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?

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 

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

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.

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.

Hydroponics

Back in the 1940s, Eve Balfour wrote a book called The Living Soil that became, along with Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament, the bible of the organic movement.  Albert and Eve were going to call farming in harmony with nature ‘Biological’ farming, but J.I.Rodale, Eve’s pal in the US, persuaded her that ‘Organic’ was a better name.  Organic farming is biological’  farming in that the carbohydrate produced by plants fuels the biological engine of microbes, worms and other creatures in the soil that converts soil nutrients into food for the plant.

So…what happens when there’s no soil involved?

When hydroponic farming came along, the organic movement was divided.  How could we not grow things in soil and call them ‘organic?’  The proponents said that hydroponics mimicked soil by using peat or coir as the growing medium, infused with water and organic nutrients.  The Soil Association allows peat and coir, but only for starting plants out or to improve soil, but not as a growing medium on its own. So as hydroponics wasn’t ‘soil’ it wasn’t approved. The EU organic regulations also prohibit hydroponic growing.  However, the US organic regulations do allow hydroponic growing. They require that the nutrients are organically approved and no pesticides or other prohibited inputs are used.  It’s what they call ‘bioponic’ – in other words as long as the biological activity is the same as in organic growing, where microbes in the soil interact with nutrients and plants, it is the same, functionally, as growing in soil.

We have an equivalence agreement with the US that allows the import and export of organic foods even where there may be some differences in regulations.  This is one of those differences and it’s now being reviewed on both sides.

I should declare my interest.  Our company Carbon Gold sells soil improver to organic greenhouse growers who benefit from the benificial biological impact of enriched biochar which encourages the active microorganisms that typify healthy soil.  It does it by providing a huge surface area that enables them to flourish.  With it they can grow tomatoes avoid suffering from soil-borne diseases.  But we also sell much more to non-organic growers who value the fact that, whether combined with coir or peat, biochar’s biological boost enables them to reduce or eliminate pesticide use and enjoy higher yields, by plugging in to the ‘soil food web.’   So I’m walking both sides of the street and ‘conventional’ growers are reducing their dependency on pesticides and inputs.

Farmers who grow hydroponically and using biology are getting yields and quality up, too. It’s reached a point where a grower in Holland can get 80 tonnes of vine tomatoes per hectare, a 10-15% increase, by working with biology.  It would be unfortunate if branding such as ‘pesticide-free’ or ‘LEAF’ were to predominate with consumers who just want a ‘clean’ product that is free of pesticide residues.  Most aren’t bothered if the roots of the plant were in soil or instead in some kind of soil-like mixture off the ground.  They just don’t want to eat pesticides.  Strawberries, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce and salad crops all perform brilliantly in controlled situations. Performance equals competitiveness.

 Organic growers use peat in greenhouses and also steam sterilise their soil between growing seasons.  This raises ecological and biological questions that are uncomfortable to answer.  With ‘bioponics’ you recreate the biological conditions of growing in soil, but in troughs that allow at least 180 litres of soil per square metre – this means ‘feeding the soil’ rather than ‘feeding the plant’ and looks like it may be the compromise way forward.  For the past 5 years I have been growing vegetables (for my own use) in my greenhouse in troughs 2 feet off the ground that contain 400 litres of homemade soil per square metre.  I use the same troughs in the spring to propagate healthy plants that are then planted out and sold as Soil Association certified.  And I’ve never had to steam sterilise or use peat.

This affects everyone.  When you go into a supermarket the first thing you see is fresh vegetables.  In Denmark fresh fruit and vegetables are 30% of the organic market. The same proportions apply in the UK.  25 years ago, when organic was first making headway the only organic products supermarkets bothered with were fresh produce. That’s because people are most passionate about organic when they are buying fresh fruit and vegetables.   If organic vegetable growers lose ground because they can’t take full advantage of the clean growing breakthroughs in biological technologies and pest controls then they’re not the only ones who will suffer.  The entire organic marketplace will be weakened if consumers start to choose non-organic ‘clean’ fruit and vegetables.  Once consumers have weakened their commitment to the organic ‘brand’ it can have unwanted repercussions on all their other purchasing. 

