Panic over?

Global warming?  Panic over.  Fly guilt-free where you like as often as you like.    Splash out on that 7 litre Mercedes you’ve always secretly wanted.  The global warming crisis could be over.  There’s an easy solution that’s been staring us in the face for decades.

The make or break climate conference, COP21, is happening in Paris in December.  There will be a lot of haggling, a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of moaning.  India and China will fight to keep their coal-fired power stations.  Exxon and their Saudi pals will continue to fund corrupt scientists who deny climate change.  Brazil will fight to protect their right to chop down the Amazon rain forest.  Let them have their way… for the time being.

There needn’t be any pain.  The negotiations in Paris could be a doddle.

We can continue to burn fossil fuels, using our abundant and cheap reserves of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. We can save liquid fuels for airplanes and ships.   We must still go for wind and solar and geothermal, but in a less panicky way.

So how do we do it?  The answer lies in the soil.

Farming is responsible for 30% of excess greenhouse gas emissions.  But farming could cancel out 100% of our annual excess greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s already happening right now, but on less than 2% of the world’s farmland, the organic land.

Carbon dioxide is killing us all.  Organic farming sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it into rich soil that will feed us forever.  Sounds like a pretty good deal.  Of course going organic means we’d have to eat food that tastes better, not get sick from pesticides in our food, enjoy cleaner water and more biodiversity – but that’s a small price to pay for having a habitable planet.

This is the UN International Year of Soils 2015.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that on current trends we have 60 years before the soil runs out.

On August 31 2015, global food giant General Mills announced an investment of $100 million to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent. This will include sourcing products from an additional 250,000 acres of organic production. Jerry Lynch, the company’s chief sustainability officer pointed out that organic agriculture promotes soil that helps farms better endure droughts, heavy rains and pests, while pulling more carbon from the air and putting it into the ground in the process. 

A 34 year trial at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania growing field scale crops shows that organic farming can sequester 1 tonne of carbon per hectare, year after year.  The Rodale trial figures show that if regenerative principles were applied globally to arable farming and pasture we could offset all of the annual increase in greenhouse gas.  

Change is afoot. The Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance brings together Government, industry and NGOs to advance new solutions to food production that protect soil from further degradation by increasing carbon-rich soil organic matter.

The French National Institute for Agronomical Research states that

if we adapted farming practices to boost organic matter in soils by 0.4% a year it would compensate for all global greenhouse gas emissions. (link to source?) France’s Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll recently commented: “We could store the equivalent of anthropogenic carbon gas produced by humanity today. Storing carbon in the soil is organic matter in the soil, organic matter is fertilizing the soil.”

The benefits of soil organic matter as a carbon sink can be further enhanced by the use of biochar - finely ground charcoal used as a soil improver.  (That’s what I do at Carbon Gold).  Biochar has a centuries-long residence time in soil, so it acts as a long term carbon sink for carbonised biomass such as rice husks and forestry thinnings which would otherwise decompose or be burned and produce more carbon dioxide.  And it accelerates the buildup of organic matter in soil. 

So it’s not just me. The Rodale Institute, the UN’s FAO, General Mills and the French government all agree: grow organic, save the planet. Agriculture can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

The COP21 climate conference is in Paris in December. Every participating country will make INDC commitments (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) to reduce emissions.  All they have to do is convert agriculture to organic and they can surpass those commitments with ease.

Solving global warming was never going to be easy, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if we cast off the deadly grip of agribusiness and started farming for the future.

Bitter Sweet Insanity

How seriously should we take official exhortations to cut sugar consumption while governments continue to subsidise industrial scale sugar farming? asks Craig Sams

When my brother Gregory and I set up Harmony Foods in 1970 we committed to never using sugar in our business. In 1972, in my book About Macrobiotics, I had written about sugar: “If it were discovered yesterday it would be banned and possibly turned over to the Army for weapons research.” But the same chapter had recipes using apples, raisins, currants and apricots. Our macrobiotic guru, Michio Kushi, even gave his support to candies made with rice malt sugar. We were all a little bit hypocritical.

In 1976 we created a separate brand, Whole Earth, so that if we ever sold Harmony products to supermarkets we had a separate brand that would not upset health food retailers’ sensibilities. Then in 1977 Waitrose and Safeway saw us on BBC News and wanted to order Harmony Peanut Butter right away. They insisted on the Harmony brand. Sales boomed in supermarkets as well as health food shops and Harmony Peanut Butter soon swept away our competitors Granose and Mapleton’s.

Then in 1977 I did something nobody had done before. I invented a jam based on apple juice and fruit. We decided to market it. We couldn’t use the sugar-free Harmony brand as apple juice concentrate is a sugary syrup. So we dusted off the Whole Earth brand and launched a hugely successful range of jams made with apple juice and marketed as ‘100% fruit, no sugar added.’ Sales of Whole Earth soared so much that we eventually retired the Harmony brand and put the peanut butter under the Whole Earth brand. For a while we were the biggest users of apple juice concentrate in the world, apart from the cider industry. My ethical defence was that our jams were only 38% sugar while white sugar jams were 65% sugar. But it wasn’t long before competing ‘no sugar added’ jams also hit the 65% level.

Now the Government has, surprisingly, got a health policy that makes sense: cut down on sugar. All sugar. Beet sugar, cane sugar, apple juice, grape juice, honey, agave syrup, coconut sugar, jaggery, maple syrup, corn syrup and any other product that is 99% sucrose, glucose and fructose. To paraphrase Romeo’s insightful sweetheart Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call sugar, by any other name would taste as sweet.” All sugars are in the sights of Professor MacGregor of Action on Sugar, who is leading the charge. The same thing is happening worldwide.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a horrifically misguided campaign that urged tens of millions of Britons to abandon butter in favour of margarines that were rich in trans fats from hydrogenated fat. The result was millions disabled or killed off by heart disease. The US has now banned all transfats and it’s almost non-existent in Europe. Then there was the demonisation of salt campaign. That killed off a goodly number of older people for whom salt
was essential to vital functions and made little difference to anyone else.

But the sugar campaign makes sense. 500 years ago Paracelsus wrote: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; the dose makes the poison.” Most people overdose every day on sugar and that’s why it’s such a major factor in obesity, cancer, diabetes, tooth decay and heart disease. But in smaller quantities can it make a useful contribution to our health and energy levels by enhancing our enjoyment of food and drink?

What’s a safe dose? MacGregor wants a 30% reduction. Others think we consume three times too much: the overdose makes the poison.

When we developed the Gusto Cola recipe we aimed for a level of sugar one third of what you’d get in a can of Coke or a bottle of apple juice. We opted for stevia as a calorie-free sweetener. Ooopsadaisy! EU Organic Regulations don’t allow stevia, unless it’s in a drink imported from the USA. So we canned it in the US, using organic stevia. Oopsadaisy! EU regulations for soft drinks, organic or not, restrict stevia levels, so you still have to use 50% sugar to match the sweetness of regular drinks – or add aspartame. Yuk. So we made the recipe less sweet and it tasted fine.

But it made me wonder why the EU and our Government exhort us to cut back on sugar while enforcing regulations against natural sweeteners that have exactly the opposite effect. Even worse, the EU subsidises sugar farmers and refineries. So does Brazil, to the tune of $2.5 billion a year. Just one French producer has had €60 million over 3 years.

A good start would be to let the sugar market find its own level instead of using taxpayer money to drive down the cost. Then exhort people to consume less.

Which is cheaper – human life or chicken breasts?

Back in May I was at the Sustainable Food Summit in Amsterdam where I heard a shocking figure - by 2030 more people will die of antibiotic resistant disease than from cancer and diabetes.  The speaker projected a figure of 10 million lives lost every year.  

We can blame lazy overworked doctors, who happily prescribe antibiotics inappropriately just to get whining patients out of their surgery clutching a bottle of pills that won’t cure their sniffles.

Or blame hospitals.  They use antibiotics to disinfect surfaces and in other situations where a bit of human labour, soap and a bit of elbow grease could do the job.  

But is it fair to lay all the blame on lazy doctors and hospitals?  Not really.  The source of 80% of antibiotic resistant disease is the food industry

Imagine you took a troublesome boy and smacked him around the ears and whacked his backside, like in the old days before we got civilised.  By the time he grew up he would be the kind of guy who thinks it is worth it when there is a fracas in the pub and will shake off the restraining arm of his girl friend to have a go at someone who looked at him the wrong way.  That’s the way it is with bacteria, too.  The more you whack them the tougher and nastier they get.  

E. coli is the perfect illustration of this.  When the first Wimpy Bars opened questions were asked in Parliament about E.coli.  Once meat is ground up the tiny amounts of E.coli that might be on the surface are able to penetrate and multiply through the entire burger.  The worry then was about diarrhoea, which was the main symptom of infection.  A few people got the runs, but burgers replaced bread and dripping as Britain’s favourite snack.  But at the same time, grazing and hay for beef cattle got replaced by intensive feedlots where cattle stood in their own poo for most of their lives, spreading infection hither and thither.  The feedlotsproduced the cheapest beef.  But those darned cows kept getting sick and infecting each other every time they dumped.  So antibiotics came to the rescue.  E.coli hates antibiotics and was pretty much wiped out once the cows got their meds.  But you can’t keep bad bacteria down.  The E.coli toughened up their act and at the same time as they became more resistant they also became a heck of a lot more virulent.  This super tough bacterium was named E. coli O157:H7 to differentiate it from its namby-pamby ancestors.  So instead of the runs people who ingested E.coli O157:H7 became violently ill and suffered kidney failure, either dying or spending much of the rest of their shortened lives on dialysis machines.  When they did die the cause of death was ‘kidney failure’ or something else that pointed the finger away from the real cause: antibiotics in farming.

MERS, SARS, MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant diseases are spreading like wildfire.  Thousands of people are dying every day from diseases that are the result of our race to the bottom in meat production.

Is cheap meat really worth this?   If meat was vital for human existence you might understand the importance of making it as cheap as possible, but any vegetarian or vegan is living proof that meat is a luxury, a frippery, a bit of icing on the nutritional cake that sustains life.  So why do we compromise on quality about something that we are already consuming in excess?  Why not just cut back to a healthy level and consume ‘better and less often’ as the Soil Association, Slow Food and various health authorities recommend? 

The global market for meat is worth about $800 billion.  

If we cleaned up the meat market the antibiotic-resistant bacteria would quickly die out - Nature never wastes energy and no bacteria will bother wearing a suit of armour and a sword if nobody is trying to poison them.  But that would probably increase the cost of meat by 25 %, adding $200 billion to the global meat food bill.  

10 million lives lost per year to antibiotic resistant bacteria could be prevented for an additional expenditure of $200 billion. That’s $20,000 per human life saved, or £13,000, half the price of a Ford Mondeo.     

Which would you choose?  Cheaper chicken or a longer life? 

Real change is coming

People have had enough of corrupt politicians and their ruthlessly self-serving corporate backers. Real world change is breaking out everywhere

Did you get what you voted for in the election? More GMOs from Monsanto? The chance for NATO to bomb another country into chaos? More useless drugs based on junk research sold at extortionate prices to the NHS?  More untested pesticides in your food? More global warming? More fracking? More nuclear power stations? I don’t think so. All you got to be passionate about were the insulting little bribes about pensions, tax allowances, housing and benefits, while the big bribes are quietly discussed in Brussels and Whitehall between lobbyists for industry and politicians, trying to keep a firm grip on power.

But, as Russell Brand says, voting doesn’t matter so much any more – in the real world things are changing, and they’re changing fast. It doesn’t matter what the drug companies and GMO merchants would like to see: if people don’t buy, then their products don’t fly. Solar is outselling fossil fuels for energy, and nuclear is uninsurable and on the way out. More and more people question the value of pharmaceuticals, and fracking is on the skids. Organic food is booming, too.

It’s beginning to look like we’ve reached a tipping point with GMOs. If I was a Monsanto shareholder I’d be dumping stock in the light of how things are going.

Hugely successful fast-food chain Chipotle has announced that its food is now GMO-free. Its sales grew 31% year-on-year last year and profits are up 57%. Meanwhile its GMO-loving competitor McDonalds agonizes over a 2.7% drop in sales and a 33% drop in profits. Chipotle had to work at it: in the US, vegetable oils, tacos and tortillas and cheese are all made with GMOs. But they did it, and it’s watching customers flock to its outlets and abandon the dinosaurs who still don’t get it. Funny thing is that McDonalds owned 90% of Chipotle shares ten years ago but cashed out in 2006 to invest more in its own business. Big mistake.

A federal court has just upheld the state of Vermont’s law requiring GMO labelling, something we take for granted in Europe. The manufacturers who opposed it claimed it violated their free speech rights! Or their right to stay quiet?

Brazil’s National Cancer Institute has condemned the use of Roundup Ready soya, saying: “The cropping pattern with the intensive use of pesticides generates major harms, including environmental pollution and poisoning of workers and the population in general.”  Brazil’s Public Prosecutor has called for a suspension of glyphosate use. Holland has banned it for gardening use and it disappeared off the shelves of French garden centres this year. Colombia’s Health Ministry has recommended a ban on Roundup spraying on coca crops – too many farmers are getting ill.

The World Health Organization has also reported that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Over 30 years ago the US Environmental Protection Agency said the same, then reclassified it as non-carcinogenic right about the time the first of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready products hit the market. Cover-up or honest mistake? We’ll never know as the evidence can’t be released for reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’.

Let’s not forget that when Roundup Ready soya beans were first planted in 1996 Monsanto promised that it would lead to reduced herbicide use. In the intervening 15 years its sales of Roundup increased tenfold. Just in the nick of time: its patent on glyphosate ran out in 2001 and competitors were offering it for a third of the price, but by then farmers were hooked on Roundup-hungry Roundup Ready soya beans and corn and had signed contracts not to use the cheaper stuff.

Neil Young’s new album is called The Monsanto Years – it is anything but a hymn of praise to America’s most reviled company. Made with Willie Nelson’s two sons, it is a plea to reverse the harm to family farms and the Midwest’s soils of the past two GMO decades.

Jo Wood, ex-wife of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, recently hosted a screening of GMO OMG– supporting GMfreeme.org. Even my missus, who’s heard it all before from me, got fired up by the film’s powerful message.

In the US Moms Against GMOs is leading the charge with the motto: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” With a little help from Chipotle and retailers and producers of organic and natural foods, things are changing.

Organic food pioneer and polemicist Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

Don't wreck our soil

In 1885, when my great grandpa Ole Doxtad first ploughed the virgin land of his farm in Nebraska the soil contained over 100 tonnes of carbon per hectare.  Now that same soil contains about 5 tonnes.  That lost carbon is now in the atmosphere and has contributed about a third of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since that time.  Most of that carbon was contained in the microbial life of the soil, mostly mycorrhizal fungi but along with thousands of species of fungi and bacteria, all working harmoniously to feed plants and protect them against disease.  Every time Ole's plough turned the soil, those fungi and bacteria died in their gazillions, decomposing into greenhouse gases.  What was left was dead dirt.  Yields went down.  Luckily tractors came along in the 1920s and Ole's son Lewis (Grandpa) could plough twice as deep as with horses, bringing up deeply buried organic matter to refresh his tired soils.  That worked for a while, then fertility fell off again.  Luckily after WW 2 artificial fertilisers were cheap and subsidised so farming could keep going.   Now the FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) says we have about 50 years of soil left before there is no land fit for farming.  Our luck has run out, whatever the GMO hucksters may promise. That's why 2015 is the UN International Year of Soils.

Healthy soil is rich in organic matter - decomposing plants and teeming microbial life.  The more microbial life there is the healthier the soil and the healthier the plants that grow in it.

Ploughing the soil breaks up that social community and forces it to rebuild, with many participants dying and decomposing during recovery. Adding artificial fertilisers to soil breaks the cycle of mutual nourishment between plants and the living soil, so microbial life dies off. Fungicides and pesticides are the final knife in the heart of life in the soil. When the living organisms in the soil die, the soil dies with them and disintegrates.  Killing soil is a slow form of suicide by humankind.  With a 50 year deadline it’s time we did something about it.

Why are mycorrhizal fungi so important?  A plant uses sunlight and photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar.  Some of that sugar is exuded through the plant's roots to feed the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil .  Why does a plant give away its precious sugar?  Because the payback is worth it. 

Those mycorrhizae use the sugar to feed the helpful fungi and bacteria in the soil:

the ones that convert nitrogen into nitrate fertiliser;

the ones that dissolve phosphorus to make it accessible to plants;

the the ones that fiercely defend 'their' plant against pathogens and pests that could kill or weaken their host plant.  Soil microbes are the probiotics of plants, keeping them healthy and well nourished while protecting them from disease.

Does this sound familiar?  We humans are just like the soil.  Our 'organic matter' is the kilo or two of microbial life that we call probiotics that inhabits our gut.  Their ‘soil’ is the food we eat, which feeds them. Like the microbial life in soil, these fungi and bacteria provide us with valuable nutrients and eradicate any disease-causing organisms that threaten our health.  They keep us happy and healthy.  The parallel doesn't stop there, though.  The soil is a vast living organism, stretching across continents with an interconnected ‘mind’ – a consciousness that spans countless numbers of tiny living beings.  Our gut flora also have a mind – neuroscientists call them the 'second brain' and 'gut feelings' are their manifestation in our first brain.  Sometimes what we think is our brain thinking a thought is actually a thought being controlled from the gut - all the more reason to eat well, keep the gut bacteria happy and think positive thoughts.

The cooperation among soil microbial life provides an admirable example of how cooperation and collaboration and sharing of food can benefit health and vitality.  A healthy soil, full of life, will support growth and yields equivalent to what can be achieved using chemical fixes. Just as a healthy gut will support life and vitality in humans, without recourse to sugar and antibiotics.

Our planet is blessed with an abundance of air, water and sunlight.   That's all that's needed to generate all the food we could ever need - as long as we don’t wreck our soils.

Hoppy

John 'Hoppy'  Hopkins passed away at the beginning of February.  Known as the ‘The King of The Underground’ in the 1960s, he gave me my very first platform for supplying macrobiotic food to the public and thereby gave me my leg up into this wonderful industry. 

I met Hoppy in 1966 at the All Saints Church Hall in Notting Hill when he organised a small event where an unknown band weirdly called The Pink Floyd played their first London gig. It was a benefit for the London Free School, which Hoppy helped run.  At firste there was plenty of room for the few dozen attendees to dance but after a few weeks the poor little church hall was bursting at the seams and people were turned away.

