Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Why we forgot how to grow food
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/real_food/art

icle6098277.ece


As a food shortage looms, people are digging for Britain — and their
dinner table. John-Paul Flintoff gets back to our roots

Not long before Christmas, a man walked into the care home next door to his
house and asked the manager if it would be possible for a group of
neighbours to grow food in the vast gardens. The manager said he would be
delighted. In the days that followed, the man casually asked various
neighbours whether they would like to get involved. They all said yes. So
he popped over to the care home with them, and each remarked how large the
garden was, and what a lot of food could be grown there.

As well as beds for vegetables, there could be fruit trees trained to grow
up the south-facing walls, a bed of herbs for the kitchens, and flowers to
take inside. The group could perhaps even keep chickens, once the fruit and
veg were up and running.

The man went home after each trip feeling tremendously pleased with
himself. I know this, because the man was me. Now, it’s not as if I did
anything special: I didn’t lift a spade. Many people have done
considerably more, as part of a grass-roots movement spreading rapidly
across the nation, to grow our own food. And fast. Because for the first
time in decades, Britain faces the real prospect of severe food shortages.

About 40% of the food we eat is imported. That includes an astounding 95%
of our fruit and most of the wheat in our bread. This reliance on goods
from abroad is perilous. During the 2000 fuel strike, Sainsbury’s chief
executive wrote to the prime minister to warn that food supplies would run
out “in days rather than weeks”. Supermarkets rationed bread, sugar and
milk. The situation is now arguably worse: world food reserves are at
historically low levels, and last year several countries stopped exporting
staples because their own populations were going hungry.

If the problems were only temporary, it would be bad enough. But they’re
not. We have become dependent on fossil fuels that are starting to run out.
Taking account of all the oil- and gas-derived fertilisers, pesticides,
distribution and retail practices, our modern farming uses an incredibly
wasteful 10 calories of energy to put a single calorie of food on your
plate.

Reverting to old-fashioned farming will be hard because our soil is in poor
shape. Fertility has come to rely on annual, chemical top-ups instead of
the traditional long-term build-up using animal manure and crop rotation.
Suddenly taking away all the artificial fertilisers will result in
drastically lower yields. And if we’re to feed ourselves, we can’t
afford lower yields — because the UK is more densely populated than
China, Pakistan or any African country except Rwanda.

Meanwhile, levels of minerals such as phosphate, which plants need for
healthy growth, are falling fast. Global supplies have peaked, and last
year phosphate prices rose by 700%. Britain imports 80% of its phosphates.
The only alter-native is to return all food waste and animal and human
manure to the land, instead of flushing it to sea. And let’s not forget
the extremes of weather that will result from global warming. Rising sea
levels spell doom for the 57% of grade-1 arable land in east England
already below sea level. In 2000, during the unprecedented heat wave, crop
yields in Italy and France fell by a third.

Perhaps most importantly, we lack know-how. Most of us today have little
experience of food- growing. The farmers we do have are mostly approaching
retirement, and there are few of them: agricultural employment has fallen
from 40% in 1900 to 2% today, and much of the work is done by casual
workers brought in from abroad.

Modern governments have not regarded self-sufficiency in food as a
desirable aim, according to Professor Tim Lang of City University in
London; but last year that changed. A report from the Cabinet Office
concluded that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a
low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”. In response, Colin Tudge,
the author of the book Feeding People is Easy, called for “a global
renaissance in agriculture”. This more or less agreed with the insights
of a less well-known environmentalist, Jeremy Clarkson: “We are heading
towards The End of Days, and you’d better get yourself an allotment.”

That’s what I did last year, just in time, because now dozens of others
are on the waiting list.

All over the country, people are starting to think about producing food.
Some because they fancy a bit of the River Cottage lifestyle, but many —
including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall — have been inspired by the growing
Transition Town movement. Transition Towns were started by an Englishman,
Rob Hopkins, after a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. At the
time, he never imagined that oil might one day run out. “But then I
showed students a film, The End of Suburbia. I have to say it was as
traumatic and shocking for me as it was for the students.” The film made
it clear that no aspect of life will be the same after cheap oil runs out
— which it suggested will happen very soon. “When we got over the
shock, we set about looking at Kinsale,” says Hopkins. “We examined how
the town might look in 20 years if it adapted instead of pretending it
wasn’t happening. We came up with a vision, then backcast it to see how
to get there, year by year.”

Unlike other environmental initiatives, this deliberately involved finding
the “upside” rather than dwelling on doom. “I like to use the analogy
of inviting a reluctant friend to join you on holiday,” Hopkins explains.
“If you paint a picture of the beach, the pool and the candlelit taverna
by the sea, they’re more likely to come.”

