currently being researched at the James Hutton Institute, Dundee, UK, which has established a bere growers’ network: further information on the Living Field web at Bere barley participatory network.

And finally … A maturing ear of the landrace bere barley adorned with lines from various folk songs that include mention of corn crops, usually barley, and milling; and inset the apocryphal tale of the death and resurrection of John Barleycorn.

Store and flux – it’s a game

Ecosystem stores and fluxes. Local-scale exchanges of energy and matter. Human as well as Biophysical stores. The threat of the big global flux. The basis of a computer game.

Latest … additions to the sources listed for the Picts on page 4.

SEDA Land [1] – a part of the Scottish Ecological Design Association (SEDA) – has been working with students at the University of Abertay Dundee [2] on a computer game in which- after catastrophic events – communities are striving for survival.

Figure 1. The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, built by early settlers who tilled the soil and grazed pasture, opening the way to today’s agriculture. Soils and essential biodiversity are degrading here, but it’s not the dust bowl yet. Images by Squire, inset shows a record (LP) cover – Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie (more below).

In the game, the communities have to provide a minimum of three things from the land – food, shelter and power. They have to grow crops, grass and livestock, make houses and barns from rock and trees, and generate power from turbines and other sources.

Land is in short supply. The communities have to work together or they fail. But there’s something else – a recent cataclysm opened portals to the other side. Standing stones, some with obscure icons carved into them, appeared in the landscape. The ‘veil’ thinned and fantastical creatures passed through, some to help the communities, some to cause mayhem. How will they cope!

Well the first thing (GS said) is to understand ecosystem stores and fluxes [3], first the real, then maybe the metaphysical. Here we look at stores and fluxes at two scales. But first a quick look at another portal, described in a work of poetry by Dante and portrayed by the artist William Blake [4].

From William Blake‘s illustrations of Dante‘s Divine Comedy, Inferno III [4] as Dante and Virgil are about to step through Hell-Gate (from one world to another), where they come across the tortured souls of the INDIFFERENT (those who did nothing?).

Figure 2. At Hell-Gate, between one world of soft leafy trees and another where souls move forever along rising paths through red and blue shards (fire and ice – climatic cycles?). Image taken by GS at the Blake Exhibition, Tate Modern, London, January 2020 [4].

Store and flux at local scales

All ecosystems are subject to large environmental ‘fluxes’ that are essential for life, but that can destroy life if not regulated. Most land-based ecosystems build a ‘store’, which consists of soil, plants, microbes, invertebrates, higher animals, and the ‘dead’ organic matter produced when these organisms shed tissue or die. The organic matter is ‘worked’ by the living things into forms that bind soil particles and hold water and the nutrients essential for life.

The main inward fluxes (Fig. 3) are of solar radiation, water, and in some cases deposition of dust, ash and chemicals carried by moving air. The store processes these fluxes to enable (for example) photosynthesis by plants in which carbon dioxide from the air is converted to plant matter, and fixation of nitrogen from the air by a symbiosis of soil microbes and roots.

Figure 3. Diagram representing ecological stores (in the box) including soil (mineral particles, dead organic matter, etc.) and living matter (plants, microorganisms, invertebrates, etc.), and fluxes of energy and matter into (black lines) and out of (orange lines) the store. Based on Squire & Hawes, 2024 [3].

The main outward fluxes (Fig. 3) are long-wave radiation from the plants and soil that have been warmed by solar energy, evaporation of water (termed transpiration when this moves through plants), gaseous emissions to the air from breakdown of organic matter, further loss of water and materials as surface runoff and drainage to bedrock, and the loss of store particles by the same forms of air movement that also deposit material.

For a system to have resilience, its stores and fluxes have to be balanced. The store must regulate the fluxes to survive. It mostly does so in a natural system. But when people came to use the land, to cut trees, grow crops, and graze animals, they added two extra fluxes: inputs such as cultivation, controlled burn, new seed, livestock, fertiliser and more recently big machines; and offtake of material for food, clothing and timber.

Over time, the inputs and offtake have become so large that they commonly lead to imbalance in the system, generally to its detriment. While managed ecosystems can in principle last for many thousands of years, they can also be destroyed in a few decades by mis-management. Imbalance in store and flux and subsequent destruction of the store for short-term gain, whether intended or through ignorance, is named extractivism. The US Dust Bowl is a classic example (Fig. 4).

From the Dust Pneumonee song by Woody Guthrie

I went to the doctor and the doctor said my son (repeat), You got that Dust Pneumonee and you aint got long, not long.

My good gal sings the Dust Pneumonee Blues (repeat), She loves me cos she’s got the Dust Pneumonee too.

