En route to Rio 2012

I am finally on my way to Rio, which somehow I doubted would actually happen, as I did question whether this was a must attend event, given the widely held view that it will be unlikely to produce any positive results. This doubt was reinforced in recent discussions with several friends, notably John Humphrys, who was withering about the summit, and advised me in his usual style that since was it vanishingly unlikely that Rio would bring about any real change and out of the question that I would be able to influence its outcome in any conceivable way, there was absolutely no point in going.

Despite all this, in the end I came to the conclusion that I still had to go, because I decided that Rio was an event, notwithstanding John's scepticism and my lack of enthusiasm, where I had a responsibility, in my new role, to at least try to 'make a difference'. Another huge plus is that my trip has been sponsored by Shumei, a Japanese cultural organisation with a particular commitment to sustainable agriculture, with which I have had a longstanding connection and behind which lies a spiritual philosophy, based on reverence for nature and celebration of beauty.

My day started at the farm. I milked the cows twice yesterday, which was memorable, because of the incredibly wet weather in West Wales, so extreme that our heifers and young bull down on the river meadows at Hafod, actually had to swim to get to drier land last week, and even though the milking herd are currently grazing one of the driest sections of the farm, they have virtually 'ploughed' about half an acre of one field which they have to walk through to get to their fresh daily ration of grass. Their hooves have converted the soil to a consistency of gloopy porridge, and it splashes onto their udders, making milking quite a bit longer as a result. Somehow leaving the farm in this way, feeling so intimately connected to the daily challenges of producing milk in an uncertain economic and physical climate, seems a good backdrop to the Rio 'experience'.

As I waited to board in Terminal 5, I did experience minor trepidation, but now I am feeling better, writing this on the plane, a British Airways Boeing 777, nearly full, with more than a smattering of fellow Rio-ites on board, including some I know and who were also there first time round, in 1992. My only previous experience of attending an event of this kind was the so called COP15 Copenhagen climate summit a couple of years ago, which perhaps influenced my current rather pessimistic attitude towards gatherings of this kind. However, my experience in life is that one's anticipation, especially negative, is rarely born of the actual events, so it occurred to me that it would be a good exercise to describe what I am expecting now, to see whether it works out differently.

So what am I expecting? A huge gathering, a great jamboree, with many thousands of people, broadly dividing into three groups, the politicians (and their advisors), business people, and the NGOs, meeting in separate enclosures, isolated and protected from 'ordinary' life. Each group will spend the next week in furious negotiations, or, in the case of the NGOs 'networking', at the end of which not much will have changed. Why? Because of a combination of political inertia, vested interests, and widespread public ignorance of the precariousness of the situation we are in.

That is what I imagine the outcome will be, but it occurs to me that I should also describe what I would like to see if things went well, in other words how would I measure success, in terms of my sphere of interest. Well, it is a Sustainable Development Summit, so obviously one would expect concrete measures to be adopted which would accelerate the transition towards more sustainable food systems. But therein lies one of the problems - to date there has been a marked reluctance to define agricultural sustainability, at least in any meaningful way.

Sustainable agriculture might be defined as follows: systems of food production which build soil fertility through the recycling of nutrients and other key inputs, with the aim of producing adequate quantities of high quality food to nourish a peak population and addressing cultural and social equity issues, whilst minimising use of non renewable inputs, protecting animal welfare and biodiversity and avoiding pollution and other negative environmental outcomes, including greenhouse gas emissions. Such systems will also need to have a high degree of resilience against future shocks, such as the sudden interruption of key inputs or breakdown of transportation systems, as a result of climate events, wars, trade disputes etc. A degree of re-localisation of key staple food distribution would be a definite plus in addressing this.

The approach I have just described is a million miles away from the current globalised, industrialised, high dependency on non-renewable external input model, but the reality is that this latter approach is currently a lot more profitable, both for the food industry and farmers, largely because the so called external costs to the environment and public health are not costed in to the equation. Because of this, the food appears cheaper to the consumer. As a consequence, any substantial change towards food systems based on the above definition will need an enabling policy environment.

So back to my question, how might one measure success? How about this for a shopping list: Firstly a Rio sustainable food and farming accord, predicated on an understanding and agreement that a global transition to more sustainable food systems is needed. Secondly an acceptance of the need for definition of terms, followed by policy instruments which create a more enabling economic environments for sustainable food systems. This would include adding taxes to practises which have negative externalities, and shift subsidies in favour of those who adopt sustainable production. Finally, targets against which progress towards the agreed changes, will be monitored against. That is just for starters!

What do I expect will be the actual outcome? Much talk of 'sustainable intensification' without any definition of terms; theatrical accords between governments and large food companies, full of fine rhetoric but without much if any of the above substance, and lots of so called 'trade offs', which in effect legitimise business as usual, justified by the need to feed a peak population of nine billion.

