Welcome to the Organic Growers Alliance, and to the first issue of The Organic Grower - its magazine.
I came to growing after ten years as a farm worker. Most of this was on the sort of farm where you could have a day off so long as it was raining, but still - in as much as it was possible - I was a keen, even an obsessive, gardener. However I wouldn’t say either occupation prepared me for life as a commercial grower.
Where is the grower in the scheme of things? Not a gardener, though we both grow plants, nor yet a farmer, though we both make our living from the ground.
Although in biodynamic practice and elsewhere commercial fruit and vegetable production may be characterised as “gardening” and the term “market gardener” is sometimes used, the divide between gardening and growing is simple and stark. One is a leisure activity. The other isn’t. One is the pursuit of freedom. The other more a matter of survival. The impetus that leads to both activities may be the same, but the moment the notion of profit and loss appears the path forks, and the two ways soon lose each other.
Farmers and growers both make their living from the land. Alike we are caught up in the rhythms of the world, moving perforce to its humours and its seasons. We live on and with the land, while the rest of humanity seems merely to occupy it. We come to recognise its meaning and its mysteries even if we cannot pin them down, whereas the non- agriculturist sees only entertainment, decoration, or a space to be passed over. In the face of this incomprehension farmers and growers must surely stand in pretty much the same place.
And yet, and yet... Of course there are farmers who grow vegetables and growers who keep stock, but away from the edges, when you look at the two professions side by side and (as it were) en masse, there is a gulf between them. There may be some sympathy, but there is limited understanding. The differences all flow, I think, from the scale on which we work. A grower can make do with an acre or two (given enough plastic) whereas a farmer may just get by on a hundred acres and its subsidies, so long as his wife goes out to work. Scale implies status. It also has a huge effect on how we view the world.
The control of land confers status according to the area owned or occupied. Admittedly the status of the profession of farming is not much, but owning land (and as like as not imagining oneself to be a farmer, even a gentleman farmer) is now an ultimate aspiration of the acquisitive classes. You might think that this sort of land ownership has nothing to do with farming, but according to DEFRA you would be wrong. “You do not need to undertake any production in order to be regarded as a farmer...” (SPS Handbook and Guidance 2006). Can you imagine anyone saying that in order to be regarded as a grower you don’t need to grow anything? It’s unthinkable. Why would anybody want to be considered a grower in the first place? It’s not even on the radar! As a farmer, now even a farmer of the unproductive kind, you can expect handsome payments from the state. Those with the most land are rewarded most handsomely. No one has ever seen fit to give growers money for nothing.
We can be grateful that we have not been conned or coerced into selling our independence, and that we can whistle at Cross Compliance - the modern farmer’s burden, somewhere between the Sword of Damocles and a Cheshire cat. We might even be proud of our class distinction. (Though to be fair we should recognise that we share it with the pig and poultry farmer). Go to a farm sale and to a horticultural sale and you will see the difference right there - in the car park! In the one - Land Rovers, four-by-fours and macho pickups. In the other - battered vans. If you go further you will see that the average weight at a farm sale is about two stone more than that at a grower sale. There will also be more beards at the latter, probably a lot more. And so on...
A grower might look on livestock as a literal waste of space; a livestock farmer tends to see vegetables, immobile in a field, as inanimate objects; the arable man’s cereal crops are composed of plants beyond reckoning, each living and dying in perfect anonymity. The difference of scale runs all through this. Grass grows without much effort. It has to be managed, a matter of skill, but it doesn’t have to be delved into. Just as well if several hundred acres are being farmed together. An arable field may only see a human presence for five or six days in the year. The value of what it produces may justify no more than that. If it wasn’t for the need to relieve themselves today’s ploughmen could go from morning to night without their feet touching the ground.
The grower cannot live like that. The plants we grow may not move around, but the skill that brings them to life and husbands them through it is not different in essence to that entailed in stockmanship. Empathy, observation, attention to detail and not leaving things to chance - these are the same in both cases. Arable crops need space if anything is to be made of them. It’s not just that there has to be a lot of them to add up to any value. The wind cannot weave its dance over a few square yards of barley. Even the swede is only really happy if it has enough of its kind around it to take up an acre or two. But horticultural crops are tame and with it - tender. They demand attention and understanding. At least at stages in their life they are individual and distinct - as seed, transplant, harvested root, fruit and the rest of it. To make a place for them and to bring them to conclusion the grower has to enter into the soil in which they root as well as to live the weather in which they grow.
While the farmer scans broad acres from his tractor seat the grower is down on the ground, and cannot live without the earth getting under his finger nails. I wouldn’t say one is better or more valuable than the other. I do think though that, as farming is now, it is the grower who best preserves that vital link of mankind with the earth and its processes. The sun’s energy, photosynthesis and the cycling of carbon - this is the basis of all life. In the growing of plants organically lies its truest human expression.
Tim Deane
The www.organicveg.org.uk website was created to showcase the research results from HDRA’s research. The site contains:
• Latest news and events in the organic vegetable sector
• Trends in organic vegetable production
• Marketing information
• Case studies from a network of organic vegetable farms
• Innovations - what’s new in organic vegetables?
• Information on conversion
All the pages have space to add comments encouraging discussion and sharing of views.
Why not join HDRA’s email discussion groups and receive news and post comments or questions on various topics? We have a pest and diseases group, organic salad group and a soil-fertility group. If you wish to subscribe please email psumption@hdra.org.uk, stating which group(s) you would like to join.