I have just submitted the following motion for the next Devon County Council full meeting, which takes place on Thursday 23 May.
At this stage it’s not clear whether the motion will be heard on the day itself or be referred to cabinet and return to the next full council in July….
I will post updates when I know more!
This council notes its resolution on declaring a climate emergency in Devon, in February.
This council notes also that officers launched the policy on wildflower verges earlier this month. Huge congratulations to the officers who helped bring this about.
The government has now declared a state of climate emergency across the UK, following the actions of Extinction Rebellion.
Climate change and other human activity is now causing species to decline at a rate unprecedented in human history, with three-quarters of land-based environments and two-thirds of the marine environment significantly altered.
Devon County Council, with its positive record on the environment is well placed to work with others to help mitigate the catastrophe coming our way.
Therefore, this council agrees to:
1. Call on the government to offer all pollinators full legal protection from harm
2. Write to all Devon outlets stocking bee harming pesticides, and urge them to permanently cancel their order with the suppliers
3. Take action to phase out all glyphosate pesticides used in council weed spraying or any other council related activity, by December 2019 (there may be exceptional circumstances such as dealing with specific non native species, such as Japanese knotweed)
4. Support Devon County Council tenant farmers in phasing out the use of inorganic fertilisers (such as nitrogen) by December 2023
5. Support Devon County Council tenant farmers in setting aside 10 per cent of their land for wildlife and/or wildflower mixes for pollinators
6. Work with community groups and non-government organisations such as Devon Wildlife Trust and the Woodland Trust to support Devon County Council tenant farmers to set aside five per cent of their land for tree planting
7. Work with community groups and non-government organisations such as Devon Wildlife Trust and the Woodland Trust on supporting town and parish councils, schools and community groups to set aside land for tree planting
8. Develop a policy on soil health good practice, with an emphasis on allowing land to recover and phasing out damaging chemicals, which are ultimately sterilising the land. This would include setting appropriate and reasonable targets for Devon County Council tenant farmers
9. Work with South West Water on a campaign to save water across the county, with an emphasis on education about future water scarcity. Specifically target town and parish councils, community groups and schools to raise awareness of the importance of good water practice
Claire, i honor your determination to get these points through. It would be great to get these points through, and ban / work around these toxic chemicals in our countryside. The farmers need to understand the effects and use less and less. Im pleased to see this.
2. At 04:35 pm on 10th May Chris Burhop wrote:
Claire this looks like an admirable ambition which I would like to support in whatever way I can. In the event that it doesn’t get the support it deserves, can we petition for something similar at EDDC too? Best of luck with it at DCC.
Tom Heap assesses how much more of our own food we could potentially produce. Currently we import nearly half - 30% from the EU but in a time of growing population and political change could we step up our home grown fare?
He asks about the innovative technology helping farmers make smart use of the land they have, visits labs to ask what changes we might need to allow and sizes up our allotments, gardens and window boxes to see if we could be more productive at home.
With some theoretical ideas and practical realities he aims to give you food for thought.
Rob Yorke - rural chartered surveyor and independent environmental commentator, AKA@blackgull - has joined us as a guest writer on rural affairs. This month, Rob gives us his take on the latest countryside conversation; the decline of our insect populations, and why we should care.
April 09, 2019
The countryside should not be a peaceful place. It should be humming with activity. While it’s hard to sometimes avoid humans, the real racket should be insects.
They have, however, been making a big noise in the news. For the purposes of this piece, I will label them all collectively as bugs - an unfortunately bland name, but required when covering a huge range of species from the revered (butterflies and bumblebees), to the reviled (wasps and ticks) – as we pay them the most attention since Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’.
Her book is worth a re-read. If only to observe the raw nerves, as an early-warning environmentalist in 1962 rightly raises the alarm on newly concocted chemical insecticides being applied with all caution thrown to the wind - a wind that blew chill as birds dropped from the skies and fish went belly up in rivers.
Look out for the bits others skip over. This paragraph caught me unawares when thinking Carson would be an organic evangelist - “All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities. Not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects”. She adds “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used.”