And what do I think would change this? Probably either a massive shock which is so serious that public opinion is mobilised to the extent that it forces the politicians to deliver real change, or, much less likely but still possible, in an internet rich, post arab spring world, the emergence of a movement built on large numbers of citizens who are highly informed about the issues and recognise the urgency of the need for change.

I admitted earlier that real events rarely turn out the way one anticipates, so now I have revealed my hand, I will write more about the reality of Rio over the next few days.

  

A Wind Farm on my Doorstep

There has been a very interesting development on our remote and beautiful west Wales farm over the last 48 hours. On Wednesday, I attended the Ashden awards for renewable energy in London, presented this year by Kevin McCloud of grand designs frame and Anna Ford. One of this year’s winners was Adam Twine's community windfarm near Swindon.

This project interested me, as it combined the production of renewable energy on quite a large scale with community involvement. This was, I understand in Adam's case, a key factor in overcoming local community opposition to the installation of a structure which would have such a major visual impact on the surrounding landscape.

The very next day my wife Becky rang up and told me that our neighbours have just submitted a planning application for the installation of two 400 kW wind turbines on the hill immediately opposite of farmhouse. We already knew about their possible intentions, as they had approached us several years ago and asked if we would be interested in some kind of joint initiative but we heard no more and thought that they had given up on the idea.

Now suddenly the thing has gone very live indeed, with an application already having been submitted to the local council and of course it is the talk of the village! But what is really interesting is that although many people will be marginally affected we will be far closer than anyone else to these turbines – so close in fact that they would completely dominate our view from the farm house.

Now I am really put to the test! It is all very well being in favour of renewable energy generally and windfarms in particular so long as they are on the M4 or on someone else's doorstep and affecting someone else's view, but in this case we will be the principal affected party, and not in a small way!

Not only would the turbines form an ever present feature in the view from our farmhouse windows, but their erection could even negatively affect the value of the farm, not that we had any intention of selling.

But how could I possibly object when it has been my publicly stated position that I am in favour for many years and my stated intention that at some point I plan to erect a turbine on our own land?

All this has been going through my mind for the last 48 hours, but last night it suddenly occurred to me that the obvious way of reconciling these various tensions was to propose that instead of an installation where only two parties benefited - my neighbours and the power company, who I believe are going to pay a ground rent and will therefore take most of the profits, instead this could be the first community windfarm in our area, hopefully setting an example for others to follow.

At this stage these thoughts are just in my imagination since there is a long and complex route ahead, no doubt involving newspaper campaigns public meetings, plenty of nimbyism
and more developments that I can't even imagine at this stage.

I shall keep you posted!

Another organic supplier calls time on supplying supermarkets

I had an interesting conversation the other day with Matthew Murton, a near neighbour in Wales but also, until last year, a large scale organic vegetable producer in Herefordshire.

Matthew used to supply several of the UK supermarkets, an organic wholesaler, Flights in Herefordshire, and some of the larger box schemes including Able and Cole and Riverford.

Matthew is a highly organised, efficient producer, but also has a strong ethical commitment to the quality of life of his team of workers and he built up his business on very high quality rented Herefordshire land to quite a large scale - around 150 acres, before the recession hit.  Since then he has been progressively reducing his area of production which was down to 45 acres last year and he has now decided to throw in the towel and sell up altogether.

I asked him why he had reached this decision, and he said that it had got to the point where he could no longer feel any sense of satisfaction from dealing with supermarket and other buyers in a cut throat environment where price was the only issue, ethics didn't matter and organic vegetables had become a commodity traded on international markets.  He told me that no one was immune from these pressures, even the larger box schemes, and that in his view market conditions were so depressing that he felt we would probably have to wait for some kind of a collapse of the existing position and marketing structures which are leading, quite literally, to the survival of the largest and fittest at the expense of the small, beautiful and ethical, before favourable conditions would exist again for his kind of project.

Although I was pretty shocked to hear this, on reflection I can't say I'm entirely surprised.  You only have to visit a few supermarkets (I won't name them since I think there are now virtually no exceptions) to realise that the recession linked response of the multiple retailers has been to pile it high, sell it cheap and compromise on the production story, to the point where, to use the infamous quote of Eric Schlosser, if you knew the real story behind the food you wouldn't want to buy it.

Sadly that includes organic produce which, although there are of course exceptions, is in the main now often supplied by conventional packers who are often part of multi national trading groups buying from industrial scale farms from all over the world.

