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Timber Talks Podcast: Craig Sams Pioneering Carbon-Conscious Practices in Food and Forestry
From Forestrydegree.net:
Lessons You’ll Learn:
Listeners will gain valuable insights into the benefits of biochar, particularly its role in supporting the soil microbiome, enhancing soil fertility, and aiding in carbon sequestration. Craig explains how biochar helps retain soil nutrients and moisture, making it an essential component for sustainable forestry and agriculture. The episode also explores the emerging technologies and practices that are transforming the forestry industry, including the use of biochar in urban tree planting, agriculture, and even road construction. Additionally, Craig discusses the importance of carbon pricing and the potential future of biochar in global environmental strategies.
Craig Sams is the Executive Chairman of Carbon Gold Limited, a company at the forefront of biochar and sustainable soil solutions. With a background in organic food, Craig transitioned into the world of sustainable forestry after realizing the profound impact of soil health on climate change. He has been instrumental in promoting the use of biochar in various industries, from agriculture to urban planning. Craig is also a former chairman of the Soil Association and has been a vocal advocate for carbon pricing as a means to incentivize sustainable farming and forestry practices. His innovative approach to soil health continues to influence global discussions on sustainability.
Topics Covered
This episode covers a range of topics related to sustainable forestry and biochar. Craig Sams discusses the origins of Carbon Gold and the company’s mission to promote biochar as a tool for soil health and carbon sequestration. The conversation explores the science behind biochar, its benefits for soil microbiomes, and its applications in agriculture and urban forestry. Craig also highlights the importance of regulatory frameworks like carbon pricing in driving sustainable practices. Additionally, the episode touches on the potential future of biochar in global environmental strategies, including its use in construction and even space exploration.
.About the Guest: Craig Sams Executive Chairman Carbon Gold Ltd
Craig Sams is a visionary entrepreneur and pioneer in the fields of organic food and sustainable agriculture. He co-founded Whole Earth Foods, a company that championed the organic food movement in the UK and brought natural, healthy products like organic peanut butter and cornflakes to the mainstream. Craig’s journey into sustainability didn’t stop at food; he later co-founded Green & Black’s, an organic chocolate company known for its commitment to ethical sourcing and environmental stewardship. Under his leadership, Green & Black’s became the first company to launch a product certified as carbon neutral, highlighting Craig’s dedication to reducing the environmental impact of food production. His early adoption of carbon-conscious practices set a precedent that continues to influence the industry today.
Transitioning from organic food to forestry, Craig founded Carbon Gold Limited, a company that specializes in biochar—a form of charcoal used to enhance soil health and sequester carbon. Craig’s interest in biochar was sparked by the discovery of terra preta, an ancient soil enrichment technique used by indigenous peoples in the Amazon. He recognized the potential of biochar to improve soil fertility, retain moisture, and reduce nutrient runoff, making it a vital tool in the fight against climate change. Today, Carbon Gold is at the forefront of promoting biochar in agriculture and forestry, offering sustainable soil solutions that support long-term environmental health. Craig’s innovative approach has positioned him as a leading figure in the sustainable forestry sector.
Beyond his entrepreneurial ventures, Craig has played a significant role in shaping the broader sustainability agenda. As the former chairman of the Soil Association, the UK’s leading organic certification body, he has been a vocal advocate for organic farming, carbon pricing, and sustainable land management. His work with the Soil Association helped to elevate the importance of soil health in the public consciousness and pushed for policies that recognize the environmental benefits of organic farming. Craig’s contributions to sustainability extend beyond business; he is a thought leader who continues to influence global discussions on environmental stewardship and the role of agriculture and forestry in mitigating climate change.
Episode Transcript
Mindy: Welcome to another episode of Timber Talks, the podcast, where we dive deep into the world of forestry and arboriculture. I’m your host, Mindy, and today we have a very special guest with us, Craig Sams, the Executive chairman of Carbon Gold Limited. Craig has been a pioneer in sustainable forestry practices, and his company is at the forefront of innovations and biochar and soil health. Welcome, Craig. Can you tell us about the origins of carbon, gold and the journey towards becoming a leader in biochar and sustainable soil solutions? And I would also like to add, could you define what biochar is for our listeners?
Craig Sams: Okay. First of all, my background isn’t in forestry. It’s in food, and that’s mainly an organic food. And I didn’t really start working with trees until I was moved on from my peanut butter business, which was called Whole Earth, to my chocolate business, which was called Green and Blacks. And suddenly I was dealing with a tree crop, cocoa beans. In the days of my food business, I launched a brand of corn flakes called Whole Earth, and we also launched a brand, Organic Corn Flakes. And we discovered that we didn’t have to pay for many carbon credits because the corn was grown organically and the farmers added carbon to the soil every year. Where they grew the corn, and that offset almost the rest of the carbon footprint of making the corn flakes, packaging them and shipping them, distributing them. And that’s when I realized that organic farming certainly is a way of dealing with the challenge of climate change. And I was the treasurer and then chairman of the Soil Association, which is our organic body here. And,, so I pushed for us to campaign for carbon pricing because, you know, if you’re an organic farmer, the big problem you have is people say, oh, organic food is too expensive. The minute you price in carbon. Organic food in most cases would actually be cheaper.
Craig Sams: That made me aware of the importance of carbon. Then I read a book that described terra preta, which is something they found in Brazil in what used to be before the Amazon rainforest took over the Amazon farming district of South America. In other words, the people there in their finding it. Every time they clear the rainforest, they find evidence that there were farmers there and they were making biochar out of all kinds of waste. They just dig a pit in the ground, throw in their food, waste any other waste, woodland waste, set fire to it, burn it without letting oxygen in. In other words, making charcoal. But the instead of burning the charcoal like like we do in barbecues or whatever, they would spread it on their lamb and it created these fertile patches of land in Brazil, where farmers would actually just sell truckloads of their soil to neighbors who didn’t have that kind of land because of the difference it made to fertility. So that’s when I thought, well, there’s this is something that should be marketed to farmers and growers in Britain. And so I founded a company called Carbon Gold, and we launched a range of products that were based on biochar. And basically biochar is charcoal.
Craig Sams: It’s ground up fine so that it really penetrates the soil. And once it’s in the soil, it has various benefits. The main one is it supports the mycorrhizal network in the soil. This is the microbiome of the soil. All the little fungi and bacteria that make for healthy soil. It also retains water. It helps to reduce the runoff of water, which often when you have runoff of water, you have runoff of the soil nutrients as well, which you don’t want to lose. And to support that, it has something called cation exchange capacity. So the biochar itself has lots of positive and negative points on it that stick to nitrates and phosphorus and other soil nutrients so that they don’t wash away when it rains. So when you put it in the soil, you are building up that mycorrhizal community, which ultimately fungi are not immortal. Bacteria are not immortal. When they die, their bodies, their cells become carbon as well. They break. So you build up soil organic matter more rapidly if you have biochar in the soil. So you’re building up long term fertility at the same time as you’re hanging on to the soil nutrients and to moisture. So that’s the difference between biochar and the charcoal that you might barbecue your sausages with.
Mindy: Okay. Well, in the US we we’ve been playing around with the carbon credits and stuff like that, but that really hasn’t. I know Europe with the ESG is you know, they have goals and stuff established. But in the US we’re typically slow at adopting some new ideas as far as agriculture or forestry goes. How has the forestry industry evolved over the years in terms of sustainability and environmental impact.
Craig Sams: Both up and down at the outset? You know, one of the things that’s happening in Europe at the end of this year is what’s called the UDR, which is the EU regulation on deforestation free products. So there’s going to start to be more control over food produced in the EU and important to the EU to make sure that there’s no deforestation associated with it., I founded a chocolate business in the farmers use bio char. They make their own, but an awful lot of cacao comes from deforested land. And because the stuff we use is organic, it’s the trees have shade trees to keep them healthy. But modern sort of ethnically chemically advanced cacao production uses chemical sprays to fight fungal diseases like black pod. And then you end up with the degraded soil and the need for more chemical fertilizer. Now the Forestry Stewardship Council and something called the Pefc program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification are both rising up the agenda. In Britain. We have the UK Woodland Assurance standard as well, the Soil Association, which I used to be chairman of, and I’m still on the board of the certification part.
Craig Sams: It’s a charity, but it has a certification business now certifies woodland to that standard and is rapidly expanding its role in certifying sustainable woodland and forestry and the associated products. And I think that’s the future. And the more that there is a legal requirement that deforestation doesn’t happen, the more it’s not going to happen. On the other hand, we still in Britain import huge ship loads of woodchips from Louisiana., that comes from forests in Arkansas that are planted, harvested, turned into woodchips, shipped to Britain. A wood pellets, I should say shipped to Britain and burned in a power station called Drax up in Yorkshire, where all the carbon that those trees have sequestered over the previous 30 years ends up back in the atmosphere in a couple of days. ,, to generate electricity and it you know, when you take into account that carbon footprint, it would be better to use oil, gas anything than wood. But. It’s renewable. And for a while that was what everybody wanted. Right, right.
Mindy: Could you give us some examples of the innovative technologies and practices that Carbon Gold has implemented to improve soil health and carbon sequestration?
Craig Sams: Sequestration? Yes. Yes. The. Well, one of the things we’re quite excited about is the Stockholm tree pit method. Mhm. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.
Mindy: No I haven’t.
Craig Sams: Well, Bjorn Hembrom was the chief environment officer of Stockholm in Sweden. He developed something called tree pits where he would just put crushed granite into a sort of framework. And the urban trees, I mean, if you’re a tree in town, you’ve got to deal with the fact that they’re building, sticking up, that are getting in the way of your sunlight. There are cars and trucks rbling away, causing vibration that rattles your roots. The polluting and noise and not a lot of fertility. Bjorn started by using crushed stone crushed granite. He now adds bone. Stockholm is there that pioneered it. They add our biochar mix, which also has worm casts, seaweed powder for trace minerals, mycorrhizal fungi and something called Trichoderma. So you get a really strong biology with the biochar. The trees don’t need any other. They. Well, somebody asked Bjorn. So where is the soil in all of this? He says, don’t worry. The microbes will make the soil. It’s absolutely right, you know, the soil builds up as the trees get bigger. And it’s now being adopted in London, in Bristol, in New York, in quite a few towns in the UK. Now, people are planting urban trees because it means they last longer and they grow better in that sort of thing. So we’re quite excited about that. We also supply fruit growers. So there’s a apple grower in Shropshire up north, planted 2000 apple trees a few years ago. He expected, you know, normally 10 to 15% don’t quite make it. The only apple tree of those 2000 that didn’t make it was the one that he accidentally ran over with his tractor.
Craig Sams: But otherwise they all established they started fruiting earlier than he expected. We cocoa farmers that we work with in Belize, we gave them a couple of kilns so they could make their own biochar, and they now use it on cocoa production. And it’s pretty much having it in the soil has eliminated Black Spot, which is the curse of cocoa growers, because a beautiful cocoa pod suddenly develops this fungal infection and you can’t, you know, you just have to throw it away and hope that the rest of the tree isn’t infected. So those are the kind of examples of the kind of success we’ve had with trees. It really makes a difference in connecting a tree to the biology, the soil microbes, the biology, the microbiome, the biology of the soil and the. Once the tree is connected to that, it has a whole army of microbes on its side, bringing it food, giving it medicine, dealing with,, any problems that tree might have. And in exchange. Drawing down through the mycorrhizal fungi. Some of the carbohydrate, you might say, sugars that the tree is making by photosynthesis in its leaves. So the tree uses some of that to grow more branches more, leaves, more seeds, but it also uses that pp some of it down into its ridge system to feed that fungal network in the soil. And biochar really supports that fungal network.
Mindy: Okay. What upcoming technologies or practices do you believe will have the biggest impact on sustainable forestry?