So Hoppy hooked up with Joe Boyd, renamed the event 'UFO' and ran a Friday night allnighter at a basement club on Tottenham Court Road.  It opened in early December 1966. I was already importing and selling books about macrobiotics and Hoppy asked me if I could cater.  We laid on simple finger food, with thanks to my Mum Margaret who stuffed vine leaves with brown rice, fried up felafel and made brown rice rissoles.  During the breaks in the music (Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Crazy World of Arthur Brown) me and my small band of macrobiotic missionaries would sidle up to people and explain to them what this strange food was that they were eating, why sugar was bad and brown rice was good.  We were building the customer base of a little restaurant-cum-macrobiotic study centre that I was planning to open in Notting Hill in February 1967.  You couldn’t ask for a more positive association in people’s minds than the Pink Floyd and macrobiotic food.

In January 1967 Hoppy organised a 'happening' in Piccadilly Circus.  It was lovely.  The police stood by smiling indulgently and the press coverage was kind.  Nobody had learned to hate hippies  yet.  Hoppy tootled on a little flute while the Dutch artist couple Simon and Marijke beat tambourines.  It was the 'coming out' party of the 'underground' scene in London.  

Hoppy went on to found International Times (IT), the newspaper of this emerging community.  It wasn't long before it got busted, for publishing small ads that enabled gays to meet each other, at a time when being gay was imprisonable.   International Times was taken off sale at newsagents and the only place you could get a copy was in our restaurant - we gave away bundles and people went off and circulated it to their friends, so it still managed to reach its readership.  On a Saturday morning Hoppy got into a coffin symbolic of the death of IT and traveled on the Circle Line, emerging at Notting Hill.  A procession of IT supporters danced, played flutes and whistles and got to the spot on the Portobello Road where, 4 years later, we would open Ceres Grain Shop. Then unsmiling police moved in in force and scattered everyone in all directions.  No more indulgent good natured bobbies, the honeymoon was over.   

To raise the money for IT's legal costs Hoppy and music producer Dave Howson decided to put on a mega-event at Alexandra Palace - called The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. They went to the music companies who by then had bands like the Pink Floyd under contract and they were all keen to showcase their groups on the bill.  One little hitch - Hoppy hadn't actually booked Alexandra Palace as there was a £400 booking fee.   He and Dave persuaded me to lend the money.   Once Alexandra Palace was booked the record company money flowed and I got my loan back two weeks later.  The event was legendary.  I served a macrobiotic breakfast in the morning sunshine before the revelers went home.               

This kind of troublemaking alarmed the authorities.  Hoppy was targeted and busted for a small amount of dope, branded ‘a menace to society’ by the magistrate and sentenced to nine months imprisonment.  When Mick Jagger was arrested that year, after a set up by the News of The World, William Rees-Mogg wrote in The Times; "Who would break a butterfly on a wheel?"   The answer was any government, Tory or Labour that felt threatened by a bunch of young people wearing colourful clothes and enjoying being alive, eating healthy food, caring about the environment and loving one another too freely.

Recent evidence reveals that while the authorities were fretting over healthy eating, sexual liberation and environmental activism they were allegedly also busy procuring young boys from orphanages for sadistic purposes.  For Hoppy being in jail changed his life.  He'd learned his lesson and after coming out of jail spent his time in quasi-academic pursuits and pioneered the exploration of a novel new technology: video.  He lived long enough to see YouTube empowering ordinary people with video capabilities and the widespread adoption of a healthier way of eating.  A bright spark that fired up the alternative society has gone out.

Michio Kushi, last of old school macrobiotic gurus, is no more

Modern Zen macrobiotics was created by the Japanese leader George Ohsawa. His leading apostle was Michio Kushi. Kushi died in December, leaving the macrobiotic movement leaderless for the first time in its history in the West. In any belief system there is always the potential to confuse the messenger with the message. The Ten Commandments ban worshipping graven images and Islam prohibits images of Mohammed. This prevents believers worshipping a fellow human who connected with the universal spirit of love and peace (or ‘health and happiness’ if you prefer) instead of seeking that connection themselves. In macrobiotics the tendency to follow the man rather than the practice has been a marginalising factor that has kept it as a cult instead of the universally popular diet that we once thought it would become. Yet macrobiotic principles are now the guiding principles of the renaissance in nutritional awareness that is gathering pace worldwide. It looks like we’ve won, just not under our flag.

The Zen Macrobiotic diet originated as a reaction to the introduction of American food in Japan. In 1907 The Shoku-Yo-Kai association was formed to educate the public in healthy eating and to encourage a return to the traditional Japanese diet and avoid the meat, dairy products and sugary refined foods introduced from the West. Japanese were beginning to succumb to hitherto unknown diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The President of Shoku-Yo-Kai was George Ohsawa in the 1930s. He was jailed and nearly executed because he opposed Japan’s militaristic and imperialistic adventures that led to World War 2. One of his students was Michio Kushi, who took the message to the US in 1949. He was not the only one. Another was a Hollywood-based Shoku-Yo-Kai practitioner called Dr Nakadadi, who in 1947 cured my father Ken, who suffered debilitating intestinal disease for years after fighting as a Marine in the Pacific war. But it was in the 1960s that Ohsawa’s book Zen Macrobiotics lit the fuse under the macrobiotic rocket. It married the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang to diet and lifestyle. Taoism, like Zen, ideally seeks to achieve states where you transcend earthly day-to-day worries and become a mover and shaker while playing and staying in a state of constant bliss.   This is why macrobiotics appealed so much to the Sixties hippie generation, who experienced those states temporarily and sought something that could bring them there without having to rely on psychoactive substances.

Ohsawa died suddenly in 1966, leaving the macrobiotic movement leaderless.

Michio Kushi on the East Coast and Herman Aihara on the West Coast, took up Ohsawa’s mantle. Kushi set up the East West Institute in Boston. It was a mecca for burned-out hippies who would make the hajj to Boston and work in the study centre or the associated restaurant and food wholesaling business Erewhon, while learning the philosophy and how to cook the food. Kushi’s lectures to his followers were published in The East West Journal and the Order of the Universe magazines, reaching more than 100,000 subscribers worldwide. His students became the missionaries of macrobiotics beyond Boston. Many of them came to London, where we welcomed them and gave them jobs in our restaurant, bakery and shop. We rented them a house in Ladbroke Grove where they could promulgate Kushi's message, give shiatsu classes and teach cooking.   They disdained our free and easy approach to macrobiotics and advised us to go to Boston to study with Michio. We thought they were too ‘straight.’ They wore suits, smoked cigarettes and drank Guinness and coffee just like Michio. But the rest of their diet was much stricter than ours, allowing little in the way of sweeteners or dairy products. It was a bit alienating, but we thought 'each to his own' and were grateful to be introduced to shiatsu and to have active missionaries spreading the message.

A few years ago I wrote here about our macrobiotic sea cruise. It included late stage cancer sufferers who had, thanks to Michio Kushi's teachings, been clear for five or ten years. It was moving to hear their stories and their gratitude that macrobiotics had given them life beyond their doctors' expectations.

Will macrobiotics thrive in Kushi’s absence? The philosophy is now everywhere, the basic principles of making healthy diet the foundation of your physical and mental well being; eating whole unrefined cereals; exercising actively; always choose organic; avoid sugary refined foods; prefer sourdough over yeasted breads; avoid artificial preservatives and colourings; no trans fats; eat locally and seasonally… these were once quirky macrobiotic precepts but are all now well-established and the stuff of Sunday newspaper supplements. George Ohsawa once commented that as long as you were in a state of bliss it didn’t matter what you ate, you were macrobiotic. Kushi’s messaging was more prescriptive, but it reached a lot more people. These great men are no longer with us, but thanks to their teachings the quality and variety of food we can easily obtain is better than it has ever been in human history. There is no excuse for eating crap any more. For this we should be eternally grateful.

Seed Magazine 1975

It's anything but dirt

The soil is a vast living organism, stretching across continents with an interconnected ‘mind’ – a consciousness that spans countless numbers of tiny living beings. All those living things have an energy field. A healthy soil has the combined energy field of thousands of different organisms. We are part of that energy field – when we disrupt it we disrupt our own spirit and consciousness.

Ploughing the soil breaks up this social community and forces it to rebuild, with many participants dying and decomposing during recovery. Adding artificial fertilisers to soil breaks the cycle of mutual nourishment between plants and the living soil, and the soil dies. Fungicides and pesticides also kill the life in the soil. When the living organisms in the soil die, the soil dies and disintegrates. To kill soil, therefore, is a slow form of suicide by humankind.

When life on Earth began 500 million years or so ago there was just a small population of fungi living on rock. The fungi would erode the rock, squeezing out small amounts of carbon, breaking it down into small pieces of sand, smaller ones of silt and the smallest particles of clay. There were minerals, but they had no life in them.

Then blue-green single-celled organisms called ‘cyanobacteria’ (‘blue bacteria’) harnessed sunlight in order to turn carbon dioxide and water into a simple carbohydrate, glucose sugar. These bacteria had invented photosynthesis and a new way to make carbohydrate. The fungi locked these cyanobacteria into cells so they could take control of their sugar output. They then created green ‘chain gangs’ – the earliest plants – by joining the cells together and surrounding their roots. These chain gangs of cyanobacteria got bigger and bigger, organised into fan shapes and leaf shapes to maximise capture of carbon dioxide. Internal tubes in the plants served as veins to deliver the sugar to the fungi in the soil and take up water and nutrients in return. Plants have been the food source of ‘mycorrhizal’ (‘root fungus’) fungi ever since.

Nothing has changed today. An oak tree is a collection of tubes that carry water and minerals up to the sugar factories in the leaves and carry sugar down to the mycorrhizae clustered around the roots. The mycorrhizae produce superfine filaments (‘hyphae’) – there can be 10 miles of these superfine threads in just a tiny handful of soil. Fungi communicate with each other and with other soil microorganisms through chemical signaling, electric pulses, smell and touch. They control the sugar supply to all the other organisms in the soil – without sugar nothing can live. The fungi rule, deciding which bacteria to nourish and therefore which shall flourish. If an emerging plant needs more sugar than it can produce, the mycelial network of fungi will deliver extra amounts to the plant to help nurture its growth. The mycorrhizal community of the soil has been described as “associations for mutual aid and the promotion of common interests.” We think that plants compete with each other for nutrients, but it is the fungi that regulate their diversity and growth rate. The soil, undisturbed, is a mutual support network with sugar as the common currency. Every time a fungus or a plant dies it is recycled to become the organic matter that holds together the living soil of tiny rock particles.

At least 10,000 different bacteria and fungi dwell in the soil. They all need sugar. They all get it from the mycorrhizae. Some, like the omnipresent actinomycetes bacteria, mimic fungi in shape, joining up to form long filaments similar to the hyphae. Those filaments are tubes that channel mineral nutrients and water to the fungi. Every time an earthworm consumes actinomycetes it excretes six times as many as it ingested. Actinomycetes give off the characteristic smell we associate with fresh good soil.

Some root-eating nematodes, tiny worms, don’t cooperate – they prefer just to eat plant tissue. Mycorrhizae entrap these nematodes with lassoes or sticky exudates from their hyphae and then digest them for their protein while protecting the plant roots. Some fungi are parasitic and are seen as disease on plants. The antidote to them comes from the soil. Soil bacteria produce salicylic acid, jasmonic acid and ethylene – natural antibiotics that kill or repel parasitic organisms. If a fungal spore lands on a plant’s leaf, the plant is ready with its defences because the soil community’s underground internet has already forewarned of approaching threats.

Mycorrhizae produce glomalin, a sticky substance that helps keep the particles of sand, silt and clay aggregated together. This gives soil its structure. Throughout this structure there are pathways of varying dimensions, whether made by fungal and bacterial threads or by worms. These passages aerate the soil and help the absorption and the retention of water and nutrients.

Without mycorrhizae the glomalin level drops, the network of life that glues it all together falls apart, and the soil washes or blows away as dust. As a result of modern agriculture, this erosion of the world’s soils causes losses annually of 10 to 80 tonnes of soil per hectare. This represents a loss of 1.8% of the world’s useable farmland every year. Some lost soil is replaced by deforestation – but we’re running out of forests. Organic farming can bring dead ‘farmed-out’ soils back to life after a few years of fallowing and regular additions of compost. This regeneration can be accelerated with the addition of biochar: finely ground charcoal. Zeolite performs a similar function, but is less durable. When biochar is present in soil at between 5% and 10% by volume, the population of mycorrhizae and bacteria increases by anything from 2 to 100 times. This increase in life generated delivers more glomalin and more vitality. This supports the creation of healthy, fertile soil.

The soil’s living community provides an example to our society of how a cooperative community of plants and microorganisms can maximise and efficiently share the production of food derived from the abundance of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide with which our planet is blessed. It is a model of efficient use of resources that our farming systems should corroborate and emulate.

Soil is the soul of society. It is where life began – it is where life begins. We treat it like dirt at our peril.

Craig Sams will be speaking at Restoring the Soil, Schumacher College, 2–6 February, 2015. 

Craig Sams is a former chairman of the Soil Association and co-founder of Carbon Gold, a company which develops biochar products.

To create real change in the world sometimes you have to compromise

Last week four Soil Association trustees resigned from the charity accusing it of lacking conviction on organic. But to create real change you sometimes just have to compromise, says Craig Sams

In 1946 two pioneering women, Eve Balfour and Dr. Innes Pearce, founded the Soil Association. Eve was a farmer who developed organic principles by creating healthy soil on her farm in Essex. Dr. Innes Pearce ran the Peckham Project in one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods and showed that good nutrition led to healthier families, better academic achievement by kids and fewer men deserting their wives. The Soil Association’s founding principle was that a healthy diet, supported by nutrient-rich organic food, would change the world for the better.

In 1966, the doctors, dentists, nutritionists and veterinarians who were members felt the Soil Association had become too farmer-oriented and resigned to set up the McCarrison Society, named after Sir Robert McCarrison, whose 1926 book on nutrition and health inspired both Balfour and Innes Pearce. This was a sad moment as it marked the divorce between the advocates of healthy soil and the advocates of healthy eating. A year later we founded our macrobiotic business Yin Yang Ltd (to become Harmony Foods and later Whole Earth) which brought together, at a commercial level, organic food and healthy eating.

Happily the Soil Association has rediscovered its roots. At a conference in 2002 titled ‘Education, Education, Education’ I gave the keynote speech that highlighted the few examples at the time of how better school food could improve kids’ behaviour and academic performance. Then the Soil Association, with Garden Organic, Focus on Food and the Health Education Trust got a £17 million Lottery grant to make it happen.

The grant money was well spent. Not only have over 4500 Schools enrolled with the project, and started to teach children to cook and grow and also taken them to visit farms, but the Soil Association Catering Mark has been developed too.This starts with the Bronze standard (75% freshly prepared, no GMOs, no hydrogenated fat, free range produce). Then they graduate to the Silver standard (a proportion of organic, a larger proportion of locally sourced, Fairtrade, MSC, LEAF). Then they go for Gold which takes it to even higher levels. The migration is only ever one way, from Bronze to Gold and the impact on organic suppliers is spectacular. The Gold holders are now asking the Soil Association for a Platinum category. More important is that schoolkids become aware of organic food, go home and challenge their parents. 950,000 school meals a day  are served with the Catering Mark and it’s now also improving food served in nurseries, hospitals, care homes, offices and industrial canteens. By this time next year there will be 2 million school meals a day served to the Catering Mark standard – half of all schoolkids in the UK. This all sounds pretty good to me and if Dr Innes Pearce were alive she would be punching the air with triumphant joy that her dream back in the 1930s and 1940s was finally being realised. And this is just the beginning. The Catering Mark is the fastest-growing activity of Soil Association Certification and is sucking in more and more organic food as the biggest national foodservice companies get behind it.

“We compromised on organic, we compromised on sugar-like sweeteners, we compromised on restaurant food (where organic regulations don’t apply). We never compromised on GMOs. We are winning because we were pragmatic. And how we’re winning!”

But concern about the Catering Mark is the main reason why four trustees resigned from the Soil Association Council at the beginning of December. They felt it was an ethical sell-out to allow non-organic food in meals that bore Soil Association approval. They were unhappy that the standards permitted organic food that was frozen or canned, as this was not ‘fresh’ even if it was ‘freshly prepared’

I got into the world of organic food from the standpoint of the macrobiotic diet. We ate natural and wholegrain and organic whenever possible, which wasn’t often in 1967. But we mapped out a route that helped us get to where we are today. The reason the marvellous macrobiotic diet that has been the mainstay of my health and happiness for five decades never went mainstream was because it got hijacked by people who were rigid and restrictive. The macrobiotic guru and author of Zen Macrobiotics, Georges Ohsawa, was horrified to see this and just before he died he tried to correct this by writing that, thanks to macrobiotics he could enjoy whisky, chocolate and other taboo foods, as long as he did it in moderation. We compromised on organic, we compromised on sugar-like sweeteners, we compromised on restaurant food (where organic regulations don’t apply). We never compromised on GMOs. We are winning because we were pragmatic. And how we’re winning! The tide is turning. Finally clinicians are recognising that food is medicine and the Hospital Food Standards Committee have recommended Catering Mark as a scheme that can improve hospital food.

You might have missed it, but School Meals Week was in early November. The Minister of State for Education, David Laws MP, praised the Soil Association’s Food for Life Catering Mark, commending it as a scheme that allows school leaders to choose caterers who are committed to providing school children with high quality, nutritious food. He said: “My message is: ‘Quality really matters’. This is our challenge for 2015. I would like to see all schools and their caterers holding – or working hard towards – a quality award like the excellent Catering Mark.” The evidence is compelling – kids at Catering Mark schools have better attendance rates, better academic performance and better understanding of food and nutrition, the key to avoiding obesity.

The three journalists and a baker who resigned from the Soil Association cited the Catering Mark as the main example of how the Soil Association has lost its way. If that’s what losing its way looks like then perhaps the Soil Association should ‘lose its way’ more often.

The future is meat less

People everywhere are reducing meat consumption. Craig Sams argues that organic farmers are well placed to adjust to the coming low-meat scenario

My late great aunt Sophia was very religious and faithfully observed all the fast days of the Orthodox Church’s nearly 2000 year-old religious calendar. When you totted up every Wednesday and Friday plus Lent, Dormition and Nativity Fasts she had about 180 days as a vegan, two with no food and another 40 that were ovo-lacto vegetarian. Two thirds of the year. She would never have described herself as a vegetarian, though. She once killed, skinned and cooked a rabbit when I came to lunch.  She cooked broad beans, chickpeas and wheat for protein on meatless days. Her generation’s view was that you weren’t a proper Christian unless you adhered to the fasting rules, purely for spiritual reasons.

When Japan went Buddhist  and vegetarian 1400 years ago it was made easier by having tofu and ‘seitan’ wheat gluten and meaty-tasting miso and soya sauce – the same meat-replacing foods that help people transition to the macrobiotic diet. Michelin 3 star chefs Alain Passard and Alain Ducasse  both now have successful restaurants in Paris that are almost entirely vegan or vegetarian.