Today’s accurately applied, highly sophisticated agro-chemicals are efficiently operational in keeping pest insects at bay, but are also proving to be insidiously persistent in the wider environment.
Overall weights of dosage are down, but toxicity loads are up and some of Carson’s words are ringing true all too loudly. In the 60 and 70s, nascent environmentalism did not have the megaphones of today’s broadcasting tools.
And, in any case, back then society was too excited at the thought of not having to rake beetles out of crop stores, tend worm-riddled livestock or handpick aphids off vegetables. Modern media has now corrected that glitch in communication. And some.
Google (the internet) is not always your friend if you want to explore, with open-minded curiosity, all the intrinsic issues around declines in ‘bugs’ - food production, insecticide use, climate change and habitat variables.
There, see, lost you already! Much easier for unscrupulous scientists to direct-sell their own mis-framed research using ‘dreadful’ language within supposedly peer-reviewed papers which, without any scrutiny, translate into apocalyptically beautiful #insectaggeddon headlines lamenting the lack of insects mashed on modern car windscreens.
Much more subtle, way under the radar, is Defra’s own Chief Scientific Adviser’s personal blog. This explores with objective examination (mind you, we all have a confirmation bias), the German study on the decline of insects in nature reserves, the value of scientific uncertainty and the morality of researching pesticides.
Uncertainty is a ‘dead hand’ on a politician’s catchy slogan. Mr Gove had to concur when I took him to task in an interview last year for saying “there are no tensions between productive farming and care of the natural world”, when the use of insecticides (selective, not drenched, obviously) is an obvious tension.
We must heed warning signs around overuse of insecticides and the lack of diversity in cropping, and be more inquisitive of those overplaying their hands.
This is not denying something is amiss, but a request to not fear disrupting the status quo in lobbying for government funds to seek new solutions – such as precision application, learning from organic practices, pushing for adaptive, integrated pest management – and making these solutions more mainstream in competition with the lazily prescriptive use of agro-chemicals.
I wrote a damning blog about dead dung beetles next to sheep poo on the hills above me the same day that the chemist who invented the wormer (avermectin) was awarded his Nobel Prize. Charismatic bees have their champions; it’s the less iconic ‘bugs’ we need to watch over, create habitat for, restrain chemicals from, and innovate around – otherwise we’ll all be buggered by the silence of the flies.
Where does Brexit leave the UK countryside? Tom Heap hosts a studio debate.
On the panel:
Shaun Spiers from the environmental think-tank, the Green Alliance;
Heather Hancock, director of rural-based consultancy 'Rural Solutions', chair of the Food Standards Agency, and former chief executive of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority; and
Patrick Holden, founding director of the Sustainable Food Trust.
Can you reinvent a food culture? Dan Saladino meets a man who did, Denmark's Claus Meyer, the co-founder of Noma, one of the world's most influential restaurants.
From there he went to Bolivia and set up a restaurant to rescue lost foods of the Andes and Amazon, and onto New York where he founded a cooking school in a neighbourhood with some of the worst levels of food related illness in America.
Claus Meyer, Owner of The Meyers Group: The Nordic Food Revolution
In this wonderful, personal and thought provoking talk the Danish gastronomic entrepreneur Claus Meyer shares his dream about revitalizing local food culture by fostering local agriculture, encouraging environmentally friendly production, and turning consumers into co-producers. Claus Meyer addresses the global challenge on how we can revitalize local foods.
The Foundation’s work is focused on the following areas: to drive social change and to combat poverty through initiatives related to food and hospitality; to use education in food and cooking and culinary craft as instruments to inspire people to pursue careers in hospitality and the culinary arts; and to break picky eating habits of children and, from an early age, strengthen their ability to influence sustainable and healthy food choices. Community – Agern Restaurant And there is a manifesto: The New Nordic Food Manifesto | Nordic cooperation New Nordic Food | New Danish cuisine - Wikipedia Here's a piece from the Telegraph from a couple of years ago:
Meet Noma founder Claus Meyer: the man behind the Nordic food revolution
Claus Meyer represents all that is good about Nordic living. He’s just got off a plane but looks as if he’s been for a walk on some wild beach. He is glowingly healthy, tall and energetic.
