Paying the price for carbon dioxide

Would you pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Putting a price on carbon makes people pay for carbon dioxide that they add to the atmosphere (ouch!) and rewards behaviour that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide (yes, please).

So why not just make people who emit carbon pay for that carbon dioxide and give the same amount of money, the ‘carbon price’, to people who take it out of the atmosphere?

A lot of people make money out of carbon emissions. Oil companies are the main subjects of hatred, but it is the rest of us who actually burn the fossil fuels that keep our homes warm, our cars on the road and planes in the air. The biggest beneficiary is the Government, which gets 53p per litre of petrol, plus another 10p of VAT. It’s like the situation with cigarettes: the Government knew for decades that fags were killing people but the tax per packet was a vitally important source of income, so it was challenging for the powers-that-be to crack down on smoking. Even palm oil, most of which gets mixed with diesel fuel, gets taxed at 53p per litre, but the food industry takes the flak when it’s in a biscuit. Palm oil has replaced hydrogenated fat, which is why heart disease rates are falling.

Organic versus non-organic

Organic farmers increase soil carbon every year: they compost green waste and crop residues; they add manure to the soils instead of chemical fertilizer; they do crop rotations that naturally boost soil nitrogen; they encourage a resilient soil microbiome that also increases soil carbon; they let the land go fallow so natural fertility is rebuilt, which means more soil carbon. An organic farm can capture and store about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Non-organic farmers use chemical fertilizers that wipe out the soil micobiome and cause nitrous oxide pollution that is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Intensive animal rearing of cattle and pigs leads to higher methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas. Herbicides and pesticides are made from fossil fuels and end up as more global warming. Farming is responsible for one third of our annual increase in greenhouse gas levels. Organic farming could cancel out that increase and bring greenhouse gas levels down by a similar amount and we could stop stressing about climate change.

Powerful stuff

So how can we encourage organic farming? How do you encourage anything? Money. Powerful stuff. Farmers love it.

The EU carbon price is just over £90 per tonne of CO2. An organic farmer can capture at least seven tonnes. If they got paid for it, that would be an extra income of £630 per hectare.

A non-organic farmer emits at least two tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year from fertilizer and soil organic matter breakdown. If they had to pay for that (a tax on fertilizers and pesticides) it would cost them at least £180 per hectare.

Every crop is different, but let’s take a look at barley. Let’s say that a barley farmer - whether organic or not - wants to make £1630 per hectare.

An organic farmer gets four tonnes of barley per hectare and can sell it at £250 per tonne; that’s £1000 per hectare. With a CO2 payment of £700 per hectare that adds up to £1700 per hectare gross income. Bingo!

A non-organic farmer gets a higher yield (thanks to chemicals) of six tonnes per hectare. At £250 per tonne that generates £1500 per hectare gross income. But the farmer must pay for two tonnes of CO2 emissions - £180 - so that brings it down to £1320. So to make as much as the organic farmer, the non-organic farmer would have to charge £305 per tonne for barley, an extra £55 per tonne. What brewer will pay a £55 a tonne premium for non-organic barley?

Much barley ends up in beer. If you’re down the pub and a pint of organic bitter is £3.30 and a pint of non-organic is £3.90 would you be prepared to pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

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

WWOOF

A couple of young women pitched up at our place recently. We fed them, gave them a twin-bed room and they worked for us for six hours every day, mostly weeding and cutting back brambles on the edge of the orchard. If they had to pay for a B&B it would cost them £700 a week at this time of year so they’re earning, for a 30-hour week, nearly £10 an hour.

And they’re not tourists; they’re immediately part of the community. That’s ‘wwoofing’ for you.

WWOOF was founded in 1971 by the wonderful Sue Coppard, who was also the editor of Seed Magazine, the Journal of Organic Living that we Samses published from 1971-1977. She wrote to an organic farmer in Sussex and asked if she could come and help out for a weekend. She had a transformative and exciting time and friends said they’d like to do it too, so she took them on a second visit. That was the beginning of an organisation called Weekend Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Then people started staying for weeks, not just weekends, so it became Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Now people in 61 countries are wwoofing. Globally there are more than 10,000 organic farms and gardens that are WWOOF hosts, so now it is Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (still WWOOF). A person who ‘wwoofs’ is known as a ‘wwoofer.’

