Relax rules on home saved seed to save organic farmers

I know that getting seed for all autumn drilling farmers has been particularly testing this year, but for us organic farmers it has been near on impossible. Fusarium levels in nearly all organic cereals has had levels of the disease that you just wouldn't plant at and although we are told that if infected seed goes into a warm seedbed and can get away quickly, then the disease should have little or no effect. As I have been desperately trying to delay drilling trying not to encourage autumn fungal/insect attacks and also to get as much weed life to germinate so that it can be cultivated out, with the nights drawing in and the weather turning wet and colder the hope of that kind of seedbed is nigh on impossible.

As organic farmers we are able to get a derogation from our certification bodies to use non-organic re-cleaned seed if no organic seed is available or we can provide a good agronomic reason why the non-organic variety we want to grow is superior than the organic varieties available. The problem this year is not only has there not been any organic seed available, non-organic seed from harvest 2012 has had higher levels of fusarium in it than organic seed. 

To try and get over the problem I spent a couple of days ringing around all the seed companies I could think of trying to find any seed that had been carried over from harvest 2011 which would hopefully have a different disease profile and thankfully I have now got 90% of my seed in the barn.

But how do our certification bodies know if when requested for a derogation by Mr Organic Farmer to use non-organic seed that there is no organic seed available?

The information is found on a website called OrganicXseeds where all the organic seed suppliers list their wares and it is where the organic certifiers look as soon as a request rolls onto their desk. The website is only supposed to list seed that the suppliers physically have in stock and was set up specifically to aid seed derogations, but alas the site has been abused.

The organic seed suppliers hate derogations because it does enable farmers to buy non-organic seed rather than their organic seed when no organic seed is available and I can understand their gripe. Considerable time and money is spent by these companies securing varieties and conducting expensive trial work with varieties that would in the eyes of the seed producer foil any request for a derogation on agronomic grounds but an organic farmer is able to get a derogation if the seed is not available at the time that he or she needs to sow it.

To counteract the derogation what has been happening and still is happening even though complaints have been made to the Soil Association who are funded to run OrganicXseeds, is that seed suppliers are listing seed that they think that they are going to have, not actual seed in stock, meaning that it is almost impossible to get a derogation.

Even before harvest started I was fully aware of the amount of fusarium and indeed yellow rust in the ears of nearly all my wheats. I usually like to save some of my own seed in the name of cash flow, less food miles and attempting to achieve a closed farming system, but by the end of July I knew that we would be incredibly lucky to be saving any seed from our own farm.

Looking on the OragnicXseeds website there was of course a plethora of seed available from harvest 2012 even though not a single ear had been cut. When I rang and challenged  some of the advertisers that they were misusing the website and that they ought to go and have a look at their seed crops to see that there was little hope that they would be disease free, I was assured that seed would be available even though they did not physically have it at the time.

In early August I rang my certification body to ask if I could start ordering non-organic seed  and I was told that unless I wanted to sow the seed right now I would have to wait until nearer the time to see what organic seed was available. I have always been a fan of early drilling, but even I know that sowing winter wheat that early is folly.

So began the torturous wait as day by day the small parcels of disease free non-organic stocks we snapped up and gradually one by one the organic seed suppliers confirmed all my suspicions; they had no seed.

A meeting was hastily arranged at the Soil Association to try and solve the problem which was attended by Ruth Mason - Food Chain Advisor for the National Farmers Union and I and the great and the good of the organic seed industry but nothing could be done.

That was September, it’s now October.

I write this blog on my loader waiting to refill the seed drill with winter wheat seed and we are now onto our last few days of cereal drilling. I did manage to get enough seed through perseverance and with the huge help of non-organic and organic suppliers, but how do we prevent this crisis happening again?

Certainly OrganicXseeds needs policing much more diligently by the Soil Association but also should be frequently spot checked by all the certification bodies to ensure that their farmers and growers are being given the correct information. 

But there is another possible way forward and ticks all “organic” boxes in the name of food miles, farmer to farmer cooperation and the aspiration to plant one hundred percent organic seed.

In the midst of this whole debacle an organic farming friend announced that he had eighty tonnes of Herewood wheat still sitting in his grain store from harvest 2011; organic, no fusarium, good germination and as local as any other seed supply. It seemed the perfect solution! Arrange for a lorry to pick up 29 tonnes of the stuff, get a seed cleaning company in, pay the royalty and bingo, everyone is quids in.