Returning to England, Hopkins helped to create a similar “energy
descent” plan in Totnes, Devon — the first Transition Town. Others soon
followed. Lewes, Glastonbury and Stroud are full of middle-class hippie
types, but in Bristol it’s the poorer districts that have been most
dynamic, and across Wales the impetus has largely come from the
agricultural community. Today, there are more than 150 “official”
groups (who have formally asked to join the network) and hundreds of others
still preparing or mulling it over. There are TTs in New Zealand, the US,
and on The Archers.

After first talking to Hopkins, two years ago, I registered my own corner
of northwest London on the Transition Town website and hoped that someone
would join me. Nothing happened. So I cycled to south London to meet Duncan
Law, an actor and director who parked the day job many, many months ago to
devote himself full time to launching Transition Town Brixton.

The cafe where we met, Honest Foods, had a policy of sourcing food locally.
Law asked for a word with the chef, said he knew someone with a vast crop
of pears in their garden, and asked if the chef would be interested in
buying them? Without hesitation, the chef said yes. I was impressed.

Law took me on a tour of Brixton: him on his recumbent bike and me on my
foldaway with tiny wheels. If we looked odd together, the effect was
increased by Law stopping every so often to collect apples that had fallen
from trees. He told me about an entrepreneur who made £4,000 in the early
1950s — more than Law’s headmaster father earned in a year — by
commissioning children to gather blackberries for him. TT Brixton, he said,
was about to start mapping fruit trees across south London. (They’ve
since done that.)

Near Balham, we visited Sue Sheehan, a Transition Town supporter who
recently started growing fruit and veg in boxes in the tiny space in front
of her terraced house. I still hadn’t got the hang of how to be upbeat
about peak oil and climate change and ungraciously told her that the crop,
though plentiful, would not be enough to keep her alive when the trouble
starts. But every lettuce you grow yourself, Law said, saves growing
another one miles away and shipping it to you, and all the emissions
associated with that.

A few days later, I watched The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak
Oil, a documentary film about what happened to Cuba after Soviet oil
supplies dried up. It shows how Cubans gradually turned away from a heavy
reliance on carbon-intensive agriculture: in rural areas, they learnt to
plough with oxen; in cities, all kinds of spaces were turned to
horticulture, from window boxes to wasteland. The transition took more than
two years, and Cubans had to forgo the equivalent of a meal a day — but
by the end, even people in cities were producing half their annual fruit
and vegetable needs.

I finally found like-minded people nearer my home, willing to launch a
Transition Town. In Belsize library, we hosted a week of film screenings
culminating with The Power of Community. It was clear from the
question-and-answer session afterwards that the audience was gagging to
start growing food. Strangely, they just seemed to want some kind of
permission to get started. I improvised: “Just go for it! What can you
lose?”

Transition Belsize was born and I found myself co-ordinating the 40-strong
food group. The first thing the group did was visit my allotment. My new
friends weeded, built a new raised bed, and took home some of my surplus
apples. Since then, we have gathered names of people on the waiting list
for allotments and put them in touch with householders who possess gardens
but insufficient time, expertise, or ability to grow food themselves.
We’ve set up a section in the local library with books and magazines
devoted to food-growing, co-ordinated bulk purchasing of otherwise costly
organic food so a wider portion of the population can access it, and got
agreement from the local franchise of Budgens to sell produce grown by
local people in gardens and allotments.

Another member, Councillor Alexis Rowell, rather brilliantly persuaded the
council to allow residents on its estates to grow food there. Having done
that, he went knocking on doors of one neighbouring estate to ask if people
would like to grow food there. Over the course of a single weekend, members
of the Transition group transformed the previously overgrown and unused
gardens. Residents supplied hot soup and drinks, and joined in the work
too. I travelled one cold January morning to Stroud, Gloucestershire, where
members of another Transition group have done amazing things. Stroud has
one of the country’s most successful farmers’ markets, and two
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes, through which householders
fund a farmer to supply food to them directly. The first was started in
2001, by four individuals renting an acre of land and employing a vegetable
grower. After two years they had formally established a co-operative and
rented 23 acres. Today two full-time growers provide veg and meat to 189
households, with enough profit to pay a bonus.

Meat production runs at a loss, and has to be subsidised by the veg, but
the farmers see stock as essential to good stewardship of the land,
providing plentiful manure. There’s another benefit: marketing. Animals
can be very attractive parts of any membership project. For that reason,
the CSA houses its pigs in a prominent position, beside notices explaining
how the scheme works.

One of the hardest things for the CSA is getting people involved. Most
members are happy to pay to receive veg — after all, it’s cheaper than
buying from most supermarkets — and will turn up to occasional events on
the farm, such as wassailing parties and apple pruning in January, blossom
celebrations in May, haymaking in August, a bonfire-night party, and
singing to cows in the barn at Christmas.