Wwoofers can be any age or nationality. It is refreshing to reflect on the people we have met who we would never otherwise have encountered: the American honeymoon couple wwoofing round England on a tandem bicycle; Andre, the French engineer in his fifties who got all our generators, strimmers, brushcutters, rotovators and everything else electromechanical running perfectly; the Italians and the dinners of pasta and brown rice risotto they would prepare for us. Then there is Chris from Oxfordshire who is happiest working alone in the woods, clearing brambles, creating nice spaces among the trees and making charcoal. He’s a regular now.

Every time a wwoofer stays with a host they get a cultural immersion. An organic farmer or grower is living a lifestyle and a philosophy; that’s why they’re organic. Living with them for a few weeks helps the wwoofer to absorb the ethical rationale for farming in harmony with nature. It’s a rationale that infuses one’s whole life. It’s ‘ecotherapy’. So, after a season of wwoofing they will return to their regular lives with an irreversible change in their attitude to all the environmental and social issues that have their roots in the way we produce our food. When they go shopping they will unhesitatingly choose the organic option when it is available. They have become part of the movement.

When Attlee’s Labour Government in 1947 passed the Agriculture Act an important part of it was subsidies on mechanisation, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, aimed at moving agricultural labour off the land and into factories. Farmers who didn’t comply could have their land confiscated by the State, so small farms and rural employment crashed. Growers became dependent on casual labour from abroad, weed killers instead of hand-weeding and chemical fertilisers instead of manure and compost. This commitment to industrial agriculture was cemented into Britain’s farming and has been a burden on the taxpayer and on the environment ever since. Organic farmers were left at a permanent disadvantage, as chemical pesticides are cheaper than manual labour and there are few controls on the resulting poisoning of the environment. Nobody really measures the cost to the NHS of farm pollution. Nobody really measures the impact on biodiversity. Nobody measures the carbon footprint. So when a farmer has a steady supply of wwoofers to help with their labour-intensive chores it is economically
transformative and makes organic food much more competitive. Readers of my column know that carbon pricing would tip the pricing balance in favour of organic. That, plus wwoofers, would mean organic food would be consistently less expensive than non-organic.

Once a wwoofer always a wwoofer. The global community of wwoofers is ever-expanding and is an important pillar of the organic movement.

How to decarbonize a planet

Making the switch to organic agriculture on a global scale and turning waste biomass into biochar offers the real prospect of being able to reverse global warming, says Craig Sams

What’s happening out there? Is the world quietly going sane? A leading US Republican, Henry Paulsen, has come out strongly for action on climate change in the New York Times. For a political party that refuses to acknowledge burning fossil fuels can have anything to do with global warming, this is a tectonic event. Americans aren’t as stupid as their leaders think and are wising up to the fact that Hurricane Sandy was not God punishing us but to do with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The explosion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started around 1850 with the coal and steam-driven Industrial Revolution and the massive expansion of farmed land that was formerly wilderness or forest. My ancestors were part of this damage to the planet – great great grandpa Lars ploughed virgin prairie in Wisconsin, great grandpa Ole ploughed virgin prairie in Nebraska and grandpa Louis bought a tractor in 1926 so he could plough even deeper.

Every year the land they farmed gave up more of its life – losing ten tonnes of soil per hectare per year and as it decomposed, pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They cut down a lot of trees too – which mostly went up in smoke. The same thing happened in Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Manchuria and the Punjab. We destroyed the soil that feeds us and filled the atmosphere with the gases that are cooking the planet.

Up to 1980 farming and fossil fuels were equally responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases; now fossil fuels are in the lead. But farming still emits more than ever. Every year 125,000,000 hectares of food-producing land give up the ghost – that’s 1.8% of the available land used up, farmed-out, lifeless.