None of the individual participants are responsible for this depressing scenario, it is just the inevitable outcome of a world where consumer ignorance is compounded by an economic and policy environment where the polluter doesn't pay and sustainable producers are not adequately rewarded for the wider beneficial outcomes resulting from their farming systems.  None of this diminishes my optimism that a 'tipping point' could lie round the corner, after which the surviving models of best practice will become beacons of inspiration and the teachers of the truly sustainable food systems that everyone will need to adopt at some point in the 21st century, but in the meantime it is dog eat dog out there in the marketplace.

Egypt Visit - Greening the Desert

My friend Peter Segger and I have just spent two days as guests of Helmy Abouleish at SEKEM, an inspiring bio-dynamic community project, which over the last 35 years has transformed thousands of acres of virgin desert into fertile soils, using only compost and water. 


Through his work, Helmy has emerged as one of the current world leaders of the sustainable agriculture movement. One of his continuing and further prioritised commitments is to the International Association for Partnership (IAP). This comprises a group of successful entrepreneurs in sustainable and organic food businesses, whose motive for forming the IAP was a sense of mutual obligation to devote time and resources to addressing the social, cultural and spiritual dimensions of sustainability.
Members of the IAP meet annually at the SEKEM headquarters, south east of Cairo, in a region where the rainfall is insignificant and the 'lone and level sands' are close at hand.

It is hard to overstate the scale and diversity of the achievements at SEKEM. They started by purchasing a parcel of desert in 1975 and using only compost and Nile water, they transformed it into a verdant 'oasis'.  SEKEM's headquarters now comprise of hundreds of acres of farmland, growing prolific crops. This includes a plant raising unit, livestock, dairy, a huge composting operation and processing units. At the headquarters, where around 2,000 people now live, SEKEM is in the process of establishing three outlying farm communities. We visited one of the three year old farms and witnessed what might be described as the 'before and after' of conversion of desert into farmland.  

Before and after (in the distance)

Because there is no significant rainfall, the only way food can be produced in Egypt is through the use of Nile water. The country has an umbilical dependence on the 55 billion cubic meters of Nile water entering Egypt from Sudan. Forty billion cubic meters of this water is extracted during its passage through the country, leaving only fifteen billion cubic meters to enter the Mediterranean.  When I asked Helmy how important this supply was, he said 'it is a matter of life and death', which gives rise to some rather disturbing thoughts about the consequences of any of the upstream countries deciding to increase their water extraction, or if they attempted to re-negotiate the agreement, made some 60 years ago, which established the current water allocation.  Amazingly, the Egyptian government, which effectively 'owns' the Nile water, distributes it to farmers virtually free of charge. Energy is also heavily subsidised, (a litre of petrol sells for 22 euro cents). In both cases the subsidies result in profligate and inefficient use.

The mode of desert transformation developed by SEKEM involves the application of large amounts of compost - 50 tones are applied in year one, 20 tones in year two, ten in year three and then lower 'maintenance' doses thereafter. The conversion of the Sinai lands would also not have been possible without Nile water, which travels 150 miles in an open channel, then under the Suez Canal. The land is irrigated and planted, either with perennials such as olive and orange groves, or vegetables and other food crops.  By year three, the current stage of the Sinai farm development, the productivity of this converted desert is quite incredible. 

This gives rise to a question and a discussion: is it possible for soils, once they have been primed with compost in this way to become not only self sufficient in maintaining their fertility, but for them actually to generate an annual surplus of biomass?  In other words, if one calculated the annual input of compost and subtracted the exported biomass represented by the crop, could the system eventually not only be self sufficient but actually generate soil organic matter without ongoing applications of compost or any other non renewable eternal inputs? The significance of this question is enormous - if the answer is 'yes', then the SEKEM system has massive potential for wider application - it could even be a blueprint of the future of soil management in the whole of Africa. What is so unique and interesting about the SEKEM desert transformation is that in farming one normally inherits a parcel of land (as I did), farms it for a few decades then makes speculative guesses about whether one has improved soil fertility, not really knowing whether one is exaggerating ones achievements. But at SEKEM here it is in real time, before, during and after, with no distorting factors to get in the way. It is an absolute revelation and something I am so glad to have seen first hand.

From virgin desert to fertile crops

                                                  

The outstanding key issue, relates to the source of the fertility priming compost. In the case of the Sinai project, the fertility building 'pump' is primed by compost produced back at SEKEM headquarters, driven the 150 kilometers from Cairo in fuel subsidised lorries. Helmy told me that much of it is now produced by the existing SEKEM farm from crop residues and other biological waste materials, but they also supplement this with thousands of tones of rice straw and other organic waste material from outside the system. I asked him how he would approach conversion of virgin desert in the absence of the availability of an outside input of compost and he said that although this was a huge advantage and speeded up the process, the same outcome could still be achieved, albeit more slowly, if they produced compost from irrigated desert soils without outside inputs.  