But schemes like this need a critical mass of members willing to help out
more routinely, and might lose energy or collapse altogether if a small
minority of volunteers find themselves always responsible for making it
work. Wandering over weed-infested fields with two such volunteers, Helen
Pitel and Caroline Denny, I see for myself how hard the work is. “But we
can’t let this fail,” says Pitel cheerfully.

Among other setbacks, the CSAs have had meat stolen from their packing
shed, and had to deal with unsupportive neighbours, such as one who
complained about the appearance of polytunnels on the hillside and forced
the CSA to secure retrospective planning approval. Even members can be
difficult. As part of recent efforts to get them to share trips to the farm
to collect food for each other, a list of names and addresses were sent
out. Some complained that this breached data security and risked ID theft,
reveals one member of the core group: “It sometimes feels like there is a
long way to go in building the ‘community’ bit of Community Supported
Agriculture!”

I’m not surprised to find that setting up and running large-scale
projects of this sort can be difficult, and no less impressed for that
reason.

One of the most significant achievements of Stroud’s food group did not
involve growing anything. It’s a comprehensive analysis, conducted by
members who happen both to be local councillors, into whether or not the
district could feed itself. The report by Fi Macmillan and Dave Cockcroft
was inspired by an article in The Land magazine, Can Britain Feed Itself?,
written by Simon Fairlie, a journalist and campaigner who has a sideline
selling scythes (to, among others, me). Fairlie lives in Somerset and has
some connection to a local Transition group, but he’s been doing this
kind of work for years. His article was itself inspired by a book published
in 1975.

Using the same model, Macmillan and Cockcroft investigated whether 110,000
people living in Stroud district could be fed if they relied on the 37,000
hectares of available farmland. The initial finding was encouraging: the
district does have enough land to feed itself, though only if people reduce
their meat intake to a quarter of the current UK average of 80 kilograms
per person per year, and significantly reduce their sugar intake. There
would be some surplus with which to trade for staples such as citrus, tea
and coffee.

Alas, the analysis doesn’t stop there. Macmillan and Cockcroft go on to
examine whether Stroud can feed itself without inputs from fossil fuels,
and with land set aside to produce the biofuels needed to replace them. (An
additional pressure on land, which they only mention in passing, is the
need for land-based textiles, whether from sheep or fibres from hemp and
other crops.)

The conclusion, this time, is distressing: “We have nowhere near enough
land to produce a significant proportion of our current level of transport
and heating fuels.” Crikey. If that’s the dismal outlook for the
district of Stroud, set among all those rolling fields, what hope is there
for London? Is it time to get out?

Rob Hopkins thinks not. He used to believe the most responsible thing to do
was to move to rural areas, build a house and grow your own food. “But
when I found out about peak oil I came to question that. We had built our
own house, and were growing our own food, but this was only going to be
sustainable if I am prepared to sit at the gate with a shotgun. What do I
do with my carrots if the village up the road is cold and hungry?

“We have to move towards collective solutions,” he says. “Peak oil is
a call to those of us who have been out in the highlands to come back and
help, because the skills are very much in demand now.” According to Simon
Fairlie, supplying our needs in the future will also need considerable
movement in the other direction: dispersal of both livestock and humans
around the country, not least so that all that human manure can be put back
on the land.

For now, the best thing I can do is to make a go of food-growing in London,
as they did in Havana. So on my return from Stroud I throw myself with
renewed energy into the Belsize group.

Over dinner, the core group wrestles with strategies for growing the group
ever larger. We agree to work hard in our own streets, as individuals, then
the next street, and so on. One attractive idea is to deliberately grow
“too many” seedlings, giving ourselves a perfectly amiable pretext for
knocking on doors and inoffensively getting neighbours started on
food-growing.

Back home, inspired by the Guerrilla Gardening movement to grow beans on a
patch of scrubby land beyond the end of my garden, I stare across at the
vast gardens of the neighbouring care home, and notice — not for the
first time — just how big and bare they are. Then I look down the road
and notice that one of my neighbours, five doors down, has likewise been
cultivating the wasteland. I knock on his door, we get chatting, and in no
time he’s touring the gardens of the care home with me. A few days later,
I ask a family with girls about the same age as my own daughter. They visit
the site too.

I set up a neighbourhood project on an online food-growing network and soon
my neighbours sign up. I decide to ask them over for drinks. We’ll watch
the first episode of The Good Life, then The Power of Community. In a few
weeks time we will have achieved nearly as much here as Belsize, down the
road, achieved all last year. After that, who knows, we might set up our
own veg-box scheme…

But I shouldn’t get carried away. In The Transition Handbook, published
last year and already reprinted several times, Rob Hopkins offers what he
calls a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the
impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the
answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. We truly don’t know if this
will work.

“Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are
convinced of is this: (a) if we wait for the government, it’ll be too
little, too late; (b) if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but
(c) if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.'