Craig Sams: I think we’ve got most of the technology. What we have is a emerging regulatory system that makes the difference. The other thing that is really coming up fast now is that satellites can measure soil carbon. What You you still validate it by doing sampling in the traditional way. But you can then say, okay, when the satellite measures this, it’s 90% of the true figure or head over. This is the true figure, but you then calibrate it so that you get an exact figure. We are coming rapidly towards carbon pricing. And I think that’s going to make such a big difference for forestry and for farming. Once we know that the numbers were getting are true. It’s going to make a big difference to how people manage forests. One of the ways is you will get more mixed broadleaf type woodland. You know, it won’t all just be conifers. , there’s still a role for conifers and they play their part. But when soil carbon and biodiversity rise up the agenda, then people are going to respond. Now, if you’re a farmer growing wheat or barley, you can respond in a couple of years just by adopting more organic regenerative farming methods. Trees have a longer time scale. You know you can’t just change the way of a forestry establishment is in a year or two. It takes 20 years, 30 years, you know, you have to you have to think in a much longer term. But it’s it’s all going in the right direction. And, you know, when you get companies like Microsoft and other really major global companies who are saying, okay, we’re going to we’re going to start dealing with our carbon footprint. That’s probably the biggest single change.
Craig Sams: And it’s something that has been bubbling under, as I said. I mean, I launched those cornflakes. The first carbon neutral food product ever to be certified in 1994. So that’s 30 years ago. But the world has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. So I think that’s probably the the biggest single thing that identify. The other thing I think is happening there are skyscrapers. There’s one in Kyoto, in Japan. There’s a student dorm at the University of Vancouver. Buildings that are made out of wood but are like 50 stories high as I mean the house I’m in at the moment. Our house was built in 1770. Wow. It’s got an oak frame. It’s absolutely as long as we take care of the roof. We don’t have to worry. Nothing else goes wrong. My oak is a hardwood. Mhm. But I think. I think there is a movement more and more towards using wood in construction to lock carbon up in buildings. You know why? They have concrete and bricks and steel with a high carbon footprint if if it’s economic to use wood instead. So I think that’s an emerging market and we’re going to see a lot more of it the next few decades is some some of the examples are quite amazing really that you know how you can build a building. I mean, my house is I we’ve got we’re three storeys high, so there’s nothing particularly exciting about that. But when you get to 50 storeys and you’re still using wood as your framework, and in the case of Japan, where they have regular earthquakes, wood buildings can bend with an earthquake. They don’t fall apart in the way that concrete based ones do.
Mindy: How is carving goal preparing for these future changes and what new projects are you most excited about?
Craig Sams: We’re going in a couple of different directions. One is we have a range of products for gardeners, and we actually use this slogan saving the planet one garden at a time. , because if everybody who gardens, you know, people don’t take stuff out of their gardens that much, they tend to just grow stuff for their pleasure. , we have something now called no mow May, where people leave their garden alone for the month of May. And, you know, I’m looking out now at my window., you know, we have grass that’s nearly knee high. I think that we’ve gone for gardening, and people use it for growing vegetables and in greenhouses. Vertical farming is coming up. The agenda now by Charles. Very helpful in hydroponics. It keeps your nutrients in the flow. So we’ve got we’ve got that the and of course these I mentioned the Stockholm tree pit method that’s really taking off now because it’s you know when you’re planting trees, you want to you’re thinking 30, 40, 50 years ahead. So you want trees that are going to still be trouble free in 30 or 40 or 50 years. We’re shipping more and more of our product to places like Qatar and Dubai in the Gulf, the sort of countries which are desert but actually are only desert because goats and sheep were prioritized and they overgrazed. And then gradually the vegetation died away, the soil lost its fertility, and the quickest way to rebuild that fertility is to get biochar, or particularly enriched biochar, which is what we make at carbon gold.
Craig Sams: And, , you know, the Cop 28, the last climate conference, I was a speaker there, and they had an urban farm, an example of sustainable carbon sequestering farm. And they had our biochar product throughout it in the soil. And it makes a big difference. So I think that’s another area where we see a lot of growth in the Middle East and anywhere where soil needs remediation. Funnily enough, biochar char also ends up in asphalt. You know, it’s especially with electric cars. You get more potholes, like holes in asphalt roads that people swerve to avoid, and then they run into an oncoming car. If you put bio char into asphalt, it strengthens it and you get a much more resilient service. California is now leading the charge on that. Yeah. In terms of getting buy chart into road building. It also goes into concrete. And I mentioned in buildings, but really the sort of the areas where we’re seeing the most growth is gardening, because people want it in their own gardens, because it makes a difference. Vegetable growers, they they’re seeing the commercial benefits. You know, they can use less manure or compost or fertilizer if they have by chart in the soil. And,, there is a,, we’re working with some people who are going to be at the,, it’s in Lincoln, Nebraska in September, and it’s a Great Plains bio char control that it’s the first one, but they’re they’re the Nebraska State. I was born in Nebraska.
Mindy: Oh.
Craig Sams: I’m quite proud about this, this development. But the Great Plains Biochar Conference, the,, Nebraska Forestry Service participating and supporting it because,, the prairies that. Well, as I said, I was born in Nebraska. My great grandfather plowed prairie that had 250 tons of carbon per hectare.. What’s that? About 100 tons per acre. By the time I was born, that was down to ten. Wow. Rest ended up. Most of it ended up in the atmosphere, but then the soil structure broke down. And as that happened, and in 1927, it rained and it the soil just gave way. And you had flooding down in,, Missouri and Arkansas, where all that farmland from places like Nebraska and South Dakota and Iowa just washed away. And that’s why there wasn’t any carbon in the soil or hardly any by the time I was born. You may have heard of Muddy Waters. Well, he was named after a song called Muddy Waters, and there was a whole slew of blues songs from all those farmers in the who, you know, got 40 acres and a mule when they were freed from slavery after the Civil War and they got washed out. All right. The they ended up in Detroit or Chicago working in car factories, but it wasn’t what they had expected. So there’s plenty of room to rebuild those rich prairie soils the Pawnee used to use biochar. The tribes of Pawnee in Nebraska would create biochar out of prairie grass. The following year, the buffalo would all graze in that area, and the Pawnee had created drive lines. They could, even though they didn’t have horses or guns, they could stampede the buffalo down the drive lines because they were all congregated there, and they would chase them off the edge of a cliff and down below the teepee makers, the clothing makers and the food processors, the butchers are all there. But. So the biochar had a use in North America historically as well as in the Amazon. Well, it.
Mindy: Seems what I’ve been kind of seeing as what is old is new again, we seem to to become a circling back around to some old techniques that that worked because we, at least in North America, we’re kind of seeing are we seeing what we’ve done to the environment and how we’ve been responsible for that? Because when I teach, , I was teaching classes for senior citizens through the AARP organization, you know, chemical application and all that stuff that I always tend to go in the organic way because it’s it’s kinder to the environment and it’s better for people. So but, you know, organic gardening hasn’t always been the, the big thing that it it is now. And unfortunately in North America some people don’t know what organic really means. So it’s sometimes it’s an education.
Craig Sams: What advice. Wendell Berry, his great quote,, he said we didn’t know what we were doing because we didn’t understand what we were undoing. And I think, you know, for my great grandfather, here was this miraculous land where you didn’t you just. You plowed it, you put in your grain, and you got these abundant crops every year, and it never seemed to run out. But then by 1930, while a few years later you had the dustbowl, the same thing happened. Not as bad as the dustbowl, but in Europe, you know, a lot of our soils are just. And they’re just not what they were. Melody. And, you know, we can’t use and do chemical fertilizers by you a bit more time, but ultimately you just have to keep using more and more to stay in place.
Mindy: Right, right. Well, in North America, you know, we’ve we are learning the lessons of but we’re really not doing much about it, about the cost of removing wetlands. You know, we have more flooding. We have like a Louisiana as an example. We’re we’re beginning to see the, the cost of that behavior. We know better. We just continue to one not adjust. And and two, I guess some ways that’s just han nature. But I love Wendell Berry. I’m very familiar with him. So okay. What are the common issues that forestry professionals face when it comes to soil health. And how can biochar help mitigate these issues?
Craig Sams: Well, I think the issues you’re talking about are ecosystem services. You know, forest isn’t just somewhere where you get wood sequesters carbon. It purifies the air that we breathe. It reduces the risk of flood. And it’s good for han health and sanity just to, you know, be in or around woods. And the fact if you add it all up, you’re the real value from an ecosystem point of view is sometimes even more than the value of the wood that you harvest from it. I think that’s what we call natural capital, public money for public goods. And it’s something that we don’t, you know, we don’t pay people who grow trees, who have woodland for the fact that they’re making our air cleaner or, you know, more oxygen. We don’t pay them. Well. We have a group here. I have 20 acres of woodland. My neighbors are quite small, most of them 48 years. A few farmers. We had terrible flooding in January of this year. Where near the sea and the people who are down in what used to be the marshes and got drained, they all got flooded. And it was really, really sad. Some of the stories of what happened were all now working together. We call it the Future Landscapes Trust, but we’re working because part of it we’re putting in what are called,, they’re like log dams that just slow the flow of water so that it doesn’t. Just when it rains, it doesn’t rush off because we’ve got hills leading down to the sea. So when it rains, the water, you know, gravity being what it is, the water washes down and,, and the people near the sea take the hit. So that’s these are all economic things that, you know, never got calculated when people were just talking about wood and wood as fuel even. Yeah, even more so. Nobody thinks about the impact on climate of burning wood.
Mindy: Right. Well, I see, you know, in North America we have, you know, this kind of divide on forests, you know, multi-use type of approaches. And, you know, everybody, you know, their opinion is the top of the pile, so to speak. So and we always have, you know, somebody wants to cut our national forests in some way, you know, take a million acres as an example and harvest it just, you know, like it’s it’s a disposable product and it is to away. But forest in the in our environment is so important to our health. I mean science is proving that over and over and over again. So there’s a local story of a gentleman. They actually named a park after him. And it was in the 1930s, and he was sick, and he kept going to his doctor, and his doctor said, I don’t know what’s wrong. All I can suggest is you spend 30 minutes a day in the forest. And so he did. That felt better. He started increasing the amount of time. He ended up being a naturalist and talked and taught people, you know, and the 1930s how being in a forest can actually make you healthier. And, you know, it’s a continuing education in my in my neck of the woods of educating people of of the value of a tree versus, you know, the beauty, the wood, what it does for our environment and what it does for us as hans. And I think that’s kind of a new concept, that trees have that type of value. It helps us stay healthy and that type of thing. So, .
Craig Sams: Well, there is a book called 13 Ways to Smell a Tree. Where is it? It captures some of what you’ve just described. There is also a book by a guy called Jake Robinson that I recommend to everybody. It’s called Invisible Friends and it’s about the. It’s not just oxygen. The trees are exhaling into the air. Every tree from their leaves. It’s all kinds of therapeutic chemicals called terpenes. Pinions. Fir trees and pine trees. And these have a real benefit. I’ll be involved with trees. And so we,, you know, if you go back far enough in han history, we were monkeys living in trees. And the benefits of tree exhalations are really hard to measure. But they are. I go for a walk out my back door. I live in a valley that faces the sea. So all the stuff that trees exude, the breezes when the wind comes over. It doesn’t. Unless it’s coming directly from the southeast. It when it blows it away inland. The rest of the time it just goes over it. So it kind of acculates here. I just go for a walk and just take a deep breath, stand still.
Craig Sams: Sometimes I’ll bunch up some leaves of a tree. Just take a deep breath and you’re getting all that stuff that’s just sitting on the leaves waiting for someone to grab it. Somebody put a value of in sterling 2.79 pounds. For every pound of that you get from woodland. So, in other words, the real value of a woodland is actually almost three times the value of the wood itself because of the benefits for water quality, air quality, soil quality. , we dug a we’ve put a wildlife pond in our garden here, which is on a slope or on a hill, which was forest for until this house was built, as I said, 270 years ago. And we wanted the water. We just thought it would be a nice little pond that would be two feet deep. Well, the guys who did it said we have to get down to the clay. We have to get down to some kind of subsoil. And they had to go find more than five feet.