So the transatlantic debate about hydroponics, bioponics and earth affects us all, not just vegetable growers. 

Agribusiness

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When a business sector sees a rash of mergers and acquisitions, it's for one of two reasons, growth or decay. The organic food industry has seen a lot of acquisitions by companies anxious to get in on the ground floor of the 5% annual growth rate in organic food and regenerative farming. Meanwhile, on the dark side, Monsanto is facing takeover by Bayer, not for any positive reasons, but because they are both looking into the abyss. Merger is one way to survive when the farmers they are competing for are spending less. Farmers aren't stupid - they can do the maths. When they see diminishing returns on their investment in seeds and agrichemicals, they reduce their spending. Normally in a situation like this the agribusiness operators would go to the EU or Washington and just wheedle more subsidies out of the national purse, bleating about food security while encouraging biofuels to prop up soy, rapeseed and corn prices. Who cares if you're destroying the earth's precious farmland at 30 football fields a minute? If you were a big landowner, you'd feel entitled to being paid to do this. That's what us mugs are here for. Now that the EU even subsidises grouse moors you'd think the gates were wide open. But the money is running out. Half the EU budget goes to farmers, much of it British money going via Brussels to France. The US spends $350 billion a year propping up agriculture in the US, channeling money through farmers to agribiz.

Let's take a look at who's eating whom. The potash fertiliser price has halved in the past 3 years, from $450 a tonne to $219. So in Canada, Agrium and Potash, two of the world's biggest potash producers, are merging in a desperate attempt to keep afloat while they wait for a bounce in price that may never happen. Bayer and Monsanto are both facing plunging sales and profits. Monsanto have the seed and Bayer have the pesticides to go with them. But again it's desperation. They hope that innovation will save them, but innovation is not something you find in mega corporations.   GMOs are losing support - US farmers never wanted them but were denied choice after Monsanto bought up all the seed companies and forced GMOs down their throats.

The whole ethanol biofuels scam is blowing up, too. It was never even vaguely 'carbon neutral' - it takes more energy to produce a litre of ethanol than the energy you get by burning it. It's more energy efficient to just mix corn with coal and shovel it into a power station, but that would be too obvious and repulsive.

Chem China has taken over Syngenta. They make the herbicides that Syngenta's GM seed can resist. Nobody in China will eat GMO rice but they'll tolerate pork or chicken fed on GM maize. But the real prize for Chem China is Syngenta's strong presence in US market: they're after Bayer/Monsanto's piece of the diminishing pie. Their US competitors are suddenly bleating about food security.   Two other agrichemical giants, Dow and DuPont, also merged recently. They're all like a bunch of drunks spilling out of the pub after a good night out, trying to keep each other from falling down.

If you're a farmer, what do you do? You used to be able to play off one agrichemical giant against the other, but soon you'll just take what you're given. Or look for an alternative and boy, what an alternative is on the horizon!

When the French '4 per 1000 initiative' succeeds at the Marrakech COP22 climate conference in November every hectare of organic farmland will be set to get over €150 a year in carbon credits. A hectare of chemical-dependent farmland will have to pay for its carbon footprint and that could cost close to €100 per hectare.   It won't happen overnight but the French have fixed a price of €56 per tonne for carbon, to take effect by 2020. The world will probably follow, even the US.   If you were a government that was facing huge annual costs to subsidise farmers with money that flows through their bank accounts to Dow/DuPont, Bayer/Monsanto and Chem China/Syngenta and you could instead just let the carbon markets transfer the money from fossil fuel power stations direct to organic farmers, what would you do? Keep on propping up a dying industry or finally recognise that organic food, when the carbon is priced in, is actually cheaper than the degenerative kind that is destroying our available soil at the rate of 30 football fields per minute? (I can't repeat this often enough)

Governments have been holding back for quite a long time because of the immense political power of the agrichemicals industry and of the landowning fraternity. They passionately hate socialism in all its forms, until it comes to their welfare payments.