Well, nearly everyone.

The only people cut out of the deal would be the seed producers which is not good. At a time when so little money is put into organic research and development we desperately need those seed producers who do that important trial work and support the organic industry.

The other major hurdle is that trading farm saved seed between farmers is entirely forbidden to protect those seed producers, but maybe there should be an EU derogation to allow this to happen in exceptional circumstances. 

A possible solution might be that the law could be changed to allow farmer to farmer trading with the seed producer in the middle ensuring that correct seed standards were maintained i.e germination, disease levels etc. and organising the seed royalty to be paid to the correct breeder. The measure would only kick in if a situation arose like the one we have had this year.

With only four or five organic seed producers in the UK I think we leave ourselves too exposed to this situation happening again. To do nothing in light of the amount of non-organic seed that will have been used this year is not good for organics, farmers or organic seed producers. We need to address it.

For the National Farmers Union website

A Poor Harvest Focuses The Mind

Wow, harvest 2012, what a shocker! 

All the signs were there earlier in the season that it was going to be a bad one. A relatively mild winter, a drought in early spring followed by a cold wet April and then a wet, cloudy early summer, not a great recipe for a bountiful organic harvest. Not that most of my wheats had much flag leaf left on them to benefit from the anticipated sunny grain filling period, neither had my beans which had started defoliating earlier than ever before. April had put pay to any green leaf area with the worst levels of yellow rust and chocolate spot I have ever seen. While organic livestock farmers are able to dip into the conventional medicine chest to alleviate their animals suffering, my poor organic crops are not allowed the same respite.

Although a lot of what happened in last years growing season was beyond my control, I could be accused of farming organically with a conventional farmers head on in the name of profit with the resultant pitfalls. Even though you should never farm for the harvest that has just gone there are lessons to be learnt and inevitably systems to change. 

With an arsenal of chemicals to control grass weeds, virus spreading insects and early fungal attacks it is possible and in fact preferable in terms of yield to drill in early September, but if you do not have that equipment, time will gradually deal you fields that are akin to a hay meadow rather than a cereal crop. The daughter of my harvesting contractor driving one of the grain trailers described the straw coming out of the back of her father's combine as "fluffy straw"...... I feel a black-grass straw marketing idea coming on......

Sowing cereals in September organically is just asking for trouble, in fact sowing before the middle of October is risky. 

NIAB/TAG have being doing trial work over the last few years on winter bean sowing dates showing that there are considerable yield advantages to sowing beans in late September early October. With several hundred acres of beans to sow on this farm every year it is always tempting to get on with the work on my heavy soils as soon as we have finished drilling the cereals. 

We have had some really good yields sowing beans in the early part of October but the two disastrous years (harvest 2012 was one of them) puts a big tick in the Don't Do It box from now on. 

I have always tried to avoid too much spring sowing on this farm as the yields are usually lower and you don't want to be messing around on heavy soil in a wet March, but some spring drilling has advantages. Firstly it spreads the workload enabling you to risk later drilling in the autumn and possibly most importantly it allows you to get on top of mainly winter germinating grass weeds like wild oats and black-grass and gives you a different disease profile to autumn sown crops.

A bit more spring drilling is now in the rotation plan.

Organic Seed Producers have had an organic winter cereal trial on my farm for the last two years and what was outstanding in the trail this year was how well oats and triticale did in terms of yields and disease resistance compared to my wheat and barley. Not only that, because they are invariably double the height of other cereals they did a superb job of smothering grass and broad leaved weeds. My concentration on what the market wants in East Anglia for non-ruminant feed has selected some pretty nitrogen demanding and short weed producing crops and that is all very well if you are getting consistently good yields, but as soon as your weed burden starts to erode those possibilities it's time to check what you are doing. 

I need to be more diverse in my cropping using the different characteristics of a range of cereals to improve the agronomy on the farm, but as importantly I need more eggs in more baskets.

So what about the things that are beyond my control, or are they?

At Wakelyns Farm near Fressingfield in Suffolk the Organic Research Centre (ORC) have been trailing wheat "composite cross populations". It's best to go on the website http://www.organicresearchcentre.com to find out what the real nature of these populations are but they are essentially up to twenty different wheat varieties all with different agronomic characteristics which have been crossed with each other meaning that no single plant is the same as it's neighbour. In fact it is claimed that no single plant is the same as any other wheat plant in the field! 