Mindy: Wow.
Craig Sams: The trees have just over the millennia. Every time the leaves drop, they decompose. And we got more soil. And we have this deep, rich soil that, you know, is gold dust. Really? Yes.
Mindy: Yes. I totally agree with you. , and people don’t, don’t really realize that soil is really like gold dust because we would be really hurting if if we didn’t have soil. And the soil has served us well, but we as a species haven’t always served soil well either. So, you know, it’s hopefully we’re seeing a change, a global change. I know that the change has to start somewhere. But I mean, in North America, farmland is getting and woodlands getting be absorbed for urban development. Like it’s, you know, an unlimited resource. And it’s not it is a limited resource and just some bad, , what I would consider some bad urban planning. But you know, again, that that will be a lesson that we have to learn. Unfortunately, in North America, I think we’re a little slow in those lessons.
Craig Sams: So North America, you know, it’s,, everywhere. And they. I think I’m a big believer in carbon pricing. You know, farmers are businessmen. They count every penny. They they more than anybody else, they really from year to year, they depend on the economic impact of the weather, of the soil, of the market for what they produce. And if you put carbon into if you could put a price on carbon, people would farm in a more sustainable way. They would plant more trees on their land. I remember my uncle, he moved from Nebraska to Iowa, but he showed me a corporate farm that had an avenue of trees leading up to the farm buildings, and he said, I don’t get it. Why are these people growing these trees? Don’t they realize that the shade from those trees is going to reduce their yield by six bushels per acre all along that site? And of course, if you just look at the bushels per acre, they get rid of the trees. But, you know, there’s so many other benefits from trees, like holding the soil together and the network. I mean, you look at a tree, what you don’t realize is you can be 20ft away from it and you’re still standing on its roots, and the mycorrhizal network can go much further even than that. So it’s all happening. It’s just invisible.
Mindy: Right, right. What best practices should professionals follow to maximize the benefits of biochar and other sustainable technologies in their day to day operations?
Craig Sams: I think on the biochar there are it’s it’s good to put it in the ground when you plant trees. It also works with trees that aren’t well. So there are a lot of examples. We work with a company here called Apex Soil Solutions, and they have a device called the geo injector, which is going to be rolled out in the US next year. It’s a device that goes, it’s like a tube that goes into the ground. That is a compressor at the back, and it blows air sideways into the soil, so it compacts the soil. When you put biochar in with the mix that we have with the mycorrhizae and the worm casts, etc., that goes into the soil as well. We have a mulberry tree in our garden that has been there for a couple of hundred years, and it’s a huge tree, and it started getting little black spots on the leaves. We gave it the treatment with the geo injector, and I’m looking at it now and it’s absolutely blast. The first year after it was treated, there were just a few spots still on the leaves. Last year it was almost perfect this year so far. Touch wood. It’s it’s it’s still it’s really doing well. And so I think there are ways of getting, making existing trees healthy and there are ways of making trees of the future healthy by putting biochar in the ground before you plant them. Then the roots get away. They connect to the soil microbiome and you’re on a roll. You know that they’re away.
Mindy: Do you see? , I used to. I did a couple of projects for NASA where I grew tomato seeds. I grew tomatoes from seeds that went up into the International Space Station. I did the same with basil. And I know they took soil samples of the soil and Mars and and mimicked the soil here on Earth. , what would grow and everything that they planted, , vegetables, herbs, trees, etc. grew in this mimicking of Martian soil. Do you see way in the future biochar being,, a component of us, , growing food on other planets, that type of thing, using the same technology. , because I would, you know, bio char, , is probably a lightweight product. Would probably be lighter than soil.
Craig Sams: Have you been reading my mail?
Mindy: No no no no no no, I’m always, always curious.
Craig Sams: I am meeting on this coming Tuesday, the 16th of July with a company called Vertical Futures to do vertical farming. They are also working with the International Space Station on developing resilient growing systems. For that, I’m not sure we should mess around with the climate on Mars or the moon, but, you know, yes, I think forgetting about them, we’ve done enough to our landscape that needs remediation. There’s plenty of work getting our planet back into good soil. Help before we go into outer space. But that’s it. Just interesting because, you know, people are looking at that and looking at the role that biochar can play in that.
Mindy: Right? I’ve written three books that have to do with herbs and seeds Will travel. That’s what I tell people. Seeds will travel and if we can take every medicine with us. But that is an option to grow our own medicine, so to speak, to. But to be able to do that, we’re going to need some, some things. And I’m not an advocate of sending synthetic fertilizer to Mars. , but I was just curious because I know that’s kind of one of the limiting factors of growing our own food wherever we go, Mars or the moon or whatever, if that was, if that was something that was in the pipeline or, or an idea you had thought of or so. Well, that brings us to the end of the episode of Timber Talks. Craig, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights on sustainable forestry practices and the future of the industry. It’s been a fascinating discussion, and to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with your colleagues. Stay tuned for more episodes of Timber Talks, where we continue to explore the latest in forestry and arboriculture. Until next time, take care and keep innovating
COP28 - Soil Carbon sequestration, Food productivity and Climate Economics
I want to start by quoting a Joni Mitchell song called ‘Woodstock’ which goes:
We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves
back to the garden
Carbon is in almost all of the food we eat.
Carbon is in all plants
1 in every 8 atoms in our bodies is carbon
Getting ourselves ‘back to the garden’ means making sure that carbon is our ally, not our enemy
It was, as carbon dioxide, once 95% of our atmosphere
Now it is less than 1/10 of one percent
We are converting carbon from 12-15% in healthy organic soils to as little as ½%.
Atmosphere 95% Carbon dioxide. Now: .04%
Cyanobacteria were the earliest lifeform that could convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrate, paving the way for microbial life and ultimately, all plants and animals. Today the total biomass of microbes is over 90 billion tonnes, about the same amount as in plants all animals are 2 billion tonnes C and humans are less than 1/10 of a billion tonnes of carbon. It was, as carbon dioxide, once 95% of our atmosphere.
““In my book a pioneer is a man who turned the grass upside down, strung barbed wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land and called it progress””
We humans, once we started farming, emitted a lot of carbon from the soil, where it does good, to the atmosphere, where it stops our planet reflecting sunlight, trapping it and thus causing global warming
“‘We didn’t know what we were doing because we didn’t know what we were undoing’ ”
Farmers in the US sent billions of tonnes of soil carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Nobody knew this was happening, but soil fertility eventually ran out.
I was born in Nebraska…near that red X on the map above. There were over 250 tonnes of soil carbon per hectare when my great grandfather ploughed virgin prairie back in 1885. By the time I was born, about 60 years later, that 250 tonnes was down to 20 tonnes of carbon per hectare. The other 90% had disappeared into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The fertility of the soil suffered, but chemical fertilisers came along just in time to keep things going. The nitrous oxide from those fertilisers made things worse, though, as nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that has a refractive index 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide. So nitrogen fertiliser increases the trapping of heat on the planet, too.
A lot of that soil carbon was lost because farming destroyed the soil structure and when it rained heavily in 1927 huge amounts of soil washed down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, wiping out many black farmers who had small farms after slavery ended.
Mississippi Floods 1927
Most emigrated to Chicago or Detroit. Many blues songs described this wipeout, including ‘Muddy Waters’ – not the singer, but a song about losing a farm to that tide of mud.
Dust Bowl 1935
A few years later the fractured soils of the Midwest gave way again and started to blow away.
An Englishman, Richard St Barbe Baker, one of the founders of the Soil Association, was asked to set up a tree planting programme that created a line of 220 million trees from the Canadian border to Mexico that stopped further soil loss.
Of course fossil fuels are part of the problem, but agriculture, up till 1980, was responsible for half of all the carbon dioxide increase since 1850. Fossil fuels passed farming around 1950 and then increased by 5 times. Farming emissions more than doubled, largely thanks to chemicals. Now it’s a total of 37 billion tonnes a year.
50% of total CO2 increase 1850-1980 is from farming. 100% of total CO2 reduction can come from farming
From 1850-1980: Today
Total CO2 from Farming: 160 billion tonnes 10 billion tonnes
Total CO2 from Fossil Fuels: 165 billion tonnes 27 billion tonnes
If we change the way we farm and even keep burning fossil fuels, we could reduce greenhouse gas levels by at least 20 billion tonnes a year and be back to a stable climate in a decade or so.
Mycorrhizae
Mycorrhizae take the carbon that plants make in their leaves as carbohydrate (sugar) and use it to grow the underground population of microbial biomass, the soil microbiome
Mycorrhizae Networking
They form a network that is the soil equivalent of the internet – if a plant needs something the mycorrhizae feed more sugar to the microbes that can help.
Actinomycetes and streptomyces - Nature’s antibiotics
Actinomycetes
Streptomyces
They feed poisonous bacteria that make chemicals that kill plant diseases (and are the source of our medical antibiotics)
Mycorrhizae feed Trichoderma fungi, whose threadlike hyphae strangle root-eating nematodes. It’s hard to imagine fungi killing worms in the soil, but they can.
All these materials are made of carbon and ultimately decompose and become the carbon in the soil from whence they came. Chemical fertilisers reduce mycorrhizae and therefore soil carbon
ANNUAL GLOBAL NITROGEN FIXATION
Mtonnes N2 per year
INDUSTRIAL
Industrial (Haber-Bosch) ~50
Combustion ~20
TOTAL ~80
NATURAL
Agricultural land ~90
Forest & non-agricultural land ~50
Lightning ~10
TOTAL ~150
Total Industrial and Natural: 230 M tonnes
WE ARE LOSING…
39 FOOTBALL FIELDS A MINUTE (Volkert Engelsman - IFOAM)
12 MILLION HECTARES OF LAND DEGRADED EVERY YEAR
12 million hectares of land degraded every year - 1.8% of available land lost to farming
WE ONLY HAVE 1.5 BILLION HECTARES THAT EQUATES TO ONLY HAVING 125 YEARS OF FARMLAND LEFT.
This madness has to stop. EVEN IF IT JUST TO GUARANTEE FOOD FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN, NOT TO MENTION REDUCING ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE
Stop subsidies
Put human health first
Green Revolution had unintended consequences
Genetic Engineering a problem, not a solution
Little time left
Protect our agricultural capital (soil)
Support small farmers and diverse ecosystems
Study and learn from traditional farming
Reward farmers who prevent climate change
The path to sanity was marked out 15 years ago by the 400 scientists on the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, the IAASTD. Its conclusion was that we need to reward farmers who prevent climate change
Eight years ago at COP21 in Paris every nation in the world signed up to an agreement that included Article 6 which said we should reward farmers who prevent climate change
Agriculture must be included in reducing Greenhouse Gas levels. Sultan Al Jaber, who organised this conference, has said that agriculture will be high on the agenda in COP28 in Abu Dhabi this November and this is why we’re here.
CARBON FARMING EFFICIENCY
Industrial Farm – 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce
1 calorie of food
Organic Farm – 6 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce
1 calorie of food
Farmer with a hoe – 1 calorie of human energy to produce
20 calories of food
Farmer with a hoe: 120 times more energy-efficient than an organic farmer
240 times more energy-efficient than an industrial farmer
An industrial farm uses 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food.
Organic is better, it uses 6 calories of fossil fuels and it increases soil carbon.
In terms of energy efficiency the organic farmer uses at least half as much energy as an industrial farmer and increases soil carbon into the bargain.
There’s money in it too, trading carbon credits.
When the boys in the City of London and on Wall Street get it, there is hope. There is money to be made in carbon and they don’t want to miss out
Rodale Institute 30 year trial results
Organic uses 45% less energy
2. Average yields match conventional (soybeans/corn)
3. C sequestration 1 MT/ha (3.7 T CO2/ha) per annum
Organic farming sequesters at least 4 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year. La Vialla a biodynamic farm in Italy, sequesters 10 tonnes per hectare per year, validated annually by the University of Siena for the last 15 years.