The way forward is a carbon tax. How would it work? Every time you emit a tonne of carbon dioxide you pay the price – at the moment it’s around $15 per tonne. But once there’s a global market the price will go up. What does this mean for organic food? It will become cheaper than industrially-farmed food as organic farming uses half the fossil fuels to produce a given amount of food. Year after year it increases the carbon content of soil while industrial farms deplete it. The recent Rodale white paper (see story opposite) shows that if the world’s arable land and pasture was farmed organically the reduction in carbon emissions would be enough to cancel out ALL the annual increase in greenhouse gases. Rebuilding soils with biochar increases soil carbon and stimulates increased growth and extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere by crops. By farming organically and turning waste biomass into biochar instead of burning it we could reverse global warming. We would also eat less meat as it will cost a lot more when you include the carbon cost (vegetarians have a lower carbon footprint and vegans emit about a fifth of the CO2 per year of meat-eaters).

Add in the reductions in emissions from a transition to wind and solar and we can face the future with confidence and look our grandchildren in the eye instead of looking away guiltily because our shortsighted greed has robbed them of a secure future.

California has a carbon tax which has equivalence with Quebec’s; China has opened eight carbon exchanges in its key industrial regions; Europe has its Emissions Trading Scheme. Unilever and Pepsi have created the Cool Farm Calculator so the whole carbon footprint of a tub of Flora or a packet of crisps can be calculated precisely, and the food industry is picking up on it. The 2015 climate conference in Paris won’t be another failure – there are too many stakeholders who are determined to make it happen and have already achieved broad agreement on principles.

If the whole world farmed organically and ate organic food, reduced fossil fuel emissions, produced and shopped locally as much as possible, insulated houses, ate less meat and planted more trees, we could possibly face a global cooling crisis caused by sucking too much CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that’s a long way off, so let’s just put carbon back in the soil, where it does nothing but good.

By Craig Sams

Organic food pioneer and polemicist
Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

Imagine for a moment

Just imagine for a moment that a politician spoke the truth.   Now stretch your imagination even further and imagine that Owen Paterson, Defra Minister, spoke the truth.  Here is what he would say.

“Her Majesty’s Government announce that we will impose punitive taxes on organic food in order to keep it at a price level that will deter consumers.  We will implement policies to encourage agricultural practices that will destroy the soil on which all life depends.  We will also continue to ensure that foods that lead to obesity and ill-health are subsidised by our government and foods that lead to good health are taxed, regulated or prohibited.”

“Your Government believes that bigger is better, so we will support the biggest farms the most and encourage obesity to that we can have bigger people to help support a bigger NHS.

“Like Labour, the Conservative Party believes that people who own large amounts of land and money should be rewarded for their cleverness or accident of birth by receiving large amounts of money from the taxpayer on a never-ending basis.  We therefore intend to continue to reward all owners of large landholdings with £110 every year for every acre of land that they own, or £265 per hectare, regardless of how they manage it.  However, we will make it difficult and complicated to claim for farmers who own less than 50 acres.  People who own a farm and home will not have to pay inheritance tax. We will continue to charge inheritance tax on non-farmers who own property worth more than £325,000.”

 “We will ensure that subsidised farming pays best when farmers do least to rebuild soil fertility and treat animals as cruelly as inhumanly possible.   We will ensure that farmers who grow food to be burned as biofuels will make more money than farmers who grow food for human consumption. We will support farming that accelerates climate change. “

What do they really say:  “Britain needs to be able to feed itself in an uncertain world.  Our farmers are our guarantee of food security and food independence.  Britain’s farmers are the backbone of rural society and help us preserve all that is best about British tradition and our countryside. We are importing too much food, we need to be more self-sufficient.’ 

What tosh.  The fact is that for every country where there is reliable data, the evidence shows that smaller farms are from 2 to 10 times more productive than large farms.  That’s productivity as normal people know it – i.e. getting a profitable income from an input of labour and capital.  In subsidised farming productivity just means ‘production.’  It is measured in soybeans and corn and doesn’t measure the input costs or the labour costs or the externalised costs such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and soil degradation.  The profit comes from the taxpayer.

Of course small farms also tend to integrate crops and livestock, they rotate their crops, they employ human beings.  Most importantly, because they live on the land and it has been in the family and they expect it to continue to be in the family they treat the land with respect and care.  An industrial farm uses up land and the employees don’t really care about a future beyond the next pay cheque.

What would happen if we took away all the subsidies and only allowed land to be inherited tax free if it was smaller than, say, 200 acres?