Trials that ORC have done show that although the populations are not the highest yielding they are also not the lowest and in fact produce a consistent average yield. The secret is the diversity in the field having plants that perform differently under similar disease pressure situations unlike a varietal monoculture where all the plants do the same which is great in years of low disease pressure but a potential failure in a year that is not. Populations might not be the barn filler you are looking for but at least you will have something in the barn come harvest time.

A simple alternative to cross populations that could be tried by all farmers certainly for the animal feed market where variety is not specified, would be to sow a known blend of varieties. Although the genetic diversity would be far less compared to the ORC populations, it might be enough to buffer against a single variety going down with a disease and possibly lessen the impact of disease with susceptible varieties being further apart in the field minimising cross contamination.

The beneficial effect of less crowding of single varieties could also be used in different crops which could be separated after harvest across a gravity separator or by screening. Wheat and beans or barley and peas for example.

The general point is I need more diversity in my farming system to buffer against any crop failing, being it failing on yield, disease, weed suppression or fertility.

So it's onwards and upwards for harvest 2013.....that's if I can get hold of any organic seed with acceptable levels of fusarium in it, but that's another story.

For the National Farmers Union website

There's Nobody on the Farm These Days

The biography at the top of this blog* says that I have "two full time staff" suggesting that I manage to farm this amount of land land with me and my two farm men David and Andrew without any other help. Well of course it's complete nonsense and arguably contrary to the claim that organic farms employ more people than non-organic ones. Shame on me.

Sitting outside the grain store as I write waiting for the next load of wheat to come in for me to push up and noticing the amount of traffic that flits around is a bit of a reality check of just how many people are actually on the farm. There is a glut either just before or at harvest time, and not all of the traffic I am seeing is directly connected to the business of farming but to pretend that this farm is a place devoid of souls is very wrong.

Aside from David and Andrew there is Peter who is one member of a family farm that we now contract farm, but is also my part time tractor driver and occasional builder-come-handyman.

Then we have another Peter and his mate who does all our hedge cutting, flying around the fields as soon as the crops are cleared trimming back the boundaries and cleaning the ditches.

And then there is the muck spreading gang with two muck spreaders and a further guy on the loader making sure that the vast spreaders are packed to the brim as quickly as possible and all under immense pressure from the next farmer on their list who is baying for their arrival while the weather holds.

This year I have contracted out all our harvesting and so we now have the harvesting team of Richard, with his son and daughter grain carting with a further younger son in the combine cab keeping Dad company as they trog on into the night, with mum going backwards and forwards with food and drink to keep them going.

Then there are Ken and Robert who do the majority of the grain haulage from the farm with their excellent team of drivers who handily are able to load themselves sparing either David, Andrew or I the task.

Chris is also around once a week for a few hours making sure that our rented properties are kept free from the encroaching countryside and that the garden is under control.

But before harvest can even happen we have Filip and his mother, a brother and two cousins who come every year from Poland to pull oats, docks and thistles and who really set the place alive with long hard days in the fields and some restrained (ahem) partying in the evening around the inevitable barbecue.

I know that she would much prefer to be in the fields painting, but the most important person on the farm is in the office on a Wednesday without whom none of the above would get paid and she is Jenny who helps me with the endless bookwork for a day a week, or for however long it takes.

Then we have all the people who rent buildings from us, either redundant farm buildings or buildings that are surplus to requirement. They are all small businesses employing local people from the neighbouring villages and I would estimate that there are no less than twenty five people here at any one time doing all manner of work from car repairs to catering.

Lastly and possibly the most fun lot of people who regularly visit the farm are the school children who my wife Alice busies around the farm turning tractors into maths lessons, hedgerows into spelling tests and the woods into games pitches. Sometimes we even tell them about how farmers are actually engaged in food production! I know, it's ridiculous, I forget myself sometimes. Anyway, there's usually about thirty five of the little varmints.

The list could go on and on if you took into account mechanics mending machinery, conservation advisors, soil samplers, solicitors, accountants or my friendly bank manager. The fact is that on any day in the summer there could be up to eighty people on the farm either helping us produce food, managing and enhancing our natural assets, being educated or people providing employment for local villagers.

I have one of my Grandfather's wages books dated 1953 in the office with fifty four men on the payroll all categorised into "ploughman, thatcher, gamekeeper" and the like, and although I do only employ "two full time staff" there are a still large number of people on the farm today who are contracted in to do specialist jobs, coming and going in a whirlwind of activity making the place feel far from soulless. 