““We could sequester the equivalent of the anthropogenic carbon
gas produced by humanity today. Storing carbon in the soil is
organic matter in the soil, organic matter is fertilizing the soil.”
”
BY LAW: CO2 price to be € 56/tonne in 2020 and €100/tonne in 2030. Today’s price €106 /tonne now
In response to Le Foll after COP21 in Paris the French Government agreed a target carbon price of €56 per tonne by 2020 and €100 per tonne by 2030. They were too conservative. The carbon price today is €80 per tonne
The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will impose a carbon fee on imports into the EU that reflects this € 80 per tonne price. That will encourage anyone who exports to the EU to reduce carbon and increase sequestration
1997 - ‘Organic’ ‘Wholegrain’ ‘No GMOs’ One year after they were introduced
‘Carbon Neutral’ Future Forests became The Carbon Neutral Company
The world’s first ever carbon neutral food product was Whole Earth Organic Wholegrain Corn Flakes 1996. We planted trees to offset our carbon footprint, but it turned out we didn’t have to plant many because the organic farmers who grew the organic corn were increasing soil carbon as organic matter every year. That’s when the penny dropped for me about organic farming and carbon sequestration
What about Wheat and Barley?
Home Grown Cereals Authority
Most emissions come from fertiliser and fertiliser induced field emissions, i.e soil breakdown. Growing organically can increase soil carbon and reduce emissions.
Farming carbon means that an organic farmer can sell at the same price as the non-organic farmer and make more money. If farmers have the same income, then organic wheat would be cheaper and an organic loaf of bread would be cheaper than one with glyphosate herbicide residues, now known to cause a multiplicity of human diseases. Who’s going to insist on paying more for a loaf of bread that is less healthy?
(Ignores antibiotics cost to human health)
With beef the methane emissions every time a cow burps or farts are a big problem, but less when they are on pasture and regenerative grazing.
Vegans and Vegetarians have lower emissions, which could be reversed if they were 100% organic – which many are.
NET ENERGY LOSS:
CORN ETHANOL -50%
PALM OIL BIODIESEL -8%
There is never any justification for burning food. 1 person dies every 7 minutes of hunger and we burn half of America’s corn crop as ethanol in gasoline and make ethanol from wheat and barley and biodiesel from rapeseed and palm oil. We scream at food companies for using palm oil instead of heart-destroying hydrogenated fat while they burn subsidised palm oil in their transportation vehicles. Carbon pricing would stop all of that nonsense dead. Corn ethanol has a higher carbon footprint than fossil fuel gasoline but it’s ‘renewable’ but so what?
Farmers vs Architects
Vancouver “Woodscraper” - Wooden buildings will be cheaper than concrete and steel
With carbon pricing it will be cheaper to build with wood than with steel or concrete. Wood that goes into a building sequesters carbon for centuries. I live in an oak frame house that was built 260 years ago and the carbon in it ain’t going anywhere. A 70 storey ‘woodscraper’ in Osaka Japan sequesters a huge volume of carbon and, as a bonus, is more resilient to earthquakes.
BIOCHAR
What is it?
Charcoal made to be used as a soil improver
What does it do?
•Increases microbiological populations
•High surface area adsorbs mineral nutrients
•Reduces plant disease
•Reduces fertiliser use
•Help soils retain moisture
•Improves soil structure
•Reduces soil greenhouse gas emissions N2O
•Long term carbon sequestration
Sawmill by-products and farm waste like rice husks and corn stalks can be made into biochar. This is agricultural charcoal and is almost pure carbon. When it’s in soil it helps with drainage, soil aeration, keeps moisture in the soil and supports a resilient and vibrant soil microbiome and minimises loss of soil nutrients.
Biochar’s tiny pores are where the soil microbiome flourishes undisturbed by nematodes and protozoa and get on with creating perfect conditions for healthy plants grown under organic methods and represent a permanent addition of carbon to the soil that would otherwise be in the atmosphere. It has been used extensively on the Urban Farm at Expo City and is being applied in other Gulf countries to restore degraded and desertified soils to full fertility. There is a biochar session on the 10th which I recommend you attend,
Who’s feeding the world?
70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares - NO SUBSIDIES
30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms - $350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES
The subsidies farmers receive are mostly to increase emissions from soil degradation, nitrous oxide emissions, methane emissions and to convert good food into biofuels. Carbon pricing can totally replace subsidies, restore fertility to our soils, improve the nutritional value of our food, fight hunger and save our lovely planet from global warming
Thank you
Craig Sams
Chairman Carbon Gold Ltd
Director, Soil Association Certification
Expo City Farm Workshop space December 3rd & 4th 2023
Social prescribing comes of age
Social prescribing represents a steep learning curve for many doctors says Craig Sams, but it’s rocketing up the agenda
The setting: a GP surgery. Receptionist: “The doctor will see you now.” Doctor: “Hi, how are you getting on with your low-carb diet? Are you getting the regular exercise we agreed? Can we de-prescribe the Metformin? Let’s do a few tests to see whether you’re ready to come off the drugs. By the way, how are you getting on with your cookery classes? Let’s see if we can finally wave type 2 diabetes goodbye.”
Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry but ‘social prescribing’ is on a roll and there will be a lot more of it in the future. Professor Tony Avery, the NHS National Clinical Prescribing director has said the aim is to bring about a ‘culture change’. He sees social prescribing as transforming modern healthcare, saving money and improving people’s lives. Not only that, but adverse reactions to medication are estimated to cost NHS England over £2 billion a year (not to mention the impact on people’s lives and health). The number of disability claimants doubled from 2021 to 2022. 8.3 million Britons are now on antidepressants.
The College of Medicine’s Beyond Pills Campaign is pushing hard to stop the overprescribing of medicines. The college says that 1.1 billion medicines are prescribed unnecessarily. Its chair Michael Dixon (medical advisor to King Charles), has said ‘Medicine…is no longer affordable or sustainable. A new medical mindset is needed which goes to the heart of true healthcare.”
Back in the 1930s an experiment in social prescribing called the Peckham Experiment engaged with 950 local families to get them on the track to health. They had a gym, a swimming pool, cookery classes, a vegetable garden and workshops about health. Members would have a medical health check once a year and were monitored on a regular basis. The kids did better at school, marriages were more stable and women were empowered (knitting groups helped with this). Social and community activities were organised by the members and helped reduce isolation, loneliness and alienation, illness levels fell dramatically. William Beveridge who drafted the plan for the NHS, was impressed and envisaged similar health centres up and down the country. When the Government put his plan to the British Medical Association in 1948 they were not impressed and the Government was forced to back down and agree that all ‘health services’ would solely be via the GP’s surgery. The Peckham Experiment closed down two years later.
But social prescribing is finally rocketing up the agenda. There are now 15 Pain Cafes in Cornwall helping people manage pain without painkillers, relying instead on exercise and psychological support. Dependency on antidepressants has been shown to cause more harm than good (as anyone who watches Happy Valley already knows). Time to kick the diazepam.
Increasing awareness of the benefits of phytonutrients (the kind of stuff the health food industry has been emphasising for decades) is filtering through to the medical industry and impacting on social prescribing. It was the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus who famously said 500 years ago: “Prevention is better than cure.” With life expectancy rates going backwards, increasing rates of alcohol and drug-related deaths and hospitalisations, along with record levels of obesity, social prescribing is happening just in time. Will people be taking their prescriptions into the health food store? Or will the pharmacies try to capture this newly lucrative business?
The Bromley by Bow Centre in East London is pioneering the ‘new’ approach to health and wellbeing, and it is a model that is being emulated in more and more places.
Yes, the first reaction is ‘I told you so’ - but the fact is that these people are serious. At least so far.
How long will it be before doctors prescribe yoga and pilates classes or give out free prescriptions for herbal medicines and supplements? Will you get free cookery classes on the NHS?
There’s still a long way to go, but at least the direction of travel has finally changed. The Government has just allocated £50 million to support 42 Integrated Care Boards across the country to help doctors to ‘de-prescribe’ their patients and get them on the path to wellness without drugs. There will need to be proper support for the medical profession - they know it makes sense but it’s a steep learning curve for many doctors. They didn’t teach this kind of stuff at medical school.
Food and agriculture centre stage at COP28
Craig Sams journeys from the wealthy ancient Kingdom of Saba to modern-day Dubai as the UAE prepares to host the COP28 climate conference
About 1,500 years ago the descendants of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon lived very well indeed. Their kingdom of Saba was insanely rich because they were the suppliers of frankincense and of spices from the Orient. Caravans of camels plodded northwards to the Mediterranean markets with incense that perfumed churches and synagogues all over Europe and spices that enhanced European cuisine. The camel caravans would stock up with food and water before their journey and the Sabaeans had plenty of that too, they had built a huge dam that captured the water of the monsoon rains and used it all summer long to irrigate the fertile plains around the capital city of Marib. At that time it was the wonder of the ancient world. The Sabaeans and their neighbours all worshipped the sun, a ‘god’ that rose into the heavens every morning.
Solomon convinced Sheba to become Jewish and abandon sun worship and she persuaded her sun-worshipping neighbours to be Jewish too. Then the Sabaeans ditched Judaism and converted to Christianity. Other sun worshippers stuck with being Jewish and the different tribes fell out over whose invisible god was the real invisible god. While they squabbled, nobody performed routine maintenance on the Marib Dam. It collapsed, and suddenly agriculture was impossible. Different tribes headed off in different directions - some to Syria, some to the Gulf. The ones who went to Syria, called Ghassanids, did rather well growing wheat and working with Rome to protect its eastern borders. The ones who went to the Gulf resorted to herding sheep and goats and moving from oasis to oasis. In the 1840s, as part of their aim to conquer Egypt and Suez, the British armed Druze who massacred 10,000 Ghassanid Christians and the survivors fled to northern Lebanon and then many to America (including my grandparents). The Sabaean tribes herding sheep in the Gulf allied with the British and then discovered rich stocks of oil and gas. They built new cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi on the profits and did rather well. Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi used some of that money to rebuild the Marib Dam that had sustained his ancestors and it now irrigates the soils of the area. He also built the Abrahamic Family House where a mosque, a church and a synagogue are all in one grand building, bringing the argumentative religions of the Bible and the Koran under one friendly roof (Israeli tourism to the UAE has boomed in the last two years).
Dubai is hosting COP28 this November, the climate conference that is making halting progress towards getting the world’s climate under control. Dr Al-Jaber, the UAE minister for industry, has stated that food and agriculture will take centre stage in COP28’s carbon reduction programmes. Why not? The Earth’s soils are ten billion hectares. Each hectare, if managed with carbon in mind, can capture and retain about seven tonnes of CO2 every year, whether it’s farmland, pasture or forest. That’s 70 billion tonnes - twice the annual increase in CO2 emissions. Duh!
All we have to do is charge the way we farm, the way we graze animals and the way we manage forests. In other words, go organic, graze ‘regeneratively’ and manage woodland sustainably.
Dubai gets things done. Solar power converts sea water into drinking water. Buildings have car-charging points and low-energy construction to minimise their carbon footprint. Just this year they are spending $40 billion to get to net zero well before 2050. Their Sabaean ancestors goofed big time and had an environmental disaster that ruined their wealthy original homeland. They don’t want to make the same dumb mistakes again.
When we infected the Amazonian tribes with our diseases most of them died and the Amazon rain forest grew up. At the same time, the Plague killed off vast numbers of farmers in Europe and Asia, the trees moved in and sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere. We had the Little Ice Age as a result of those blasted trees taking over. Then we discovered steam engines and coal and oil and that saved us from freezing to death. We are humans. We have the brains and the power. The UAE and Dubai can get us on track at COP28. They learned their lesson the hard way 1,500 years ago. Now they can help us get back into balance.
COP26: The deal of the century for organic farming
COP 26 was, in my humble opinion, a resounding success. 2021 will go down in history alongside dates like 1066 and 1776 as years when the fate of the world was dramatically changed.