A fifty-year-old French man of a similar level of success - Meyer runs an empire that encompasses hotels, restaurants, bakeries, delis and a charitable foundation – would be suave and formal. But Meyer - sporting jeans, All Stars and a crumpled but expensive cotton jacket – bounds into the room with the warmth of a Labrador and smiles broadly.
It’s possible you won’t have heard of him – Rene Redzepi, with whom he set up Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant which has grabbed the top slot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list more than once – gets much more attention, but Meyer has brought about a revolution in Nordic food of which Noma is only a part.
The reasons for his dedication to improving the food of his country are obvious and painful, though he offers them without self-pity.
“I was a very unhappy child,” he says simply. “My mum and dad fought all the time and we ate food from the microwave. The vegetables were frozen and had been cooked a decade before in Eastern Europe. Everything was cheap, and most of it was dipped in melted margarine. People in Denmark believed it was a sin to put much time into cooking or into exploring the pleasures of eating. It was because of the Puritanism handed down from the past. I would say that ninety percent of the kids growing up in Denmark in the 1970s ate like I did."
This arid culinary landscape was also due, he believes, to the industrialisation of food production. "Denmark developed big cooperatives. These inhibited the kind of diversity you get in Italy and France.
"And in Denmark we gave ourselves the worst food, we had what was left after everything else had been exported. Never in the history of Denmark was there education about food."
His parents separated when he was fourteen. His father, who he says never loved him, left, and his mother became an alcoholic. Meyer went to France to work as an au-pair in his late teens and ended up living with a fourth generation baker and traiteur and his family in Gascony. It changed him for ever.
"In France I tasted food that could have been from another planet. Besides the flavours I saw a different way of life too, a capacity for enjoying the moment. That trip to France was huge for me."
Meyer was very overweight when he arrived in France, but there, as he puts it, he ate his way out of an eating disorder. "The food in France fed me in a different way: it was spiritually nourishing as well as delicious. I wasn’t just trying to fill a hole so I didn’t eat as much. When I went back to Denmark I wanted everyone to experience it."
He started to import French ingredients, foie gras, olive oil and truffles, and became a chef, applying French techniques and recipes to Danish produce. He became a TV star – twenty per cent of the Danish public watched his cooking programmes - but in 2001 he realised he’d got it all wrong.
‘I was down at the harbor in Copenhagen, near the site on which Noma eventually opened, where all the food arrives from the other Nordic countries. I liked the space and the smell. I suddenly thought that change had to come about with our produce, not the produce of France or Italy.’
He was struck by how fellow Danes and film makers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg had created the Dogme 95 Manifesto, an approach to film making that set Denmark apart, marking it out as different from Hollywood. Meyer realised this philosophy could be applied to food, too: the Nordic countries didn’t have to follow, they could lead.
He finally decided to start a restaurant that would show the potential of the ingredients that were in his own backyard. This restaurant was Noma. Meyer approached Danish chef Rene Redzepi - then a 25-year-old sous chef who had worked at El Bulli in Spain and The French Laundry in California - to head up this new venture.
Working with fourteen chefs he developed the New Nordic Food Manifesto. It urges sustainability, seasonal cooking, the use of more vegetables as well as indigenous and local foods, sound animal welfare and a focus on health. It was a smart move.
"The manifesto was vague," he explains. "That way everyone would get on board and work towards change. And that change had to start with a great restaurant cooking with the food of our landscape. We had to show that beetroot could be as luxurious as truffles, that you can make a vinaigrette with buttermilk. Hundreds of restaurants took something from Noma. They realised they didn’t need to make beurre blanc or Hollandaise sauce, that there were things we could do with indigenous ingredients." There were Nordic culinary traditions – smoking, fermenting, curing – that could be built on and explored.