It's time for a change. We need to bring freedom to farming. Carbon pricing that encourages regenerative farming instead of degenerative farming is the way forward. Organic is good for you and the climate, too.

Soil and Gut

Q, What's the functional difference between a carrot and an intestine?

A.  Nothing.

One is the mirror image of the other.  One is outward looking and the other is inward looking but they do the same things.  The parallels between how we eat to sustain good health in your bodies and how we farm to sustain good health in the body of the earth have never been so clear.   The digestive system is just a root turned inside out, but the functions are the same.

When you grow organically you are supporting a system of food production that is biological, using the marvelous intelligence of the trillions of microorganisms in the soil - when you eat organic whole foods you're supporting a system of food digestion that is biological, using the marvelous intelligence of trillions of microorganisms in your gut.

When we eat food it becomes soil-when we grow in soil it becomes food. 

Plants consume sun energy, carbon dioxide and water to make carbohydrate-we consume carbohydrate and to make energy, carbon dioxide and water. 

Soil is comprised of ‘soil biota,’ trillions of microorganisms that digest every bit of nutrient that comes their way- our gut is composed of 'gut biota,’ trillions of microorganisms that digest every bit of nutrient that come their way.

The soil microbes do 'transmutation' - they are little chemical factories that can convert stuff into other stuff – the nutrients that make plants healthy.  Our gut microbes transmute our food into whatever our bodies need, including manufacturing stuff like vitamins such as B2, B12 or C and essential minerals from the raw materials of the food we eat.

When we put chemical fertilisers on the soil plants that are making the carbohydrates that feed the soil microbiota stop sending them down.  Why should they?  The farmer is giving the plants soluble nutrients for free.  So the microorganisms that nourish the plant and defend it from disease are exterminated by disease-causing bacteria and fungi that attack the plant.  The resulting disease can be controlled with toxic pesticides, which end up in our food, but the soil sickens and cannot support healthy plant growth anymore. 

When we put excessive junk food and sugar into our digestive systems the microorganisms in our gut are not needed and die off or are exterminated by fungi like candida.   The result is that the microorganisms that support our immune system no longer support health and vitality.   The resulting disease can be controlled with toxic medications, which end up in our bodies,  but the gut sickens and cannot support health any more. 

The only real difference between a carrot and the gut is the that carrot looks outwards, sending its root hairs away from the carrot to collaborate with the friendly microorganisms and the food and immunity they bring.  The gut looks inwards, sending its root hairs into the intestine to collaborate with the friendly microorganisms and the food and immunity they bring. 

Not farming organically is shortsighted - you waste precious living soil microbiota in order to get temporary crop yield increases that leave you with degraded sickened soil that can't support healthy life and is dependent on drugs like fertilisers and biocides.   Not eating healthily and organically is shortsighted - you waste your precious living gut microbota to get temporary energy increases that leave you with a degraded, sickened digestive system that can't support healthy life and is dependent on drugs and antibiotics.

When you add charcoal to soil it helps protect the microbes in the soil from dying off so they can cure soil degradation and plant disease.   When you add charcoal to your diet it helps protect the microbes in the gut from dying off, curing gut degradation and disease.

A healthy soil is full of mucus, a sticky substance called glomalin that holds the soil particles together to ensure that nutrients and soil microbes all stay happily in the upper layers of soil

A healthy gut is full of mucus - sticky material made by gut flora that helps ensure that nutrients and gut microbes stay happily in the upper layers of the gut lining. 