Farmers would go back to mixed farming.  Our current system mirrors the disastrous communist farming of the 1950s and 1960s, where government decided what would grow where and who would grow what.  Farmers would study the market and respond to demand from consumers, not price manipulation by government.

Agriculture is multifunctional.  It produces food but it also manages the landscape.  It creates employment and it should keep us all healthy. 

Sadly, it does the opposite.  It would be better to plant trees on the 40% of the US land that is devoted to growing corn to be burned as ethanol.  Why subsidise greenhouse gas emissions when you could be planting trees?

What can be done?  Nothing in Whitehall, nothing in Brussels, nothing in Washington.  They are hopelessly corrupted by the manufacturers of agrichemicals who spend fortunes on lobbying them and ensuring that the public have no say in how their food is produced. 

We just need to be aware and become the change.  Every person who cuts back on meat and uses the savings to always buy organic food is slowly but surely driving back the tide of industrialisation.  Supporting small farms, local food producers and the future.

Agroecology – The new Organic?

Over the past few decades the gap between organic food and the rest has narrowed.  Not that long ago, if you wanted to be sure you were avoiding pesticide residues, artificial colourings and flavourings and preservatives, animal cruelty, human exploitation, soil degradation, hydrogenated fat and GMOs, the only safe haven was to look for the word ‘organic’ on the label, or at the very least, ‘natural.’

In March 2 2012 Nestle announced they were removing artificial ingredients from their entire range.  That’s 80 formerly ‘safe’ additives that are now disappearing in ‘response to customer demand’ (and possibly also due to legal advice).  The RSCPA Freedom Food label and ‘free range’ are nearly organic.  Fairtrade reassures on exploitation.  Hydrogenated fat is finally out of most of our food, though the fast food industry need to pull their socks up.   The US is pushing for GMO labelling, which will be a nail in its coffin

Nestle’s announcement coincided with the Soil Association conference.  Farming is moving towards organic as well.  For a long time the Soil Association maintained clear blue water between organic and the rest by raising its own standards.  But under Helen Browning’s leadership a more pragmatic and outward-looking approach is emerging.  The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Agroecology.’  What is agroecology?  Well it’s organic, with knobs on - but also with more flexibility.  So it considers things that go beyond organic, such as air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions,  social and economic and political impacts. It looks at food from a global holistic aspect, not just from the view of the farmer and the food processor.   And it’s on a roll.

A big driver has been the 2010 IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development) report, where 400 of the world’s top agricultural experts agreed that there was no future for more intensification of agriculture; that the Green Revolution was a disaster; that GM foods won’t help; that we have to look to small farmers for the wisdom and the resilient technologies of the future if we are to feed the world and prevent climate change.   Download a copy and read the executive summary of this influential document. Monsanto and Syngenta, who helped choose those experts, dismissed it grumpily the week before it was published.

When Lady Eve Balfour founded the Soil Association in 1946 nobody was worried about greenhouse gas and global warming. 

The day before the conference I visited 2 Soil Association licensees.  One creates remarkably effective organic fertilisers. He criticised Soil Association policy of restricting external farm inputs.  The other said that, as a propagator of vegetable plugs that go out to most of the country’s organic vegetable growers, there was no way he could operate without external inputs.  He has no livestock and no need of them.  He uses peat (with Soil Association blessing) to get seeds off to a good start.  At the conference’s agroecology workshop 4 of the speakers guiltily commented that they had to buy in some inputs.  Who cares?  If you have a farm of a certain size, and you raise animals for meat or milk, then you can create a system that is a self-contained island or productivity.  But what if you just grow vegetables, or cereals?  What if you’re vegetarian?  Agroecology says we have to reduce meat and dairy consumption if we are to get the right balance in food production.  It encourages agroforestry, where you use trees and shrubs as part of food production, to increase tree cover, improve soil quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Organic encourages dependence on cows and other methane-emitting animals as part of a mixed farm system.  That means more pasture and fewer trees.

It’s time to lighten up and to embrace the ‘opposition’ and bring them towards a holistic and environmentally sound system that is truly organic…and agroecological.   They’re already moving in our direction and the Soil Association conference was a historic step toward embracing them and bringing them into the fold before it’s too late.  Look out Monsanto – the ground is starting to slip away from you.