Figure 4. Cover of the classic Woody Guthrie record of songs about the US Dust Bowl released by Folkways some decades ago. The people most affected by such environmental catastrophe are usually the poorest, the vagrant, not those who encourage the change or set the policy. The words above left are from one of the songs; those below from inside the record sleeve [5].

The pioneering ax and plough rapidly upset the interplay of natural forces that had formed and preserved rich soils ….. The same tide that rolled the frontier forward from the Atlantic rolled back nature’s stabilising mantle of trees and grasses and bared virgin soil to weathering.
John Asch

But something is missing from Fig. 3 – the knowledge and experience that people have in managing land is also part of the store …. and no matter how good the management, the store can be affected by distant forces.

The store of knowledge, continuity and community

The diagram in Fig. 3 therefore represents only one part of a managed ecosystem. The other part of the store is held by the People that live and work on the land (Fig. 5). The People not only give to and take from the biophysical store but they form an additional store in terms of their knowledge, experience and social connections.

Figure 5. Diagram to represent an ecosystem in terms of its biophysical components and its communities of people (orange boxes), both under constant threat from large global fluxes, here divided into Biophysical and Human (blue boxes).

Probably more so that at any other time, ecosystem stores are now under threat from extractivism. Inputs and offtake have become so great that they dominate the store. This need not be, and we can learn from those examples of successful stewardship.

Yet well managed systems are under threat from things well outside their control. In talking to the Abertay students, these threats came to be called ‘Big Fluxes’ (Fig. 5).

Threat of the Big Flux

The Big Fluxes can be divided broadly into those having Biophysical and those having Human causes. The Biophysical, such as volcanic eruption, tsunami, flooding, and cycles of global cooling and warming, are outside the control or influence of any parcel of land and its people. Many of the Human causes are also outside local control – take war, blockade, nuclear fallout and the acts of occupying ideologies to force mass starvation and genocide. In some cases, the controlling hands are physically closer to the scene – take the evictions and clearances that depopulated rural Scotland in the 1700s and 1800s.

But some Biophysical forces can in principle be influenced by Human intervention, both inside and outside the land in question. For example, disease epidemics (and pandemics) may have originated well outside the land, but their spread to and within the land could have been limited, more than they have been recently, through better understanding of the infection process and more effective control.

Can anything be done to make the local stores and fluxes in Fig. 3 resilient to a Big Flux? To a degree it can, for some of the Big Fluxes. For example, if agricultural or grazing land is denuded of perennial vegetation, its soil over-cultivated or over-grazed, the organic matter allowed to degrade and the surface left exposed, it will suffer more under flood and storm than if it was properly cared for (Fig. 6). And fire-prone forest and bush can to a degree be protected by creating breaks and reducing the store’s burnable material.

Figure 6. Erosion gulleys like this form in many parts of the world, mainly when gradual soil degradation over a long period (which may be unnoticed) is scaled up to catastrophic erosion during extreme rainfall and flood. Most organic matter, including roots, in the photograph above occupies the upper 10 to 20 cm of soil (short vertical bar). Some roots, mainly of the shrubs, can penetrate the red soil layer to 0.5-1.5 m (long vertical bar). Arrows show the ends of roots exposed after the collapse of the soil into an erosion gulley 5 m deep. Photograph by Squire, south-east Asia, 2014.

Forgetting the Big Fluxes

The situation that needs to be faced, in reality and in the game, is that People forget about the Big Fluxes. There will be another, there’s no doubt, but People fail to prepare for it.

Some Big Fluxes are so infrequent that generations, sometimes centuries, even millennia, pass without experience of them. The last major tsunami to hit Scotland was thousands of years ago and the last volcano to throw its ash this way was Laki, in Iceland in 1783-84.

Others Fluxes are more frequent but governance repeatedly fails to act. In Scotland, and in the UK as a whole, home-grown food production fell well short of feeding the people in the run of bad-weather years in the late 1870s. Rather than giving long-term technological support for agriculture, the government filled the void by importing food from north America, leaving agriculture to suffer and its people to leave the land.

A few decades later, and in the face of blockades in 1914 and 1939, the country again had to rely on imports. Even now when its advanced agricultural technology could in principle feed the people, it would still fall well short in a face of blockade. Extreme climatic events elsewhere could have the same effect. Imagine that drought destroyed the vegetable harvest in Spain and north Africa. Where would the UK get its veggies from?

So ‘memory’ of the big fluxes needs to kept by people, by their communities and in their shared history.

It’s a game

How is all this going to be realised in a computer game? Well not all of it, at this point, but things like soil, vegetation, livestock, rock and power sources can be represented spatially. People have a choice as to whether they build their stores and extract materials sensibly, or let them degrade and ultimately fail.