Meyer has been criticised for his ‘top-down’ approach, but all these years later he has had an effect, and not just in high-end dining. There is much more demand for Nordic produce in Denmark; cooking is now more vegetable-centric and sustainability very much to the fore.
Food lovers flock to eat the ‘new Nordic’ food that’s cooked in restaurants all over Scandinavia (so the tourist boards and politicians are happy) but the reach of Meyer and Redzepi has gone beyond their own back yard. There are Nordic-inspired restaurants with wooden tables, stoneware ceramics, ‘ferments’, minimalist menu speak ("beet, ash, liquorice") everywhere, from Volt in Stockholm to Septime in Paris and Lyle’s in London.
Meyer, putting food and philanthropy together, set up Gustu in Bolivia in 2013, where two Danish chefs are trying to create a kind of Andean Noma, using ingredients that are indigenous to the region while employing and training marginalized youth.
Meyer admits that his connection to Noma – he has now sold most of his share in it – has had disadvantages as well as advantages.
"People confuse the Manifesto with what Rene is doing. Rene has just taken the tenets of it. They think the manifesto laid down laws - like you can’t use tomatoes in a Nordic kitchen - but that wasn’t the case. That was something that they followed at Noma, but that was their decision - Rene’s. He is doing his own thing."
The home kitchen is what Meyer is focusing on right now, which, of course, is the whole point. If you ever wondered what the New Nordic Food Manifesto means when you’re cooking for your family, it’s in The Nordic Kitchen, his book of seasonal Scandinavian dishes. Mussel soup with barley and wild garlic, roast chicken with rhubarb: there’s no cheap bacon or marge here.
In Denmark, where they published a longer version, the book has become a culinary bible. "People use it every day," Meyer says. He smiles with pride. He is restless, a serial entrepreneur, driven, ambitious (he is about to open his first restaurant and a food hall in New York) a wealthy celebrity in a country that values humility so, despite the social programmes, he does get criticised.
But it’s hard to resent the joy he takes in what he’s achieved. No, not everyone in Scandinavia is eating mounds of vegetables they’ve dug up that morning, or fermenting their own Nordic miso. But Meyer knows what he’s done.
"A large number of important people, opinion formers with influence on people’s lives, have come to believe that the values in the New Nordic Cuisine Manifesto aren’t a trend, that they’re now the new normal. Change takes time. But I think we’ve made a good start."
We are sharing more and more of our spaces with wolves: Futures Forum: Sharing Our Lives with Wolves: on BBC's Shared Planet And some are even campaigning to reintroduce wolves to this part of the world: Futures Forum: Reintroducing wolves to Devon For this week's Costing the Earth on Radio 4, Tom Heap goes to France - and the Netherlands, a country which is more developed and densely-populated than the UK - and looks at how things are working with rewilding the wolf on the Continent:
Wolves were hunted out of many European countries over a century ago. In recent years they've been migrating back naturally and have now reached every country in continental Europe. Not everyone is happy - while their preferred food source is said to be deer and wild boar the killing of sheep and goats has angered many farmers. Tom Heap travels to the French Alps, meeting farmers to see if its possible to rear livestock alongside a wolf population and hears about projects to help - including an innovative scheme where volunteers camp out to protect the sheep. Tom's taken his own camping gear in the hope of getting closer to these creatures and hearing or possibly seeing them.
He also travels to the Netherlands. Even here, they've had sightings of wolves since 2015, so he's going tracking in one of the areas they've been spotted - hoping for a sighting or a sign. Tracks or scat can give important evidence and may help indicate if the wolves have now settled here. How will the first resident female wolf - or eventually pack - for 140 years change life for the Dutch? Join him as they wait for important news.
Torridge District Council has joined a national call for the Government to produce an urgent strategy for rural areas in preparation for Brexit. The call is the result of concern that challenges to the sustainability of rural communities and service delivery in rural areas have been inadequately addressed by those in power for too long.
Council leader Jane Whittaker urged other councils to join in and said: “The call for action is a timely reminder that rural communities have been neglected and underfunded for many years. Digital infrastructure remains weak and the cost of providing services or doing business in a rural environment has not been properly or fully addressed.