In 2008 I went with Dan Morrell (who traded the first ever carbon offset back in 1989) to the COP14 in Poznan, Poland. Our mission was to ensure that soil sequestration of carbon was on the negotiating document that went to the next climate summit: COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. We succeeded! It was high fives all around. When locking up carbon in soil is rewarded in the race to net zero, farmers have another ‘crop’ that they can sell. Instead of farming being 1/3 of our annual emissions it can (if it goes organic) stop its own emissions and capture enough carbon to easily outweigh emissions from energy, industry and transportation. The Copenhagen COP13 was a failure and it wasn’t until the Paris COP 21 in 2015 that the importance of agriculture in saving us from climate disaster was recognised. Article 6 of the Paris agreement set out the case for using forestry and farming to save the planet. The ‘4 per 1000’ part of that agreement declared that if farmers could increase soil carbon by 4 parts per 1000 that would be enough to offset ALL our other greenhouse gas emissions. Organic farmers can do better: La Vialla, a 1500-hectare farm in Italy, has been measured by the University of Siena for more than 10 years. They lock up 7 parts per 1000 on their farm of cereals, vines, pastures and woodland. Organic farming is the answer to climate change.
People blame capitalism for the mess we’re in. That’s not fair. It is socialist policies like biofuel subsidies and subsidised chemical inputs that are a big part of the problem. Our government subsidises the burning of trees (pelletised and imported from Arkansas and Latvia) at Drax power station in Yorkshire to the tune of £2.1 million a day and then we rant at Brazil for clearing forest in the Amazon. We endure increased levels of lung disease from burning wood, too - wood smoke is dirtier than coal. The EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation requires member states to burn 10% of all motor fuel from renewable sources such as rapeseed, palm and soybean oil for biodiesel. Then people moan at the food industry for using palm oil (which replaces deadly hydrogenated fat). Petrol is blended with ethanol from barley, wheat and sugar beet. What a colossal waste of land while we lament the plight of the millions who go to bed hungry. This is socialistic government policy, engineered by agribusiness lobbyists to subsidise industrial farming. The deluded comparison of ‘renewable’ with ‘sustainable’ is used to cover up this deceit. If ‘renewable’ fuel was really good for the environment then we’d be investing in whaling. Whale oil is renewable and it doesn’t compete with farmland for food production. But this is the thinking that you get when politicians pretend to be businessmen.
So can capitalism do it any better? There are more than 10 billion hectares of farmland, forest and pasture globally. If it was all farmed to maximise carbon capture it could sequester at least 7 tonnes per hectare overall, for a total of 70 billion tonnes a year. That would very quickly reverse the annual increase in greenhouse gas levels, currently running at 20 billion tonnes a year.
What’s in it for capitalism? Well, somebody has to buy and sell the carbon crop. 70 billion tonnes a year at $50 per tonne is $ 3.5 trillion. That’s the kind of money that gets Goldman Sachs and Cargill and hedge funds and other wheeler-dealers out of bed each morning.
Getting to net zero will make a lot of other people money: organic farmers, sustainable foresters, regenerative grazers. In fact, when industrial farmers and intensive dairy and beef farmers have to pay for their emissions, there isn’t likely to be a farmer on the planet who won’t go organic. Organic food will be cheaper than high-carbon industrial food.
The whole carbon offset market has been beset by cases of fraud, cashing in carbon credits more than once and some dodgy calculations of carbon capture. The Soil Association, the Sustainable Soils Alliance and similar bodies around the world are now agreeing strict protocols to validate carbon capture to ensure that investors and traders are getting what they’ve paid for.
COP 26 has achieved a major result. With global agreement that ‘net zero’ is a universal target, there is hope for reversing climate change. Thank you, Great Britain, for pulling off the deal of the century
Oestrogens, xenoestrogens and the future of humanity
Wildly Deliciously Organic
“Hey Craig - we’re going to Belize to make a movie about the Crystal Skull of the Maya. Want to come?” My cousin Anthony Conforti was a film maker and I couldn’t refuse. It was 1987. We filmed the Maya doing the Deer Dance and a local farmer took me to see a cocoa grove. I was blown away, I had never seen cocoa trees, with yellow and red pods growing out of the stems of the trees. That evening I wrote in my diary a plan for a chocolate spread called Whole Earth ‘Maya Maya’ – a Nutella-like concoction of peanuts, cohune oil and date juice. It didn’t happen, but the dream wouldn’t go away.
A few years later André Deberdt, a French organic consultant in Togo offered me organic peanuts. They were delicious but failed our aflatoxin test. I called him up with the bad news. “They grow organic cacao, too’ he commented. I had read that 70% chocolate had a tiny glycemic index: 21 compared to 60 of brown rice, so we got a sample made. It was mind blowing. My girl friend Jo Fairley fell in love with it and came up with the name ‘Green’ for organic and ‘Black’ for being the darkest chocolate on the market. We launched 30 years ago, in 1991. It was the first chocolate that talked openly about its provenance – farmers in Togo who were regenerating their farmland by going organic. It was a hit.
In 1993 I got in touch with some friends in Belize and found that the cacao farmers were in big trouble: they had borrowed money to plant cacao trees on assurances from the US Peace Corps and Hershey that they would be getting $1.75 lb a few years later. By the time they were cropping, the price was $0.55. Farmers abandoned the cacao but now had bank debt. Sainsbury’s said they’d stock our idea of ‘Maya Gold’ if we would give them a 6 month exclusive. So I offered the Maya farmers $1.25 and a 5 year rolling contract and put $20,000 prepayment in their bank to keep their bank manager on side. The Fairtrade Foundation suggested it could be a product to launch their Mark and flew out to Belize to validate what we were doing and said ‘It’s all we are looking for…and more.’
So in March 1994 the Fairtrade Mark was launched to the world on Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate. All the supporters of Fairtrade now had something to sink their teeth into, both literally and campaigning-wise. Tesco, Safeway and Waitrose were all asking for it and Sainsbury’s nobly let us off the exclusive deal in the shared interest of seeing Fairtrade take off. Within a year the Fairtrade Mark was on coffee, tea, bananas, and sugar and became a must stock category for natural food stores and supermarkets.
Green & Black’s grew and grew. We made milk chocolate and cocoa and hot chocolate, working with the finest artisan chocolate makers in the world. (I’ve never made a bar of chocolate myself)
In 1999 we sold some shares to a group of people led by William Kendall, who wanted to invest. With a humungous marketing budget we grew the brand in a way that had never been possible before.
By 2005 we had gone from £1.5 million turnover to £26 million turnover. Cadbury’s bought the business. Then they got gobbled up by Kraft. In November 2012 Tim Cofer, the CEO of Kraft, called me up to say that tomorrow he was announcing in Abidjan a $400 million plan called Cocoa Life that would build on what we had done in Belize with Fairtrade. They appointed women to run the programme in Ghana and Ivory Coast and it has been hugely successful, with farmers queuing up to be part of it. Now it is going to the Dominican Republic, where most of the organic cacao is grown. Green & Black’s has just enjoyed a massive advertising push, with a stunning video that simply says “Wildly, Deliciously, Organic.” The entire organic market benefits when a brand like Green & Black’s or Yeo Valley establishes the organic version in a product category as a leader.
Jo and I still work with the team at Green & Black’s, having a moan when we think they are going off piste and patting them on the backs when they get it right. We’ve had nothing to moan about for quite a while, in fact we are very proud of how well our erstwhile baby is growing
A glimpse of the future?
Back in 2002 I wrote the Little Food Book, which was published by Alastair Sawday. It was a succinct coverage of the key issues about food, health and society. It still stands up well today. I also wrote an (unpublished) forecast of what the world would be like by 2012 as a result of the world catching up with the insights in my book. It makes interesting reading as we are still getting there, but the horizon seems a bit closer than it was.
You can get a secondhand copy for under £3 (including delivery) here.
Dateline New York 2012 - The United Nations World Food and Health Organisation (WFHO) has published its State of the World Report.
Key data: The world’s population has, as predicted, reached a plateau at 10 billion. Life expectancy in all the world’s nations continues to rise, with a global average of 80 years. Levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes are all in steep decline, ensuring that the quality of life for the aged is greatly improved. Infant and childhood mortality has plummeted to the lowest levels in recorded history. The ongoing programme of converting hospitals into luxury apartments continues, with 7000 hospitals converted to other uses in the year 2011. The number of the world’s citizens employed in agriculture continues to increase, along with the proportion who are part-time agriculturalists. Farm sizes continue to reduce. Grain reserves now stand at 400 days. Starvation has gone the way of smallpox – totally eradicated. Land retirement continues as meat consumption worldwide falls to an average 6 kgs per person per year. GNP per person continues to rise as the reduction of military capacity continues, transferring investment into money-saving, planet-saving technologies. Emigration from Europe and North America continues to infuse Africa, Asia and Latin America with the capital and skills from returning immigrants, reinvesting in their places of origin. The world’s economy continues to thrive since the Global Trade Justice Agreement of 2005 that led to the abolition of all US, EU and Japanese agricultural subsidies and protectionism following the Cairns Group Ultimatum of 2004. McDonald’s recently announced that its sales of organic vegeburgers now outstrip beefburger sales by 6 to one, with wholewheat buns now representing more than half of all buns sold. Monsanto, whose genomics seed division has continued to come up with naturally bred landrace seed varieties tailored to the precise soil and climate requirements of the world’s regions, announced record profits. A company spokesperson announced: “The diversification and empowerment of small farmers that followed the Trade Justice Agreement has provided us with rich rewards. Our Small Farmers Seed Saving Programme has enriched our genomic data base while rewarding farmers who select ideal traits from their crops.”
Fantasy? Not a bit of it. Nothing in the above optimistic scenario should stretch the credulity of anyone who’s read this little book. We are not faced with immutable forces that lead us to starvation, obesity, disease and environmental degradation. We have the technologies - in agriculture, preventive medicine, food processing and energy production – to realise the above scenario.
We suffer a distorted system where powerful forces coerce and cajole governments to work against the public interests. Nobody really gains much from it. None of us ever really asked for the system we got – it has been sold as delivering the greatest goods, but in practice it demands ever-increasing subsidy and brings, as a product of its systems, obesity, new more virulent bacterial diseases, increasing dependence on chemical fungicides, insecticides and herbicides as well as a cocktail of antibiotics, genetically engineered hormones, drugs and adulterants in our food and environment.
We need a new kind of accounting that counts all the costs. Cheaper hamburgers and sugary foods may make a few pennies more profit for the shareholders in a chemical, pharmaceutical or fast food company, but who’s counting the cost in heart disease and diabetes? Nowhere on the national account are the negative costs counted - the heartache of the bereaved, loss of earning power, amputation, blindness and agonising pain aren’t calculated on the debit side of the ledger. If they were, we’d be in a very different situation with food.
Is cheap food worth the ill-health that is its concomitant? Is it worth the environmental destruction? The excessive use of fossil fuels? The risk of global warming and increasingly violent weather and flooding? Do we really want our children to enter puberty in hormonal turmoil, brought on by consumption of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in unpredictable interactions with the hormone imbalances inherent in obesity?
Is it fair to the children? They didn’t ask to be hooked on junk foods and additives before they were old enough to learn about nutrition. The inevitable result in the longer run will be evolutionary degeneration. Surely this wasn’t part of the deal? I don’t remember seeing ads that said: “Eat junk food and your grandchildren and great grandchildren may well be at risk of a wide range of degenerative and congenital conditions that are a direct consequence of your ill-informed food choices.”
But it’s happened, Inexorable, focused pressure on governments around the world has brought us to a situation where the richest 20% of the world’s population suffer chronic obesity disease and the poorest 20% starve. The middle 60% aren’t doing that well, either, with the exception of a rapidly-growing minority who engage in ‘joined up thinking’ about food, diet and farming. If you do the sums properly, i.e. from the perspective of a nation or society, eating unsubsidised organically grown wholesome food free of artificial additives and in a proportion that favours grains, pulses and vegetables over meat and dairy products and sugar is the answer.