They might be succeeding, and all looks good, but then what’s the chance of a Big Flux! Can other forces help them? It’s a work in progress.

Further information on soils, agroecological farm practice, early game plans, Pictish art, livestock and related topics discussed with the Abertay students can be found on subsequent pages of this post listed after Sources | Links.

Author | contact: For this article: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk or geoff.squire@outlook.com. For SEDA Land and development of the game: gail@halvorsenarchitects.co.uk. Lorna Dawson at SEFARI Scot gave ideas and information on a range of topics: lorna.dawson@hutton.ac.uk.

Sources | Links!

[1] SEDA Land: https://www.seda.uk.net/seda-land

[2] Abertay University: School of Design and Informatics

[3] Store and flux and related agri-ecosystem processes are described in a book chapter to be published ‘open access’ in September 2024: Squire GR, Hawes C (2024). Biodiversity for Agriculture – the role of integrated farm management in supporting agriculture through biodiversity. In Managing Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes: Conservation, restoration and rewilding. Edited by N Reid and R Smith. Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing.

[4] William Blake (1757-1827) made many illustrations based on events in the Divine Comedy by Dante (1265-1321). Some were shown at an exhibition William Blake at Tate Modern in 2019-2020 and the complete set is now available in a book – Schutze S, Terzoli MA – William Blake – Dante’s Divine Comedy – The Complete Drawings, published by Taschen. The Divine Comedy is available in paperback and in online translations at Project Gutenberg and Digital Dante.

[5] Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie, Folkways Records, 1964: see Smithsonian Folkways. More on the Dust Bowl at livingfield web: Dust Bowl Ballads which includes links to the pioneering work on soils by Hugh Hammond Bennett, e.g. Bennett HH, Chapline WR. 1928. Soil erosion a national menace. Circular No. 33, United States Department of Agriculture.

[6] William Blake and the Dust Bowl were both referred to in an earlier presentation and web resource viewable on the curvedflatlands web at Soil: healing the skin. The healing remedies include Bandage (e.g. coverings) and Ointment (e.g. exudates and other organic matter from grass-crop-tree mixtures). Click for a PDF file of the presentation.

Continued …..

Further background to a range of topics discusssed with Abertay students over the last few month – click on the page number links at the bottom.

Page 2 More on soil degradation under agriculture and forestry and ways to avoid it by Lorna Dawson and Geoff Squire.

Page 3 Early project ideas and descriptions offered to the Abertay students by SEDA Land and James Hutton Institute (Geoff Squire, Lorna Dawson, Gail Halvorsen and Pete Iannetta).

Page 4 Pictish art – some standard books and links to active groups and people.

Page 5 Sheep, cattle, walls and fences – including examples of ancient breeds.

Pages: 12345

Community mapping – food, climate

SEDA Land’s mapping initiatives. Communities, landowners, science, technology, computer gaming. Food sourcing and food security. Local vs global. Spatial data and the need for local knowledge. Building resilience to global disruption.

SEDA Land arose from the Scottish Ecological Design Association’s 2021 Land Conversations as an active and inclusive grouping intent on exploring and then influencing the way we value and manage land and water [1].

One of the first developments from the Land Conversations was an idea to ‘map’ the land around a place or community for its capacity to provide for the people, now and in the future. That capacity included food, water, wood, open space and a sense of place. The ideas quickly developed and by early 2022 took form through collaborations between many people and organisations in a project called Mapping Future Food and Climate Change.

A map of fields (inset) on a farmed landscape, Aberdeenshire (original photograph by GS).

Community – land – science – art – gaming

A pilot study began in 2022, based on the locality of Huntly, comprising a range of community groups, schools and local landowners [2]. Scientific institutions are providing knowledge of soil, crops, food, carbon storage, greenhouse gas emissions [3] and expertise in computer gaming [4]. The main elements of the pilot study are as follows.

The land in and surrounding the town, and its nature, shape, occupancy, community involvement and ownership.
The biophysical status of the land, its climate and weather, bedrock and soil, carbon storage, biodiversity.
Structure of the land – mapping ‘parcels’ or units of management (e.g. fields, woods) and what they produce or contribute.
The community’s use of locally-grown products versus the import of things grown on resources elsewhere.
The meaning of the land to the people, expressed through tradition, art craft, music [1].
Definition and analysis of spatial and temporal ‘layers’ (e.g. area, soil, climate, use, inputs, outputs) to understand the current value and limitations of the land and its future potential for delivering benefits such as food security, C sequestration, biodiversity and community involvement.
Expressing all of the above through computer gaming.