In 1981 my brother Gregory came up with an idea for a vegetarian burger mix. He registered the name ‘Vegeburger’ as a Trademark because it was such a novel term –(just imagine trying to do that today).  Set up under the Realeat brand the Vegeburger took off like a rocket and Gregory hooked up with Gallup to launch an annual survey on ‘Changing Attitudes to Meat Consumption’ that revealed the dynamic growth in the market for vegetarian food that continues to this day.   It shook off the ‘beards and sandals’ image that some backward folk still had about vegetarianism and made meat reduction hip and groovy. Pirate radio stations ran the first ever rapping food advertisement. That cemented the Vegeburger as cool.

The VegeBurger made the transition to vegetarianism much easier and more tempting for people at a time of rising food awareness in the 80s. Some people were critical – ‘Why imitate meat dishes with a veggie substitute?’ they’d ask. Why not? Most sausages are about 90% breadcrumbs.  Rissoles and patties have been around for as long as hamburgers. If putting something savoury in an appropriate roll or bun is delicious, who says it has to have been a mammal or bird previously?

Last August I attended a conference titled “Reversing The Trend” organized by Plantlife, Wildlife Trusts and Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Attendees mapped out a strategy to raise the profile of pasture-fed meat as opposed to intensive factory farmed animals.  The Prince of Wales dropped in and emphasized the arguments for biodiversity and reducing global warming.   The conclusion?  The same message that Slow Food and the Soil Association repeat: “Eat less meat, but eat better.”

People everywhere are reducing meat. There’s good reason. Eating meat is cruel to animals, in excess leads to degenerative disease, environmental degradation, accelerated climate change, the theft of food from poorer countries and widespread starvation.

What about organic vegetarian alternatives to meat? In my 25 years helping out at the Soil Association I have worked alongside conscientious meat and dairy farmers whose commitment to the environment is unchallengeable. Many, however, mistrust vegetarianism as they think organic farming systems cannot function without animals to supply manure for fertility building. But if we were vegetarian we’d need less than half the land used for food production now and if we were vegan we’d need just one fifth of the land – we could farm more extensively, and grow more clover.

Meat alternatives have never been more convincing. The Nordic countries are leading the charge in creating organic high quality alternatives to meat that convincingly satisfy the need for meaty texture, savoury flavour and concentrated protein. What’s more, they’re successfully marketing it as hip and groovy. So can organic farmers adjust to the coming low meat scenario?  With modern developments in composting, green manures and overwintered crops there’s no need to be dependent on animal manures.  The future is probably never going to be vegetarian but food processors are coming up with some very competitive alternatives to meat, lower in price and higher in flavour.

I wish my Aunt Sophia could see how far things have come, but she’d be 115 by now  – even 222 days a year as a vegetarian can’t swing that.

• The Nordic Organic Food Fair, the leading organic food event for the Scandinavian region, takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on 26-27 October 2014.

Nordic thriller

The Nordic Food Lab fuses the finest gastronomic traditions with cutting edge science to thrilling effect, writes Craig Sams

You have to hand it to the Danes.  They took over Britain in 1066 and have ruled it with a firm hand ever since.  Now Nordic Food is where it’s at with food technology. This isn’t the food technology that destroyed the health of a couple of generations when, back in the 60s hired liars in white coats assured us that hydrogenated fat, DDT residues and carcinogenic flavourings and colourings were good for you and that sugar was a vital source of energy. This is food technology that takes the best of past tradition and combines it with cutting edge science. The heart of this progressive movement is the Nordic Food Lab, sited atop the Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen.

Voted World’s Best Restaurant year after year, Noma is the only restaurant in the world to have 2 Michelin stars despite not having tablecloths (OMG!).  I chose the vegetarian options but with egg and dairy and paired juices.  Then the fun began.  I sipped a thyme-y herbed apple juice as we awaited the first of 20 courses. Highlights of the petite starters included rye flatbread with rose petals, crispy deep fried cabbage leaves sandwiching a filling of chopped samphire held together with a watercress puree, reindeer moss with ceps, smoked  pickled quail’s egg, a boulet of blackcurrant and roses and a lovely baked onion in walnut oil. My accompanying juices included: cucumber with yogurt whey; apple with Douglas fir pine needle; celery and seaweed; nasturtium; salted grape and lingonberry; each pairing perfectly balancing the course it accompanied.

The ‘mains’ were also superb, I haven’t eaten beechnuts in years because they’re such a fiddle, but they were perfect with butternut squash and kelp ribbons. The roasted and braised lettuce root was a revelation, served with St. John’s wort – opiates and tranquilisers in one dish.  Puddings included aronia berries with an ice cream centre. Oh, did I mention the ants?  Wood ants, of course, served on a charcoal roasted green bean.  I mentioned to our waitress Cat that I’d shove my hand into wood ants’ nests in Burnham Beeches (where I used to forage for beech nuts) just to enjoy the unique physical pleasure of ‘formication,’ where hundreds of ants’ feet run up and down your arm (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it).  She responded that was how their forager harvested them.

After a four-hour gastro-journey, a Geordie called Stu took us into the front kitchen where we saw how the person who served your food also took the final steps of preparation. Then we visited Lars, the enzymologist who makes fermented sauces out of almost anything and has bred cultures from Japanese koji that perform miracles when added to fermentable carbohydrates. We bonded when I told him about how I started using enzymes at Ceres Bakery back in 1972 – they are the key to making good sourdough breads. We also looked at his garums, savoury sauces historically made by Romans from anchovies, but his included beef and other protein sources.  We went upstairs and met Rene Redzepi, the creative force behind Noma. We chatted about Slow Food, school meals, how kids can be raised on good food at home and then be corrupted on the first day at school, cooking with burdock root and eating biochar.  I’ll send him some of my biochar oatcakes

To enlist science in the interests of human health, local integrity, artisanal quality, organic production and, above all, total and unalloyed deliciousness is a dream we’ve all dared to imagine from time to time.  At the Nordic Food Lab I have seen the future, and it’s wild, wholesome, fermented, smoked, cooked, raw and yummy. It is reinventing food culture and marking a path that anyone anywhere can follow.  You don’t have to be Danish to do it.  Noma is a university that is turning out chefs and artisan food biotechnologists who are going to change the way all of us eat.  The Nordic approach will work anywhere – it’s about building gastronomy on a foundation of local geography and protecting your natural environment by eating it.

I asked Stu if some of the people who worked there had ambitions to open their own restaurant or food business. He replied “All of them, if they don’t then they shouldn’t be working here.”

• The Nordic Organic Food Fair, the leading organic food event for the Scandinavian region, takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on 26-27 October 2014.

 

War of the world

After a century of destructive conflict a new battle is about the begin – the one to save Planet Earth. It’s the war we really can’t afford to lose, writes Craig Sams.

“I’m the King of the castle – and you’re a dirty rascal”

Every since my playground days I’ve been aware of who holds the high ground and who is a serf. In the olden days it was the legacy of your birth that determined your future chances. In our corporate world ‘legacy industries’ cling to their power in the face of change.

Economists bat on about ‘creative destruction’ in capitalism, but there are still way too many gigantic corporations that are dinosaurs; fat and obsolete but refusing to just lie down and be creatively destroyed. They’re the ‘kings of the castle’ and they’re not about to let any perceived ‘dirty rascals’ impinge on their power.  Sometimes creative destruction does work. A disruptive technology like a smartphone can instantly make obsolete regular cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, cameras, wrist watches, calculators, voice recorders and game boxes. Apple nearly destroyed IBM.

In Victorian times Britain and France went on a colony-building binge, demolishing the Ottoman Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire in order to take over their territory.  This led in 1914 to the ‘War to end all Wars’ that we commemorate.  Hindsight shows it was the start of a 100 Years War…WWI was followed by a lot of mini wars, then WWII, then the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanon invasion, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, to name a few.  NATO is at the heart of most of these wars

The NATO conference agenda recently called for increased military expenditure now that the EU economy seems to be finally.  Where would the money go?  To arms manufacturers in the US and Britain and to terrorists who we train and arm before they go over to the other side, creating new conflicts.

War of course isn’t the only legacy industry that made all its money out of a situation and can’t move on. .

Adam Smith nailed it in The Wealth of Nations when he wrote:  “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Who are the other dinosaurs that have sunk their fangs into the taxpayer’s neck and are sucking out our hard earned money to pay their salaries and remunerate their shareholders?

The pharmaceutical industry depends on widespread disease.  Many diseases arise from environmental reasons: lead in petrol, hormones in meat, pesticide residues in food and water, side effects of drugs, additives in food and toiletries and poor quality food grown in depleted soils. Prevention is the best cure, but where’s the profit in that?  If everyone was healthy Pharma would be in a very bad place.

Agribusiness depends on depleted soils.  Once you’ve knocked the life out of soil with nitrates, fungicides, insecticides, nematicides and other toxic material the only way a farmer can get a crop is by buying in ever more chemicals.  Farmers have to do what the government pays them to do, so Big Ag leans on government to make sure that the subsidy system encourages farmers to grow biofuels instead of food and to farm for production rather than sustainable productivity. They spend a lot of money fighting off real progress.

The ‘disruptive technology’ in agriculture is organic farming – like the smartphone it delivers a number of products in one package: sustainable yields, healthier soils, lower pollution, healthier people, reduced global warming, more biodiversity and far less expenditure on subsidies for expensive poisons and chemical fertilisers.

The oil industry get massive subsidies masked as exploration grants to make them seem more competitive than they really are. Private energy generation is discouraged, but it’s more resilient and cheaper.

But the biggest legacy industry of all is government – not only does it collaborate with the other legacy industries to protect their obsolete positions, the legacy industries collaborate with government to keep them dishing out the dosh and keeping their upstart competitors at bay.

Silicon Valley blew a hole in a number of legacy industries: big computers, expensive telephony, monopolised media and communications, to name a few. Now the Silicon Valley investors are investing big time in what they call ‘AgriTech.’ These investors don’t care for heavy-handed government regulation and can see an opportunity to cash in on food production in a world where daft ideas like biofuels, GMOs, subsidies and chemicals are making less and less sense. Organic farming and agroecological systems are where the smart investment money is heading. Backed by technology, organic farming can wipe the floor with the dinosaurs like Monsanto – they’ll fight back but there is a tidal wave of smart money that is betting against them

World War Three will be the war to save planet Earth. This is one we can’t afford to lose.

By Craig Sams

Organic food pioneer and polemicist Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

Say it Loud, I’m Blob and I’m Proud

Oh, dearie me. In a bitter article in the Sunday Telegraph just a few days after Cameron sacked him as Environment Minister, Owen Paterson lashed out at “the ‘Green Blob’ of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy groups and public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape.”

Then he got personal:

He criticised a ‘rich pop star’ (Brian May) for standing up for badgers, saying that May had ‘never been faced with having to cull a pregnant heifer.’

A gratuitous and most unchivalrous pop followed at national treasure Vivienne Westwood for opposing fracking. He called her ‘a dress designer for whom energy bills are trivial concerns.’

George Monbiot got it in the neck as ‘a public school journalist who thinks the solution to environmental problems…is Back to the Stone Age, but Glastonbury style.’

And he couldn’t resist a blob job on me, either: ‘a luxury chocolate tycoon uninterested in the demonstrable environmental and humanitarian benefits of GM crops’.

For the record: I have been interested in those demonstrable benefits every since they were first promised in 1996. I’m still waiting. Things are getting worse, not better. Herbicide resistant weeds are forcing farmers to use herbicides that were banned for very good reason more than a decade ago. Why should anyone want this in Britain?

Paterson should have saved his venom for Cameron, who realised that having someone like him on the front bench was electoral suicide.   In their parting row Paterson was overheard saying: “You can’t sack me, it’s a smash in the face for 12 million people who live in the countryside.” Then he stuck the knife in and twisted the blade: “I can out-ukip UKIP” he is said to have shouted. If anything, that probably confirmed Cameron that he’d made the right decision.

But what if Gove and Paterson, as George Monbiot has suggested, set up a British ‘Tea Party?’ In the USA ‘Tea Party’ has connotations of freedom-loving Bostonians dumping tea in the sea as a protest against tax-grabbing government. In Britain ‘Tea Party’ just conjures up images of mad hatters and people who have ‘believed six impossible things before breakfast.’ Hmmm. Funnily enough it was an earlier manifestation of the Green Blob in Britain that pushed for the 1898 ban on the use of mercury in hat making, while in the US the hatters unions failed to get similar protection. In 1945 80% of American felt hat makers had mercurial tremors, the dreaded ‘hatters shakes.’ In Britain the same disease had become a rarity by 1910. Go figure.

I feel honoured to have been celebrated as being one of the influential forces that made Paterson’s job such a struggle of imagined good against perceived evil. The trouble with being honoured in a newspaper article is that it is too ephemeral – tomorrow’s fish and chips. How about making it official? I’d love to be able to put the initials O.G.B after my name, marking my elevation to the Most Noble Order of the Green Blob. Otherwise next year nobody will remember that I was ranked with Brian May, Vivienne Westwood and George Monbiot as an enemy of the industrialised countryside of Paterson’s dreams. No fracking, no GM crops, no badger massacres. I doubt that Paterson’s 12 million country dwellers are sorry about that.

Back in 1958 my girl friend cuddled a little closer when we watched a new horror movie called The Blob.  The Blob came from outer space and slowly changed from green to pink as it got bigger and bigger by eating the inhabitants of a small town. Then a clever kid noticed it hated freezing temperatures so they sprayed it with cold air from CO2 fire extinguishers.  Frozen almost solid it was flown to the North Pole where it was dropped in a place where the ice would never melt. Oops! Let’s keep it there by not fracking, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not overstocking cows, and planting trees instead of GMO biofuel crops.

By Craig Sams

Organic food pioneer and polemicist
Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

How to decarbonize a planet

Making the switch to organic agriculture on a global scale and turning waste biomass into biochar offers the real prospect of being able to reverse global warming, says Craig Sams

What’s happening out there? Is the world quietly going sane? A leading US Republican, Henry Paulsen, has come out strongly for action on climate change in the New York Times. For a political party that refuses to acknowledge burning fossil fuels can have anything to do with global warming, this is a tectonic event. Americans aren’t as stupid as their leaders think and are wising up to the fact that Hurricane Sandy was not God punishing us but to do with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The explosion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started around 1850 with the coal and steam-driven Industrial Revolution and the massive expansion of farmed land that was formerly wilderness or forest. My ancestors were part of this damage to the planet – great great grandpa Lars ploughed virgin prairie in Wisconsin, great grandpa Ole ploughed virgin prairie in Nebraska and grandpa Louis bought a tractor in 1926 so he could plough even deeper.

Every year the land they farmed gave up more of its life – losing ten tonnes of soil per hectare per year and as it decomposed, pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They cut down a lot of trees too – which mostly went up in smoke. The same thing happened in Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Manchuria and the Punjab. We destroyed the soil that feeds us and filled the atmosphere with the gases that are cooking the planet.

Up to 1980 farming and fossil fuels were equally responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases; now fossil fuels are in the lead. But farming still emits more than ever. Every year 125,000,000 hectares of food-producing land give up the ghost – that’s 1.8% of the available land used up, farmed-out, lifeless.

The way forward is a carbon tax. How would it work? Every time you emit a tonne of carbon dioxide you pay the price – at the moment it’s around $15 per tonne. But once there’s a global market the price will go up. What does this mean for organic food? It will become cheaper than industrially-farmed food as organic farming uses half the fossil fuels to produce a given amount of food. Year after year it increases the carbon content of soil while industrial farms deplete it. The recent Rodale white paper (see story opposite) shows that if the world’s arable land and pasture was farmed organically the reduction in carbon emissions would be enough to cancel out ALL the annual increase in greenhouse gases. Rebuilding soils with biochar increases soil carbon and stimulates increased growth and extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere by crops. By farming organically and turning waste biomass into biochar instead of burning it we could reverse global warming. We would also eat less meat as it will cost a lot more when you include the carbon cost (vegetarians have a lower carbon footprint and vegans emit about a fifth of the CO2 per year of meat-eaters).

Add in the reductions in emissions from a transition to wind and solar and we can face the future with confidence and look our grandchildren in the eye instead of looking away guiltily because our shortsighted greed has robbed them of a secure future.

California has a carbon tax which has equivalence with Quebec’s; China has opened eight carbon exchanges in its key industrial regions; Europe has its Emissions Trading Scheme. Unilever and Pepsi have created the Cool Farm Calculator so the whole carbon footprint of a tub of Flora or a packet of crisps can be calculated precisely, and the food industry is picking up on it. The 2015 climate conference in Paris won’t be another failure – there are too many stakeholders who are determined to make it happen and have already achieved broad agreement on principles.

If the whole world farmed organically and ate organic food, reduced fossil fuel emissions, produced and shopped locally as much as possible, insulated houses, ate less meat and planted more trees, we could possibly face a global cooling crisis caused by sucking too much CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that’s a long way off, so let’s just put carbon back in the soil, where it does nothing but good.

By Craig Sams

Organic food pioneer and polemicist
Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

Soil Carbon: Where Life Begins

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Back in 1967 my brother and I ran an organic macrobiotic restaurant and food store – we followed macrobiotics, the way of eating described in the book Zen Macrobiotics by Georges Ohsawa. The restaurant bought as much as possible from organic producers around London so we built strong links with the Soil Association, which was founded by Lady Eve Balfour in 1946.   In order to talk about biochar I will first talk about soil, because that is the context into which biochar fits.   Satish Kumar also spoke about soil last year in his excellent magazine Resurgence.

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What is soil? Where did it come from? When life on earth began there was no soil, just rock. On and in that rock lived fungi that eked out a precarious living extracting carbon from the calcium carbonate of limestone. The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide and when it rained the rain became a weak carbonic acid solution that helped fungi to extract carbon from rock.

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The rock slowly broke down to sand, silt and the finest particles - clay. But there was no ‘soil’, no humus, none of the decomposing plants, organic matter and living organisms that define soil.

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Then a miracle happened

Tiny single celled organisms, ‘cyanobacteria’ (Latin for ‘blue bacteria’) developed the ability to take carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of sunshine, convert CO2 and H2O into simple carbohydrate: C6H12O6, or sugar. This was and is the fuel that powers all life on earth. The fungi saw their opportunity and locked the cyanobacteria into cells and strung them together in chain gangs.

Then they started to bundle them together in a form that we would recognise as plants

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 These strands of cyanobacteria became the earliest plants, such as horsetail

Plants were an efficient way to comb CO2 out of the air. The original plants didn't even have roots, the fungi had their own root system inside the plant to extract the sugar as soon as it was made. The plants were the root extensions of the fungi, not the other way round, which is how it appears today. Plants evolved with root systems and the fungi continued to keep their root network in the plant's root system. These fungi are called 'vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi'   ‘Arbuscular’ means 'tree-shaped' and reflects the form they take when the occupy the root system of a plant. 'Myco' means 'mushroom' and 'rhizzal' comes from rhizome and means 'root' - so they are ‘tree-shaped root mushrooms’. ‘Vesicular’ refers to the vesicles that are the storage areas where the mycorrhizae hold a stock of nutrients and sugar.

mycorrhizae

A plant will deliver in its sap from 10-20% of the sugar it makes in its leaves to the mycorrhizae, retaining the rest for its own growth. The mycorrhizae increase the reach of the plant’s roots by up to 10 times, penetrating soil that plant roots can’t access.