The parallels go on. Whether you grow organically or eat organically, you are following the road of biology.  When you don't you're following the road of chemistry and drugs.  Chemistry creates addictive behaviour.  We have to kick the habit, in growing and in eating.  

 (Craig Sams will elaborate on these parallels at NOPE.  He will discuss the implications and opportunities of this emerging awareness for vitamin and supplement manufacturers, natural food processors and growers and farmers)

Panic over?

Global warming?  Panic over.  Fly guilt-free where you like as often as you like.    Splash out on that 7 litre Mercedes you’ve always secretly wanted.  The global warming crisis could be over.  There’s an easy solution that’s been staring us in the face for decades.

The make or break climate conference, COP21, is happening in Paris in December.  There will be a lot of haggling, a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of moaning.  India and China will fight to keep their coal-fired power stations.  Exxon and their Saudi pals will continue to fund corrupt scientists who deny climate change.  Brazil will fight to protect their right to chop down the Amazon rain forest.  Let them have their way… for the time being.

There needn’t be any pain.  The negotiations in Paris could be a doddle.

We can continue to burn fossil fuels, using our abundant and cheap reserves of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. We can save liquid fuels for airplanes and ships.   We must still go for wind and solar and geothermal, but in a less panicky way.

So how do we do it?  The answer lies in the soil.

Farming is responsible for 30% of excess greenhouse gas emissions.  But farming could cancel out 100% of our annual excess greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s already happening right now, but on less than 2% of the world’s farmland, the organic land.

Carbon dioxide is killing us all.  Organic farming sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it into rich soil that will feed us forever.  Sounds like a pretty good deal.  Of course going organic means we’d have to eat food that tastes better, not get sick from pesticides in our food, enjoy cleaner water and more biodiversity – but that’s a small price to pay for having a habitable planet.

This is the UN International Year of Soils 2015.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that on current trends we have 60 years before the soil runs out.

On August 31 2015, global food giant General Mills announced an investment of $100 million to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent. This will include sourcing products from an additional 250,000 acres of organic production. Jerry Lynch, the company’s chief sustainability officer pointed out that organic agriculture promotes soil that helps farms better endure droughts, heavy rains and pests, while pulling more carbon from the air and putting it into the ground in the process. 

A 34 year trial at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania growing field scale crops shows that organic farming can sequester 1 tonne of carbon per hectare, year after year.  The Rodale trial figures show that if regenerative principles were applied globally to arable farming and pasture we could offset all of the annual increase in greenhouse gas.  

Change is afoot. The Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance brings together Government, industry and NGOs to advance new solutions to food production that protect soil from further degradation by increasing carbon-rich soil organic matter.

The French National Institute for Agronomical Research states that

if we adapted farming practices to boost organic matter in soils by 0.4% a year it would compensate for all global greenhouse gas emissions. (link to source?) France’s Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll recently commented: “We could store the equivalent of anthropogenic carbon gas produced by humanity today. Storing carbon in the soil is organic matter in the soil, organic matter is fertilizing the soil.”

The benefits of soil organic matter as a carbon sink can be further enhanced by the use of biochar - finely ground charcoal used as a soil improver.  (That’s what I do at Carbon Gold).  Biochar has a centuries-long residence time in soil, so it acts as a long term carbon sink for carbonised biomass such as rice husks and forestry thinnings which would otherwise decompose or be burned and produce more carbon dioxide.  And it accelerates the buildup of organic matter in soil. 

So it’s not just me. The Rodale Institute, the UN’s FAO, General Mills and the French government all agree: grow organic, save the planet. Agriculture can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

The COP21 climate conference is in Paris in December. Every participating country will make INDC commitments (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) to reduce emissions.  All they have to do is convert agriculture to organic and they can surpass those commitments with ease.

Solving global warming was never going to be easy, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if we cast off the deadly grip of agribusiness and started farming for the future.

War of the world

After a century of destructive conflict a new battle is about the begin – the one to save Planet Earth. It’s the war we really can’t afford to lose, writes Craig Sams.

