Cheap, freely available food has been taken for granted for so long that few journalists and politicians would have expected to see global food prices and supply dominating our news as they have recently. Spiraling food prices and accompanying riots in over thirty countries, the European and American bio-fuel fiasco, a rash of reports questioning the yield benefits claimed for GM crops and now a 2500 page UN and World Bank backed study of the options for world agriculture. The conclusions of the five year study written by over 400 leading scientists were so unexpected, and for some outrageous, that the biotech lobby walked out in disgust, unhappy that this does not fit their commercially motivated agenda. Suddenly, the phone is buzzing with journalists wanting an organic farmer’s perspective culminating in our appearance on Newsnight last week.

The UN and World Bank study investigated science, technology and farming practices in the face of pressures created by growing world populations. The agrochemical companies seemed to expect the researchers to give a resounding thumbs up for pesticides, fertilisers and GMOS as the future for feeding a growing world population. Instead the project led by Professor Bob Watson, an eminent environmental scientist who was part of the team that discovered the hole in the ozone layer, called for a radical re-think. In the face of diminishing fossil fuel supplies, declining soil quality and unfair competition from subsidised western production, the group concluded that localised solutions are centrally important for a sustainable future. Feeding a growing world population is clearly a complex socio-political issue and goes beyond the farm. However, the group appealed for a future where farmers in the less developed world are not reliant on expensive agrochemical inputs from western multinationals. They also called for major changes to the farm subsidy system that makes it so difficult for poorer farmers to compete on a world market.

For many years, the Right Honourable Michael Meacher MP has been a lone voice in government calling for a saner, more holistic approach to food and farming - first as our Minister for the Environment and more recently from the back benches after he disagreed with Blair over GM crops. The removal of such a good man, with his principled stand, from the inside is a great loss. Last week my father and I, along with some eminent, if radical, scientists joined Michael Meacher at the House of Commons to speak at the launch of yet another comprehensive study of the challenges and options for global agriculture and food production. The report, entitled ‘Food Futures Now’ was compiled by the geneticist Dr Mae-Wan Ho and an international group of scientists and agriculturalists. The study is well researched, surprisingly readable and optimistic in its assertion that proven, practical techniques already exist to solve many of the agricultural and associated social and nutritional problems in the developing world. In the developed world, we have a mountain to climb as our agriculture and food distribution is far from sustainable. At 177 pages the report is more accessible than the UN sponsored tome but reaches similar conclusions, perhaps most contentiously that GM crops and their associated high tech, high input, globally traded agriculture are not the answer to the world’s food, energy and environmental problems; solutions are more likely to be found in complex, integrated, locally based organic farming systems. If your interest in these issues goes deeper than my rants and the normal, mainstream media coverage the report is available at £15 from www.i-sis.org.uk.

Guy Watson

Could it be the best job I have ever had?

Don’t let my boss know that. But when the sun is shining and the workers are out in the fields, I get out of the office and start shooting (I usually work in the office dealing with all things technical and creative on the computer). I must admit I am a bit of a fair weather photographer, mainly because that’s the time when I will get the best pictures. Early morning and before home time is when the light is at its best.

I arrive at the entrance to a field I have never been to before, where I was told I would find a small army picking spring onions or bunched onions (I haven’t quite worked out the difference yet) for the vegboxes. It’s actually a minute’s walk from Guy’s house… maybe he likes to look out of the window and see people working hard in the fields. I discover that just as I have arrived, everyone’s on a 20 minute break. Typical timing by me. I feel slightly bad, as this is really the first thing I am about to do for the day, and all these people have been working so hard and started so early that they need a break already.

It does however give me a bit of time to decide where to shoot from and to get some shots of people on their break - it is part of the working day after all. I try to work out what the stacks of boxes are at different points around the field, and why there are green leaves piled randomly along the rows. Crates are huddled together with more scattered alongside. It all clicks into place when the field workers return to their jobs. Some are pulling the onions, dead leafing while they go and putting them into crates. Some are sitting on crates bunching and elastic banding, and then chopping the tops off nice and neat with a flick of the wrist and a very sharp knife. Then back into the crates, piled at intervals, to be loaded onto the tractor and vanned back to the farm and into the cold store to go into the boxes for the next day.
I ask how much they have to do, as the field is pretty big and progress looks painfully slow. “80 crates – we’ll be here all day.” comes the response. I am not wearing one, but I take my hat off to these guys and girls. They even have to carry on working when it rains. I am afraid I am yet to capture that shot.

Martin Ellis

From September we will have to feed the contents of the meals we cook for our local school into a computer which will tot up the nutrients and tell our cook if they are fit to eat. I am sure this initiative is full of good intentions, and may even help to reduce some abuses at the lower end of school catering, but it strikes me as depressingly reductionist, culturally degrading and an intrinsically unhealthy approach to food.

In a recent edition of Radio Four’s excellent Food Program, Michael Pollan author of “In Defence of Food”, gave some simple guidance on how to eat a healthy diet and enjoy it:

1. don’t eat anything your great grandmother would not recognise as food
2. don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients
3. only eat at a table; eat slowly and communally
4. distrust any food claiming health benefits

This all made so much sense that I bought the book, the gist being that your granny is a better source of dietary guidance than science and nutrition experts. Having spent five years studying natural sciences I am wary of unquestioning adulation of native wisdom but when it comes to nutrition, science has earned a bad name. Our relationship with food is far more complex than simply summing up the known nutrients and multiplying by their known effects on our bodies - there is just too much that we do not know. Judging from a recent article in the New Scientist we are still far from understanding the relationship of appetite, diet and weight gain but this has not prevented the proliferation of highly processed functional foods marketed on their ability to fight coronary heart disease and help weight loss.