The ‘arbuscular’ shape of the fungus is shown in a root cell – this tree-like shape is a mirror of a root system – the fungus has its roots in the plant, the plant has its roots in the soil.

fungus

There are other organisms in the soil that live symbiotically with the mycorrizae. Most notable are the actinomycetes bacteria – originally they were thought to be fungi because they copied the form of fungal hyphae, with filamentous threads. With the advent of electron microscopes they turned out to be bacteria that had strung themselves together in chains in order to efficiently ferry nutrients to the mycorrhizae in exchange for sugar.   Most of our antibiotics come from soil bacteria. Streptomycin When a plant needs medicine, the mycorrhizae can farm it by feeding sugar to the bacteria that can produce that particular antidote – most commonly jasmonic acid, salicylic acid (aspirin) or ethylene. These medicines are sent up with the sap of the plant to provide it with immunity to fungal and insect attack.

One example of how mycorrhizae are used in farming is the French practice of ‘alley cropping’ where rows of fruit trees keep the fungal network going and enable crops planted in between to flourish rapidly thanks to the existing network of mycorrhizae supported by the trees. In Windsor Great Park an oak nursery accelerates the growth of oak saplings by raising them in ground surrounded by mature oaks – the big oaks provide the sugar to support a large mycorrhizal population. The baby oaks get sugar and nutrients from the mycorrhizae and grow away rapidly and healthily.

Soil is fascinating. It’s wonderful stuff. So what do humans do with it? Since the dawn of agriculture we mostly just kill it. Ploughing breaks up the neural network within the soil, though it reconnects fairly quickly but with a lot of casualties. Adding chemical fertilisers breaks up the symbiosis – the mycorrhizae no longer can exchange mineral nutrients for sugars because the farmers is providing them for free. The plant cuts off the sugar supply to the mycrorrhizae clustered around its roots and the mycorrhizae die off. Their 10,000 or so co-dependent microbial species also die off. The plant is then exposed to the challenge of fungi and other pests that give it nothing and just want to consume it. This creates the need for pesticides including fungicides, which further deplete the microbial population of the soil.

I have several generations of form in the area. My great great grandfather farmed virgin soil on the Koshkonong Prairie in 1842, cutting down trees and raising crops of grain and grazing cattle. My great grandfather farmed virgin prairie in Nebraska. These Norwegian farmers were notoriously stingy. They were frugal people in everything they did, they wasted nothing and recycled everything. Here’s an example:

Frugalism-Less is More

My grandfather would deliver eggs from his chicken houses to the Safeway supermarket and other stores in Sioux City. He would then purchase tools, sugar, flour, salt, paper and other essentials that could not be produced on the farm. The flour sacks were made of calico, so the farmer’s wives would recycle the bags to make overalls for their boys and dresses for the girls.

Nell Rose flour company bags

Flour is a commodity – one bag of white dusty flour is just like the next. So the Nell Rose flour company marketing people got clever and printed nice floral patterns on their flour bags.

This appealed to people like my grandmother and she used Nell Rose flour to make the dresses for my mother (on the right) with her sister Thelma and their cousins.

Margie on the farm

This remarkable frugalism and avoidance of waste stands in stark contrast to the way that the soils of the Midwest were relentlessly wasted, often beyond recovery. Here there was no recycling, just relentless ploughing and harvesting, breaking down the soil. The farmer’s wives wasted nothing, their husbands wasted the fertile heritage of millennia. When land was ‘farmed out’ people would just move further west.

The original Louisiana Territory and adjacent territories embraced the great river network of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers, a 2000 mile wide water system draining into the Gulf of Mexico.

Original Louisiana

By 1925 more than 80% of the trees in this great river network had been cut down in order to create productive farmland.

trees cut down

Floods

The result was inevitable – the Mississippi Floods of 1927 were devastating – 27,000 square miles were inundated, up to depths of 30 feet. It triggered huge migrations of Afro-American farmers to Northern cities. Below Memphis Tennessee the Mississippi was 60 miles wide, 3 times the width of the Straits of Dover. The land was flooded from April to June.

This great flood was followed by further devastation. The weakened fractured soils of the prairie began to turn to dust and the winds blew up vast clouds of dust that reached as far as Washington DC, prompting Congressional action.   President Roosevelt created the Civil Conservation Corps and 3 million recruits planted 10 billion trees from Mexico to Canada to try to hold down the soil.

Dust bowl

This destruction of soil happened also in Argentina, Manchuria, Ukraine, and other fertile breadbaskets around the world as tractors and chemical fertilizer accelerated the rate of soil destruction.

The greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane that were emitted accounted for half of all the increase in greenhouse gas levels between 1850 and 1980. Since then agriculture’s annual rate of emissions has continued to grow, but has fallen behind the astronomic rate of emissions growth from manufacturing, energy and transport.  But it is still responsible for at least one third of our excess emissions.

Emissions

From 1850-1980:

Total CO2 from Farming:      160 Billion Tonnes

Total CO2 from Fossil Fuels: 165 Billion Tonnes

How can we stop this wasteful and environmentally damaging activity?

Part of the answer lies in a discover that was made nearly 500 years ago. When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzarro was buy looting the silver and gold of the Incas he heard about cities of gold with even greater wealth. He deputed his brother and Francisco de Orellana to find these cities and to bring back their gold.

Orellano

The parties were separated and Orellana could not return up river. The chaplain on his boat kept records of their travels. They encountered wealthy populations but were repelled by armed natives, led by fierce women warriors. These natives knew already that if you came close to a white man you would break out in red spots of measles or smallpox and then, because they had no immunity, die. They attacked and drove them away – Orellana described his boat as looking like a porcupine after one such attack. They called this region the Land of the Amazons and this is how the river got its name. When explorers sailed up the Amazon about 30 years later the wealthy civilisations Orellana had described were gone – wiped out by disease. People questioned whether the ‘El Dorado’ he had described ever really existed.

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Within the past 50 years archaeologists have found that the areas he described as populated coincide with areas where the soil is black to a depth of several metres - the ‘Terra Preta’ of the Amazon river settlements. Farmers who have Terra Preta have little need for fertilizer and even sell their soil to less fortunate farmers who are on the typical infertile jungle soils. The Terra Preta was made by the Amazons by taking all their waste, including animal bones and forest waste and domestic waste, piling it into pits, covering it with clay and setting fire to it. Once it was burning hot they’d cut off the supply of air and the material became charcoal and provided the growing medium for the next season’s crop.   The contrast between Terra Preta and soils of the forest is apparent when the land is cut away.

Terra Petra

Brazilian farmers who farm on Terra Preta benefit from its fertility and crops like corn grow vigorously when planted in black earth. They sell it to other farmers and bag it up for sale in garden centres. It is what we now call ‘Biochar’ – charcoal for use in the soil rather than charcoal for use for barbecuing sausages.

So what is Biochar? What does it do?

Biochar provides a supportive environment for mycorrhizae and their associated microorganisms. This leads to a doubling or more of the microbial population that is the living essence of soil.

Biochar had a high surface area – a single gram of biochar can have twice the surface area of 2 tennis courts – this means there are lots of points where minerals can stick, each point has a negative charge, so it sticks to minerals with a positive charge – this stops the leaching of nutrients from soil, keeping it in the zone where it can reach the plant.

Biochar also helps retain moisture. The result is healthier plants, more nutrient availability, more water availability and better soil structure.

Biochar also reduces soil emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

Biochar stays in the soil, too, for anything from 10 years to 4000 years, depending on the type of biochar, the soil type and the farming system. The scientific consensus settles around 1000 years. This represents carbon dioxide that is kept out of the atmosphere – most woody biomass ends up returning to the atmosphere by rotting or being burned. Thus biochar can be an important tool for reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. It is estimated that recycling woody waste as biochar could remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2 annually from the atmosphere. Instead we burn it.

Biochar cell structure

Biochar retains the cell structure of the original feedstock. So biochar from bamboo has larger pores, biochar from chestnut has small pores. But all those pores provide a refuge for mycorrhizae and a base from which they can expand even if they are disturbed by ploughing or by predators such as mites, protozoa or nematodes that feed on them.

Imagine the pieces of biochar as a ‘five star hotel’ for mycorrhizae or, even as Norman castles in the English countryside. Each biochar particle is a base for a contingent of mycorrhizae, helping them to weather the stresses and pressures of life in the soil.

We have an image of mushrooms as passive softies but they are much more than that. When nematodes that threaten a plant enter mycorrhizal territory they get more than they bargained for. The mycorrhizae attach to them with sticky substances that hold them fast, then insert their filamentous hyphae into the tiny worm and suck out its amino acids, providing protein for more mycorrhizal growth and nitrogen for ‘their’ plants. Some mycorrhizae form lassoes that are scented with fragrances that attract nematodes – the nematode pokes through the lasso that then snaps tight, holding the nematode while it is digested.

nematode

Mycorrhizae also oversee the production of insecticides and fungicides. When there is a threatening insect or fungal pest the news travels fast through the underground internet – the mycelial network. The appropriate preventive medicine such as jasmonic acid, salicylic acid or ethylene is produced and delivered via the plant’s sap to the threatened area. How is this done? We don’t really know but it is likely that the mycorrhizae simply feed more sugar to the bacteria that produce these defensive chemicals and then pass them over to the plant.

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It may be that the plant produces the defensive chemical itself or that it produces it in conjunction with the soil microbes. Both the plant and its supportive microbial community have a shared interest in defeating any disease threats quickly, before they have time to weaken the plant.

Biochar, by providing a resilient and abundant network of soil fungi and bacteria, is the framework of the plant’s immune system and helps it with nourishment and water.

So what have we done at Carbon Gold to turn this theoretical ideal situation into a reality?

biochar kiln

The first thing we discovered was that the production method for charcoal was expensive, slow and inefficient – we wanted to reduce our carbon footprint in biochar production as much as possible and make it available cheaply to small farmers. We developed the Superchar 100 kiln.

It makes a 100 Kg batch of biochar in 8 hours instead of the usual 3 days. It delivers double the yield of traditional ring kilns. It has greatly reduced emissions – we recycle the gases emitted by the wood and burn them to heat the kiln contents instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. They’re now hard at work in Belize, Botswana, Turkmenistan, Fiji, Brazil and the UK, with orders for more in the pipeline.

We also make a double-barrelled kiln that will produce 2 x 400 kg batches of biochar in a 12 hour day.

This one is part of a marshland regeneration project north of Perth, in Scotland

double barrelled kiln

Whitmuir Organics, just south of Edinburgh, are making biochar for their horticultural operation and are experimenting with it in pig feed, where a small amount makes a big difference to pig health and feed conversion.

The first UK field trials of biochar were on my smallholding near Hastings in September 2010. We planted cabbages and winter lettuce in late September, some with biochar and some without. In November we had heavy snows and the lettuces were covered in snow for 3 days. When the snow melted the winter lettuces without biochar had died. Those with biochar were intact. I think this could be that a high microbiological population in the soil acts as underfloor central heating, biological activity generates heat and this is probably what saved the plants. We also discovered that biochar has no repellent effect on hungry pigeons, which destroyed the cabbage crop completely.

biochar field trials

We work closely with Rijk Zwaan, the world’s 5th largest seed company and one that regards GMOs as an obsolete technology – they are world leaders at using natural breeding methods harnessed to genomic data. Their Field Trials Manager, Martin Kyte, stopped a comparative trial of Carbon Gold seed compost and peat compost after a few months because the results were so obviously in favour of our seed compost.

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And Fergus Garrett, head gardener at the marvelous Great Dixter gardens in Sussex, has switched to biochar.

Stephanie Donaldson, Gardening Editor of Country Living magazine, trialled Carbon Gold with lettuces. After one month the difference was significant:

In Belize one of our shareholders took 3 Maya cacao farmers to Cornell University in 2008. We studied biochar production and its use with Johannes Lehmann, the world’s leading authority on biochar and founder of the International Biochar Initiative. After that we helped the farmers build a simple kiln. They did trials and found that cacao tree seedlings raised with biochar outperformed those without biochar in the nursery. A $50,000 UNDP grant helped them expand production and recently the Inter American Development Bank funded the establishment of 9 new nurseries with a target of producing 45, 000 cacao trees to really expand cacao production. It normally takes 6 or 7 years for a cacao tree to begin to produce, with biochar it starts in 3 years – that makes a huge economic difference to a farmer who has invested in establishing a cacao orchard.

cacau

Belize: Biochar + Cacao = fruit within 3 years

Normal maturation time: 6-7 years

We’re also working with farmers in Africa.

In Ghana, where tomatoes retail at $12 per kilo, Sunshine Organic Farms are starting to grow tomatoes near the capital, Accra. Biochar will help ensure healthy abundant cropping.

In Ivory Coast cashew nut waste will provide a feedstock that can then be used on cashew trees and in Senegal it will be rice husks that provide the feedstock.

We have just shipped a kiln to Botswana. Farmers in Fiji are now making biochar with our kilns to improve their fertility and cropping.

Wight Salads grow more than half of the organic tomatoes sold in the UK every year. They have greenhouses in Portugal and the Isle of Wight. Last year they started using biochar from us. The results:  8% higher yield, 10% higher sugar content in the fruit, less watering and fertilizer cost and, most excitingly, a dramatic fall in the population of root-eating nematodes. They had a lower level of this pest in their organic biochar production than in their conventional production where they use nematicide to kill this damaging pest.

Wight Salads tomatoes

They were considering cutting back on organic tomato production because of these nematodes, but now they are going to expand.

nematodes2

Some nematodes work collaboratively with mycorrhizae, some eat them, some just eat plants and some provide food for the mycorrhizae when they venture too close to the plant the mycorrhizae are protecting. Once lassoed they are soon converted into nitrogen compounds

Biochar works wonderfully on turf as well. Forest Green Rovers Football Club trialled Carbon Gold last year and found that at the end of the season this year the treated part of the pitch had withstood the stress of weekly games and practice far better than the rest of the pitch. Last week they spread biochar over the entire pitch and their groundsman has helped initiate trialy by the groundsman at Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal. Those trials will open up new opportunities on sports grounds everywhere and help reduce the use of nitrates and other chemical treatments.

We make products for gardeners too. These are available from some garden centres, but most of our sales come from our own website, other online retailers, QVC and Amazon. This is because biochar still takes a bit of explaining and garden centre staff are not always available or able to tell a customer about it.

Last year we worked with Bartlett Tree Experts, the Queen’s tree surgeons, on trials with Carbon Gold biochar. They successfully cured honey fungus and saw accelerated growth in horse chestnut seedlings. The results of their research were published in April in the prestigious Arb Magazine, the journal for members of the Arboricultural Association. An ash dieback trial they initiated last year has so far shown no sign of infection, but they are waiting until this October before publishing any results. They have endorsed our tree growth enhancement and protection range and are now offering it to all their customers.

Biochar to CO2

We are not yet capturing the carbon offset value of using biochar, but it is now becoming available as a carbon offset of value. The conversion ratios vary – our own figure is based on making biochar in a Carbon Gold kiln and reflects the greater efficiency and lower carbon footprint of the Superchar range of kilns.

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In 2011 I visited the Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas in Brussels. She invited me back to present the biochar story to the Green Group of MEPs. In attendance were representatives from DG Agri and DG Enviro. They had a meeting after our meeting and the outcome was Eurochar. This programme funds research into biochar as a strategy for long term carbon sequestration and funds research into greenhouse gas mitigation with biochar.

Lady Eve Balfour lost the post war argument about the future direction of agriculture, but the Soil Association continued to fight the good fight while the introduction of subsidized nitrate fertilizer forced farmers into the industrial fold. The same process happened in the rest of the world and led to the Green Revolution, which is now running out of steam. Ten years ago there was a major collaboration to map out the future of agriculture in a world with diminishing resources and increasing population. WHO, FAO, UNDP, UNESCO, Defra, USDA, Monsanto and Syngenta were just a few of the global stakeholders who selected a crack team of 400 of the world’s leading agronomists to look at how we could reduce hunger, improve livelihoods and ensure social and environmental sustainability. 2 weeks before their report was published in 2009 both Monsanto and Syngenta went public by rubbishing its contents. Why? Because it said that the Green Revolution hadn’t delivered sustainable results, that genetic engineering was a dead end and that we should listen to small farmers and adopt traditional farming systems.

All of the other benefits of their proposals are summed up in rewarding farmers who prevent climate change. Whether you call it organic farming or agroecological farming, the fact is that farming in support of the living soil and its wonderful microbiological population is the only sustainable way to go. It is lower in carbon emissions and hugely effective in carbon sequestration. If only Lady Eve had lived to see this outcome that so firmly vindicated her predictions in The Living Soil published in 1943.

carbon farming

We are eating oil – it takes vast amounts of fossil fuel energy to make food energy and this is plainly unsustainable.

Farming Systems Trial

The Farming Systems Trial at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania has been growing the same crops side by side using organic methods and conventional methods. Once the health of the soil was restored, the organic crops matched conventional yields, showing greater resilience in years of drought.   Every year the organic soil added 1 tonne of carbon to the soil, while the industrial crops gradually lost it. The organic crops used 45% less energy.

Professor Pimentel at Cornell University mapped it out: organic farming could reduce atmospheric CO2 by 1.1 trillion pounds a year. That’s half a billion tonnes of CO2 – about 1/10 of the annual increase in CO2 equivalent. Add in biochar and you would get at least another half a billion tonnes, bringing down CO2 levels by 20% a year.

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If the cost of CO2 was factored into food production, then organic farming would deliver a € 350 per hectare cost benefit if carbon was priced at the real cost to future generations of €70 per tonne. Add in the benefit of €210 per hectare for every tonne of biochar added to the soil and agriculture could be part of the climate change solution instead of a major element of the problem. Lord Nicholas Stern quoted the figure of €70 per tonne in his book Blueprint for a Safer Future but a few months after it was published he said he was mistaken the real cost was €150 per tonne. Anyone who experience Hurricane Sandy in New York would probably agree. But even if CO2 was only priced at €35 per tonne it would deliver an economic imperative to farm organically and to use biochar universally. The Paris climate talks in 2015 will not exclude agriculture or transportation, the fatal mistake of the Kyoto protocols back in 1993. That will be when farming has to face reality and get a grip on its emissions.

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And not a moment too soon. Every year 125 million hectares of land become so degraded they can no longer reliably produce crops. That’s nearly 2% of the world’s arable land. We have replaced that lost land by cutting down forests, but that is no longer an option. We have to live within the means of our natural capital of soil and that means not spending it but saving it and building on it.