Wuhan – a blessing in disguise?
Some people will allege that Covid 19 is the result of ‘gain of function’ research at China’s germ warfare laboratory in Wuhan and point to the involvement of America’s EcoHealth Alliance in financing research there after Obama’s government put a stop to it in the US. Others will point to plucky little bats - living in caves 800 miles from Wuhan.
What is sure, though, is that people worldwide now really get it about the immune system. Sales of organic food and vitamins and supplements that strengthen immunity are booming. Awareness of the fact that most people who are symptomatic or die of Covid have ‘comorbidities’ has sparked a wider understanding of how to stay healthy and shrug off this horrible mutation of the coronavirus, a virus we’ve known for centuries as the ‘common cold.’ People have always been getting colds, some get them worse than others and some rarely get colds at all. Now many more people understand why.
The comorbidities that land you in hospital with Covid include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and cancer. If you don’t have one of those then the likelihood of Covid exposure giving you any symptoms is pretty low. You are certainly very unlikely to die of it.
What causes comorbidities? The main factors are diet, exercise and environmental pollutants. (plus booze and fags)
Sugar and refined cereals drive obesity and diabetes. Now more people are reducing sugar and eating whole grains.
Hydrogenated fat and overeating cause heart disease. Cardiovascular disease has dropped 60% in Denmark since 2002, when they led the world in banning hydrogenated fat, or trans fats, in food. Denmark ranks 45 on the global list of Covid deaths per capita. The USA and India were the last to ban hydrogenated fat, the US last year and India planning cuts next year.
A diversity of gut flora microorganisms helps resist the virus. Overuse of antibiotics devastates the gut flora. The NHS is now urging doctors to stop prescribing antibiotics for colds and flu. The mystery is why doctors ever did - they’re doctors, not pharmacists.
In 1948 the NHS envisioned centres all over the country educating people about healthy diet, exercise and preventive medicine. The British Medical Association insisted that the first point of contact was with a General Practitioner, not some poncy ‘health centre.’ This was a victory for doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. The ‘prevention versus cure’ debate has been going on ever since.
In the 1950s every Briton could get free cod liver oil and free concentrated orange juice. This was because 70 years ago doctors still understood that if people had a high level of Vitamin D and Vitamin C they would be able to better resist colds and flu. This was probably the last official support of prevention as an alternative to medication. Since the coronavirus pandemic numerous doctors and clinicians have started urging that getting people’s D and C levels up is a key preventive measure. In January 2021 the NHS finally announced that free Vitamin D was available and urged people to get their D levels up, This was 11 months after the pandemic hit and after the Government had wasted tens of billions on track and trace and lockdowns. In 2020 in the sunniest April and May in memory people were told not to go out in the Vitamin D-rich sunshine.
The authorities are talking about ‘health passports’ to allow people who have been vaccinated to travel and go to the theatre. How about health passports for people who have a robust immune system and are unlikely to get colds or flu? It could be easy to do: just measure indicators of immune strength such as T Cells and Vitamin C, D and zinc levels. Doctors and nurses should have that kind of health passport before they go to work in hospitals, to protect them and patients. If your immunity is good, skip the vaccination. If not, get the jab.
And maybe it’s time to stop all germ warfare research everywhere? Just in case something could possibly go wrong?
Could we also please have ‘eco’ and ‘bio’ back? The EcoHealth Alliance researches deadly viruses. ‘Biowarfare’ puts them to work. Not our thing at all.
Pity Poor Pharma
Mexico has just passed a law that bans American agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration from acting freely in the country. This was a response to the US arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos, former Defense Minister of the Mexican Government, on charges of drug trafficking.
What’s going on in Mexico? The drugs gangs are all at each others’ throats, fighting over an ever-diminishing pie. There are now only 6 American states left where marijuana is illegal - in all the rest it is legal or allowed for medical purposes. The impact on Mexico’s drug gangs has been horrendous. Almost at a stroke the lucrative American market has collapsed.
With the marijuana market gone the Mexican drug gangs had to start pushing Fentanyl even though it meant competing with American legal pharmaceutical companies, but boy is it profitable. A kilo of heroin costs $6000 and can be sold for $80,000, a mere 13 times profit. A kilo of Fentanyl costs $4150 per kilo and sells for $1,600,000 as it is 100 times stronger than heroin. That’s a stonking 385 times profit. As a mere organic grocer like me, who’d go out of business if I aimed for a 2 times profit those figures are pretty impressive. Just think if vitamins were that profitable.
But to a legal pharmaceutical company those figures are pathetic. Xanax costs 2p to make 1 mg and sells for £100 per mg. That’s 5000 times profit for Pfizer. Prozac costs 9p to make 20mg and sells for £185 per 20g. That’s 2000 times profit for Eli Lilly.
Bear in mind, however, that the manufacturing cost doesn’t include all the research on the drug and then ‘educating’ doctors in how to prescribe it and the endless fines for illegal marketing and health care fraud. Pfizer holds the record for the largest criminal fine - $2.3 billion in 2009.
The great thing about being a pharmaceutical company is that you can take the occasional billion-dollar fine in your stride. Even better, you never go to jail. Mexican pharma-dealers are always at risk of a prison sentence for their wrongdoings, something corporate pharma executives never have to worry about. They just pass the cost of fines on to their shareholders.
But legalised marijuana has had a damaging effect on the sales of opioids and alcohol and antidepressants. Potheads drink less booze and actively avoid opioids like Fentanyl or oxycontin and would rather take CBD than take an antidepressant.
Marijuana legalisation’s been bad enough for the drug business but worse challenges are on the horizon. In November 2020 Oregon decriminalised all drugs. Instead of spending $375 million a year arresting and prosecuting drug users, Oregon is now going to open a dozen drug treatment centres to help addicts get well. With $100 million a year coming in from the tax on legal marijuana sales they can afford it. For blacks this is particularly good news as, even though drug use is no higher among black people, a heck of a lot more of them are stopped, searched and arrested for possession - drugs are the leading cause of jail time for people of colour.
So who else is making money out of illegal drugs? You and me. ‘Our’ UK Government-backed Angel CoFund has shares in Small Pharma, who are raising £12 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange to research DMT, the most powerful psychedelic of all. If they did the research here they’d go to jail, so they will do it legally in Canada. The Canadians are already spearheading the use of psilocybin from magic mushrooms - a couple of doses and depression is alleviated that would otherwise require a lifetime of antidepressant use. More bad news for the makers of Prozac and Xanax - and doctors and pharmacists.
Luckily the pharmaceutical companies have harvested £6 billion from governments for their coronavirus vaccine research. Making vaccines is usually bad business - you give someone a shot and they don’t need another one. But lavish subsidies make it worthwhile.
Just think if the cash that has been spent on vaccine research had gone to protect people in care homes and making sure everyone’s vitamin C and D and zinc levels were adequate. Prevention sounds nice, but profitable? Forget it.
Lord Northbourne - the first ‘organic’ farmer
80 years of ‘Organic’ food and farming
While since earliest times farmers have understood the importance of giving back to the land in return for the food that it provides us, the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming was first used by Lord Northbourne in his book ‘Look to the Land’ published in 1940. It came out at a time when industrial farming had relentlessly destroyed the accumulated fertility of millennia and sparked a debate for sustainable farming that continues to this day. But where did the inspiration come for Northbourne’s ideas? The trail leads back to the late 18th C and to the ideas of the poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1790 book, An Attempt to Interpret the Metamorphosis of Plants, laid the foundations for modern plant biology.
Two hundred years ago Goethe propounded the idea that there was a life force in plants. He saw that plants were driven by an ongoing intensification and that a ‘cycle of expansions and contractions’ shaped the plant, making either leaf, flower or seed depending on the degree of the ‘dynamic and creative interplay of opposites’. This is what underpins the harmony of the universe and the harmony of life on earth down to the tiniest life forms.
Rudolf Steiner wrote extensively on Goethe and developed Anthroposophy on the foundation of what he called Goethe’s ‘spiritual-scientific basis’ of thinking.
Goethe’s doctor was Christoph Hufeland, author of Makrobiotik oder Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796), (Macrobiotics: the Art of Living Long). He was a naturopath who was also doctor to the King of Prussia Frederick Wilhelm lll, Schiller and Goethe, all part of the Weimar set. His ideas on human health and vitality mirrored Goethe’s observations on plant health and vitality and he was a close friend of Samuel Hahnemann, creator of homeopathy. Goethe hosted a Freitagsgesellschaft (‘Friday Society’) at which Hufeland would read from his drafts of Makrobiotik. Hufeland’s medicine envisaged a life force that should be nourished - the Hufelandist movement was largely vegetarian and inspired the Lebensreform (“Life Reform”) movement in the rest of Germany over the next century.
Steiner was an active proponent of this Lebensreform movement which sought a ‘back to nature’ way of living, with an emphasis on healthy diet and alternative medicine. In 1924 Steiner gave an agriculture course that was organised by biodynamic farming researcher Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer then went on to found the 800-acre biodynamic research farm at Loverendale In the Netherlands that provided the practical proof of Steiner’s theory. So in 1939 when Lord Northbourne decided to set up Britain’s first biodynamics conference he invited Pfeiffer to run it. The resulting Betteshanger Summer School and Conference brought together a wide range of proponents of biodynamic farming. It was a seminal event in the history of the organic farming movement. A few months later Germany invaded Poland, World War ll broke out, making further collaboration difficult. A year later, in 1940, inspired by the visionary 9 days of the Betteshanger Summer School, Lord Northbourne’s book ‘Look to the Land’ was published.
It was a best seller. In it Northbourne identifies debt and ‘exhaustive’ farming as having the potential to lead to ‘the extermination of much of the earth’s population by war or pestilence.’ He points out that if the land is sick, then farming is sick and that people will be sick. That Nature ‘is imbued above all with the power of love; by love she can after all be conquered but in no other way.” In ‘Look to the Land’ Northbourne coins the term ‘organic’ to describe farming that sees the farm as an organism. “The mechanism of life is a continuous flow of matter through the architectural forms we know as organisms. The form alone has any life or any organic identity.” In this he mirrors Goethe’s writing on botany.
He wrote that to quarrel with nature makes no more sense than a ‘quarrel between a man’s head and his feet.’ He described ‘organic’ farming as “having a complex but necessary interrelationship of parts, similar to that in living things”. Although nobody had previously used the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming, ‘Organic’ became, in English, the accepted descriptor.
In 1943 Eve Balfour’s ‘The Living Soil’ began by quoting across several pages in her first chapter directly from ‘Look to the Land’ She founded the Soil Association 3 years later in 1946, with support from Northbourne. Her book and Northbourne’s informed the debate about the future of farming in Britain, a debate that was closed off by the Agriculture Act of 1947 where ‘exhaustive’ agriculture to maximise production prevailed. Subsidies were given to farmers who used ICI’s chemical fertilisers and farmers who refused to ‘modernise’ were threatened with land confiscation. Farming was nationalised and the organic movement was marginalised.
In Japan, Sagen Ishizuka, doctor to the Japanese imperial family, followed up on Hufeland’s macrobiotic ideas and developed “shokuiku” (“Food Study”) and in 1907 created the Shokuyo (Food for Health) movement. A shokuiku follower, George Ohsawa, subsequently published a book in 1960 setting out the principles of healthy living and called it ‘Zen Macrobiotics’.
Ohsawa knew of Christophe Hufeland and freely adopted Hufeland’s term ‘Macrobiotik’ to describe his diet based on similar principles, embodying a yin and yang approach to food. He sought out and met a descendant of Hufeland in 1958. Ohsawa’s seminal book was adopted by the emerging alternative society and inspired the natural foods movement of the 1960s that supported whole food and organic farming. The natural foods stores adhered to macrobiotic principles, selling only whole grains, eschewing sugar and artificial ingredients and supporting organic food.