Science will not solve a cultural problem; namely a collapse in the willingness, confidence and skills needed to cook and enjoy real food. There is no one healthy diet, no silver bullet that can better the knowledge, accumulated over generations, of how to use predominantly locally sourced ingredients to sustain us through happy and healthy lives. Pollan’s advice is, that unless you suffer from a specific illness like diabetes, the best thing to do with a nutritionist’s advice is to ignore it.

Guy Watson

Raphael and John (who’ve been at Riverford for over 5 years) have been planting Victoria plum trees on our Devon farm this week - over 720 of them. This year they’ll look beautiful as they flower and next year the fruit will come. We’ll just have to be patient!

They’ve planted the trees at a 30 degree angle and attached them to wires running horizontally. You can see the trees are in open space to let the wind blow through rather than blowing them over and that lovely organic fertiliser (mainly chicken poo) will help get them going in the early days.

We grow 104 different types of crops for the boxes. Almost without exception, every crop from the lettuce to the sweetcorn, suffered last year at the hands of the awful summer. But while crops struggled all over the farm, one knobbly little subterranean root was relishing the miserable conditions. 
We’ve ended up with nearly double what we had originally planned for the boxes.

We came up with a plan to share in this unexpected success and get a few more people loving this potato-like, flatulence-inducing, hardy little root. In every box this week we are including a free net of artichokes along with lots of cooking ideas. This is the biggest Jerusalem artichoke giveaway in history (we think).

So what can you do with them? Here are a few of our ideas and you can get the full recipes on our website: winter salad of jerusalem artichokes; jerusalem artichokes with leeks, bacon and sizzled sage; jerusalem artichoke & hazelnut soup.

Share your recipes here and encourage the nation to embrace the great jerusalem artichoke!

One of our wonderful customers has sent in photos of the tomato and mushroom punnets being used to root cuttings (mostly penstemon) before potting them on. The punnets are made out of recycled material, used for packing tomatoes or mushrooms, reused for rooting cuttings then composted - now that’s inspiring.

We’d love to hear other interesting reduce, reuse, recycle stories that are out there.

A combination of cola and certain orange processed foods make my youngest son quite uncontrollable. It can be entertaining for a few minutes but I would hate to have to deal with him in a classroom. Mostly he is deprived of the junk he craves by a puritanical father but I sometimes relent at the cinema with the result that he once had to be physically restrained in the aisle half way through Lord of the Rings. The Food Standards Agency deserves some credit for sponsoring Southampton University to do the research that confirms beyond doubt what many parents and teachers have known for decades; certain additives in highly processed foods send certain children up the wall. Perhaps more disturbing is the finding that these foods can cause a “deterioration in behaviour in the general population”.
How can it be ok to knowingly feed our children unnecessary colourings and preservatives that radically alter their behaviour? How can we be expected to trust our government and its regulating authority the FSA when, after consultation with the food and drink industry but no one else, it refuses to act on its own research? Why has it taken thirty years for science to “prove” what many parents know from their own living experiment of raising children? Isn’t it an abdication of governmental responsibility to suggest that we make our judgements based on labels read by few and intelligible to even fewer?
Very few issues are so black and white and call so unambiguously for government action, NOW. It is all too reminiscent of tobacco and cancer, asbestos and asbestosis, BSE and CJD and more recently the continuing abuse of antibiotics in agriculture, the rise of MRSA and general antibiotic resistance. Commercial interests, protected by cynical PR and intense lobbying, have built expertise at delaying legislative action so that a profit stream can be maintained for a few more years. There is no doubt that these additives will be banned but when the evidence is so clear why does it have to be such a painstaking process, subject to delay at every turn? The FSA was set up after a collapse in public confidence in the old Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food after BSE. It was supposed to be independent of commercial interests. The problem seems to be that the name might have changed but the spineless nature of the bureaucrats hasn’t.

We all know that air travel is the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions, so should the Soil Association try and discourage bringing organic vegetables to the uk by air? Or even refuse to grant anything air freighted organic status? If so, what about the African farmers just starting to make a living selling the organic green beans flown in to the UK?

At Riverford we have never air freighted anything, but we know it’s a complex issue and there’s an interesting consultation document on the Soil Association website

As Anna Bradley, Chair of the Soil Association Standards Board says: “as awareness of climate change has grown, concerns have been raised about the damage caused to the environment by air freight.

However, when reducing our impact on the world’s climate, we must carefully consider the social and economic benefits of air freight for international development and growth of the organic market as a whole.”

There’s a rather scary podcast on the Soil Association website about how intensively-farmed animals are devoloping a form of MRSA, which is spreading like “wildfire” in Europe and transferring to humans.

In Dutch hospitals a terrifying 25 per cent of all MRSA cases are now caused by the farm-animal strain, and farmers are no longer permitted in general wards without prior screening.

Scientists are blaming the over-use of antibiotics for creating the drug-resistant strain, and an almost untreatable form of e-coli, which means death for 30 per cent of people who contract it.

All of which makes a powerful case for organic farming!