Public health will benefit too. Antibiotics saved millions of lives – they were derived from soil bacteria. Now, due to overuse in agriculture they have created resilient disease pathogens that can no longer be treated effectively with antibiotics. 80% of all antibiotic use is in agriculture, to keep animals alive that could not survive in the filthy conditions in which they are raised, on beef feedlots where they wallow in their own excrement or in pig and chicken farms where antibiotics are the only thing that keeps the animals alive during their brief lifespan.

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The sad thing is that industrial farming isn’t feeding the world. The world is feeding itself despite the waste and inefficiency of industrial farms.

70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares

NO SUBSIDIES

30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms

$350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES

No wonder the IAASTD was so adamant that small farmers using agroecological and traditional methods were the only way to feed the world. They can produce up to six times as much per hectare as industrial farms, using fewer fossil fuel-based inputs and more human labour. Our taxes are being wasted on subsidising the destruction of our soils and dangerous increases in greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Only a carbon tax can reverse this.

As this is a Slow Food Eire event it would be remiss of me not to touch on the similarities between the microbiological health of the soil and the microbiology of its counterpart in us, the gut flora, whose product is often referred to as ‘night soil.’ One third by weight of what we excrete is the offspring of the gut flora that have multiplied on our food in our digestive system and pass out along with the digested food. There are clear parallels in function between mycorrhizae and actinomycetes bacteria in the soil and the lactobacilli and bifidobacteria and associated microbial forms in the gut.

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We know that babies born by C section are likely to lack the microbial flora that are part of a healthy immune system. It’s now established that stool transplants in patients with clostridium difficile can save lives – 110,000 Americans a year die of this infection, which arises after antibiotic use.

In the soil, worms are a sign of good health. The emerging medical treatment of helminthic therapy reflects the finding that the absence of worms in the human gut is associated with diminished immune function. When an earthworm consumes soil containing actinomycetes bacteria, an important part of the soil’s immune system that produces antibiotic substances, it excretes six times as many as it ingests. Roundworms in the human gut consume food we eat and excrete cytokine, an immune booster.

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In Chinese tradition, Kwan Yin is the Goddess of Mercy and ‘mercy clay’ has saved millions from famine – it is rich in humus, minerals and microbial activity and can sustain a person when no other food is available.

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In Haiti the production of clay cakes is commonplace. Made with clay, salt and oil, they aren’t consumed to keep hunger at bay, they nourish and have special benefits for pregnant women as it prevents morning sickness. Clay helps eliminate toxins and infections.

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When one’s tummy is upset, particularly if traveling in foreign lands where a combination of different prevalent bacteria and different hygiene standards can lead to digestive disorders, charcoal tablets have the same beneficial effect on our digestive night soil as it does in the soil in which we grow our food.

I began this talk by quoting three people who have deeply influenced my thinking about soil and about its fundamental importance to our lives.

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I would like to close by quoting an even higher authority:

Genesis 3:19

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

The soil’s living community provides an example to our society of how a cooperative community of plants and microorganisms can maximise and efficiently share the production of food derived from the abundance of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide with which our planet is blessed. We come from the soil and we return to the soil, we owe all life on earth to the soil.

We should never treat it like dirt

Imagine for a moment

Just imagine for a moment that a politician spoke the truth.   Now stretch your imagination even further and imagine that Owen Paterson, Defra Minister, spoke the truth.  Here is what he would say.

“Her Majesty’s Government announce that we will impose punitive taxes on organic food in order to keep it at a price level that will deter consumers.  We will implement policies to encourage agricultural practices that will destroy the soil on which all life depends.  We will also continue to ensure that foods that lead to obesity and ill-health are subsidised by our government and foods that lead to good health are taxed, regulated or prohibited.”

“Your Government believes that bigger is better, so we will support the biggest farms the most and encourage obesity to that we can have bigger people to help support a bigger NHS.

“Like Labour, the Conservative Party believes that people who own large amounts of land and money should be rewarded for their cleverness or accident of birth by receiving large amounts of money from the taxpayer on a never-ending basis.  We therefore intend to continue to reward all owners of large landholdings with £110 every year for every acre of land that they own, or £265 per hectare, regardless of how they manage it.  However, we will make it difficult and complicated to claim for farmers who own less than 50 acres.  People who own a farm and home will not have to pay inheritance tax. We will continue to charge inheritance tax on non-farmers who own property worth more than £325,000.”

 “We will ensure that subsidised farming pays best when farmers do least to rebuild soil fertility and treat animals as cruelly as inhumanly possible.   We will ensure that farmers who grow food to be burned as biofuels will make more money than farmers who grow food for human consumption. We will support farming that accelerates climate change. “

What do they really say:  “Britain needs to be able to feed itself in an uncertain world.  Our farmers are our guarantee of food security and food independence.  Britain’s farmers are the backbone of rural society and help us preserve all that is best about British tradition and our countryside. We are importing too much food, we need to be more self-sufficient.’ 

What tosh.  The fact is that for every country where there is reliable data, the evidence shows that smaller farms are from 2 to 10 times more productive than large farms.  That’s productivity as normal people know it – i.e. getting a profitable income from an input of labour and capital.  In subsidised farming productivity just means ‘production.’  It is measured in soybeans and corn and doesn’t measure the input costs or the labour costs or the externalised costs such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and soil degradation.  The profit comes from the taxpayer.

Of course small farms also tend to integrate crops and livestock, they rotate their crops, they employ human beings.  Most importantly, because they live on the land and it has been in the family and they expect it to continue to be in the family they treat the land with respect and care.  An industrial farm uses up land and the employees don’t really care about a future beyond the next pay cheque.

What would happen if we took away all the subsidies and only allowed land to be inherited tax free if it was smaller than, say, 200 acres?

Farmers would go back to mixed farming.  Our current system mirrors the disastrous communist farming of the 1950s and 1960s, where government decided what would grow where and who would grow what.  Farmers would study the market and respond to demand from consumers, not price manipulation by government.

Agriculture is multifunctional.  It produces food but it also manages the landscape.  It creates employment and it should keep us all healthy. 

Sadly, it does the opposite.  It would be better to plant trees on the 40% of the US land that is devoted to growing corn to be burned as ethanol.  Why subsidise greenhouse gas emissions when you could be planting trees?

What can be done?  Nothing in Whitehall, nothing in Brussels, nothing in Washington.  They are hopelessly corrupted by the manufacturers of agrichemicals who spend fortunes on lobbying them and ensuring that the public have no say in how their food is produced. 

We just need to be aware and become the change.  Every person who cuts back on meat and uses the savings to always buy organic food is slowly but surely driving back the tide of industrialisation.  Supporting small farms, local food producers and the future.

Have you been dealing comfrey, sonny?

The natural food trade should take a lead in exposing the hypocritical regulation of herbal medicine, says Craig Sams

A bust in Denver: “Okay, kid, put your hands up against the wall. Spread your legs while we pat you down.” Two cops search a young man’s clothing.

“Nothing here but a couple of marijuana joints … Wait a minute, what’s this? It looks like comfrey tea bags. Get the handcuffs – let’s take this one down to the station.”

A bust in London: “Okay, kid, put your hands up against the wall. Spread your legs while we pat you down.” Two cops search a young man’s clothing. 

“Nothing here but a couple of comfrey tea bags … Wait a minute, what’s this? It looks like a couple of marijuana joints. Get the handcuffs – let’s take this one down to the station.”

Depending on where you are in the Western world of free and democratic nations, your choice of therapeutic herbs can either put you in the slammer or be purchased legally.

Charlotte Mitchell, who almost singlehandedly rescued the Soil Association from bankruptcy and oblivion back in 1991, has suffered the ever-increasing impact of multiple sclerosis. The NHS refused to authorize the use of Sativex (a marijuana extract made by a drug company in Kent) for her, so she has to fork out £100 a week for this medicine in order to be legal. She could buy dope from a street dealer in Edinburgh for a fraction of the cost, with all the risks of dealing with criminals, but she sticks to the legitimate stuff. The NHS, too busy enriching the peddlers of statins, antidepressants, hydrogenated fat margarines and other crappy drugs, won’t allow Sativex for patients in England or Scotland. All her working life Charlotte paid her NI contributions, but when her time of need came, she got two fingers and now has to pay out of her savings for the only medication that effectively eases the pain of MS.

Meanwhile, it’s all kicking off in the US. Not only do 20 states allow medical use of marijuana for all sorts of conditions, but two of them, Colorado and Washington, have decided to allow it for recreational use, too. However, comfrey is still prohibited in the US and all sorts of herbs are now prohibited or strictly regulated in the UK. How on earth are we going to deal with the hypocrisy of a situation where people can go to jail for peddling herbs like comfrey and slippery elm while we empty out our prisons of people who were sent down for dealing in herbs like marijuana?

This is not the only paradox in our society that needs resolving now that progress is beginning to happen. What about speed?

The pot paradox
‘Speed kills’ – this slogan arose in the sixties as people realized that amphetamines were a terrible drug with progressively degenerate consequences. Yet our rulers encourage its use. Today we force school kids to take speed if they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It slows them down. But it also makes them fat for the rest of their lives, with all the health problems that come with obesity. The US Army gives its soldiers amphetamines, antidepressants and sedatives to keep them going in battle conditions. Then they come home and struggle with addiction – a third of addicted ex-soldiers die of overdoses or suicide. More soldiers kill themselves than are killed by enemy forces – one in five suicides in the US are ex-Army. In US states where medical marijuana was legalized, the overall suicide rate dropped by 10% or more. It’s not just that marijuana cheers people up. It also lowers consumption of alcohol, a well known depressant and significant factor in suicides.

Is it time for the natural foods trade to lead the charge for marijuana legalization in the UK? Legalization of marijuana would help to clear away all the other hypocritical regulation of herbal medicines and strike a powerful blow for the right of all human beings to own their bodies and make informed decisions about what medications they take. As someone who hasn’t been to a doctor for 49 years, but who has also had recourse to use therapeutic herbs from time to time that have kept me happy and healthy, I’d welcome the chance to live my life without the nagging fear of being imprisoned for not being a burden on the NHS.

By Craig Sams

Organic food pioneer and polemicist
Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

War and Peace

Back in 1993 when the world was waking up to the market potential of organic food Simon Wright put together a technical book called The Guide to Organic Processing and Production that cost £75 (a lot of money for a book in those days) which was essential reading for anyone who wanted to cash in on the coming organic boom.  I wrote the Introduction, a long explanation of what organic was, where it came from and why it was the future.  I wrote "The difference between conventional farming and organic farming is the difference between war and peace.  Conventional farmers wage war on nature using their armoury of chemicals to keep her at bay while they take as much as they can get. Organic farmers attempt to apply a creative process of conflict resolution whereby nature volunteers her bounty in return for a balancing contribution towards her well-being.  E.F.Shumacher wrote: 'We speak of the battle with Nature, but we should do well to remember that if we win that battle, we are on the losing side.'"

So when I read Maria Rodale's recent open letter to President Obama I was 100% behind her.  Maria is the granddaughter of J.I. Rodale, the man who convinced Lady Eve Balfour to call their enlightened way of farming 'organic' and who founded Rodale Press. It's the world's leading health and wellness publisher (Organic Gardening, Prevention, Women's Health, Men's Health and books like The South Beach Diet) and Maria is CEO.  Her letter refers to a cartoon of a little girl speaking to Obama - his speech bubble says "We are going to war with Syria because they poison little children" and the kid replies "So why don't you bomb Monsanto?"

Like many people in the organic movement, Maria Rodale campaigned in support of Obama's election campaign.  She was subsequently dismayed at his unthinking support of Monsanto's interests.   Now she is horrified to see that he seems no more than a puppet of the military-industrial complex that needs wars in order to use up the weaponry that keeps arms factories going.  With 3500 cruise missiles at $2 million each, the US is well-stocked, but that means that Raytheon, who make Tomahawk cruise missiles, will have to shut their factory if they don't get more orders.  So the military has to use them up.  Sound familiar?  Monsanto needs to sell herbicide, that's where their profits come from.  If farmers make peace with nature and find non-poisonous ways of dealing with weeds, coexisting with them and protecting biodiverity, then the bottom falls out of Monsanto's market.  It's the same with GM - designed to allow increased use of ever more deadly herbicides and to contain poisons that kill insects on contact... until the weeds and bugs develop resistance.  Then they use stronger poisons.  Now Wall Street is pouring money into pesticide companies as their sales boom to farmers for whom the GM crops no longer work.

The Organic Trade Board and the Pesticide Action Network have shown that the amount of pesticide residues we and our kids consume has doubled in the past decade - unless we choose organic.  We know that pesticides can trigger adverse health reactions and that long-term exposure is undesirable.  But the fact is that American and British kids are 'collateral damage' in the war against weeds and bugs just as Pakistani kids are 'collateral damage' when a drone blows up a village because a terrorist might be there.  In Vietnam a US officer famously said: "We had to destroy that village in order to save it."   

Our 'village' is the global community.  It is being torn apart by unnecessary wars fought for fictitious reasons but leaving behind real corpses, devastated landscapes and psychologically damaged ex-soldiers whose suicide rate exceeds their death rate in battle.  The war against nature using pesticides and genetic modification, leaves behind devastated landscapes and (in India) devastated farmers whose suicide rate exceeds any historic comparison.  

It's time to stop the killing and to fight on the side of nature.  Instead of making imaginary enemies let's all fight together against global warming, which no amount of genetic modification or explosive weaponry can stop.  We only have one planet to live on and we are destroying life on every level, from the tiniest microbes in the soil to entire communities of people in whose lives we have no business to interfere.  Living organically means being committed to peaceful coexistence with nature - it's in everyone's ultimate best interest to shut down the arms trade's endless war against people and to shut down the pesticide industry's endless war against nature.   Let's use the trillions they waste each year to make the Earth safer for future generations by waging war on carbon dioxide emissions instead.

Carbon Tax

I love fossil fuels.  After food and sex they are just about the best thing that has happened to humanity in all our history.  More than William Wilberforce of Abraham Lincoln, they helped us transcend the need for slavery, creating energy from machines to replace forced labour.  This led to the libertarian regard for human rights and freedom that makes the times we live in more blessed than any other period in human history.  We must never go back to the bad old days of not having cheap energy.   But fossil fuel abuse is a transgenerational form of child abuse – we waste them now and our grandchildren pay the price in flooding, starvation and war.

Back in 1841 my great great grandpa Lars Doxtad, arrived from Norway and started chopping down trees in Wisconsin.  Thousands of other pioneers like him cleared the massive forests of the Mississippi river system to create the American Midwest.   80% of the trees were gone by 1920.  In 1927 came the great Mississippi Flood.  Water levels were 27 feet above the flood line.  Instead of replanting the trees, the Government dredged deeper channels and built levees, or raised banks, all along the Mississippi, to carry away flood waters infuture.   In 1933 came the Dust Bowl.  There were no trees to hold down the soil.  When Lars Doxtad first put his plough to the soil, the level of soil carbon in the Midwest was 100 tonnes per hectare.  Now it's 5.  The other 95 tonnes of carbon as organic matter either washed down the river or blew into the air as carbon dioxide gas.   Nearly half the increase in greenhouse gas levels since 1850 has came from deforestation and farming. This process of human ignorance, which began by cutting the trees in the upper Euphrates above Sumer and sparked the flood legend of Noah, just goes on an on.  It happened in Egypt, Babylon, Mohenjo-daro, China, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Ukraine - with the same disastrous results.  Can we avoid repeating the mistakes of our ancestors?

Farming can save the planet almost singlehandedly – of course we need to reduce fuel consumption, eliminate waste, eat less meat and insulate our buildings, but farming is the magic wand that can solve our climate problems at a stroke

Industrial farms are the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the history of farming.  Although they only produce one third of the world’s food, they contribute most of the  .

Rodale research shows that organic farms sequester 3.7 tonnes of CO2 per annum and industrial farms emit the same amount.  That’s a difference of 7 tonnes – organic farmers support global greenhouse gas reductions almost equal to the emissions of industrial farms.  Take it worldwide: if everyone farmed organically then we could take 7.2 Gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year, easily cancelling out the 5.5 Gigatonnes of increase in CO2 that is steadily making the planet more uninhabitable

Oh, yeah, I forgot - organic food is ‘too expensive.’  For F**k’s sake!  Help me somebody! What is really, really expensive is having to deal with floods, droughts, massive crop failures, flooding of the world’s coastal cities and human extinction. 

The solution is so easy it makes me want to weep.  All we need is a carbon tax that prices carbon emissions at the future cost of dealing with climate change.  That’s about £150 per tonne.  Actually, we probably only need to tax it at £35 per tonne to get the behavior change that would solve our problems

What would a carbon tax do
Well, the price of meat would go up, particularly beef and dairy products (did you know that if you put all the world’s cows on one side of scale and all the rest of the non-human mammals on the other that the cows would weigh more?). 

The price of organic food would go down.  £35 per tonne would mean that an organic farmer would get £130 per hectare in carbon rebate and the industrial farmer would have to pay a carbon tax of £120 per hectare – that’s a £250 difference.  It pretty much cancels out the phoney cost advantage of industrially produced food and in many cases organic food would cost less.   

We’d end up with other benefits – reduced nitrate pollution of water supplies; fewer endocrine disrupting chemicals affecting us from the foetus till old age; more biodiversity – you know the drill. 

A carbon tax would also encourage tree planting. You can cut a tree down in a few hours - it takes 20-50 years to grow a new tree.  A carbon rebate for tree planting would pay the tree grower 10 tonnes or £350 a year, just for planting a new woodland. 

Sheep farming emits 5 tonnes of CO2 per year per hectare, so sheep farmers would have to pay £175 in carbon tax – that’s a difference of £525.  Few farmers would raise sheep and they’d all plant trees.  What would happen if we planted trees on the higher ground?  Well, trees soak up water when it rains.  Their root systems stop soil from washing away into rivers and the sea. Duh.

There’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land and about 3.5 billion hectares of pasture.  That’s 5 billion hectares.  If we stopped trashing the soil and started farming organically and planted trees on pastureland we could sequester over 50 tonnes of CO2 every year.  That would be overkill, though. The net increase in carbon dioxide that is causing global warming is only 4 tonnes per year.   But it shows how easy it would be if we just taxed the emission of carbon and rewarded farmers and foresters who sequester it.

We stopped emitting lead 20 years ago because it was making everyone stupid and crazy.  We stopped emitting hydrofluorocarbons because they were destroying the ozone layer.  We stopped emitting sulphur dioxide because it was causing acid rain.  This was done with regulation and taxes to encourage the alternatives. 

The big climate talks are in Paris in November 2015.  By then the EU, China, California, Quebec, New England, British Columbia, Washington state and Oregon will have a carbon tax.   This means there will be genuine momentum to bring the rest of the world into the system, with no exceptions (Kyoto excluded agriculture and transport and let developing nations like China, India and Brazil off the hook).  A carbon tax is the simplest way to change behavior.  By paying a tax of £35 per tonne of CO2 now we can save a future cost of £150 per tonne emitted and protect our grandchildren from the consequences of climate change.  That’s £4 of payback for every £1 we save now.

