Welcome to the Organic Growers Alliance, and to the first issue of The Organic Grower – its magazine.
I have lost count of the number of organic conferences that I have attended over the past three decades. The first ever conference that I went to was in fact a Soil Association event at Lackham College in 1977. I came away feeling that something big had changed in me. The star was Dr Victor Stewart, and there was somebody who really understood and had a passion for soils. It has left an indelible mark and done much to shape my life since. The Soil Association lost the plot around this time and started to flounder badly, then along came the Organic Growers Association - a grower’s salvation to be sure, plenty of dirty finger nails there. This took over the conference role, to be joined a few years later by British Organic Farmers. The organic conference came of age and there was some real practical content to be had, plenty of stuff to learn and take back to the farm.
During the Nineties everybody was talking organic and it became the political flavour. The conferences were, after the untimely demise of OGA and BOF, taken over by the Soil Association again. They became not so much a farmers/growers event but more of a networking and media event for the politicians, academics, press, marketing men and general hangers-on people. Nothing wrong with this, there is a need to have such conferences but there is also the need for the practical stuff and getting together with growers, which is the role of the new OGA. So I started to lose interest as there did not seem to be much for me, and few growers bothered to turn up anyway.
I have attended the last four Soil Association conferences primarily as I was invited to give presentations, so there was a free ticket and a chance to hang out with organic people, which is something I do like to do. They were sort of OK conferences but nothing really particularly stimulating until this year’s at Cardiff on “One Planet Agriculture”. The subject matter was quite clear and some may say not a day too early - at last we were to address this very real problem. I along with the rest of the delegates went with a sense of needing to do something. We understand the issues and the problems, but not the solutions within our own business. The event was very well organised with an impressive list of presenters from across the planet. At times it was depressing but invigorating, both sad and happy. Indeed there was a real and electric sense of emotions around the place and a great deal of food for thought.
Cardiff has left me thinking hard about the future. It was not that we really needed to know that things had to change; I think most people knew that. But it was the fact that we were all there as one - that makes the real influence. It was at times overwhelming in terms of the enormity of the challenge ahead, but always with humour and inspirational company, this makes it bearable and gives a sense of attainability. We will all have to undertake enormous changes, within our lifetimes. I see this as a serious challenge for the Soil Association and?I am confident that they can and really do need to be at the forefront of change and influence in organic agriculture. Growers have a pivotal role to play in this, we may not have much land but we have pioneered local distribution, employ lots of people and produce a lot of food.
So as with all conferences one comes away with great ideas and ideals about things you are going to do when you get home. My travel companion and I were full of it on the way back - resolutions, new policies and a host of bright ideas about how we were to change the world forever. Then you get home - great! Two days away with like-minded people in the middle of winter can be a real therapy in any circumstances. Even more so when you know for real that unless we really do something, the future of a society even remotely like the one we know is well and truly scuppered. The reality doesn’t take long to set in when you run a farm business. All those great ideas tend to look less great once you take the beer goggles off and get back to facing the day-to-day humdrum of growing and selling vegetables. The mud was particularly bad this year, due no doubt to climate change and as a result of my driving a tractor to the fields each day to collect vegetables…
Before the conference I had ideas as to things I really wanted to do to clean up our act, reduce our carbon and really try to make a change to our production methods. The conference showed two things of real importance, to me that is. Firstly - our business was pretty good in respect of our carbon output and in the energy we use to produce the vegetables that we do, and there are plenty of other good examples amongst us growers Secondly, it gave me the confidence to take the bull by the horns and implement some changes.
The first big change had to be to our pricing structure. We had always managed by virtue of our distribution and production methods to sell organic for about the same price as conventional supermarket produce. This we believed in - organic food for everybody not just the middle class and wealthy who fancy it. But much as I still want to believe in that, I have to accept that this is not going to be sustainable for ever and that our customers have to support us not just to grow vegetables but in what we need to do to improve our sustainability. We need to invest in the future, not the future as in next season but the future as in next generation and further. We have to develop what is already a very energy efficient system of food production and distribution to something that can really call itself sustainable. We need to be able to demonstrate to other producers that the carbon footprint can be as near carbon neutral as possible.
Our simple and efficient system has become something of an example already. We featured on a climate change programme on BBC2 Newsnight a few weeks ago, then again on BBC1 “Inside Out” recently. Ours is a much-visited farm and we need to be continually improving what we do if we are to remain an influential and credible alternative to the 21% of all energy that is consumed by conventional agriculture. We have some very interesting plans for the future but as tenant farmers we lack the financial resources to implement them. So I informed our customers as to why we needed to raise prices and added 30% to the cost of our produce. I have to admit as to being scared as to the possible outcome, what if we lost 30% of our customers or even more? It turned out that we lost around 10%, which is OK. I suspect that some of those will return anyway once they get to realise that the alternative is supermarket veg or a national “box scheme”. I received 4 customer letters, three were very encouraging and positive, one was confused and didn’t know why I should want to commit financial suicide, but it turned out they hadn’t read the newsletter!
What am I to do with this 30% jackpot? Well - one third goes into absorbing increased costs since the last price rise we had over two years ago, another part goes into introducing a recycled paper carrier bag as opposed to the plastic we had been using. This has been well received by the customers. We have conditioned them to care for them, fold them and return to us - and a great deal of them do come back. Then there is the delivery system. We want to improve our distribution around Oxford by the use of rickshaws. So we are to establish a new round to concentrate on the heart of the city, which is to difficult to do by van as half of it is closed to vehicles and the remainder is full up with buses and taxis. This will be very carbon neutral and energy dependant on no more than healthy, get-fit students. The big challenge is to reduce the already tiny amount of fuel we use to deliver to our customers (less than 3 litres per year per household). In a flight of fancy I have thought about a solar powered barge along the River Thames, but the reality is that this would cost a huge amount in time, as well as the boat itself. We have always reckoned that we deliver locally; the centre of Oxford is less than 25 miles from our farm. But without that tiny bit of diesel it is actually too far away. I am having to rethink my whole attitude to local and have to conclude that it is about as far as you can walk and back in a day. So in time we will have to consider becoming even more local, not such a great thought when you have spent a chunk of your life developing a delivery round. We could do Reading by boat or horse; it is just 4 miles away. I made enquiries about the possibility of horse drawn barges, but there are too many things in the way now and it would take a bit of persuasion to get people thinking positive about me cutting down all the trees along the riverbank. That doesn’t look much like saving the planet.
Another thing I decided we need to do is to be able to measure our energy inputs, and carbon outputs. There is no easy standard formula to achieve this and all of us need to know how to get there. As a result of our involvement with Surrey University we have actually now got some figures that have some real meaning. I will write of this in a future article.
Education we see as a major role in what we do, so we are to expand the rather limited educational role that we have here. Using the farm as an example of what a grower’s holding can do to reduce its planetary impact is probably one of the best things we could manage. Engaging more with our customer base (we deliver to 5 college/university campuses as well as 30 other neighbourhood reps) is an achievable possibility. Through them we are able to at least inform people about the realities of food production and distribution and the changes we will have to get to grips with if we are to become increasingly sustainable in a world where energy will no longer be a cheap fix. Increasingly I want to be able to use the farm as a demonstration model, make it more available so that people can benefit from the exchange of ideas. I see one of the biggest challenges as being getting Joe public to accept the real price of food. When you start to look at the detail, take out most of the cheap energy and replace it with alternatives it gets real pricey. Just how pricey? I will tell you next time around.
Iain Tolhurst