ORGANIC REVOLUTION
Helen Browning - interview by Sophie Poklewski Koziell
The land is not ours; it belongs to the future.
We should leave the land in good heart.
Helen Browning, Chair of The Soil Association, runs Eastbrook Farm in Wiltshire, UK. In 1986 she converted this 1,350-acre farm to an organic system. Twelve years later, she was awarded an OBE for services to agriculture.
To meet Helen is an enlivening experience. Her enthusiasm is infectious. Not only is she a most convincing and eloquent speaker on organic agriculture, but her farm is a shining example of how agriculture can be both commercially successful and at the same time improve animal welfare and the environment.
What was the initial response of your family to your plans when you decided to turn the farm “organic”?
My father passed the farm to me when I was twenty-four years old. It was a very stable and profitable business, run conventionally. On the face of it, my plans to run it organically were a huge risk. My father had many reservations. But to his credit, he had a lot of courage and stood back, saying that I had to make my own mistakes. Today, my father is an ardent supporter of organic agriculture. He said to me when we had a drive round one summer, “I’ve never seen this farm looking so well.” And he’d been here forty years.
My father’s initial doubts were largely financial. He couldn’t believe that you could farm without chemicals and not decrease yields enormously. To his generation the advent of chemicals was an absolute godsend. Over a thirty-year period they managed to quadruple their production. Today, most farmers relate that increase to the use of chemicals, but there was also a huge improvement in plant breeding — that probably counted for half the increase in yield — and a terrific improvement in mechanization.
The last couple of decades have seen farmers adopting the goals of maximum yield, at any price.
For instance, there was a “Ten Ton Club” formed in the early eighties by farmers who had produced ten tons of wheat per hectare. If you weren’t a member of that club, then you weren’t anybody. It was all about maximum production — but at the expense of animal welfare, wildlife and the environment. Organic farming, on the other hand, is about optimizing production, taking into account those other factors. Ultimately we must leave land in good heart for future generations. Land is not ours; it belongs to our children. The way of organic farming is to protect the land and the soil.
Organic agriculture seems to reflect a philosophy of respect for the land and nature.
Humans have evolved in very close contact with the land over thousands of years. It is only within the last couple of hundred years that we have withdrawn from the land and have gone to live in cities. The natural cycle of life and death, spring and autumn, rain and sun: all these things are the basics for human evolution. But most city dwellers have little experience of life in nature and rhythms of land.
I’m convinced that the majority of our ills start from a lack of understanding of natural processes. It is important for our culture that people have the opportunity to work outside. It is vitally important that people have the chance to reconnect with the natural world: whether it is doing conservation work, having an area to grow food, working on a farm or at least visiting a farm. This farm is open to the public — as I believe that it is an important public resource.
Some people envisage organic farming in terms of hand weeding, horses and carts. Although this is a distorted picture, it raises the question of what role modern technology has in the future of organic farming?
For some people, organic farming is about turning the clock back and is anti-technology. This is untrue. Technology has a role in our future. For example, on this farm satellite mapping is used to give information on yield patterns within the fields. We use this technology to identify areas where there is something wrong with the soil. This enables soil problems to be corrected by putting more muck on certain parts of the field, sub-soiling, or aerating the ground. So the technology is being used to strengthen the organic system. At the same time we make sure that the technology is not going to do any damage in the long term.
How about new technology such as genetic engineering?
This is a dangerous technology that is being forced on us by huge commercial pressure. It is a recipe for disaster. There are many factors behind the scenes that are driving the gene technology forward. For instance, with pesticide legislation tightening up, many of these agro-chemical companies need to find a new way of staying in business. In addition, the patent for the popular herbicide Roundup expires in 2000. So it is critical for Monsanto, which owns the patent, to find another way of maintaining control and sales of the products through selling farmers a package of pesticide-resistant seeds and pesticide.
In the end it is all about screening technology according to its appropriateness. What we need to do in society is to come up with criteria as to what type of technologies we want and how we are going to control them.
We are in a period of incredible change in the farming industry both in the uk and Europe. What role can organic farming play in the future of agriculture?
We are going to see a very big increase in organic production over the next ten to fifteen years. The Soil Association itself has doubled in size over the past eighteen months; it is just phenomenal. The projections are that by 2005, at least ten per cent of Europe will be organic. In the uk, the market is expanding at least forty per cent a year and the area that was being farmed organically doubled last year. So it is accelerating very rapidly.
However, alongside all this growth, it is important that the organic sector continues to break new ground. There are a couple of big issues that need to be cracked. For instance, organic agriculture is still a big user of fossil fuels, (although much less than conventional farms), so it is important to address energy use and biofuels. Also, it is almost impossible to talk about closed nutrient cycles, which is what we are aiming towards, when a situation exists where sewage sludge is dumped in landfill sites because it is too toxic to be returned to the soil. It is probably a twenty-to-fifty-year project to clear up, or process, sewage sludge so that it can return to the fields. Lastly, the whole packaging issue needs to be tackled. At the moment, trading standards are beginning to crack down on some supermarkets for selling organic vegetables loose. But organic farmers mostly want to avoid excess packaging. The distribution chain should also be examined, to try to get more food sold locally. I’m not against trade but we need to find a way that makes environmental sense.
Does organic agriculture have a role to play in stimulating rural economies?
Yes, definitely. A recent report by the safe Alliance called “Double Yields” shows that there are thirty per cent more people on organic farms than traditional farms. This farm has gone from eight or nine people, when I took it on, to fourteen full-time now. Also, a lot of organic farmers are involved in local marketing and that increases employment. So it has a very big role to play. Putting more people on the land is a very healthy way of providing work. At present in the uk hardly three per cent of people are working on the land, because the conventional farms are highly mechanized.
Organic farms tend to be smaller and more labour-intensive. Therefore, going organic is bound to bring more people onto the land. That can only be a good thing. Working on the land brings good health, as well as other spiritual and social benefits. Organic farming is a way of life as well as a way of employment
Sophie Poklewski Koziell is co-author of Gathering Force. DIY Culture Radical Action for those Tired of Waiting. (Big Issue, London).