So, there's nobody on the farm these days? Wrong, the farm is busy, alive, diverse and exciting just as it was sixty years ago.


For the National Farmers Union website

*From my NFU blog page: John Pawsey farms 700 hectares in Suffolk with a further 300 hectares under farm management contracts, all farmed organically, with two full time staff and three tractors.

The Welfare of the Farmer and his Animals

The ears of our winter barley are turning rapidly into that golden harvest yellow and thoughts turn to trimming gateways and readying harvest machinery for the pending mad rush. 

The rooks have also discovered that the barley grains are firming as they have started trampling some of our crops to get the seed. I can usually turn a blind eye to a limited amount of damage, but this year they are proving to be very persistent and have made the grave mistake in choosing a corner of a field too near to my house where their noisy presence makes them the more conspicuous. 

The rook’s head and beak is something to behold. The beak itself is shaped perfectly like a “Dibber,” the implement that we use in the garden to plant our bean and other vegetable seeds. I am sure that the early agriculturalists were inspired by this mighty bird’s beak when they designed that first wooden planter that we still use today. They too would have been frustrated by this bird’s tenacity and equipment in extricating their freshly planted seed and no doubt deduced that if the rook’s natural tool was the right shape and size to pull seed out of the ground, then a replicated design should also be just-the-ticket for planting the seed and thus the “Dibber” was born.

The rook’s head has also been further modified by mother nature in the way that she has understood that feathers going all the way to the beak would only get muddy in less than perfect “dibbing” conditions and so she has given our rook scaly skin at the base of the beak to enable additional penetration without the inconvenience of soiled feathers. It is a truly remarkable and well adapted bird.

When the damage to my barley got to about half an acre I felt able to quantify the damage in pounds, shillings and pence to make a financial case for shooting the culprits to my vegetarian daughter who although still protesting was able to understand my dilemma as even she could see that half an acre’s damage was visually upsetting given the amount of time and effort she had seen me putting into growing the stuff. I did however find it more difficult to explain to her that to keep the killing down to a minimum I would have to display the victim in a way that would warn it’s fellow feeders that I mean’t business.

The corvid family are some of our most intelligent arable birds which makes them extra wary of a farmer with his gun, making them more difficult to shoot than your average game bird. Seeing one of their number being shot upsets them but they will eventually come back to the scene for more food within a short space of time and you will have to get back out there. The trick to keeping them away is to string the culprit up between two sticks as an example to the others and because they are intelligent they keep away. 

As a sentient human being understanding the fact that the corvid registers a degree of anxiety on seeing this crucifixion, causes me to question the act. I am unable to just walk away from the scene without justifying my actions and the reason why I or any other farmer who has respect for the living creatures on his or her farm can round the argument is partly due to the fact that dealing with life and death on our farms on a day to day basis to protect our crops and produce for the meat eaters of this country to enjoy is that we are all to a degree brutalised.

From an early age I have shot, gutted and jointed rabbits for the pot; loaded animals on trailers and taken them to market for slaughter; shot game for sport, then plucked, drawn, roasted and eaten them. 

This brutalisation seen in a positive light not only enables me to feed my family and sleep at night, it also enables us as farmers to be able to provide meat for the buying public without troubling them with seeing animals loaded onto a trailer and taken to the abattoir to be slaughtered. It also saves the NHS millions of pounds every year in counseling fees in not having to deal with a load of farmers suffering from PMST - Post Market Stress Disorder. This enables us to turn around and do the whole thing again the next week without having an emotional break-down.

In other everyday situations the dulling of these senses enables our fireman to arrive at the scene of an accident and be able to cope and in the extreme, allows our soldiers to return to the battlefield without deserting.

The difficulty arises when we become so dull to the experience that our judgement takes us beyond what is not only unacceptable to the general public who haven’t been through our whole desensitising experience, but also crosses the boundaries of respecting the accepted checks and balances of animal welfare.

Back in the early eighties I worked for a few months on an intensive pig farm when tethering was legal. Tethering the sows mean’t that day in day out they wore a canvas band or girth that went around their bodies just behind the shoulder with a metal chain at the bottom of the girth chaining them to the floor, meaning that they could stand up, lie down, eat, and that was all. My initial reaction on my first day was that the system was cruel, but it was amazing how quickly I accepted it for what it was and looking back at it now, my ability to justify it in my own mind so readily was the most shocking element of the experience.