“I’m the King of the castle – and you’re a dirty rascal”

Every since my playground days I’ve been aware of who holds the high ground and who is a serf. In the olden days it was the legacy of your birth that determined your future chances. In our corporate world ‘legacy industries’ cling to their power in the face of change.

Economists bat on about ‘creative destruction’ in capitalism, but there are still way too many gigantic corporations that are dinosaurs; fat and obsolete but refusing to just lie down and be creatively destroyed. They’re the ‘kings of the castle’ and they’re not about to let any perceived ‘dirty rascals’ impinge on their power.  Sometimes creative destruction does work. A disruptive technology like a smartphone can instantly make obsolete regular cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, cameras, wrist watches, calculators, voice recorders and game boxes. Apple nearly destroyed IBM.

In Victorian times Britain and France went on a colony-building binge, demolishing the Ottoman Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire in order to take over their territory.  This led in 1914 to the ‘War to end all Wars’ that we commemorate.  Hindsight shows it was the start of a 100 Years War…WWI was followed by a lot of mini wars, then WWII, then the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanon invasion, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, to name a few.  NATO is at the heart of most of these wars

The NATO conference agenda recently called for increased military expenditure now that the EU economy seems to be finally.  Where would the money go?  To arms manufacturers in the US and Britain and to terrorists who we train and arm before they go over to the other side, creating new conflicts.

War of course isn’t the only legacy industry that made all its money out of a situation and can’t move on. .

Adam Smith nailed it in The Wealth of Nations when he wrote:  “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Who are the other dinosaurs that have sunk their fangs into the taxpayer’s neck and are sucking out our hard earned money to pay their salaries and remunerate their shareholders?

The pharmaceutical industry depends on widespread disease.  Many diseases arise from environmental reasons: lead in petrol, hormones in meat, pesticide residues in food and water, side effects of drugs, additives in food and toiletries and poor quality food grown in depleted soils. Prevention is the best cure, but where’s the profit in that?  If everyone was healthy Pharma would be in a very bad place.

Agribusiness depends on depleted soils.  Once you’ve knocked the life out of soil with nitrates, fungicides, insecticides, nematicides and other toxic material the only way a farmer can get a crop is by buying in ever more chemicals.  Farmers have to do what the government pays them to do, so Big Ag leans on government to make sure that the subsidy system encourages farmers to grow biofuels instead of food and to farm for production rather than sustainable productivity. They spend a lot of money fighting off real progress.

The ‘disruptive technology’ in agriculture is organic farming – like the smartphone it delivers a number of products in one package: sustainable yields, healthier soils, lower pollution, healthier people, reduced global warming, more biodiversity and far less expenditure on subsidies for expensive poisons and chemical fertilisers.

The oil industry get massive subsidies masked as exploration grants to make them seem more competitive than they really are. Private energy generation is discouraged, but it’s more resilient and cheaper.

But the biggest legacy industry of all is government – not only does it collaborate with the other legacy industries to protect their obsolete positions, the legacy industries collaborate with government to keep them dishing out the dosh and keeping their upstart competitors at bay.

Silicon Valley blew a hole in a number of legacy industries: big computers, expensive telephony, monopolised media and communications, to name a few. Now the Silicon Valley investors are investing big time in what they call ‘AgriTech.’ These investors don’t care for heavy-handed government regulation and can see an opportunity to cash in on food production in a world where daft ideas like biofuels, GMOs, subsidies and chemicals are making less and less sense. Organic farming and agroecological systems are where the smart investment money is heading. Backed by technology, organic farming can wipe the floor with the dinosaurs like Monsanto – they’ll fight back but there is a tidal wave of smart money that is betting against them

World War Three will be the war to save planet Earth. This is one we can’t afford to lose.

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.