“Our predicted departure from the EU and the potential loss of subsidies are likely to have an impact on significant sectors of our local economy, such as farming, without any reassurances that there are plans in place to mitigate this.”
Rural Services Network chief executive, Graham Biggs said: “Rural Communities are frequently overlooked in a policy environment dominated by urban thinking and policy concerns. This often means communities either miss out on the benefits or experience unintended consequences from policies which are poorly thought-through from a rural perspective.
“It is time for this ‘rural mainstreaming’ to stop. People living in ours towns and villages simply cannot afford to wait any longer for politicians to take their concerns seriously and act on them.”
The potential impact of Brexit on rural Scotland has been described as the ‘21st Century Clearances’ in a new report published by Scottish Rural Action. The report summarises findings from a series of community conversations held across rural Scotland.
Amanda Burgauer, the charity’s chairwoman, said: ‘This report is about giving voice to a rural point of view that is rooted in Scotland’s people and places, rather than its rural industries. Three major themes emerged.
‘Of most concern was the fear of long-term depopulation, exacerbated by the economic impact of the end of freedom of movement. There was an expectation of a hollowing out of rural Scotland through loss of EU funding, and there was worry about social cohesion with Brexit intensifying a sense of ongoing powerlessness in rural communities.
‘There is widespread anger and frustration across rural Scotland, but that anger isn’t solely about Brexit. It was clear from workshop discussions that Brexit is compounding long-standing concerns about rural equity and fragility.
‘Brexit was described as the “straw that breaks rural Scotland’s back”, with people pointing to structural fragilities across rural communities. Participants generally believed that an historic over-reliance on EU funding to “prop-up” rural areas makes rural Scotland particularly exposed to future loss of EU support.’ Brexit could lead to '21st century clearances', claims charity | The Oban Times Or, if you prefer the fruitier version: Official Scottish report into Brexit declares: ‘We are f***ed’
The strong language was blamed on a 'design and layout' error
An official report on the impact of Brexit on rural Scotland has included the quote, “We are f***ed”.
Published by Scottish Rural Action (SRA), the document – which was launched at an event in Elgin on Monday – features a side banner with the statement on its fourth page. It is not until the following page that the comment’s context is explained.
The banners in the document showcase the responses of workshop participants asked to imagine the newspaper headlines they expect to see following the UK’s departure from the EU. SRA chairwoman Amanda Burgauer said the “icebreaker” exercise saw several of the participants use “earthy language” to describe their feelings on Brexit. Official Brexit rural impact report includes phrase: 'we are f*****' | London Evening Standard . . .
Climate change is a global concern which challenges each and every one of us. Thankfully, more and more people are actively addressing the implications of climate change, and want to make a difference. But what do we mean by deforestation and climate change? What is the relationship between them? And how can you help?
What is climate change?
Global warming is measured as the mean annual average temperature of the Earth’s surface. It’s happening because greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas, trap more of the sun’s energy in the atmosphere.
Scientists have found that global warming is causing climate change. Those rising greenhouse gas levels change air flows at a global scale. This leads to unpredictable weather such as storms, flooding and drought. Melting polar and glacier ice is also adding cooler water to the oceans. This in turn is causing shifts in currents that can have major effects on the weather.
Unpredictable and extreme weather events are being linked with climate change (Photo: Phil Lockwood/WTML)
What is deforestation?
Deforestation is an overall loss in the total area of woodland. We hear about it most in other parts of the world, like the Amazon, Canada and Indonesia. It’s often driven as much by the alternative land use of cleared land as it is by the value of the timber. Vast areas of the world’s forests have been destroyed to make way for:
coffee, soy and palm oil plantations
the cattle ranches that produce the world’s supply of beef burgers.