So it was that Goethe’s doctor Christophe Hufeland coined the term “Makrobiotik” that drove the Lebensreform movement and inspired Rudolf Steiner to develop the anthroposophical farming principles known as ‘biodynamic, which were proven in practice by Steiner’s follower Pfeiffer. Lord Northbourne’s book gave the movement momentum and the name ‘organic.’ A Zen version of the same principles emerged in the 1960s and helped drive the natural and organic transformation of farming, diet and medicine that will ultimately restore our soils and thereby underpin the health and vitality of us all.
"Who knows himself and others well / No longer may ignore: / Orient and Occident dwell / Separately no more” Goethe
The Midwestern Farm Boy who invented Regenerative Agriculture
Regenerative farming is the buzz word now. Biodynamic and organic describe farming that treats the entire farm as an organism and adopts practices that think about the farm holistically. Regenerative embraces organic and biodynamic and looks at how we can regenerate the entire planet through agriculture.
The American War of Independence is often characterised as a revolution based on ‘no taxation without representation’ and the iconic Boston Tea Party. There is another, darker motive for the revolt against British rule. With Iroquois support, the British successfully drove the French out of Canada in 1770. The Iroquois were motivated by the promise that, if they helped Britain prevail against the French, King George guaranteed there would be no further settlement by farmers of the lands west of Pennsylvania.
But by that time the fragile soils of Pennsylvania had been deforested and eroded and become ‘farmed out’ - no longer fertile. Desperate farmers wanted the rich lands further West and Britain’s commitment stood in their way. The Revolutionary War was a disaster for Britain and for the Native Americans, who were pushed further and further west by land-hungry farmers.
The farmlands of Ohio were the first to feel this onslaught and by the early 20th Century were almost totally ‘farmed out.’
It was a party animal and widely-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Louis Bromfield, who decided to try to reverse that situation. In the 1930s he had a groovy house in Senlis just outside of Paris, where luminaries of the Paris creative scene would gather for his legendary weekend parties. Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Elsa Schiaparelli, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Douglas Fairbanks and Edith Wharton were all friends and regular visitors. He learned traditional gardening techniques from his French peasant neighbours. He embarked on a voyage to India, where he visited Sir Albert Howard’s soil institute at Indore and learned the Indore composting technique that was to become the bedrock of British organic farming. He wrote a best-selling novel set in India called “The Rains Came” that became a wildly successful movie. That set him up financially for life. He despaired at Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and wrote “England, the Dying Oligarchy” a bitter critique of British policy. After the Munich Agreement he’d had enough and headed back to the US. He bought a 600-acre farm in Ohio where he could raise his family in safety and apply the techniques he had learned in France and India. The land was in dire condition, but he knew what had to be done.
In 1942 he set up the Friends of the Land and allied it with the US Soil Conservation Service with the goal of turning around the ruinous impact of the ‘Dirty Thirties’ where the Dust Bowl had led to the abandonment of vast acreages of farmland that had become useless. He introduced what he called ‘trash farming’ which we now call ‘no till agriculture’ where you didn’t plough the land, you let the crop residues sit on the soil and then planted into the residue in the Spring. He introduced green manures, mulching and strip cropping to stop erosion and rebuild soil fertility. The Friends of the Land journal ‘The Land’ included contributions from Rachel Carson, whose 1962 best seller “Silent Spring” kickstarted the environmental movement. He was best man when Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall at his organic farm. If his Senlis residence was the hippest place outside of Paris, his Ohio farm drew groovers from all over the USA.
A poem in the New Yorker captured the vibe:
‘Strangers arriving by every train, Bromfield terracing against the rain,
Catamounts* crying, mowers mowing, Guest rooms full to overflowing,
Boxers in every room of the house, Cows being milked to Brahms and Strauss,
Kids arriving by van and pung**, Bromfield up to his eyes in dung,
Sailors, trumpeters, mystics, actors, all of them wanting to drive the tractors,
All of them eager to husk the corn, some of them sipping their drinks till morn’
But while all the partying was going on there was serious business - the soil of his Ohio farm steadily became more fertile year after year. It regenerated. He proved that degeneration could be reversed and laid the foundations for the organic farming movement in the USA.
*wild cat **sleigh
Vegeburgers allowed, but plant-based dairy under cloud
Great news! In October the European Parliament rejected the meat industry’s attempt to ban the use of words like ‘sausage’ or ‘burger’ to describe plant-based sausages and burgers. But it was a darned close-run thing - just 55% of MEPs voted against insanity. Not really surprising as the EU Parliament has form when it comes to these things.
But before you congratulate them on their common sense: they also voted to ban any reference to dairy products unless they come from cows, sheep, goats or Italian water buffalo. So no soy milk, no almond milk, no sunflower cheese. What is the EU going to do about coconut milk? Or coconut cream? Or peanut butter? Should we just give the EU Parliament control over our dictionaries. These words are part of the English language. No doubt ‘Milk of Magnesia’ is heading for the chop, too.
In 1981 my brother Gregory created the world’s first vegeburger. We got the trademark as the word had not previously appeared in print. So it was Vegeburger™. The problem with that was the word went generic. Hoover had the same problem when ‘hoovering the carpet’ became a verb for sucking out dust. A descriptor may be generic but that won’t stop the valiant guardians of the consumer, sorry, producers in Brussels.
If someone buys coconut milk it’s frightfully confusing for those poor souls who are unaware that coconuts don’t have udders bursting with milk and don’t say ‘moo.’. As for peanut butter, it’s called ‘burro di arachidi’ (peanut butter) in Italian, ‘mantequilla de mani’ (peanut butter) in Spanish, ‘beurre d’arachide’ (peanut butter) in French and ‘Erdnussbutter’ (peanut butter) in German. I think maybe that particular train may have left the station but don’t be surprised if the EU vote initiates a process of suppression of the way people actually speak and starts to rewrite dictionaries.
This Whac-a-Mole game with vegans and vegetarians and coconut milk and peanut butter lovers still has a long way to run.
Meanwhile the EU Green Deal takes shape and the EU Parliament is quite happy to ignore the scandalous waste of food and land it represents. There are 22 million hectares of EU farmland devoted to growing rapeseed for biodiesel. That’s enough land to feed 30 million people a year. 10 million people die of hunger globally every year, but the EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation mandates that we feed cars and trucks and aeroplanes, which take priority over starving human beings. And that’s before you count the 2 million hectares of palm oil that ends up as biodiesel or power station fuel in Europe. If we had carbon pricing instead of EU laws that require the burning of food there would be a lot more happy orangutans in Indonesia. It always vexes me that orangutan lovers are more concerned about a tiny amount of non-hydrogenated palm oil in a jar of peanut butter (sorry, ‘peanut-based bread surfacing material’) than they are about the fact that their hybrid car is running on a palm oil/diesel blend.
Then there are those poor French farmers who are still producing relatively ropey wine that nobody particularly cares to drink. Wines from England, New Zealand and other areas are organic and more palatable. Understandably the French wine growers are very pro biofuels. You take the wine, turn it into brandy but instead of leaving it in burnt oak barrels to develop some flavour you just mix it with petrol at 15%. The E85 petrol blend of grape wine ethanol and petrol is subsidised to make it a lot cheaper than regular petrol and that helps the French to quietly burn (with subsidies) all that wine that nobody wants to drink. That wine ethanol also makes good hand sanitiser - coronavirus saves the day!
While the EU continues to squabble about what is a burger or milk or butter or a sausage, Britain is launching the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme. Britain will lead the world in having a farming policy that will deliver ‘public money for public goods.’ So much more grown up than a farm policy that just makes global warming worse while trying to change the language people use to describe their food.
There's a fungus among us
When their owners are coming home - even when they are miles away, their dog is at the window barking a welcome. This was all in a book called “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home” by Rupert Sheldrake. He coined the concept of ‘morphic resonance’ to try to explain how this apparent telepathy may have some kind of energetic basis. His work was, perhaps inevitably, scorned by mainstream science and a senior editor of Nature magazine said the book should be burned. Rupert’s wife is Jill Purce, who teaches Mongolian overtone chanting, a way of creating deep resonance from your vocal chords that cures digestive disorders.
Their son is Merlin Sheldrake, whose recently-published book “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures” investigates the way that fungi play a pivotal role in all life on the planet.
It’s a gripping book and completely upsets one’s conventional perspective on life. Life began with algae in the sea - the algae could use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugary carbohydrate, but they couldn’t survive on land. Enter fungi, which attached themselves to algae and brought up water from the earth so algae could live on land. Then the algae created their own filaments (roots) which are inhabited by fungi and plant life on Earth began. When you look at an oak tree, you are looking at the food-gathering ‘mouth’ and ‘stomach’ that delivers carbohydrates to the fungi in the soil. An oak’s roots are full of mycorrhizal fungi, milking the tree for sugar. The fungi use that sugar to ‘pay’ for minerals and medicines from the 10,000 or so bacteria like actinomycetes that need that sugar to live and reproduce. The fungal network can stretch over miles, the fungi transferring sugar from trees that are producing a lot to other trees that need a sugar fix.
Then the fungi moved beyond plants - they created moving ‘plants’ (worms and other soil creatures). A worm eats soil that contains fungal spores and bacteria. The worm’s gut is a safe place in which soil microbes reproduce, thriving on the food that comes in the worm’s mouth, reproducing and then coming out the other end of the worm in huge numbers to build fertility.
Where does it end? Are we humans also just food gathering organisms for microbes? Is our real ‘soul’ a group of microbes that use us to feed and increase their populations? If it’s true of trees and plants and worms, why not us?
Plants have roots that go outward into the soil, we have intestinal villi, tiny roots that absorb nutrients, via our gut flora, from the food we eat. Plants and animals use probiotics and prebiotics to maintain health. There is lateral gene transfer among our gut flora and among soil flora - so we are constantly evolving along with our microbial partners (or masters)
Merlin Sheldrake also points out how fungi can influence our brains. Psilocybin comes from ‘magic’ mushrooms, LSD comes from ergot, a fungus that infects rye grains. These are medicines that researcher envisage will replace addictive tranquilisers in years to come.
So why do dogs know when their owner is coming home? Dogs are pack animals, They share a pack microbiome so that, when they’re hunting, they act with one brain. When you are close to a dog, you share its microbiome. Is that the same telepathy that Merlin Sheldrake describes as the “Wood Wide Web’ - that instantaneous shared awareness that can stretch between trees that are miles apart in a forest. Does it apply to animals and humans too?
Why does overtone chanting cure digestive problems? Could it be that the vibrations of the chanting are like a lullaby to your gut flora, helping them to settle down and live in harmony?
Could it be that Merlin’s book contains the explanations for what his parents saw and recognised as real but didn’t have the insight that their son brought to the table?
What it also confirms is that organic farming and healthy eating is the best way to benefit from the multiplicity of life-enhancing benefits that arise from having a vibrant and dense fungal community in our bodies and environment.
Prevention over cure
Read more about boosting your immune system here.
Auto-Biography
A large part of my life has been spent riding around in automobiles. Each had its own motor personality and embodies memories of periods of my life. This little ‘auto-biography’ reminisces through the lens of the vehicles in which I rode.
1946 Plymouth coupe, when we lived in Venice (California). This car had no first gear so when we visited my aunt Thelma in Topanga Canyon my Dad would get up a good run so that we could make it up to their house.
Because we were moving from California to the UK in 1951 my Dad bought a Nash Rambler, a ‘compact’ car by American standards but still a bit of a hog in the UK. Ours was green with the fake wood look around the windows.
Here’s my Dad’s friend Emil in front of our Nash Rambler, parked outside our flat at 5 Lancaster Gate, now a hotel.