It’s time to forget adaptation.  We have the power to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, we just need a carbon tax. 

The Future of Food, Wessanen

GOOD AFTERNOON.  AND MANY THANKS FOR INVITING ME TO SPEAK HERE THIS AFTERNOON.

AS THE FOUNDER OF WHOLE EARTH I’D LIKE TO DISCUSS HOW WE TOOK OUR VALUES, WHICH FOR MANY YEARS HAD BEEN A COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE, AND TRANSFORMED THEM INTO A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.

FORGIVE ME FOR DRAGGING YOU BACK INTO THE DIM AND DISTANT PAST, BUT TO OFFER ANY COMMENTS ON THE FUTURE FOR WESSANEN ORGANICS IT HELPS TO KNOW A BIT ABOUT ITS HERITAGE AND THE STORY OF THE WHOLE EARTH BRAND HAS BEEN WOVEN INTO IT FOR AT LEAST 34 YEARS. 

IN 1965 I TRAVELLED THE ‘HIPPIE TRAIL’ JUST A FEW YEARS BEFORE IT ACQUIRED THAT NAME, HITCHHIKING, WALKING AND TAKING TRAINS AND BUSES FROM LONDON TO INDIA VIA SYRIA, IRAQ, KUWAIT, IRAN AND PAKISTAN.

EVENTUALLY I WAS IN NEW DELHI, WHERE I SPEND A NIGHT IN THE GENERAL HOSPITAL WITH ADVANCED AMOEBIC DYSENTERY AND INFECTIOUS HEPATITIS.

REALISING I MIGHT DIE IF I STAYED IN THE HOSPITAL, I STRUGGLED ON TO KABUL, WHERE I RESORTED TO THE SIMPLE FOLK REMEDY OF UNLEAVENED WHOLEMEAL FLATBREAD AND UNSWEETENED STRONG TEA TO TREAT THE DYSENTERY.

THE LIVER PAINS SUBSIDED AND I WAS FIT ENOUGH TO TRAVEL BACK TO LONDON.  HOWEVER, I HAD LEARNED THAT DIET AND HEALTH WERE INEXTRICABLY INTERLINKED AND, BACK AT UNIVERSITY IN PHILADELPHIA LATER IN 1965, I ADOPTED THE MACROBIOTIC DIET.

ON GRADUATION IN 1966 I DECIDED TO OPEN A MACROBIOTIC RESTAURANT IN LONDON, SOON TO BE JOINED BY MY BROTHER GREGORY.

SETTING TRENDS:

- MACROBIOTICS

- Organic - Sustainable

- Wholegrain

- Local and Seasonal

-‘Justice’ (Fair)

- Balanced

- Zen/Japanese (Miso,Nori)

- No Additives, hormones

- Avoid sugar

- Eat only when hungry

- Exercise

SEED RESTAURANT WAS A SUCCESS,  IT WAS THE LEGENDARY HIP - AND HIPPIE - MACROBIOTIC WATERING HOLE OF THE LATE 60S, WHERE BROWN RICE AND ORGANIC VEGETABLES DOMINATED THE MENU. OUR RESTAURANT ROCKED, BOTH WITH PROGRESSIVE MUSIC AND A GROOVY CLIENTELE DRAWN FROM LONDON’S ALTERNATIVE SCENE OF MUSIC, THE ARTS AND FASHION.

JOHN LENNON WAS ONE OF OUR REGULARS AND HE GAVE MY BROTHER GREGORY A LITTLE CARTOON IN GRATITUDE FOR OUR FOOD AND FOR HARMONY, THE PIONEERING MAGAZINE GREGORY PUBLISHED.

WE ESPOUSED A DIET THAT PRESCRIBED WHOLEGRAINS AND ORGANIC FOODS THAT WERE LOCAL AND SEASONAL – AND PROHIBITED ADDITIVES,  COFFEE, SUGAR, FACTORY FARMED MEAT AND YEAST.  WE THOUGHT MACROBIOTICS WAS THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE IN A WORLD RUNNING OUT OF RESOURCES, WITH A GROWING POPULATION AND INCREASING DEGENERATIVE DISEASE.   I STILL DO.

THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION RATHER ALARMINGLY SAID THAT THE DIET WOULD ULTIMATELY LEAD TO DEATH.  THEY WERE OF COURSE, ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.  I HAVE FOLLOWED A MACROBIOTIC DIET FOR 49 YEARS NOW AND, MUCH AS I HATE TO ADMIT IT, IT’S A MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY THAT I’M CLOSER TO DEATH THAN I WAS IN 1965

BUT I FEEL HEALTHIER THAN I DID THEN AND I’VE NEVER FELT BAD ENOUGH TO NEED TO SEEK MEDICAL HELP OF ANY KIND, FOR WHICH I AM GRATEFUL.

MY BOOK, ABOUT MACROBIOTICS, WAS PUBLISHED IN 1972 AND HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO 8 LANGUAGES, IS STILL IN PRINT IN PORTUGUESE AND HEBREW.

I WROTE A FEW OTHER BOOKS, THE LITTLE FOOD BOOK COVERED FOOD ISSUES FROM A 2002 PERSPECTIVE AND THE GREEN & BLACK’S STORY INCLUDED SOME OF THE STORY OF WHOLE EARTH FOODS

WE SOON HAD CERES (LATIN FOR DEMETER) - EUROPE’S FIRST NATURAL FOODS STORE - GOING FULL TILT ON THE PORTOBELLO ROAD, IN THE ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY’S THEN HEARTLAND.  THEN OTHER BUDDING RETAILERS WHO WANTED TO DO WHAT WE DID CAME TO US FOR SUPPLIES, FORMING THE WHOLESALE CUSTOMER BASE FOR HARMONY FOODS.

WE WERE KNOWN AS THE BROWN RICE BARONS, BECAUSE IF YOU BOUGHT BROWN RICE IN THE 1970S IN BRITAIN OR IRELAND IT CAME FROM US.

WITH OTHER RETAILERS, WE FORMED THE NATURAL FOODS UNION, PROMISING EACH OTHER NEVER TO SELL PRODUCTS CONTAINING SUGAR OR ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS, THUS DEFINING THE NATURAL FOODS MARKET.

WE ALSO MADE PEANUT BUTTER UNDER THE HARMONY BRAND.

IN 1977 I CREATED APPLE JUICE SWEETENED JAMS THAT WERE THE FIRST PRODUCTS IN THE ‘NO SUGAR ADDED’ CATEGORY.  THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WE ALSO STARTED TO SUPPLY SUPERMARKETS, BREAKING THE BRAND BARRIER THAT STILL INHIBITS RETAIL SALES OF ORGANIC PRODUCTS IN MANY EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND MAKES THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL BRANDING MORE DIFFICULT.  WE HAD DEVELOPED THE WHOLE EARTH BRAND TO BE OUR SUPERMARKET BRAND BUT THEN DECIDED TO USE WHOLE EARTH TO BRAND ALL OUR PRODUCTS AND MIGRATED OUR HARMONY PEANUT BUTTER ACROSS TO WHOLE EARTH AND THE HARMONY BRAND WAS RETIRED.

WE WERE THE FIRST WITH ORGANIC BROWN RICE, SOURDOUGH BREAD, NORI SEAWEED, MISO, BREWED SOYA SAUCE, ADUKI BEANS, NATURAL PEANUT BUTTER, NO SUGAR ADDED JAMS, ORGANIC BAKED BEANS AND CARBONATED FRUIT JUICE DRINKS - BUT THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMEONE BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN US WHO WAITED UNTIL THE CATEGORY GOT BIG ENOUGH, THEN DID WHATEVER IT TOOK TO GET RID OF US. OFTEN THEY WERE OUR OWN DISTRIBUTORS AND IT WOULD BE UNREALISTIC NOT TO MENTION DISTRIBORG AND NATUFOOD, BOTH OF WHOM BUILT THEIR BUSINESSES ON EXCLUSIVE DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENTS OF WHOLE EARTH JAMS AND THEN LATER SWITCHED CUSTOMERS TO THEIR OWN LABEL VERSIONS, NATUFOOD AND BJORG, FRUSTRATING OUR HOPES OF BUILDING A EUROPEAN BRAND IN PARTNERSHIP WITH OUR IMPORTERS.

NONETHELESS, BY THE LATE 1980S WE MANAGED TO CREATE A VERY SUCCESSFUL AND MUCH-LOVED PRODUCT IN WHOLE EARTH PEANUT BUTTER.  IT HAD A RESPECTABLE 20% OF THE BRANDED PEANUT BUTTER MARKET. THEN NESTLE TOOK OVER SUN PAT.  THEY COULDN’T ACCEPT OUR EXISTENCE AND TOOK STEPS TO ELIMINATE US.

IN 1989 NESTLE SUN PAT LAUNCHED WHOLENUT – THE LABEL ARTWORK LOOKED LIKE OURS, THE NAME SOUNDED LIKE WHOLE EARTH EVEN THE RECIPE EMULATED OURS.   VISITING A SUPERMARKET BUYER WAS LIKE SEEING YOUR OWN FUNERAL REFLECTED IN THEIR EYES – THEY KNEW THAT THIS WOULD PROBABLY BE YOUR LAST VISIT – THEY’D SEEN THE STORYBOARDS FOR THE £5 MILLION TV ADVERTISING LAUNCH THAT NESTLE WERE PLANNING. WE MANAGED TO SEE THEM OFF, SHOWING THE POWER OF THE WHOLE EARTH BRAND. THEY COULD HAVE BOUGHT OUR BRAND AT THAT TIME FOR £2 MILLION AND SAVED £3 MILLION BUT EGOS DON’T WORK LIKE THAT.  NESTLE’S WHOLENUT LASTED JUST 4 YEARS.

Sugar vs Apple Juice

WE ALSO LAUNCHED THE FIRST NO SUGAR ADDED SOFT DRINKS IN 1984 – SWEETENED WITH APPLE JUICE

THESE WERE THE FORERUNNERS OF THE WHOLE EARTH SOFT DRINKS RANGE

REPLACING SUGAR WITH APPLE JUICE WAS THE BACKBONE OF THE WHOLE EARTH RANGE IN THE 1980S BUT THE FUTURE FOR THIS CONCEPT OF NO ADDED SUGAR IS LIMITED – UNLESS THE CALORIE CONTENT IS LOWER THERE ISN’T REALLY MUCH DIFFERENCE.

AT WHOLE EARTH’S 20TH BIRTHDAY PARTY IN 1987 I MADE A HERBAL BREW BASED ON OUR WHOLE EARTH COLA BUT WITH ADDED GUARANA AND CHINESE HERBS.  IT REALLY PEPPED UP THE OCCASION.  WE COULDN’T LAUNCH IT AS A WHOLE EARTH PRODUCT AS IT WAS EDGIER THAN RED BULL – NOT RIGHT FOR THE BRAND. SO WE NAMED IT GUSTO.

Gusto poster

Gusto poster 2

MY SON AND DAUGHTER LAUNCHED GUSTO IN 1990 AND IT BECAME A £500,000 BRAND.

IN 1999 WE SOLD SHARES IN WHOLE EARTH FOODS TO A GROUP OF INVESTORS AND THEY MISTAKENLY REFORMULATED GUSTO AND LAUNCHED IT IN NEW PACKAGING, ON THE ADVICE OF A WAITROSE SUPERMARKET BUYER. IN 2002 WE SOLD WHOLE EARTH AND GUSTO TO WESSANEN AND I OFFERED £100,000 TO TAKE GUSTO OUT OF THE DEAL.  I WAS REFUSED. A YEAR OR SO LATER WAITROSE DELISTED GUSTO AND I BOUGHT THE BRAND BACK FOR £2000.  MY SON WENT BACK TO THE ORIGINAL FORMAT, MADE IT ORGANIC AND IT IS NOW A £300,000 BRAND AND GROWING

IN 1989 WE LAUNCHED THE FIRST ORGANIC PEANUT BUTTER. TESCO GAVE US A LISTING.

THEN A SHIPMENT OF PEANUTS FAILED OUR QUALITY CONTROL AND IT TOOK 7 WEEKS FOR ANOTHER CONTAINER FROM PARAGUAY TO REACH US. SO WE STARTED LOOKING FOR A SUPPLIER WE COULD RELY ON.  LISBETH DAMSGAARD OF URTEKRAM TOLD ME ABOUT AN ORGANIC PROJECT IN TOGO, WEST AFRICA AND I GOT IN TOUCH WITH ANDRE DEBERDT, A FRENCHMAN WHO WORKED WITH THE GROWERS. ANDRE SENT ME A PEANUT SAMPLE AND WE TESTED IT FOR AFLATOXIN.  IT FAILED. I RANG ANDRE TO GIVE HIM THE BAD NEWS. HE MENTIONED THAT THE SAME FARMERS ALSO GREW ORGANIC COCOA BEANS.  I GOT HIM TO ARRANGE FOR A SAMPLE OF 70% SOLIDS CHOCOLATE TO BE MADE FROM THOSE BEANS.  WHEN IT ARRIVED I MANAGED TO KEEP SOME BACK FOR JOJO FAIRLEY, MY GIRL FRIEND AND A JOURNALIST.

WHEN SHE TASTED IT SHE SAID “THIS IS THE BEST CHOCOLATE I’VE EVER TASTED! YOU’VE GOT TO DO IT!”

IT COULDN’T GO UNDER THE WHOLE EARTH BRAND AS WE WERE A NO SUGAR BRAND.  JOJO HAD JUST MOVED IN WITH ME AND HAD £20 GRAND IN THE BANK FROM THE SALE OF HER FLAT IN FULHAM, SO I DECIDED TO TAKE A RISK - WITH HER MONEY.

THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE THAT HAD EVEN 50% COCOA SOLIDS, NOTHING THAT WAS ORGANIC AND NOTHING THAT TASTED AS GOOD, SO WE CHARGED INTO THIS TRIPLE NICHE.

WE SAT IN BED ONE NIGHT THINKING UP A BRAND NAME – WHOLE EARTH WAS A NO SUGAR BRAND AND HAD TO STAY THAT WAY.

I’M GLAD WE DIDN’T CALL IT ECOCHOC, ORGANICHOC OR NATUCHOC

WE WANTED A BRAND THAT SOUNDED LIKE IT HAD A GLORIOUS CONFECTIONERY HERITAGE.  IT NEEDED TO SOUND LIKE WE’D BEEN CRAFTING ARTISAN CHOCOLATE SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL.

WE WERE ‘GREEN’ BECAUSE WE WERE ORGANIC AND ‘BLACK’ BECAUSE WE HAD THE DARKEST CHOCOLATE ON THE MARKET, SO GREEN & BLACK’S PUSHED ALL THE RIGHT BUTTONS.  AND YOU COULD PRONOUNCE IT IN ANY LANGUAGE.  SOME OF YOU HERE MAY HAVE HAD TO REPEAT THE WORDS ‘WHOLE EARTH’ SEVERAL TIMES BEFORE ANYONE UNDERSTANDS WHAT YOU’RE SAYING. AS SOON AS SHE SAID ‘GREEN & BLACK’S’ WE KNEW WE HAD OUR NAME.

THE WHOLE EARTH OFFICES WERE IN THE SHOP BELOW MY FLAT ON PORTOBELLO ROAD SO I LEAPED OUT OF BED AND MOCKED UP A DESIGN IN 10 MINUTES.

Green & Black's 1st design

THE NATURAL FOOD TRADE WERE RESISTANT.  SUGAR WAS STILL A BIG NO-NO IN THE TRADE AND YOU CAN’T SWEETEN CHOCOLATE WITH APPLE JUICE..

Green & Black's 1st bar

COMMUNITY FOODS, THE BIGGEST NATURAL FOODS WHOLESALER, REFUSED TO STOCK GREEN & BLACK’S BECAUSE IT CONTAINED SUGAR.  HOWEVER, BECAUSE THEY WERE ALSO A MASTER DISTRIBUTOR FOR THE WHOLE EARTH RANGE. I URGED THEM TO RECONSIDER THEIR NO SUGAR POLICY AND THEY WERE RELUCTANTLY BLACKMAILED INTO STOCKING THE CHOCOLATE.  THAT WAS THE END OF THE NO SUGAR RULE IN THE UK NATURAL FOODS SECTOR.

WE ALSO GOT IN TO SAINSBURY’S AND SAFEWAY.

FROM THE OUTSET WE EDUCATED THE PRESS AND CONSUMERS ON THE ETHICAL ISSUES, EMPHASISING THE BENEFITS TO THE AFRICAN PRODUCERS.

IN 1992 WE WON THE FIRST ETHICAL CONSUMER AWARD AND GAINED THE IMPORTANT SUPPORT OF THE WOMEN’S ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK, WHO HAD JUST PUBLISHED CHOCOLATE UNWRAPPED, A BOOK WHICH HIGHLIGHTED THE DREADFUL PLIGHT OF WOMEN ON LARGE COCOA PLANTATIONS AND SUGGESTED WOMEN SHOULD REFUSE TO BUY CHOCOLATE

Chocolate Unwrapped

JOJO BONDED INSTANTLY WITH BERNADETTE VALLELY, WHO FOUNDED THE NETWORK AND WE MADE SURE THAT OUR CHOCOLATE WAS AVAILABLE AT ALL THEIR EVENTS.  IF YOU JOINED THEIR NETWORK, YOUR JOINING GIFT WAS A BAR OF GREEN & BLACK’S.

WE CALLED IT GUILT – FREE CHOCOLATE.  BUT FIRST WE HAD TO EXPLAIN TO PEOPLE WHAT THEY SHOULD FEEL GUILTY ABOUT.

WE ADDRESSED MORAL GUILT - WE PAID FAIR AND FIXED PRICES AND THE GROWERS WERE NOT EXPOSED TO DANGEROUS CHEMICALS.

WE ADDRESSED SUGAR GUILT - IT WAS LOWER IN SUGAR THAN ANY OTHER CHOCOLATE, ALL THE REST WERE 50-65% SUGAR, OURS WAS ONLY 29%.

WE ADDRESSED ENVIRONMENTAL GUILT - WE WERE SHADE-GROWN ORGANIC, SO WE HELPED THE RAIN FOREST.

ABOLISHING GUILT ON CHOCOLATE-RELATED ISSUES HELPS TAKE THE EDGE OFF THIS PURITANICAL GUILT OF SELF INDULGENCE AS WELL.

A HEADLINE IN THE INDEPENDENT SUMMED IT UP: “RIGHT ON – AND IT TASTES GOOD, TOO.”