Slow Food Skye Speech

This was my keynote speech at the launch of Slow Food UK back in 2005.   I was the Chairman of the Soil Association at that time  (and went on to be Chair of Slow Food UK)

The Soil Association was founded in 1946 with a mission to research and develop an understanding of the link between the health of the soil and the health of the plants, animals and humans that it supports and to then establish an informed body of public opinion on these matters.  That informed body of public opinion was established but still had no political impact so we went one step further and helped create a $30 billion worldwide market for organic food.  Dr Innes Pearce, one of our founders, had shown, with the Peckham project, that if working class people were educated in how to freshly prepare wholesome food the indicators of social well being such as education, income, marital stability and staying out of jail all improved. So we married agriculture with social and health issues.  How, you may ask, does this fit with the Slow Food philosophy, which has its roots in gastronomy and food culture?

 Last year the Nobel Prize in medicine went to Richard Axel and Linda Buck, who mapped the code between genes and odour receptors.  They found that we have 350 genes that connect to our smell receptors.  There are another 600 genes that are dormant, reflecting humanity’s reduced reliance on smell.  Taste uses only 29 genes, and sight a mere 3, so this research emphasises the importance of our sense of smell.  As the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote: “Everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the whole world is the nose.” 

So how is it that smell, or flavour, is so important?  When plants evolved on this planet, long before animal life, they needed to create substances to protect themselves against oxidation from oxygen, ultraviolet light from the sun and the various viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects that threatened their existence. These antioxidants, anthyocyanins, antiseptics and antifeedants come under the general name of flavonoids.  When animal life evolved it never created any of these substances, Nature is too efficient for that.  Instead we animals get them from our food.  How do we know where they are?  By our sense of smell – what we perceive as flavour is actually the antioxidants and other health-giving flavonoids that are in food.  So when food tastes really good to us it is because it really is good for us.  Cuisine and digestion concentrate and combine these flavonoids in a way that underpins our health and is at the root of our culture and civilisation. 

When a farmer uses artificial fertilisers, pesticides or other crop protection chemicals the plants produced have reduced levels of these flavonoids as they don’t need to produce them. Organic crops have to protect themselves with their own natural defensive chemicals, so their levels are often 50% higher. These natural defensive chemicals taste good to us for evolutionary reasons.  That’s why organic food tastes better and is better for us.  Gastronomy and good health spring from the same source, healthy soil and healthy plants.

The use of chemicals and artificial fertilisers springs from and underpins the industrialisation of agriculture – they reflect the need to reduce labour costs and to squeeze every last drop of cash out of every hectare of land.  The use of artificial colourings and flavourings  in food processing deceives our noses into thinking we are eating good food when we aren’t.  That’s why organic farming and food processing regulations exclude these unnatural chemicals.

Organic farming is by nature human scale and mixed.  Smaller farms are actually more efficient and more productive than large farms and, as the oil price rises, industrial agriculture will need ever increasing subsidy support.  The Soil Association supports the restructuring of land use around optimal sized mixed farming units.  Many of the pictures you saw this morning were from Soil Association conferences where Pam Rodway organised superb Slow Food lunches drawn from local producers, some organic, some not.

We heard this morning about proposed guidelines for Slow Food.  In the early days of organic food a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and we soon saw the need for standards defining the word ‘organic.’  This led to the need for inspection protocols and then to certification systems.  The Soil Association pioneered these developments and has since helped the Biodynamic Agriculture Association, the Henry Doubleday Research Association, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Vegan Organic Trust, the Forestry  Stewardship Commission and the Fairtrade Foundation to create efficient effective systems to ensure that claims can be verified.  The day may come when Slow Food will want to protect its integrity and I hope that we will be able to help by sharing our experience and expertise in this area. 