How deforestation affects climate change
Forests store enormous quantities of carbon. This is captured from carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) in the air and turned into the structure of the tree. Microorganisms in the soil draw even more carbon into the forest floor – there is more carbon below ground than above. Left undisturbed, this carbon is safely locked away. But when the trees are cut down (and often burned) the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
People often associate deforestation with other parts of the world but it's happening here in the UK too (Photo: WTML)
As well as storing carbon, forests also create their own weather systems. The trees and other vegetation circulate water vapour to create clouds and rain. Taking the trees away also takes away those weather systems, which can lead to desertification - 6000 years ago the Sahara was a tropical jungle! Around the world, we can already see examples of where this has happened. This highlights the need to stop cutting old growth forests.
Deforestation in the UK
Surprising as it might sound, deforestation can and does happen right here in the UK. We know of at least 800 woods that are currently under threat, usually from development. The rate of planted new woods is seriously low right now. The average in England has totalled just 1,000 hectares in recent years. That means there’s a very real prospect that we’re in a state of deforestation. And the UK has an internationally legally binding commitment not to do that!
We need more new woods and trees. They can do so much more than lock up carbon, also:
reducing flood risk and soil erosion
offering shade and shelter for livestock
creating habitat for wildlife including pollinating insects
even providing food for farm animals.
The HS2 rail project is the biggest single development threat to ancient woodland right now. Whitmore Wood in Staffordshire is one of 108 ancient woods threatened with loss or damage (Photo: Whitmore Wood (C) N Chadwick :: Geograph Britain and Ireland)
How you can help
By joining the Woodland Trust’s growing membership you can help to stop deforestation in the UK. You’ll be contributing to the fight to save threatened woodland and our beautiful, irreplaceable ancient woods. You’ll also be helping us to create new woods that will turn down the heat on global warming.
Patrick Holden, an organic dairy farmer and founder of the Sustainable Food Trust, on why our food system needs to change if irreversible climate change, a biodiversity catastrophe and the breakdown of civil society are to be avoided
Interview: Ellie Costigan
Patrick Holden is the founder of the Sustainable Food Trust, a charitable organisation that strives for a better food and farming system, for people and planet. A self-proclaimed hippy, when Patrick set up his west Wales community farm in 1973, he wrote the rules on organic dairy farming. Alongside his internationally influential advocacy work, Patrick continues to produce exceptional cheeses (one of which, the cheddar-like and utterly delicious Hafod, can be found at Neal’s Yard Dairy) from the milk of his Ayrshire herd.
You’re known for promoting a more ‘sustainable’ food system. What do you mean by that?
It’s the food system we all need if we’re going to avoid irreversible climate change, biodiversity catastrophe, a breakdown of civil society, and all the other things we’re scared about these days. The pre-requisite for a stable and civil society is a secure and relatively local supply of food. We want to produce food in a way that protects and preserves our human capital. Also, the food we produce needs to be of high nutritional quality, otherwise we’ll continue to have the problems we’re experiencing in the National Health Service—it would currently be more accurately called the National Diseases Treatment Service, because it’s picking up the bill for deficient agriculture. To do that, we need a return to farming systems that build soil fertility through crop rotation. You need the cycle, because that’s the way to build soil. That’s the way all the soils of the world have been built, through this kind of practice—either managed by nature or managed by us.
What changed?
During the second world war, we made explosives using a process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen, called the Haber-Bosch process. Once the war was over, we didn’t need explosives anymore—but we could use the same process to make nitrogen fertiliser, which became widely available. Farmers realised if they put it on the fields, they could avoid the need for crop rotation—not realising that the traditional method was not just providing nitrogen, but also providing carbon, which is vital for soil quality and fertility. Our wonderful UK soils are carbon rich—or were carbon rich, before the agricultural revolution. Unfortunately, we’ve been mining the accumulated fertility of generations. Now we need to put it back.
Many people are advocating a move toward more plant-based diets. Is that the right way to go?
A lot of young people in particular are turning to vegetarianism or veganism and there’s a big campaign now to eat less meat, but better, and move to a plant-based diet. A lot of young people are responding to that, thinking that it’s the most responsible way to eat in a world of climate change. In fact, what we need to do, in my opinion, is differentiate between livestock that are part of the problem—feedlot beef, intensively reared chickens and pigs, intensive dairy—and support the livestock and products that come from systems that are part of the solution. Without a healthy, buoyant market for grass-fed beef and lamb, dairy, pastured chickens and pigs, the farmers that need to rebuild their soil can’t do that.