Independent on Green & Black's

IN 1993 I CONTACTED SOME OLD FRIENDS AMONG THE MAYA IN BELIZE, WHOSE COCOA PLANTATIONS I HAD VISITED 5 YEARS EARLIER AND WHO WERE MEMBERS OF THE TOLEDO CACAO GROWERS ASSOCIATION.

Toledo Cacao Growers Assoc

I FOUND THAT THERE WAS AN OPPORTUNITY TO LAUNCH A PRODUCT AND A PROJECT THAT FROM THE OUTSET COULD BE DESIGNED TO BE A PERFECT EMBODIMENT OF ORGANIC AND FAIR TRADE PRINCIPLES.

WE WORKED OUT A NEW DEAL FOR A NEW PRODUCT CONCEPT - MAYA GOLD - AND MADE AN OFFER TO THE TCGA.

1. A FIVE YEAR ROLLING CONTRACT, PAYING $1.75 PER POUND

2. HELP TO OBTAIN ORGANIC CERTIFICATION.

3. A  $20000  CASH ADVANCE SO THAT THE FARMER MEMBERS WERE GUARANTEED ‘SPOT CASH’.

4. WE TRAINED KEY COOP MEMBERS IN MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING, CORRECT FERMENTATION AND QUALITY CONTROL TO ENSURE THAT OUR ORGANIC COCOA BEANS TASTED BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE’S.

A FEW WEEKS LATER I MET MIKE DRURY OF THE FAIRTRADE FOUNDATION, WHO URGED US TO CONSIDER THE FAIRTRADE MARK.  IT HADN’T YET BEEN SEEN ON ANYTHING AT THAT TIME AND WHAT WE WERE DOING MATCHED OR EXCEEDED ALL THEIR CRITERIA, SO WE AGREED.

Maya Gold 1st packaging

MAYA GOLD WAS LAUNCHED ON MARCH 7 1994 ON THE OXFAM STAND AT THE BBC GOOD FOOD SHOW IN LONDON.   WE DIDN’T ADVERTISE – WE DIDN’T NEED TO.  BBC NEWSROUND SENT A CAMERA CREW TO BELIZE AND CAME BACK WITH FOOTAGE OF MAYA KIDS EATING MAYA GOLD, THE FIRST TIME MANY OF THEM HAD EVER TASTED CHOCOLATE AND PROBABLY THE FIRST TIME THAT PRODUCERS OF CACAO HAD SEEN THE FINISHED PRODUCT OF THEIR EFFORTS.

THAT DATE MARKED THE BIRTH OF THE FAIRTRADE MARK AND TOOK IT FROM A WORTHY IDEA TO A SUPERMARKET SHELF REALITY, STARTING WITH SAINSBURY’S AND SOON IN ALL THE MAJORS.  CLIPPER TEAS AND SOON FOLLOWED

Fairtrade

BEING FIRST WITH THE FAIRTRADE MARK GENERATED A HUGE WAVE OF PUBLICITY -

.

THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF MARKET SECURITY TO THE GROWERS ARE OBVIOUS.  A BONUS HAS BEEN A CASCADE OF UNFORESEEN ADDITIONAL BENEFITS – A VERITABLE FAIR TRADE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE.

Maya village

EVERY MAYA VILLAGE IS SITED ON A RIVER, WHICH SERVES AS BATH AND LAUNDRY AND DRINKING WATER SUPPLY. SKIN DISEASES, RASHES AND BLISTERS ARE A THING OF THE PAST NOW THAT CHEMICAL USE HAS BEEN ABANDONED.

Maya bird

MIGRATORY BIRD POPULATIONS HAVE INCREASED DRAMATICALLY, REFLECTING INCREASED FOREST SHADE COVER AND REDUCED PESTICIDE RESIDUES.

MAYA RESERVATION LAND HAS BEEN KEPT INTACT AND THE BANK HAS NOT FORECLOSED ON THE OLD LOANS.

parrot

THE AMERICAN AUDUBON SOCIETY OWN A SCARLET MACAW BREEDING RESERVE IN BELIZE.  THE FARMERS THERE HAVE STARTED GROWING CACAO IN ORDER TO PROTECT THE HABITAT OF THIS AREA WHERE MACAWS FROM ALL OVER CENTRAL AMERICA COME TO BREED

fish

THE MANGROVE AND CORAL REEF WERE BECOMING SILTED UP FROM AGRICULTURAL RUNOFF AND DAMAGED BY PESTICIDES.  NOW TARPON ARE RUNNING UP THE RIVERS, ATTRACTING AMERICAN FLY FISHERMEN, ANOTHER GOOD SOURCE OF TOURIST INCOME.

OUR ENLIGHTENED SELF INTEREST PAID OFF.  MOST ENTREPRENEURS BENEFIT FROM KEEPING THEIR SUPPLIERS AND CUSTOMERS IGNORANT OF EACH OTHER.  OUR SUCCESS AROSE FROM BEING ACTIVELY TRANSPARENT.

THE SOCIAL BENEFITS WERE THERE, TOO

UNTIL WE BEGAN TRADING WITH THE MAYA, THERE WAS VIRTUALLY NO SECONDARY EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN FROM THE COCOA-GROWING VILLAGES.  TODAY, 80% OF MAYA PRIMARY SCHOOLCHILDREN GO ON TO ATTEND SECONDARY SCHOOL, AND QUITE A FEW HAVE MOVED ON TO UNIVERSITY.

Craig with Maya women

WOMEN CONTROL THE FINAL STAGES OF CACAO PRODUCTION AS THEY DO THE FERMENTING AND DRYING.  THEY TAKE IT INTO TOWN ON MARKET DAYS AND CONVERT IT INTO CASH. THIS STRENGTHENS THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN AND WOMEN SPEND MONEY ON HEALTH AND EDUCATION.

AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURE IS EMERGING, TOO.  CYRILLA CHO, FOR EXAMPLES, RUNS A NURSERY THAT SELLS LOCAL VARIETIES OF CACAO TREES TO FARMERS, REPLACING THE UNRELIABLE HYBRIDS INTRODUCED IN THE 1980S.  SHE ALSO MAKES CHOCOLATES FROM HER OWN COCOA BEANS, WHICH ARE SOLD IN LOCAL HOTELS AND SHOPS.

Cyrilla Cho & Craig

ANDREW PURVIS

WE WOULD NEVER HAVE DARED TO MAKE THE CLAIMS THAT THE ARTICLE MADE ABOUT US - SOMETIMES PR IS THE ONLY WAY TO TELL A REALLY GOOD STORY.

Observer Food Monthly

ALL THIS HAPPENED WITHOUT US EVER ACTUALLY MAKING A BAR OF CHOCOLATE.  IN FACT I STOPPED MAKING PEANUT BUTTER AND JAM WHEN I SOLD MY EQUIPMENT TO DUERR’S IN 1988.   A FACTORY THAT MAKES THINGS IS NO MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE ROAD OR THE TRUCK THAT DELIVERS THINGS.  THE ORIGIN OF INGREDIENTS, WHEN THEY ARE ORGANIC, CLIMATE FRIENDLY, FAIRLY SOURCED AND SUSTAINABLE ARE THE ISSUES THAT CUSTOMERS AND STAKEHOLDERS CARE ABOUT.

SCALE OR RESILIENCE?

WHAT WE ACHIEVED IN BELIZE HAD MUCH WIDER RAMIFICATIONS.  INSTEAD OF BEING SEEN AS A MARGINAL AND QUIRKY APPROACH TO CACAO PRODUCTION, THE ORGANIC AND SUSTAINABLE APPROACH IS COMING TO REPLACE THE CHEMICAL DEPENDENT PLANTATION MODEL IN COFFEE, OIL PALM AND RUBBER TO NAME A FEW EXAMPLES.  THE SMALLHOLDER FARMER IS NO LONGER SEEN AS A BACKWARD PEASANT TO BE REPLACED BUT IS BENEFITING FROM A REAL SHIFT IN THE BALANCE OF POWER IN THE FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN.

UNTIL THE 1960S ALMOST ALL THE WORLD'S CACAO WAS GROWN BY SMALLHOLDER FARMERS ON HOLDINGS OF A COUPLE OF HECTARES. IN THE EARLY 1970S A MAJOR PROGRAMME OF DEVELOPING INDUSTRIAL SCALE COCOA PLANTATIONS EMERGED, WITH THE MAIN NEW LOCATIONS BEING THE MALAYSIAN PROVINCE OF SABAH AND THE REGION OF BAHIA IN NORTHEAST BRAZIL

HISTORICALLY CACAO TREES WERE PLANTED 15 FEET APART, WITH SHADE TREES IN BETWEEN.  THE SHADE TREES CAPTURE SUNLIGHT FROM THE CANOPY AND RAISE MINERALS AND WATER FROM DEEP WITHIN THE SOIL.  THE LEAF FALL FROM THESE TREES FEEDS THE CACAO TREES AND THE SHADE ALSO INHIBITS THE SPREAD OF INSECT AND FUNGAL DISEASES.  IT'S A FUNCTIONAL ECOSYSTEM.  THE NEW INDUSTRIALISED SYSTEM PLANTED TREES 8 FEET APART. THERE WERE NO SHADE TREES.  CHEMICAL FERTILISERS WERE APPLIED TO SUPPLY NUTRIENTS AND ENCOURAGE HIGHER PRODUCTION. LACK OF SHADE MADE THE TREES PRONE TO FUNGAL DISEASE.   THE HOPE WAS THAT FUNGAL DISEASES AND PESTS COULD BE CONTROLLED WITH FUNGICIDES AND INSECTICIDES. THEY COULDN’T

THE PLANTATION MODEL IS FLAWED BECAUSE ITS COSTS AND RISKS ARE EXCESSIVE

FERTILIZER AND PESTICIDES COST MONEY

CLOSE PLANTING AND REDUCED SHADE ENCOURAGES FUNGAL DISEASE

WITHIN 20 YEARS BIG PLANTATIONS FAILED ALL AROUND THE WORLD.

IN 1989 85% OF BRAZIL’S COCOA PRODUCTION WAS IN THE PROVINCE OF BAHIA.  AN OUTBREAK OF THE FUNGAL DISEASE WITCHES BROOM WIPED OUT MOST OF THE PREVAILING MONOCULTURE CACAO PRODUCTION. COCOA PRODUCTION FELL 90% FROM PREVIOUS LEVELS

IN MALAYSIA THE COCOA PRODUCTION AREA FELL FROM 414000 HECTARES IN THE LATE 1980S TO A CURRENT LEVEL OF 20,000 HECTARES, A 95% REDUCTION.

SO WHERE ARE WE NOW?  LEADING CHOCOLATE PROCESSORS HAVE INTRODUCED INITIATIVES TO BUILD RESILIENCE BACK INTO THEIR SUPPLY CHAIN.   THESE PROGRAMMES ARE WELL FUNDED

MONDELEZ, OWNERS OF CÔTE D'OR, GREEN & BLACK'S AND CADBURY, HAVE INITIATED THE COCOA LIFE PARTNERSHIP, WITH $400 MILLION FUNDING AND A 10 YEAR DEVELOPMENT PLAN TO ACHIEVE THE FOLLOWING GOALS, IMPLEMENTED IN COLLABORATION WITH WWF AND ANTI-SLAVERY INTERNATIONAL.

INCREASE SMALLHOLDER INCOMES BY IMPROVING CACAO YIELDS AND QUALITY.

INTRODUCE CACAO VARIETIES THAT THRIVE WITHOUT AGRICHEMICALS

TRAIN FARMERS IN TRADITIONAL SKILLS SUCH AS SHADE MANAGEMENT, PRUNING, NATURAL FERTILITY BUILDING AND DISEASE CONTROL

ENCOURAGE DEMOCRATIC FARMER COOPERATIVES, CUT OUT MIDDLEMEN AND ESTABLISH LONG TERM SECURE CONTRACTS WITH FARMER COOPS

THIS IS ENLIGHTENED SELF INTEREST – BUT ALSO SATISFIES INVESTORS WHO CARE ABOUT SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SATISFIES CONSUMERS WHO NOW EXPECT ALL BRANDS TO OPERATE AT A HIGHER MORAL LEVEL THAN HITHERTO.  BARRY CALLEBAUT HAVE A SIMILAR SCHEME

Cacao

MARS HAVE ALSO DONE A WONDERFUL THING

THE MARS COCOA GENOME PROJECT HAS MAPPED THE ENTIRE GENOME OF DIFFERENT VARIETIES OF CACAO AND HAS PUT THIS INFORMATION FIRMLY IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. RESILIENT CACAO VARIETIES ARE BEING DEVELOPED AND NO OPPORTUNISTIC COMPANY LIKE MONSANTO WILL BE ABLE TO CAPTURE THIS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY FOR THEIR PRIVATE GAIN.

SMALLHOLDERS ARE THE BACKBONE OF ANY DEMOCRACY. PEOPLE WHO OWN THEIR OWN BUSINESS OR THEIR OWN LAND CHERISH FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS. INDUSTRY WILL NO LONGER NEED LARGE ARMIES OF WORKERS AS AUTOMATION TAKES OVER MOST MANUFACTURING AND ASSEMBLY OPERATIONS.  BUT THEY WILL STILL NEED CUSTOMERS FOR THEIR PRODUCTS.  SMALLHOLDERS, WITH DECENT INCOMES BASED ON FAIR PRICES, REPRESENT THAT FUTURE MARKET. THE ERA OF CHEAP FOOD BASED ON EXTERNALISING ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS SUCH AS CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOIL DEGRADATION IS COMING TO AN END.  RESILIENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY WILL BE ESSENTIAL REQUIREMENTS OF FUTURE FOOD PRODUCTION.  THE CACAO EXAMPLE IS AN EARLY INDICATOR OF THE FUTURE OF MOST FORMS OF AGRICULTURE.

CLIMATE AND FOOD SECURITY

MANY PEOPLE THINK THAT IT’S FACTORIES AND AIRPLANES THAT ARE CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING. IN FACT LAND CLEARANCE AND AGRICULTURE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR NEARLY HALF OF ALL THE GREENHOUSE GAS INCREASE SINCE 1850.

Original Louisiana

MY PLATTDEUTSCH FARMING ANCESTORS BEGAN TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS PROCESS IN THE 19TH CENTURY, PLOUGHING VIRGIN PRAIRIE IN WISCONSIN – THE BLUE ON THE MAP AND THEN DOING THE SAME IN NEBRASKA, IN THE GREEN PART, WHERE I WAS BORN.

trees cut down

BY THE 1930S 80% OF THE TREES IN THIS TERRITORY HAD BEEN REMOVED.

REGULAR PLOUGHING AND CHEMICAL FERTILIZER USE ALONG WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF TRACTORS EXHAUSTED THE SOIL CARBON CONTENT.  IT FELL FROM 100 TONNES PER HECTARE TO 5 TONNES PER HECTARE. THE CARBON RICH HUMUS OF THE BLACK SOIL DISAPPEARED AS CARBON DIOXIDE.  THE SOIL LOST ITS WATER HOLDING CAPACITY, WHICH WAS IN ITS ORGANIC MATTER

THE RESULT WAS INEVITABLE

Floods

IN 1927 A PERIOD OF PROLONGED RAIN LED TO THE GREAT FLOOD OF THE MISSISSIPPI.  WATER CRESTED AS MUCH AS 9 METRES ABOVE THE FLOOD STAGE AND A MILLION AMERICANS BECAME REFUGEES.  INSTEAD OF REPLANTING TREES, THE GOVERNMENT BUILT LEVEES AND DAMS TO CONTAIN FUTURE FLOODING.

THEN IN THE 1930S CAME DROUGHT.

Dust bowl

AN AREA LARGER THAN ALL OF THE BRITISH ISLES TURNED TO DUST, EVERY SUMMER, YEAR AFTER YEAR.  A MILLION REFUGEES MOVED OUT – THE ‘OKIES’ OF JOHN STEINBECK’S BOOK THE GRAPES OF WRATH.

THIS ALARMED PEOPLE IN EUROPE AND IN BRITAIN, WHO FEARED THE SAME THING WOULD HAPPEN IF FARMING WAS INDUSTRIALISED ALONG AMERICAN LINES. IT WAS A MAJOR FACTOR IN THE FOUNDING AND NAMING OF THE SOIL ASSOCIATION

Soil Association founder

THE SAME PROCESS HAS SINCE HAPPENED IN THE CHINA, INDIA, BRAZIL, UKRAINE, KAZAKHSTAN AND AUSTRALIA.  THE RATE OF CARBON EMISSION HAS DECREASED ONLY BECAUSE OUR SOIL CARBON STOCKS ARE SO DEPLETED THERE IS LITTLE LEFT TO WASTE.  BUT WE CAN RESTORE CARBON TO THE SOIL.  IT IS A BANK THAT WE'VE ALMOST EXHAUSTED OF CAPITAL, BUT WE CAN REBUILD ITS.  AS A CARBON STORE IT IS UNRIVALLED AND ALSO SECURE - CARBON IN THE OCEANS CAN RETURN TO THE AIR AS OCEANS HEAT UP. CARBON IN FORESTS CAN BE CHOPPED DOWN AND BURNED.  CARBON IN SOIL STAYS THERE.

IN 1995 THE PRINCE OF WALES DELIVERED A LADY EVE BALFOUR MEMORIAL LECTURE CALLED ‘COUNTING THE COST OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE.’  I REALISED THAT IF THE CARBON EMISSIONS SAVINGS OF FARMING ORGANICALLY WERE PRICED INTO THE COST OF FOOD AT THE REAL COST OF EMITTED CARBON THEN ORGANIC FOOD WOULD BE CHEAPER THAN INDUSTRIALLY PRODUCED FOOD.

400 OF THE WORLD'S LEADING AGRONOMISTS CAME TO THE SAME CONCLUSION 4 YEARS AGO.

IAASTD

-

• Stop subsidies

• Put human health first

• Green Revolution had unintended consequences

• Genetic Engineering a problem, not a solution

• Little time left

• Protect our agricultural capital (soil)

• Support small farmers and diverse ecosystems

• Study and learn from traditional farming

• Reward farmers who prevent climate change

THIS REPORT IS NOW THE MAIN DETERMINANT OF UN POLICY ON AGRICULTURE.

I’VE HIGHLIGHTED THE LAST POINT – TO REWARD FARMERS WHO PREVENT CLIMATE CHANGE

Industrial Farm – 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food

Organic Farm

Farmer

Farmer with a hoe:    120 times more energy-efficient than an organic farmer

                                   240 times more energy-efficient than an industrial farmer

AN INDUSTRIAL FARM USES 12 CALORIES OF FOSSIL FUEL TO PRODUCE ONE CALORIE OF FOOD – WE ARE EATING OIL

AN ORGANIC FARMER USES HALF AS MUCH ENERGY TO PRODUCE THE SAME AMOUNT OF FOOD ENERGY

A FARMER WITH A HOE USES ONE CALORIE OF THEIR OWN ENERGY TO PRODUCE 20 CALORIES OF FOOD ENERGY, SO IS 120 TIMES MORE EFFICIENT IN ENERGY TERMS THAN AN ORGANIC FARMER AND 240 TIMES MORE EFFICIENT THAN AN INDUSTRIAL FARM

ORGANIC ISN'T PERFECT - IT STILL DEPENDS TOO MUCH ON FOSSIL FUELS, BUT AT LEAST IT PUTS SOMETHING BACK IN EXCHANGE FOR WHAT IT TAKES OUT.