When faced with any system of raising livestock where farm animals are kept for what they produce or are slaughtered to provide us with meat, is that our first reaction to the animal’s situation is usually the most humane. Our difficulty as farmers is when you have been brought up seeing these systems from an early age, we have in fact already been desensitised to a degree. 

Given that this is the case for most of us, the only way that we as an industry can check ourselves is to listen to those who are able to consider what we do objectively and strike a balance where not only animal welfare is judged to be humane but as importantly, those who work from farms to slaughterhouses are equipped to behave in a way that ensures that they can clearly disseminate what is humane and what is cruel. Any system that does not fully address both issues equally, will never be able to deliver the animal welfare standards that we farmers, our customers and our animals deserve.

For the National Farmers Union website

Genetic Modification and Organic Lunacy

The on-going Rothamsted GM trial has been a difficult cross for we organic farmers to bear as we have once again been forced into the debate because our standards DO NOT permit us from coming within a gnats hair of the stuff and our public mantle has been hijacked by lunatic organic farmers making any credible argument for the “concerned” farming lobby all the more difficult to be heard.

In my experience the Anti-GM movement appears to develop two forms of organic lunatics.

Lunatic one – The Anti-GM organic farmer that has the public eye: An emotional organic farmer who has taken to expressing their own views on media platform. I feel that very often individuals such as these fail to get any coherent points across because it is impossible to interpret the emotional verbal diarrhoea that is often displayed by these individuals. The public need and want a reasoned debate and instead often get a shouty mess. Anti-GM, nuls points.

Lunatic two – The Anti-GM organic farmer that has taken action: Others choose to take matters into their own hands and  have been known to scale Rothamsted’s fence and attempt to destroy the independent trials. These individuals are often Seasoned protestor and appear to take great glee in their actions. Many of us are stained by the actions of these individuals and feel that it does not help the debate to move forward - another nuls point.

My experience of organic farmers over recent years is that they are starting to question why the “organic movement” is so entrenched in it’s anti GM stance. As one long standing organic farmer put it the other day when talking about the perils of GM, “Nobody died yet.” An organic farmer stood up at a Soil Association conference a couple of years ago and suggested that GM crops could actually be of benefit to organic farmers. Gasp!

In my view there should be no reason why organic farmers should have any different opinion from non-organic farmers about whether or not GM would be good or bad for UK agriculture, it shouldn’t be just an organic issue. None of us want environmental contamination and “super-weeds,” none of us want all our profits controlled by global agribusiness and nobody wants to eat food that will harm us. The issue is all of ours to deal with.

I am no GM apologist, but organic farmers need to distance themselves from the lunatics and the carte blanche “NO to GM” lobby. We need objective debate so that farmers from every persuasion as well as the general public can be presented with the facts. And if anyone is going to do research into GM crops, for God’s sake let it be independent research institutes like Rothamsted or dare I say it the Organic Research Centre and let it be publicly funded.

 For the National Farmers Union website

The Single Payment Scheme. Who Does it Really Subsidise?

It’s that time of year again, a couple of days spent in the office checking areas, split fields and where we’ve sown what to gain another big fat yearly cheque from the Rural Payments Agency for essentially doing what we do which is to, “Don’t Change and Carry On”. 

I find it difficult to defend the Single Payment Scheme amongst non-farmers as I find the arguments against it pretty compelling. Environmental payments I can stand behind until the Corncrakes come home, but a payment for just being a farmer, ‘fraid not.

Our argument that the payment subsidises cheap food really doesn’t wash, it actually makes food more expensive and will continue to do so unless it is properly targeted in the next reform.

Currently the scheme subsidies the fertiliser industry, it subsidies the agrochemical industry, and it subsidies the sales of overpriced new tractors and combine harvesters. As soon as those devils see an opportunity in our gross margins they leap in with unfathomable price increases and they steal the payment from us. As for land values, don’t get me started. The sad thing is, its us who let them get away with it.

When commodity prices are poor those who would lift the payments from our pockets lie low, but as soon as we start making any kind of profit the real subsidy sharks come and snatch it from working farmers hands, and for the past two years they have been having a bonanza.

Money that should be going into diversification projects that help to wean us from our addiction go to the real agribusinesses that we will never be able to compete with.  The UK farming business model is severely flawed.  

Sure, the NFU slaps the hands of the fertiliser boys occasionally, but they know what you can afford to pay because they’ve had a little look in John Nix or the latest report from your friendly land agent and they can see that everything is rosy. The same goes for the agrochemical industry, they leave us just enough to keep us coming back for more.