Right now, the market for beef is on the floor and farmers are going out of business. It should be remembered that 71 per cent of the United Kingdom’s farmed area is grass—so my message to the vegetarians and vegans is, try to align your future diets to what we could actually produce from this nation if we farmed in a sustainable way. If you recognise that, then you need to differentiate between livestock that you shouldn’t eat, and livestock that you should—that is, if you’re not ethically opposed—and feel good about it. Methane emissions do come from ruminant animals, beef or lamb, but the soil carbon gain has the potential to more than offset that.
The narrative surrounding the nutritional merits of meat has fluctuated over the past few decades. What’s driven that?
It’s fascinating. The trend away from fatty meat towards lean meat and away from butter and dairy fat towards margarine goes back to the 1980s, when the government published a report which basically said that animal fats and sugar are bad for you. A journalist called Geoffrey Cannon got hold of this report and wrote a big headline story in The Sunday Times. The food industry was upset about this, especially the sugar industry, which embarrassed the government, so they commissioned another report from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy. It was published a year later, and it focussed purely on the fact that animal fats are bad for you. It turned out that many of the people on the board had interests in the sugar industry. It was a brilliant plot to deflect away from the damage that sugar is doing to public health and put it all on meat. The rest is history. The whole of the modern British diet was shaped by a report that was dominated by vested interests. Now there’s evidence emerging that even saturated fats from animals aren’t necessarily bad for us. The whole thing has turned.
Have those myths about health influenced the general shift toward plant-based diets?
There are conspiracy theorists that think the turn towards veganism and vegetarianism is backed by vested interests—I’m not that much of a cynic. I think it’s simpler than that. I think young people are, quite rightly, angry about the industrialisation of food and farming. They hate intensive factory farms. The younger generation are mobilised by their power as citizens to bring about change by their actions. But in reacting as they have, they’re throwing out the grass-fed ruminant baby with the bathwater of industrial feedlot beef and intensive chickens. I think there is a learning curve here.
Between the turn of the 20th century and today, we’ve switched our dietary fats from 80 per cent animal and 20 per cent plants, to the other way around. If you look at where those dietary fats come from, it’s palm oil, soya oil—which is genetically modified and causing a huge amount of soil erosion in South America—and crops like almonds, which everybody thinks are very good, but if you go to California, you’ll find that it’s a disaster, in terms of desertification. We need to think very carefully about where all our food comes from, not just meat.
What do you think is the main obstacle to transitioning to a more sustainable food system?
That’s the question: how does change happen? I think it happens through a combination of external circumstances. A problem emerges, it gets to a critical point where people begin to realise something’s wrong, and that creates a degree of fear—what will happen if we don’t change? People in a leadership position think, yes, we do need to change, and then policy makers start to work out how we can. But they won’t do that unless there’s pressure from the public. I think right now the pre-conditions exist: there is growing awareness that agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, and unless we change our food systems, we won’t have a planet fit to live on—and that’s really the truth. I think we’re near a tipping point. I’ve been involved with advocacy for more sustainable food systems since the 1970s; it’s only now I feel that change is happening. A lot of young people, millennials, feel there’s a shift at hand. I think that’s really positive. But I think the shift needs to be grounded in a better understanding of what the issues are.
Do markets have a role in reconnecting consumers with farmers?