OBVIOUSLY WE CAN’T ALL GO BACK TO HOEING THE SOIL, BUT WHAT IF THE WHOLE WORLD JUST WENT ORGANIC?

Farming Systems Trial

Rodale Institute 30 year trial results

1. Organic uses 45% less energy

2. Average yields match conventional (soybeans/corn)

3. C sequestration 1 MT/ha (3.7 T CO2/ha) per annu

A 30-YEAR TRIAL IN PENNSYLVANIA SHOWS THAT ORGANIC FARMING CONTINUOUSLY SEQUESTERS 1 TONNE OF CARBON PER HECTARE PER ANNUM.

WHAT WOULD THIS MEAN GLOBALLY?

- USA arable: 172 Million Ha

Global arable: 1.4 Bn Ha

US is 1/8 of Global farmland

Organicc

- USA in Metric:         Per Annum

- Conventional:  .45 Gt Co2 emitted

- If Organic:       .50 Gt CO2 sequestered

- Worldwide  Per Annum

- Conventional:  3.6 Gt CO2 emitted

- If Organic:       4    Gt CO2 sequestered

- Net improvement 7.2 Gigatonnes

- Net annual CO2 growth 2013: 5.5 Gt CO2

- Good  - but can we do better?

IF EVERY ONE OF OUR 1.4 BILLION HECTARES OF ARABLE LAND WAS ORGANIC THERE WOULD BE A NET REDUCTION OF 7 BILLION TONNES OF CARBON DIOXIDE TAKEN OUT OF THE ATMOSPHERE ANNUALLY – ENOUGH TO STABILISE AND REVERSE GREENHOUSE GAS LEVELS.

THE CLIMATE COST OF INDUSTRIAL FARMING

• 7,000,000,000 tonnes CO2 p.a. difference

• 1,400,000,000 ha arable land

• = 5 tonnes CO2 per Ha per annum

• The real cost of CO2 emitted is €70 tonne

• €350 per ha cost benefit from organic farming

IF WE TAX CARBON EMISSIONS AND REWARD CARBON SEQUESTRATION ORGANIC FOOD IS CHEAPER

HOW MUCH CHEAPER?

WHAT WOULD THE IMPACT BE ON THE COST OF FOOD?

THE COST OF A TONNE OF CO2 EMITTED IS ESTIMATED AT BEING AT LEAST €70 PER TONNE TO FUTURE GENERATIONS.  CARBON MARKETS CURRENTLY PRICE IT AT BETWEEN ONLY €3 and €20 PER TONNE.

CARBON TAXES FACE FIERCE RESISTANCE FROM OIL, AGRIBUSINESS, MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL AND TRANSPORTATION LOBBIES WHO UNDERSTAND WHAT CARBON PRICING WILL DO THE MARKET FOR PETROLEUM, AGRICHEMICALS, INDUSTRIAL FOOD, WAR AND TRANSPORT.

BUT THE PARIS CLIMATE TALKS IN 2015 WILL BE A TURNING POINT.

THE 1994 KYOTO PROTOCOLS EXCLUDED CHINA AND INDIA AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AND EXCLUDED AGRICULTURE, FORESTRY AND TRANSPORTATION.  THE USA REFUSED TO SIGN, SO EUROPE ATTEMPTED TO COMPLY ALL ON ITS OWN.  IT WAS HARD FOR EUROPEAN MANUFACTURERS TO COMPETE WITH COUNTRIES THAT EMITTED UNLIMITED CARBON, LIKE CHINA.  THE VOLUNTARY MARKET HAS GROWN ANNUALLY, SUPPORTED BY COMPANIES LIKE WESSANEN WHO OPERATE SOME OF THEIR BRANDS, INCLUDING WHOLE EARTH, AS CARBON NEUTRAL.  THE COOL FARM INSTITUTE HAS LAUNCHED A WEB APP SUPPORTED BY PEPSICO, UNILEVER, HEINEKEN AND MARKS AND SPENCER THAT WILL ENABLE FARMERS TO MEASURE THEIR CARBON FOOTPRINT.  SO IS THERE HOPE, OR DO WE FACE ANOTHER 20 YEARS OF INACTION?

WHAT’S DIFFERENT TODAY?

EUROPE STILL HAS AN EMISSIONS TRADING SCHEME.  CALIFORNIA INTRODUCED ONE A YEAR AGO. QUEBEC INTRODUCED A SCHEME THAT NOW FREELY EXCHANGES AT PARITY WITH CALIFORNIA. CHINA NOW HAS 8 ACTIVE CARBON EXCHANGES IN ALL ITS MAIN REGIONS AND IS NEGOTIATING TO HAVE PRICE PARITY WITH CALIFORNIA.  THE NEW ENGLAND STATES ARE JOINING AND THE MIDWESTERN STATES SEE A HIGH CARBON PRICE AS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR WIND ENERGY.

SO AT PARIS 2015 THERE WILL BE CHINA, MOST OF THE US, CANADA AND THE EU ALREADY PRACTICING A CARBON TRADING REGIME AND PUSHING FOR A GLOBAL AGREEMENT.

AFTER PARIS THERE WILL BE A MORE ROBUST CARBON PRICING REGIME AND IT IS REALISTIC TO EXPECT IT TO CHANGE THE WAY WE FARM

pic42

WE HAVE TO MOVE SOON.  125 MILLION HECTARES A YEAR OF FARMLAND GO OUT OF PRODUCTION EACH YEAR.  AT THAT RATE TODAY’S FARM LAND WILL BE GONE IN 110 YEARS.

pic43

THE DEMAND FOR CHEAP MEAT HAS SEVERAL DANGEROUS EFFECTS AS INTENSIVE MEAT PRODUCTION RELIES ON ANTIBIOTICS TO KEEP ANIMALS ALIVE IN SHITTY CONDITIONS WHERE THEY WOULD NORMALLY DIE OF DISEASE.

1. THE LOSS OF FOREST WHICH TURNS CARBON SINKS INTO CARBON EMISSIONS

2. OBESITY, BOWEL CANCER AND OTHER DISEASES OF EXCESS MEAT CONSUMPTION

3. THE EMERGENCE OF E.COLI H7/O157, A VIRULENT MUTATION OF E.COLI THAT KILLS 100 AMERICANS A YEAR AND SICKENS 265,000

4. FAILURE OF ANTIBIOTICS – 80% OF ANTIBIOTIC USE IS ON FARMS AND EMERGING SUPERBUGS THAT ARE ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT RAISE THE SPECTRE OF A MUTATION OF BUBONIC PLAGUE THAT COULD BE FATAL TO BILLIONS. BACTERIA LEARN FROM EACH OTHER AND TRANSFER RESISTANCE TO ANTIBIOTICS. ALL FOR A CHEAP HOT DOG

Who’s Feeding the World?

- 70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares

                         NO SUBSIDIES

- 30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms

$350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES

THE PRICE WE PAY IN CLIMATE DISRUPTION SOIL EROSION AND DISEASE RISK FOR CHEAP MEAT AND OTHER FOOD IS DISPROPORTIONATE.  MORE THAN 2/3 OF THE WORLD’S FOODS IS GROWN ON SMALL FARMS OF LESS THAN 5 HECTARES, YET ALL THE AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES GO TO INDUSTRIAL FARMS THAT CAUSE THE MOST HARM AND ONLY PRODUCE 1/3 OF THE WORLD’S FOOD

Modern Farmer

A YEAR AGO IN THE UNITED STATES A MAGAZINE CALLED MODERN FARMER APPEARED.  IT IS REACHING OUT TO THE NEW ‘RURBANISTAS’ – PEOPLE WHO MAKE A LIFESTYLE CHOICE TO OWN AND WORK SMALL FARMS – THE GROW-YOUR-OWN MOVEMENT HAS MOVED FROM PEOPLE’S GARDENS TO LARGER FIELDS AND REFLECTS THE FAILURE OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE, WHICH CANNOT SURVIVE WITHOUT SUBSIDIES.  CAN IT ALSO REPRESENT THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE?

DROP SHOP

-How will Wholesalers operate when customers shop online and then collect delivery from a Drop Shop?

Drop Shop

ANOTHER AREA WHERE THE FOOD INDUSTRY CAN SAVE MONEY AND CARBON IS IN DISTRIBUTION.  ONLINE SHOPPING IN THE UK REACHED 20% LAST YEAR.  THE DAY OF THE SUPPLY CHAIN RUNNING FROM MANUFACTURER TO DISTRIBUTOR TO RETAILER TO CONSUMER IS COMING TO AN END.  WHAT WILL REPLACE IT?

THE ‘DROP SHOP’ CONCEPT IS EMERGING, WHERE A CUSTOMER ORDERS THEIR FOOD ONLINE AND HAS IT DELIVERED TO A LOCAL OUTLET.  THE CUSTOMER PICKS UP THE ORDER WHEN READY. THE RETAILER HAS LOW STOCKHOLDING COST, LOW STAFFING COSTS AND NO SHOPLIFTING.  THIS EMERGING MODEL, CALLED DISINTERMEDIATION OR, IN PLAIN ENGLISH ‘CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMEN’ HAS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WESSANEN OWNERSHIP OF DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES AND ITS PARTNERSHIPS WITH RETAILERS. IT WILL ALSO BUST OPEN THE DIFFERENTIATION IN BRANDING BETWEEN SUPERMARKET ORGANIC BRANDS AND NATURAL FOOD ORGANIC BRANDS – THE NATURAL FOODS CUSTOMER WANTS TO AVOID SUPERMARKETS BUT IS HAPPY TO ORDER ONLINE.

WHEN CARBON PRICING COMES IN THIS MODEL WILL BECOME EVEN MORE COST EFFECTIVE AND DISRUPTIVE.

SO WHAT AM I DOING ABOUT CARBON AND SOIL?

Corn Flakes Future Forests

Future Forests became The Carbon Neutral Company

Carbon Neutral Company

IN 1996 WHOLE EARTH CORN FLAKES BECAME THE FIRST CARBON NEUTRAL FOOD PRODUCT.  WE DISCOVERED THAT, BECAUSE IT WAS ORGANIC AND WHOLEGRAIN THAT WE DIDN’T HAVE TO PLANT MANY TREES TO BALANCE OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT.  THAT GOT ME GOING ON THE LOW CARBON FARMING WARPATH.

MY NEW BUSINESS VENTURE IS AIMED AT ACCELERATING THE REMOVAL OF CARBON FROM THE ATMOSPHERE AND REBUILDING SOIL CARBON.

THERE IS AN FAST AND EFFECTIVE WAY TO REBUILD SOIL CARBON.  THIS IS TO MAKE CHARCOAL OUT OF ORGANIC MATTER SUCH AS WOOD CHIPS AND AGRICULTURAL WASTES LIKE RICE HUSKS, COFFEE HUSKS AND SHREDDED PALM LEAVES. THEN YOU PLOUGH THIS CHARCOAL INTO THE GROUND, WHERE IT IS STABLE FOR A HUNDRED YEARS OR SO. THE PRODUCT IS CALLED BIOCHAR, TO DIFFERENTIATE IT FROM THE BARBEQUE CHARCOAL

BIOCHAR DELIVERS SAVINGS IN WATER COSTS AND INPUT COSTS AND PROVIDES HEALTHIER PLANTS WITH HIGHER YIELDS.

RAR IN PORTUGAL WILL HAVE 105,000 OF THEIR 250,000 SQUARE METRES OF GREENHOUSE CROPS RAISED WITH BIOCHAR THIS YEAR. THEY DO THIS FOR ECONOMIC REASONS, BUT THE CARBON CREDITS ARE MEASURABLE .

WHEN THE CARBON BENEFITS CAN BE MONETISED, IT WILL BE EVEN MORE PROFITABLE . THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING ON THE VOLUNTARY MARKET.  WE HAVE BEEN IN DISCUSSIONS WITH THE CARBON NEUTRAL COMPANY ABOUT THIS

Biochar

Biochar

What is it?

• Charcoal made to be used as a soil improver

What does it do?

•Increases microbiological populations

•High surface area adsorbs mineral nutrients

•Reduces plant disease

•Improves soil fertility

•Reduces fertiliser use

•Help soils retain moisture

•Increases crop yields

•Improves soil structure

•Reduces soil greenhouse gas emissions N2O

•Long term carbon sequestration

IN A NUTSHELL, BIOCHAR SAVES MONEY ON INPUT COSTS, INCREASES YIELDS, MAKES PLANTS HEALTHIER AND SEQUESTERS CARBON

NOW WE’RE MAKING IT REAL

Making it Real

Production

Projects

Products

WE DEVISED A SERIES OF MODIFICATIONS TO A TRADITIONAL CHARCOAL KILN THAT MORE THAN DOUBLES YIELDS TO 25-30% AND REDUCES EMISSIONS BY 80%.

Carbon Gold logo

biochar kiln

THERE ARE TEN OF THESE KILNS IN BELIZE, WHERE CACAO GROWERS WHO SUPPLY GREEN & BLACK'S USE THEM TO GENERATE BIOCHAR THAT IMPROVES YIELDS AND REDUCES DISEASE.

cacau

AS WELL AS SALES TO UK GROWERS AND PRODUCERS, WE OFFER BIOCHAR TO HOME GARDENERS.

biochar3

SO WE’VE LAUNCHED GROCHAR, A BLEND OF BIOCHAR WITH MYCORRHIZAL FUNGI, WORMCASTS AND SEAWEED. THE PRODUCTS ARE APPROVED FOR USE IN ORGANIC FARMING.

TRIALS WITH BARTLETT TREE EXPERTS THIS YEAR SHOW EXCITING RESULTS IN CONTROLLING HONEY FUNGUS IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS, ASH DIEBACK, PHYTOPHTHORA AND IN ESTABLISHING BEECH HEDGING.  TREE DISEASES ARE AN EXPANDING PROBLEM – BIOCHAR OFFERS A SOLUTION.

The Gulf

LAST WEEK I MET IN ABU DHABI WITH THE LANDSCAPE CONTRACTORS FOR THE NEW PRESIDENTIAL PALACE. THEY WANT 1700 TONNES OF BIOCHAR FOR THE PALACE GARDENS.  THIS PROJECT WILL BE A MODEL FOR REGREENING THE DESERTS OF THE ARABIAN REGION AND A MODEL FOR LAND REHABILITATION

The Climate Trust

Biochar : Carbon Dioxide

1 tonne : 2.35 tonnes

VCS

Biochar : Carbon Dioxide

1 tonne : 3 tonnes

Carbon Gold logo

Biochar : Carbon Dioxide

1 tonne : 6 tonnes

(Biochar made in Carbon Gold Kiln)

ONE DAY THERE WILL BE CREDITS FOR CARBON.  EVERY TONNE OF BIOCHAR WILL GENERATE FROM 3 TO 6 TONNES CO2 OFFSETS.

BUILDING TRUST IN A BRAND

ONE WAY TO BUILD TRUST IS THROUGH THIRD PARTY CERTIFICATION.  NOBODY TRUSTS BRAND OWNERS ANY MORE – THAT’S WHY INDEPENDENT CERTIFICATION OF ORGANIC, FAIR TRADE, CARBON NEUTRAL OR GMO FREE IS THE WAY FORWARD.   SOME COMPANIES TRY TO SELF-CERTIFY, BUT IT DOESN’T GENERATE THE SAME LEVEL OF TRUST. THE HORSEMEAT SCANDAL, COLLAPSING FACTORIES IN BANGLA DESH AND GMOS IN BABY FOOD ALL POINT TO THE NEED FOR THIRD PARTY CERTIFICATION

UNFORTUNATELY IN THE ORGANIC WORLD WE HAVE A PROBLEM – FAR TOO MANY CERTIFIERS.

EMPOWERING CUSTOMERS: Operation Raleigh and Community Development in Dominican Republic

Operation Raleigh and Community Development in Dominican Republic

Volunteers

THERE ARE 430 DIFFERENT CERTIFIERS OF ORGANIC FOOD IN THE WORLD.  THERE IS ONLY ONE FAIRTRADE, ONE SLOW FOOD, ONE MARINE STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL AND ONE FORESTRY STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL.

THE ORGANIC MOVEMENT HAS ITS ROOTS IN ALL THESE INDEPENDENT CERTIFIERS BUT THE TIME HAS COME TO BRING THEM TOGETHER UNDER ONE BANNER IN ORDER TO ENSURE THE INTEGRITY OF THE ORGANIC ‘BRAND’.  JUST ONE ROTTEN APPLE IN THIS BARREL OF 430 CERTIFIERS CAN DAMAGE THE CREDIBILITY OF ALL ORGANIC FOOD BECAUSE EACH CERTIFIER RELIES ON THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE OTHER ONES.  WE HAVE ALL HAD CLOSE SHAVES WITH ORGANIC PRODUCTS OF DUBIOUS AUTHENTICITY.

THE MANY DIFFERENT CERTIFIERS NEED TO HARMONISE THEIR STANDARDS, CREATE A HARMONISED DATA BASE OF ALL THEIR INSPECTION AND CERTIFICATION DATA AND CLOSE THE LOOPHOLES THAT ALLOW FRAUD.  AT THE SOIL ASSOCIATION WE HOPE TO FORM CLOSER ALLIANCES WITH OTHER CERTIFIERS – WHAT WE SHARE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR COMPETITION FOR BUSINESS.  ORGANIC COMPANIES SHOULD ACTIVELY SUPPORT AN INITIATIVE LIKE THIS AS THE VALUE OF YOUR BRANDS RELIES HEAVILY ON TRUST.

LET ME CLOSE WHERE I BEGAN, WITH A PROPOSED SYMBOL THAT COULD HARMONISE ALL THE DIFFERENT ORGANIC CERTIFICATION BRANDS.

Harmony Logo

WITH CARBON PRICING, INCREASINGLY STRINGENT CONTROLS ON HEAVY METALS IN FOODS, THE NEED TO CONTROL THE MEAT INDUSTRY AND ITS DRUG DEPENDENCY, SOIL DEGRADATION AND THE TREND TOWARDS VEGETARIANISM AND VEGANISM THE WESSANEN COMPANIES ARE WELL POSITIONED TO CAPITALISE ON THE FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES THAT ARE TAKING PLACE GLOBALLY.  BUT THIS WILL ALSO HERALD AN INVASION OF YOUR TERRITORY BY COMPANIES THAT HITHERTO HAVE

THANKS

CRAIG