The machinery manufacturers have completely carved the whole game up by arranging that none of their dealers can offer a discount out of their area making it impossible to get any meaningful alternative quote. We are completely and utterly stuffed by them and in fact it needs a proper investigation to see how the whole game is cooked up. BBC Watchdog, are you listening?

Given what most of us have spent the money on, it amazes me that these payments in their current form have gone on for so long. You would have thought that since the start of the Single Payment Scheme in 2005 when the whole not-for-production-payment came in, that we would have used the cash to diversify into non-farming areas to replace that payment. It’s job should have been done. It’s not as if they even asked us to go cold turkey like our New Zealand friends, we are in our ninth year of it and there is a new scheme coming along any time soon.

Okay, so will I be claiming my 2012 Single Farm Payment? Yes, because like all junkies I am addicted but I want to be cured. I also want to be protected from those opportunists who seize every means to temp me away from my chance to reinvest and diversify. I need to be protected from myself.

It seems to me that the only way we are going to be able to wean ourselves off this dependency is to only be paid if we actually do something for the money. That means stepping up to the mark to put some gravitas behind that often quoted phrase that we farmers are the "Custodians of the Countryside". Although the threatened "greening" of the proposed CAP changes hardly touch that remit, it is a start. 

It is naive to think that we can continue to be paid in the way we are in these times of austerity without giving some public benefit for the money we receive. 

I see the greening element as a way of not only protecting a payment that the general public can accept as giving some public good for the long term, but also as a way of making us change management practices to get the payment, which may persuade us to use it for the long term success of our businesses rather than giving it away to those who would lift it from our wallets for short term gain. 

For the National Farmers Union website

Filling the Environmental Hungry Gap

At the end of June this year my Organic Entry Level Scheme (OELS) comes up for renewal and so it’s time to decide wether or not I should be committing to another five years of organic farming.

Over the past two years it could be argued that I would have made more money farming conventionally depending on how clever I might have been in buying my fertiliser and marketing my crops, but over the whole five year rotation of my present OELS agreement there is no doubt that on average my organic rotation has been financially better.

The difficulty I now have is that going back into my fertility building leys I do not have the cushion of the Conversion Payments that I got first time round, and with a stockless system and therefore no income during that fertility building eighteen months, it makes my budget look a little on the lean side. So I have been considering other options to see wether or not I can tap into environmental payments under the Higher Level Scheme (HLS) that value the habitat that my leguminous fertility period and preceding overwintered stubbles provide, which will also fill in my own “hungry gap.” The picture (see photo) taken of the back of our mower cutting red clover last summer indicates that my insect population is extremely healthy and is providing a wonderful food source for insect eating birds. Surely that has a value?

But environmental schemes also provide me with a financial dilemma. Do they actually stack up when comparing the income you forgo taking land out of food production against the income you get from the various arable options that the scheme requires you to embrace?

The better paying options of Pollen and Nectar Mixes and Wild Bird Cover deliver £550/ha under OELS but with current organic prices where they are it is very difficult to find even an awkward corner or a north facing headland under a high hedge that doesn’t pay more than that. Having poured long and hard over five years worth of yield maps from our combine harvester I thought that unprofitable areas would leap out at me begging to be released into an environmental scheme, but it really was not the case. With Natural England’s budget as tight as a cow’s exhaust on spring grass there is little chance that we will ever get a just reward for the expense of entering into any of these options.

So if we are not going to be paid enough to cover income forgone then there must be another reason for favouring wildlife over food. Could this be what the National Farmers Union is thinking about when they talk about “Sustainable Intensification?”

I do hope so, because with all this worry about how we are going to feed all those meat hungry Chinese desperate for our decadent western diet, has made me start to feel extremely guilty about even entertaining the thought of not working every piece of my farm to with an inch of its life.

Actually that’s a bit of a lie as my aesthetic eye has always been more fulfilled looking at parts of the farm which have been allowed to do as nature intended which should possibly be incorporated into the field and be growing a crop. The continuous mowing of tracks, field edges, difficult corners and farm yards making the countryside all look a little bit clinical has never attracted me and it’s probably why I can stomach an organic farm in May when the black grass is flowering above my cereal crops, but it seems a bit mad why anyone would spend time cutting these havens when you can actually stick them into an environmental scheme and at least get something back for them. It’s also much easier to argue for environmental payments to the village farmer basher than trying to justify your Single Farm Payment unless you make it a habit of wandering the village in rags begging for a bowl of rice.