So Helmy is confident that the key elements of the SEKEM system could be applied ANYWHERE ON EARTH! In order to convince others it is important to collect the data. Then we can address those who are of the opinion that feeding nine billion (the world's peak population) will be impossible without the use of nitrogen and other non-renewable fertiliser in-puts. SEKEMs work is currently physically demonstrating a successful alternative approach.

www.sekem.com

Fighting the Fugg

4th February 2012

It is 4.30 am, my alarm goes, and I fumble to silence it so I can continue to stew in the toxic but somehow addictive juice of my own negative thoughts and anxieties. Every part of my body, is in revolt against the prospect of getting up. My mind is reinforcing the resistance, reminding me that I have had a hard week with much travel and that my poor, frail body deserves a rest. 

But my son Sam is coming to make cheese at 7am and I have to be finished by then, so I have no choice. Pulling on my clothes, I struggle, full of self-pity, across the freezing yard into the new milking parlour. It is minus 5°C and despite our attempts to insulate it, there are many frozen pipes and valves. At sixty one, why on earth do I continue punish myself in this way?  I get the cows out, rake fresh straw from our 2011 oat crop over the cubicle beds and scrape the cow manure out with our 1967 Massey Ferguson 135 tractor,  after which I manage to get the first four clusters working. It is still really cold, I feel turgid and ill, and I still can't imagine why I am such a masochist. 

Half an hour later, my blood is starting to flow, and out of nowhere, a positive thought arises. I imagine how we could grow better grass this year, and hang all the gates before the cows go out. By the time I have milked another 30 cows my mood has completely transformed. I resolve to ask my boys if they will help out this evening, they will be thrilled, and I hold optimistically to the idea that next week there could be a global transformation to more sustainable food systems. Suddenly, I am full of the joy which can only come from physical work on the land.

What is this strange transformation which has taken place in me, so quickly that I could hardly identify the second when it occurred? I can see that there is much here for me to observe, because this is, in a microcosm, the story of my life. I am constantly in the grip of changing states of positive and negative energy, and paradoxically it is only through conquering the intense physical resistance of getting up when my body absolutely refuses, that I set into motion this sequence of events which unusually for me, I've actually managed to observe, at least for a moment.

What is in question is my attitude towards the effort. Why do I spend so much of my life either avoiding this effort against what seems to be some kind of lawful resistance, when I have been given this incredible insight? It is a mystery, but I know full well in writing this that the effort required next time the alarm goes at four thirty will seem just as insurmountable.

That same evening, the battle ground between the mild Atlantic air and the continental frost has shifted, the air has become balmy and the boys join me to help with the evening milking. At ten, William still has to climb on the steps to open the doors to let the cows out, but he is actually starting to be useful. Ben and Harry also, although it has to be said that James who is still only four is less so, but since he is so delectable his company is enough. Perhaps one of the four of them will yet emerge as a replacement milker!

SFT proposals for 2012

I made a list to myself over the New Year of the most important actions I could think of to further the mission of the Sustainable Food Trust during 2012, here they are:

1. I will do all I can to ensure that SFT emerges as a small, but dynamic organisation that helps to accelerate the changes we need in our food systems.

2. We will launch our website in February, which we hope will offer a facility for everyone in the wider food movement to become more connected through sharing ideas, opinions and activities, thus inspiring more people to do the same.

3.Through my blog, I will share my experiences on the farm, keep a record of my activities with the SFT and offer my opinion on key issues affecting the food movement.

4. We will build partnerships with like-minded organisations across the world. Rather than replicate the work of others we will always seek to cooperate, enabling and supporting the aims of our partners.

5. We will invite food movement leaders to share their ideas with us on our web platform.  We believe this could help in publicising key issues and inspiring citizen action.

6. We will draw attention to key issues, highlighting either the damaging outcomes of the present system or the benefits of the sustainable alternative. We will base everything we say and do on good science, and will not be afraid to speak out in advance of definitive evidence if we believe it to be in the public interest.

7. We will seek to build consensus with individuals and organisations playing leadership roles across the whole of the food movement, in recognition that the challenges we share are becoming ever greater than the issues that divide us.

8. In spite of the negative carbon foot print, I will continue to travel to support the mission of the SFT. I believe that the benefits of building cohesion in the food movement will more than repay the carbon debt.

10. We will listen to what you think and stay true to our commitment that SFT should be an alliance of citizens and organisations that share the objective of building more sustainable food systems globally.

I look forward to reporting on the progress we make on each of these areas during 2012.
Patrick

Beautiful curds

Small video taken over Christmas of cutting the curds in the dairy ready to make cheese. The quality of the milk and texture of the curds is a beautiful thing!