We are only too aware that inspection and certification is a burden on the small producer – I myself pay far too much in fees for a bureaucratic process that is excessive relative to my tiny levels of production.  The Soil Association is developing and testing systems that will enable a high degree of self-certification and a reduced frequency of inspections, so that the cost of being certified organic for the small producer can be dramatically reduced.  However, these need to be approved at a European level, which will take a long time.  An ideal outcome might be that Slow Food certification enabled small producers to have an independent assurance of their integrity and that we could help with this.

Allow me to read from The Little Food Book by, ahem, Craig Sams. “Slow Food sees children as the Slow Foodies of the future and seeks to educate them in the taste of food and in how it is produced.  They even produce a book teaching kids about flavour and its appreciation via ‘aware’ tasting.”

Our Food For Life campaign to improve school dinners inspired Jamie Oliver’s influential TV series.  The Dinner Lady and author Jeanette Orrey, who now works for the Soil Association,  is now running a cooking school for dinner ladies at Ashlyns Farm in Essex.  Our Policy Director sits on the Government committee to improve school meals.  Palates that are trained in childhood never lose their taste for good food.  Our inspiration for this campaign came from the example of Italian schools, where Slow Food has been so instrumental in bringing about change.  A few weeks ago Jo and I spoke at a meeting at Sacred Heart school in Hastings where the headmistress is determined to produce school dinners on site when her catering contract expires in a year’s time.

In all our work, the Soil Association sees itself  more as an enzyme to bring about change rather than  as an empire-builder.  We initiate and support change without trying to control it.

Let me describe one effort, typical of what is beginning to happen all over the country at the local level.

Jo and I have recently taken over our founded-in-1826 local bakery in Hastings and expanded it to a retail shop that sells organic local fruit and vegetables grown locally.  Last month we budgrafted 25 trees of the near-extinct Saltcote Pippins, one of the surprisingly few indigenous varieties of apple that Sussex can boast, which originated 5 miles from Hastings in the early 19th Century.   Eventually we’ll harvest them from our orchard in November for sale when they reach their prime in late January and February and use them in our apple turnovers.  We have lamb and beef from the salt marsh a few miles away at Pett Levels.  We sell cheeses from sheep’s milk that is the natural dairy product of the Downs to the north and south of us and cheeses, ciders and wines that represent the continuation or the revival of the traditional foods of East Sussex.

We’ve kept on baking Judges’ popular and traditional white bloomers, teacakes, Eccles cakes, wet nellies,  pasties and sausage rolls – but now all 100% organic.  Many customers have commented on the improvement in flavour,  but we have not blown the organic trumpet at all.  We’ve introduced almond croissants, sweet little gingerbread seagulls, sourdough rye, onion focaccia and pan Pugliese. Whenever you go into the shop there is something to be sampled – the sale of local cheeses has soared.

ALL our breads, even our standard white tins, are Slow Bread – which to us means that the doughs ferment at least 18 hours and that the starters are nourished and built up for 3 days before the bread goes into the oven.  Some people with bread allergy have found that they can eat it without ill effects.

We aim to be part of a Slow Food ‘convivium’ that will reach out to local producers and bring together local customers who share the Slow Food ideal. Now that we’re up and running we plan to have regular Slow Food lunches where our customers will sample the produce of East Sussex producers and become part of a network that combines enjoyment with reduced food miles, just-picked freshness and that ineffable satisfaction that comes from being part of a community.  When your database of membership for the UK is up and running, remember that there are 60,000 members of the Soil Association and HDRA as well as perhaps another 100,000 supporters who are prospective members of local conviviums.

The Slow Food Manifesto speaks of ‘dealing with the problems of the environment and world hunger without renouncing the right to pleasure.’

Organic farming offers solutions to the problems of the environment. Decentralised self-sufficient farms are the answer to world hunger. Organic production fulfils the aspirations of gastronomy to take pleasure in the production, preparation and shared enjoyment of good food.  With these goals in common, I see Organic and Slow Food as natural allies – with a shared interest in combining the joy of eating with responsibility for health and the future of the planet.