But where do we begin … ?

Fig. 1 Map of the Climatic Conditions in Scotland, published 1970-72 by Birse and colleagues at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research [5].

Mapping the biophysical, economic and political landscape of Scotland has a history going back several hundred years. The climatic maps produced in the early 1970s from the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research (Fig 2) are among the most spectacular. The arable-grass agricultural land lies mostly in the red and yellow areas around the east coast and across the central belt.

In the half-century since Fig. 1, digital maps have become the norm, now available online for many features – including land classification, soil and soil carbon content, erosion and compaction risk, and land suitability for agriculture and forestry [6]. The study based around Huntly will be able to use the maps, and the data behind the maps.

Fig. 2 An area of land, a few kilometers in diameter, in which the individual parcels are identified, each having the potential for distinct and different land use [7].

Mapping land and land use

The patterning of the land is one of the first things to appreciate, and in particular the division of the land into the units of management. Why is this important? Well … suppose three fields have similar soil, slope (etc.) but one is woodland, another is grassland and the third is cropland. They all differ in what they produce, their agrochemical and mechanical inputs, the carbon they store, the biodiversity they support and what they conserve or release to the wider environment. Therefore the management of the field is just as important as its underlying qualities.

Mapping fields and other land parcels in fine detail is now possible (Fig. 2). Their shapes can be made visible and to a large degree, but not completely, the use of the land in each parcel can also be defined. Without even visiting the area, the parcels containing established vegetation such as woodland and marsh can be identified from remote sensing and each of the agricultural parcels can be separated into grassland and arable (or cropped land) using data from government census.

The sequence of crops grown in an arable field can also be defined, and from that, combined with data on soil, climate, outputs (yield, etc.) and inputs (agrochemicals, etc.), the capacity for carbon storage end emissions can be estimated or modelled.

Let’s get on with the mapping.

Fig. 3 The parcels of land in Fig. 2 supporting grass for livestock grazing (left), crops such as barley (centre) and a variety of other uses in agriculture and forestry (right) [7].

Given the right information [7], the shapes can be coloured to show the different forms of land use. In the example in Fig. 3 – based on the field patterns in Fig. 2 – the first to go in is grassland (Fig. 3 left), then tilled or arable land (centre) and third, the remaining areas consisting of woodland, vegetables and fruit, minor crops that occupy relatively few fields, and also semi-natural vegetation (right).

When all land parcels have been identified, the map looks as in Fig. 4: a complex mosaic of land use types that gives the Atlantic zone maritime its unique features. Some of the patterning originated hundreds, even thousands of years ago. Like much of lowland Scotland, and despite removal of the original vegetation, the fields are diverse in size and shape, with little evidence of prairie agriculture that continues to degrade so much once-natural land in many parts the world.

Fig. 4 The three parts of Fig. 3 brought together, where each colour represents a distinct type of land use [7].

Limits to data – the need for local knowledge

Because of the way land use has been recorded historically, the arable fields can be defined by the crops grown in them, such as barley, oats, wheat, beans, peas, oilseed rape, potato, turnips, and so on. However, grassland – which often occupies the most land in regions of lowland Scotland – tends to be lumped in just a few categories. In the current census, the two categories are grass present in a field for under 5 years and grass in its fifth year and over. This lack of definition in grassland obscures the great variation found across Scotland’s managed grass in terms of biodiversity, soil carbon content, fertiliser inputs, greenhouse gas emissions and grazing potential.

Several other factors important for the study cannot be gained from current surveys. It is not possible to know from remote sensing or census data the quality and purpose of the product and whether it is consumed locally or exported from the area. For example, a field of cereal (barley, wheat or oats) could be used for malting (alcohol), livestock feed or milling to produce flour. The cereal feed might be given to livestock on the same farm or sold to a merchant to be used in another place. Even much of the grain used for milling – though small in quantity compared to malting and feed – will be sold to merchants for distribution elsewhere.

And it’s not possible to know what the landscape means to the people who live in the area. So for these unknown or uncertain features, we must add in local knowledge ….. that provided by the general community and the people that manage the land.

Next steps

SEDA Land, the Huntly Community interests and the academic partners are now looking to obtain grant funding. In the meantime, several of those involved will be scoping the digital mapping and other background data available online and members of the mapping group (1-4] will be getting to know each other through meetings, real and virtual.

By way of introduction to the project, SEDA Land is preparing a set of questions asking people’s perceptions of what the land around Huntly provides – for example, how much food and timber is grown locally rather than imported. The questions are intended primarily for schools but will be available to any in the community.