To argue that we are true “custodians of the countryside” we do have to prove to the general public that we are just that, especially if we want to get paid for being so. Unbelievably you do not get awarded the COTC Cup for investing in a shiny new sprayer, having wheat fields as level as a billiard table and providing wildlife habitat purely for game birds.

Being in the Organic Entry Level Scheme or the conventional version does seem to be very least we can do to show that we appreciate that there are some areas of the farm that should be production areas for wildlife. The scheme’s options may not cover the Barley Barons of East Anglia’s income forgone, but it might mean that we can continue to farm the rest of our farms in a responsively productive manner.

That is surely what we all want to get on and do.

Blog for the National Farmers Union

Online Conference Boosts Office Productivity

I cannot thank the National Farmers Union enough for providing an online live feed from their 2012 conference. As the day loomed I began to regret not having committed to attend in person, and looking at my diary a few days before hand I could see that it was going to take a lot of juggling to make it, but to temp myself further I went onto the NFU website and downloaded the conference brochure to see exactly what I would be missing and spotted the link to watch all the major speakers live. I was in!

The sound on Peter Kendall’s opening speech was very distorted to the point that I had to turn the sound down and bury my head in the office work I had allotted myself for the proceedings, but following Peter was Caroline Spelman MP, Secretary of State, DEFRA and her undistorted dulcet tones grabbed my attention and it was sound perfection for the rest of the conference.

Not only was it audio heaven, but the way that the picture swapped between speaker and what was being shown to the delegates on the overhead projection was perfectly timed. I can’t help thinking that in the quiet of my own office with lashings of fresh coffee and shortbread that my experience of the conference was possibly better than those who attended.

Having said that, to actually be there for the charged atmosphere that the conference typically creates, the banter in between sessions, the cut and thrust of the bar in the evening swapping beer enhanced fanciful new directions and ideas takes some beating.

Unfortunately the deadline to get the paperwork sorted out for my pending photovoltaic (PV) installation and the looming deadline of 3rd March to achieve the 32p Feed in Tariff (FiT) weighed more on my mind.

But I have had a major problem. Because the energy company that I have to deal with has taken around three months to come back to me with confirmation of what I can actually feed into the grid, it has taken me an abnormally long time to be able to commit to the offer that my chosen PV company has made me. Because the FiT is being funded by energy companies who in turn have to raise their energy charges to us to pay for them, makes these tariffs unpopular which means the energy companies have little or no incentive to get back to prospective PV customers, especially at the tail end of the higher tariff. Even I have calculated that it would be insane to put up a 50kW installation to discover that I could only feed in 30, so I was completely ham strung until I had got that information. The cynic in me says that the energy companies know it and hope that with the confusion that the government created by messing around with their FiT promises will unsettle us all and we will all go away until the tariff has been lowered.

The only benefit from the delay has mean't that all this uncertainty has brought the price of PV panels down meaning that it now looks like a bit of a financial no-brainer for farmers even at this late stage. This unexpected windfall is not without risk and may be construed as opportunistic by the general public, but whatever the man or woman in the street thinks of this green tax, the whole green energy revolution has to be kick-started and the most effective way to do that is with government incentive, even if this one now looks over egged. Governments have been subsidising coal and nuclear power for decades, so why should renewables be any different?

The downside of the delay means that I have not yet applied for planning permission which means that it will have to be made retrospectively, and that planning application was what was distracting me from the conference. This might all seen like planning suicide, but a call to my local planning department gave me some solace in stating that although they could not definitely say that I would get it, given the information that I gave them they felt that my circumstances indicated that it would be difficult to find a reason why it would be turned down. So, the materials arrive imminently and we are standing by our beds.

However, the scoop I am dreading in the East Anglian Daily Times is:

"Local Organic Farmer Refused Green Energy Plans".

My only hope is that there are too many cuddly words in that potential headline for the planners to refuse me. Fingers crossed!

Less Meat and Three Veg

Christopher Stopes, president of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements’s EU Group told us at the Organic Research Centre’s conference in Birmingham last week that DEFRA had become production-orientated saying that, “The production narrative is not enough. We need to confront issues of consumption.” He went on to say of our Secretary of Sate for DEFRA that, “I don’t accept Caroline Spelman saying we need to increase production. We can feed ourselves, but we need to change.”