At the recent Oxford Real Farming Conference, we had a session on plastics. A guy called Phil Haughton, who runs Better Food in Bristol, put his hand up and said: “I can’t help feeling that getting plastics out of our food packaging is treating the symptom, not the cause. The cause is the move away from farmers’ markets and a direct relationship with our fresh food, toward wrapping it all in plastic and shipping it great distances.” I think he’s right to a large extent. The renaissance of the farmers’ market movement is a fabulous expression of that, and long may it continue to grow and prosper, because it’s needed. Not least, it gives farmers an opportunity to cut out a couple of links in the profit chain and sell at affordable prices, to people who they actually meet, which is a brilliant thing. Even certification is not needed if you know your farmer. The Americans had a scheme during the Obama administration, called Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food—a wonderful motto for markets. As the great food journalist Eric Schlosser said, the thing about the way most food is produced these days is, if you knew the story behind it, you wouldn’t want to eat it. That’s the truth. Which is scary. It’s such a powerful thing to think about. We need to know more about the story behind our food and when we do, we need to still want to eat it.
You’re first and foremost a farmer: how did you come to be engaged with the more political side of food?
I grew up in and around London. I used to go on holidays to do with farming, so I had these glimpses of nature. Then my dad moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for a visiting professorship. When I was about 20, I went out there, drank the Kool-Aid, came back and decided I wanted to get back to the land and live self-sufficiently. A group of us moved to Wales, that was in 1973, and set up a community farm—it’s still there. That was how I got involved in farming. We established the dairy herd—bought some Ayrshire cows from Scotland—started milking them and have carried on ever since.
As soon as we started farming, we knew we wanted to do so in a sustainable way, and that meant organic farming. We just did it out of instinct, really. Then we wrote some standards, because there weren’t any. I wrote the world’s first draft of the organic dairy standards. A group of us got involved with the Soil Association Livestock Standards Commission. It became clear that an organic market was starting to develop and there were lots of farmers interested, so I became more and more involved and eventually started working for the Soil Association. I worked my way up the Social Association and headed it up for 15 years. That took me through to 2010, when I left to set up the Sustainable Food Trust.
What prompted the move?
The Soil Association is an incredible organisation and its founder, Lady Eve Balfour, was an amazing woman, a visionary. But, in some ways, it is misunderstood, in my opinion. A lot of people now have a negative view about organic food—that it’s elitist and you have to be rich to afford it—but that’s not really the Soil Association’s fault. The real reason behind that is, the polluters are not paying. If you want to buy proper food, sustainable food, you have to pay more, because the apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, it’s produced using methods that degrade the environment and cause pollution. It’s destroying the balance sheet of nature. I thought, well actually, if we’re going to save the planet, we need to be more inclusive—change the economic policy framework in which all farmers have to operate, so that all farmers can move towards more sustainable methods. That was a major influence on my decision to set up the Sustainable Food Trust. It’s not operating at odds with the Soil Association, it’s just got a more inclusive agenda.
A big question that’s often raised is whether sustainable farming practices can be economically viable for both farmer and consumer. Do you see a time where these things will go hand in hand?
These things can work in harmony. Many thousands of farmers all over the world would prefer to do what they probably know in their hearts is the right thing. If we can shift the economic conditions, whereby farming in a more sustainable way and producing healthy food pays nearly as well, or even as well, as what they’re doing at the moment, they’ll shift. Who wouldn’t want to farm in harmony with nature? To preserve biodiversity, look after animals as best we possibly can, and promote public health? The only reason why farmers are not doing those things is they’re trapped by the economics and the policy environment into a race to the bottom on price. We are the people who eat their food, so if we want them to change, we have to change. We have to realign our diets. We need to be discerning about which livestock products we eat and once we’ve understood that, we need to eat them. We won’t keep the farmers who are wanting to return to mixed farming in business unless we eat their food.
We spend about 10 per cent of our disposable income on food—it used to be around 30 per cent back in the seventies. I know we have legitimate, big expenses, but actually we could afford to spend more on food. Besides, we’re paying in hidden ways for the so-called cheap food: we’re paying with our health, our water bills, we’re paying in climate change, and we’re passing on that damage to future generations. We must do this. We have to know more, and we have to use that knowledge to shop in the right way—Borough Market, farmers’ markets, finding ways of supporting producers directly, that is absolutely the way forward. We are causing irreparable damage to the planet: we need to use our food buying power to support producers who are not causing it. It’s an incredibly empowering thing to do as a citizen; to use your money to support a more sustainable food future.