Fig. 5 Map of a region in Scotland showing land in broad categories: the lower altitudes support arable (crops) and grass, shown in green and yellow; the higher reaches, especially to the top of the image holding mainly rough grazing. Map prepared by the James Hutton Institute as a contribution to Nourish Scotland’s work on food systems [7].

Spatial scales and land categories

One of the first things the group will consider is the spatial scales at which data will be recorded and the categories into which land is divided. An example of broad land use categories is given in Fig. 5, which represents a tract about 30 miles at its widest. This sort of mapping gives a quick guide to the general possibilities for food and timber production. Green and yellow is already under managed agriculture. Orange, which covers more than half the area, is of low productivity, mostly used for extensive grazing of sheep, but offers possibilities, for example, of woodland regeneration.

Fig. 6 An area of land, lower altitudes to the bottom-right containing many small fields (average area around 7 ha), rising in height to large units of more open moorland at the top [7].

Much finer detail can be defined, as in Fig. 2-4, giving clues as to how local topography, soil, microclimate and past management determine the patterning of fields and what can be grown in them.

The fields and other units in a tract of land a few kilometers wide are shown in Fig. 6. The area to the bottom of the image, comprising many small fields, has been in agricultural use for thousands of years, but records exist of its conversion into high-quality arable and grass from the time of the monastic improvements beginning in the 1200s. The top of the image is higher land which would have been woodland in prehistory, but now comprises large units of open moor or rough grazing. The strands of small fields running down from the moorland identify water courses. Fig. 6 is taken from the upper left of the larger area shown in Fig. 7.

The scientific contributors will assist with defining scales and data, but anyone with interest in the project can begin now with online and free-to-use mapping through the National Library of Scotland and Ordnance Survey [8].

The curvedflatlands web site will be publishing further news, posts and comment over the coming months and maintains a growing inventory of relevant data sources [9]. The SEDA Land web pages [1] will be the formal point of contact for the project.

Fig. 7 Fields and other land units delineated over a landscape bordering the sea (in white), two crop types identified by orange and yellow colour; width 47 km. From work by Nora Quesada, Graham Begg and Geoff Squire at the James Hutton Institute [7].

Sources | Links

[1] SEDA Land is part of the Scottish Ecological Design Association: https://www.seda.uk.net/seda-land. A working group within SEDA Land, including all the participants, is taking forward the work on community mapping. Primary contact for the project: Gail Halvorsen, email: gail@halvorsenarchitects.co.uk. As in the Land Conversations, writing, poetry, art, craft and music will be integral. Contact: Sophie Cooke (sophie.cooke1@open.ac.uk).

[2] Primary contact: Huntly Development Trust www.huntlydevelopmenttrust.org. Email: Jill Andrews (jill.andrews@huntly.net). Local schools and landowners are active in the project.

[3] The scientific input is guided by the James Hutton Institute and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). Contacts at JHI: Lorna Dawson (lorna.dawson@hutton.ac.uk) and Cathy Hawes (cathy.hawes@hutton.ac.uk). Contact at SRUC: Mads Fischer-Moller (Mads.Fischer-Moller@sruc.ac.uk).

[4] The University of Abertay, Dundee, will be working towards gaming design through a post-graduate student group starting later in 2022. Contact: Kenneth Fee (k.fee@abertay.ac.uk).

[5] E L Birse and colleagues at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research (now part of the James Hutton Institute) produced three classic maps on the Assessment of the Climatic Conditions in Scotland. The one shown is the last of the three, credits as follows:

[6] The James Hutton Institute’s online resources: Scotland’s Soil Data and other maps accessible from that page .

[7] Data for defining land use (crops, grass, etc .) in Fig. 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 came from EU’s Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) and was spatially analysed by Nora Quesada, Graham Begg and Geoff Squire at the James Hutton Institute. The maps in Fig. 4 and 7 were published some years ago on the Living Field web site at Scaperiae. Contact: graham.begg@hutton.ac.uk.

[8] Online map resources The National Library of Scotland has an increasing range of historical maps available online at the Map Images Homepage. The Ordnance Survey’s extensive downloadable resources are at Open Data Downloads and for education, see Free Education Resources for Teachers, and Digimap for Schools.

[9] curvedflatlands is compiling an inventory of mostly online data on land, soil, vegetation, biodiversity, climate, etc., which will be updated as new material becomes available: Sources of Information.

Author / Contact: GS has been working with SEDA to develop the 2021 Land Conversations, is on the steering group of SEDA Land and keeps (honorary) links with the James Hutton Institute. email: geoff.squire@outlook.com or geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

[Page online 10 March 2022, minor edits 27 March 2022]