Consumption has been foremost in my mind having only just survived the excesses of the Christmas period. The two stone I lost in 2011 has been severely compromised, so Mr Stopes’ call for change got me thinking about my own diet again.

A family walking safari in Kenya last February gave me a bit of a wake-up call as far as my own daily food intake was concerned. While we were treated to a full western diet before and after our daily trek, our Samburu guides survived on their staple of maize cake and cabbage. I asked them how much meat they ate and was told that they ate it maybe once a month at the most. It seemed incredible to me that men as fit and healthy as they were could live on such a basic diet and essentially without meat.

The meat thing is interesting. I eat meat at least once if not twice a day, but it hasn’t always been like that.

When I was a child my family ate very little meat. For Sunday we would have a roast of some kind and if it was a chicken it would last for days. On Sunday it would be carved at the table and there would be the usual fights over the leg, thigh and wings. On Monday there would be sandwiches or cold chicken with a salad using mainly the breast meat. On Tuesday it would be Chicken Fricassee which was made with chicken leftovers (or the flappy bits as my wife calls them) with vegetables in a white sauce and a breadcrumb topping. On Tuesday night the stripped bones would go into the soup pot with whatever vegetables were around and some seasoning which would simmer overnight to then be made into soup for Wednesday. A single foul would provide our family with the meat we ate for over half the week. These days the tasteless pumped up equivalent is lucky if it lasts a day in most households.

Now I am not saying that I returned from Africa and immediately went out and bought a catering sack of maize and cabbage, but it did give me a bit of a reality check on how my own diet was unhealthily dominated by meat. I spent the next few months weaning myself onto smaller quantities, and although I still make the Samburu look like militant vegetarians and am still no threat to livestock farmers, my intake has definitely gone down. 

Learning to make dishes just out of vegetables, albeit with some meat stock lurking in there somewhere, has also been a bit of a challenge, but I have to say I am getting there. When I started exploring all the pulses that are out there to get the meat protein equivalent in my diet I was amazed at the variety of what was on offer - see picture of my bean casserole!

By the way, just in case you don’t already know, the argument for eating less meat runs along the lines of the disparity in the amount of plant protein you have to feed an animal to get the equivalent amount of protein out in the form of meat. Same stuff but with added blood. If all the land we currently used for growing animal feed on was converted to land that we could grow food for ourselves on, it that would solve the global food security problem. I know that it’s far more complicated than that, but it’s the gist of the argument. Unfortunately it’s normally Sir Paul McCartney who trots out this fact and we carnivores don’t like being preached to by a veggie. However, I do have sympathy with Sir Macca’s protestations, and although he eats revolutions for breakfast, it would take one to effect such a change and it would have to be the developed countries of the world to show the rest the way. We can’t judge the Chinese for wanting to eat a more Western diet if we are not prepared to hold our hands up and say, “Sorry chaps, we got it wrong, it’s just not sustainable”.

OK, that is the meat consumption down, what about everything else. 

Going back to the Samburu. It seemed to me that they ate what they needed to get through to the next meal and that was it. Now I realise that that is a risky strategy especially in Africa as the risk is if you don’t get the next meal things can get out of control, but in the UK with a supermarket around every corner and food as cheap as chips it’s not so risky. So why do we all eat far too much?

The easy answer is that even though food prices have risen recently, food is still relatively cheap and our local supermarket is just around the corner and it’s brimming with the stuff. Two-for-one deals are at the end of every isle and we all like a bit of a bargain. In any case, there is no point in having that new massive American fridge if it’s not stuffed with food. Talking of massive Americans, have you seen how many are getting into our market towns these days…. if they are that fat they must be Americans… aren't they?

Food can only be cheap if it is produced with the ruthless axe of cutting costs to the bone and invariably that means something has to give. The usual candidates are animal welfare, taste or nutrition and in some cases all three. Good food is not and never can be cheap, you get what you pay for. 

So, the key to tackling consumption is to eat less and eat better quality food produced to the highest animal welfare and environmental standards. You don’t necessarily have to buy organic, but if you do it already ticks all the boxes. Good food is going to cost you more per kilogram, which means more return for your friendly farmer, but you will be eating less. The really good news is that not only will you be lean and healthy, but your weekly spend will be no more than when you were eating rubbish.

OK, so this is the thinly veiled launch of my UK food revolution (stand aside McCartney), and the mantra goes like this, “All we are saying, is give peas a chance”. 

My keep fit video will be launched in March.