The Nash was sold when we lived in Wiesbaden and we had a VW Microbus which we took back to the US when we moved to Omaha, Nebraska. When we passed another one we’d stop and they’d stop and we’d exchange notes on being members of what was then a very rare breed
My best friend Jimmy Wickencamp in Omaha had a ’49 Pontiac Chieftain convertible. We were the ‘Condors’ so it was the gang car and we all chipped in for gas money. One cold winter’s night we were macho posing in 25°F weather with the top down at Shada’s Drive-in. The car wouldn’t start. We were shamed as we got out and pushed it down to the adjoining highway to get a bump start. We were the talk of Omaha Central High School the next day.
Jimmy then bought an Oldsmobile Super 98, the ‘muscle car’ of its era. Aged 14 I did my first 100 mph in it, with Condors aboard, in driving rain on Route 6 west of Omaha. An oncoming truck splashed water over the windscreen so I was driving blind for several seconds. They cheered me (with relief) for holding firm. Jimmy dropped out of school and ran away with Carol Corbley, who painted her fingernails different colours (radical - this was Omaha, 1958). He had painted all the chrome with gold paint.
In 1959 we moved to Chateauroux France where our first car was a Renault 4 CV - it was the first manual I ever drove.
My mother and I went up to Paris in 1959 and collected a brand new Renault Dauphine from the Billancourt factory on Sequin Island on the Seine. It was quite revolutionary for its time. Soon after, in 1959, we drove it to Valencia via Pamplona and then took the ferry to Ibiza.
In London in 1966 I bought an Austin 12 from a Kiwi friend for £12. Painted the front wings white and the chrome gold. (Wickencamp’s influence?). Got stopped and searched every time I parked outside the Head Shop on Kensington Park Road.
The Austin gave up the ghost and I then drove a Thames van with a mattress in the back and a little camping stove. Drove it to Glastonbury where we camped with Mark Palmer and John Michell and believe we saw flying saucers over the Tor in October 1967.
In 1968 drove nights for Yellow Cab in Philadelphia. The suspension on some of the cars was so bad I could barely stand after an evening of driving. I stuck to North Philadelphia which many drivers avoided as it was a black area, but there were lots of profitable short rides as supply was limited and demand was good.
I had a Ford Fairlane in Philadelphia but the transmission was on its last legs and I got rid of it and bought a Studebaker Commander from one of our commune members - we shared a big house in Philly and then all moved to farm near Doylestown.
The 1955 Studebaker Commander was a dream. It had been resprayed gold. I did have to put in a gallon of oil every time I filled up the tank but it got me from Philly to Los Angeles on Route 66 and the clouds of blue smoke disappeared once it was running smoothly in third gear.
Some drunken guys in Venice (California) driving a 1956 Studebaker Commander at 60 mph through a red light smashed into my 1955 Studebaker Commander. They were members of ‘The Organisers’ - a group who were working with the police to keep tabs on the more radical Black Power activists. So the police were disturbed when 2 Organiser guys jumped out of their car after the crash and were seen running up the street with automatic rifles. Double agents.
After the crash I bought a car that had seat belts and a more substantial chassis - a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible
Back in London in 1969 I had a 1961 Vauxhall Cresta. Nice fast car. Painted it black and yellow so it looked like a wasp.
In 1974 I got a Hillman Minx convertible for £15, worth the drive across to Walthamstow. But a lot of the front wing was a plasticky repair substance and it started falling off, no MOT possible, goodbye
Then I got a Rover 105, a great car and utterly reliable. A bit stodgy for a hip young groover, but I had a family and I had heard all the urban legends about how Rovers emerged intact from accidents that would have crumpled any other car.
My first Citroen, a DS 19. Lovely ride, the suspension lifted the whole car up when you turned on the ignition.
A used Ford Executive was a poor man’s luxury car - their secondhand value was low as they were such gas guzzlers. However, I owned it at the time that we had monthly board meetings in Coventry with Wilson King, our investors in Whole Earth. It was a great motorway cruiser
My Peugeot 604 was OK, but not the love of my life. I had bought it at auction and was glad to be rid of it.
The Rover 2000 was rock solid, perfect for drives to see the MacLagans, London friends who’d moved to Wales.
The Citroen XM was a superb car. I sold mine to my wife Josephine and bought a stretch version, resprayed emerald green. It was actually inconveniently long and made parking difficult, even with a Kensington and Chelsea residents parking permit.
I only ever bought a new car once. It was a Land Rover Discovery and it cost me £39000 in 2005. I bought it because my brother Gregory and I had been stranded on a track in our woodland and had to be towed out. So I wanted a robust 4 wheel drive to avoid a repeat. 3 weeks after buying it I got bogged down in a field in not very challenging terrain and had to be towed out by a farmer neighbour. It was also too big to easily get in and out of our garage. I sold it 13 weeks after I bought it and was lucky to get £26,000. I lost £13000, £1000 a week, also probably not far from the total that I’ve spent on buying all the other cars I’ve ever owned.
After that I then got a Land Rover Freelander, which was lighter and smaller and easier to navigate across fields and through the woods. I loved it. But it had the notorious Ford V6 engine and eventually the head gaskets blew, the metal warped and it went to the scrapyard.
I wanted another Freelander and this time I bought one over the phone from a dealer in Rye for £1750. It has the 4 cylinder BMW diesel engine. I’ve been driving it for nearly a decade and apart from brake repairs, has served me faithfully and costlessly.
Offset the climate mess ...or stop complaining
In September 1993 at Whole Earth Foods we ran a retail promotion called “Eat Organic - Save the Planet.’ This highlighted our increasingly organic range - organic ingredients were becoming widely available. I recorded a rap. We sent the cassette out to all participating shops. One verse ran:
“The weather round the world is getting mighty strange,
As the Amazon rain forest turns into a cattle range
But still you keep on buyin’ all those products that they sell
Eatin’ burgers, drinking coffee, let the Indians go to hell.
Eat organic, save the planet.’
26 years later everyone’s got their knickers in an almighty twist about the same thing and blame Brazil’s President Bolsonaro for the fires in the Amazon. Bolsonaro snaps back that he blames the green NGOs. He’s deluded if he thinks that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF are secretly lighting fires. But if you asked me who was responsible for this tragedy I would blame the same culprits.
The idea of carbon offsets has been anathema to these NGOs. My inbox is full of their urgent requests for funding, promising to campaign against Amazon fires. None have a credible strategy. The only viable strategy is one they oppose: clean up the mess!
Back in 1854 Soho in London had a severe cholera outbreak. A doctor called John Snow cured it by removing the pump handle from the pump at the public well. People stopped dying. After that London invested heavily in sewers to separate the liquids (and solids) that come out of your body from the liquids that go into your body. It became a model for the world. Otherwise we’d all be dying of cholera. Nobody minded having to pay to remove the crap that was killing people. If it was today, you’d have NGOs screaming at people to reduce the number and volume of their bowel movements.
Excrement is visible and smellable. Our carbon dioxide excrement is invisible and odourless. But it is far more threatening to society than a cholera epidemic. So why do we baulk at the cost of cleaning it up? We have marvellous tools like trees, soils, pastures, the use of wood in buildings, biochar, peat bogs and salt marshes that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and very quickly and cheaply reduce greenhouse gas levels. So why do the NGOs oppose it? Here’s their policy, mostly set out around 2008.
Greenpeace: “allowing forests to become a get out of jail free card for polluters would be extremely bad news for the fight against climate change.’
Friends of the Earth: “Allowing rich countries to offset their carbon dioxide by buying up huge tracts of forest is riddled with problems and will do little to tackle climate change.”
WWF “We committed to only purchasing offsets from projects which have been certified by the Gold Standard. The Gold Standard excludes forestry. Buying forestry offsets does nothing to lessen society’s dependence on fossil fuels to generate its energy, something that is ultimately needed to address climate change”
We have wasted 10 years. The rain forests burn and we lose 30 football fields of farmland every minute.
We have to pay farmers and foresters to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If the global carbon price was $50 tonne CO2 the cost to society would be minimal, about $10 per barrel of oil. A hectare of rain forest would be worth $500 a year. That’s a heck of a lot more than anyone makes grazing cattle or growing soybeans. Brazil has been cleaning up our shit for several decades now and we’ve never paid them a penny for it. We make the CO2, they clean it up. We refuse to pay them because a few worthy NGOs play right into the hands of the climate change deniers by opposing the market for offsets. If we did pay for carbon removal we’d all be eating organic food and have more trees. We’d stop using peat. We could still make progress on wind and solar but meantime we would have more biodiversity, purer water, healthier soils and cleaner air. Would that be so terrible? If you don’t want to pay to clean it up then don’t complain about the mess.
The Elephant in the Obesity Room
Antibiotics can double the weight gain of a chicken, what are they doing to us?
For peat's sake
2500 years ago Plato wrote about ancient Greece many years before: “... the earth has fallen away all round and sunk out of sight. The consequence is, that in comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.”
At a remarkable mid-June gathering at Morvern in the West Highlands I read the above excerpt from Plato, who was describing Greece before farmers totally screwed it up. The theme of the conference was ‘Soil Matters’ and it brought together leading soil scientists, artists, musicians, government and NFU officials, land managers and others with an interest in soil and sustainability. It was hosted by the Andrew Raven Trust, a trust established in memory of his profound influence on Scottish land management and environmental issues. Because we were in the Highlands the role of peat in climate change and sustainability was a topic. Peat has a deep resonance with the spirit of Scotland - I’m not talking about whisky here but about peat bogs.
The Scottish landscape has seen some hard times - the Clearances led to populated areas seeing the longstanding human residents sent off to Glasgow or America or Australia, to be replaced by deer and sheep. Now the Scots are recreating the marvellous environment that reflects the levels of rainfall that typify the region and rebuilding rural populations living in harmony with this unique environment. A surprising number of the new migrants are from England.
Misguided post-war policy gave indiscriminate tax incentives to forestry. Trees were inappropriately planted on peatlands, the bogs dried out, the ecosystem collapsed. Now there are active peat bog restoration projects all over Scotland and the benefits to environment and climate are inestimable. A peat bog can compete with a woodland in the amount of carbon dioxide it takes out of the air and stores permanently in the depths of the earth. Scotland’s peat bogs are making a huge contribution to mitigating climate change and we still don’t pay them a penny for doing it. With carbon pricing on the horizon that could change. If the carbon price is £50/tonne CO2 then an undisturbed peat bog could earn its owner £2-300 per hectare per year. That’s more than you could make by cutting the peat for fuel or compost.
Peter Melchett, the late Policy Director of the Soil Association, dreamed of the day when peat use was phased out completely from organic farming. A 2010 Government deadline for removing peat from horticulture was quietly extended to 2020 and now neither Defra nor the EU have any concrete plans to phase out peat use - the pressure from horticulture is too strong - tomato and vegetable growers are a powerful lobby.
So, while the Scots are diligently restoring peat bogs the rest of the world is still digging it up to save microscopic amounts of money. We deserve to die if we can’t do anything about this insanity. Vast peat bog areas of Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania and Canada are being mined on an industrial scale to supply vegetable growers. There have been attempts to phase peat out of organic and conventional production. ‘Peatless peat’: compost blends of coir, composted shredded bark, biochar and green waste perform just as effectively but cost a tiny bit more. They have a vastly lower carbon footprint. The organic movement sees itself as superior to other growers and farmers but the use of peat is one area where we must hang our heads in shame. Every principle of sustainability is contradicted by the use of peat;: it takes tens of centuries to replace; it turns into carbon dioxide within a year or two of being used; and it destroys biodiverse habitats. Growers feel under tremendous pressure from supermarkets to cut costs in any way possible and peat is cheap.
Alternatives that don’t devastate the environment can do the job just as well, they just cost 1/2 a penny more than peat for a seedling plant. A tomato plant can produce 50 tomatoes, so that’s 1/100 of a penny that is saved by using peat to grow tomatoes. Screw the planet, let’s save a penny per 100 organic tomatoes.
It is time for the organic movement to revisit its founding principles, look to the Scottish example and drive a worldwide movement to restore peat wetlands and make peat use extinct before peat use makes us extinct.
