183 Harvests, £41,300 A Year. The Form Has No Box For ‘Keep Measuring’.

FERNHURST, Hertfordshire — Forty-one thousand three hundred pounds a year. One technician's post at £31,900 including on-costs, £4,100 to a contractor who cuts and carts, and £5,300 of laboratory analysis.

That is the cost of keeping the oldest continuously running field experiment on earth running for another twelve months. Between 2011 and 2019, nine applications for that money were refused.

This desk has read all nine, and every reviewer comment attached to them. There is no antagonist in the file. Not one reviewer is hostile. Several are admiring, and one of them apologises.

What is in the ground

The Sixteen Acres at Fernhurst was pegged out into twenty-four strips in the spring of 1843 and sown with wheat.

The same strips have been sown with wheat every year since. Strip 3 has had nothing on it for 183 years. Strip 8 has had fourteen tonnes of farmyard manure every autumn. Strip 15 has had the same ammonium salts at the same rate, in the third week of April, for 183 springs.

One hundred and eighty-three harvests, with no gap. Not for either war. Not for 2001, when the grain was cut by two men who were already living on the site because nobody else could cross the restriction.

Every harvest, soil and grain from every strip go into sealed glass jars. The jars are not opened. They are stacked in the order they were filled, in a brick building with a slate roof and no heating, and there are about three hundred thousand of them.

The objection, nine times

All nine applications went to the responsive-mode scheme of the Biological and Rural Sciences Council, which scores out of ten on novelty, hypothesis, approach and impact. The funding line sat between 7.2 and 7.6 throughout.

The nine scored 5.1, 5.4, 4.9, 5.6, 5.2, 5.0, 5.5, 5.1 and 4.8.

The comments are all one comment. The applicants do not state a testable hypothesis. This is a proposal to continue an existing activity. Excellent resource; unclear research question.

Professor Yusuf Lindqvist-Abara chaired the panel for two of the nine and does not resile from either score.

"You are asking me whether the form is stupid," he said. "The form is not stupid. The form exists to choose between forty hypotheses when there is money for six, and it does that well. It cannot score a thing that makes no hypothesis, because scoring is comparison, and a measurement has nothing to be compared with. There is no box on it for keep measuring. There has never had to be one. Nobody refused it. It scored 5.1 against a line of 7.4, and that is the whole of it."

What the jars have already done

The station's own count is that 2,141 published papers have drawn on the archive. The arrival of radiocaesium after 1963. Lead going in, and lead coming out again after 1986. Four separate revisions of what nitrogen does to soil carbon, two of which overturned the one before.

Every one of those papers used a jar filled by somebody with no idea what would be asked of it.

The Council's 2021 impact case for its Soil Health Platform cites four of them. We put that to the press office in writing. The answer is that impact cases draw on the published literature irrespective of funder, which is true, and which is the answer.

The schoolteacher

In February 2019, after the ninth refusal, the station gave the Sixteen Acres twelve months.

In November 2019 Miss Winifred Callowhill died at Kettering, aged ninety-one. A retired schoolteacher. She had visited Fernhurst once, in 1978, on a coach trip, and in 1994 she made a will leaving it £427,000.

At £41,300 a year that is ten years and four months. It runs out in July 2030.

Nothing else moved. The scheme is the same scheme. The form is the same form.

What happened when we offered

This newspaper wrote on 4 August offering to pay the technician's post for five years. Dr. Iolanthe Ferreira-Mowbray declined on 5 August.

Her letter runs at the foot of this page, unedited. It is the best argument in this story and it is against us, and it also corrects a sentence in our draft that we had thought was safe.

She is right on both counts. A paper that writes about a site cannot pay for the site. We would not accept it from anybody else and we should not have asked.

What this desk takes from it

We went looking for a villain and came back with a scoring rubric.

A measurement is worth more the longer it runs, and a scheme built to fund the newest idea in the room will always rank it last, and both of those are correct at the same time. That is not a scandal. It is a gap between two things that are each working as designed.

The form has not been changed. Nobody with standing has asked for it to be, and the station will not ask, because the station is a claimant and knows how that reads.

Somewhere there is a committee that could add one box. We spent six weeks trying to establish which committee, and we could not.