Facing the future: Innovation in food and farming

Soil Association Annual Conference 2012, Royal Horticultural Halls, London, 2 March 2012 

This year’s conference is a celebration of innovation in food and farming. The day will be full of talks and workshops exploring this theme from two different perspectives: from a technical perspective looking at the scientific and technical progress being made in organic and low-input farming systems; and also from a commitment to Good Food for All, which contributes to the important debate about food, public health and social justice.

I’ll be there blogging on behalf of the Soil Association and look forward to hearing contributions from some good friends and colleagues including Ed Hamer from Chagfood, the community supported agriculture project in Chagford, Devon; Graham Harvey author of The Carbon Fields: How Pasture Can Save the Planet; and Joanna Blythman who will be talking about her new book What to Eat.

Tickets can be booked here. Find out more about the venue here.

>> Check my book pages for details of Stuffed: Positive Action to Prevent a Global Food Crisis – which I wrote for the Soil Association in 2010. You can also visit Stuffed Online, a great teaching resource, here.

UPDATE: You can read all the blogs from the day here.

Life by Me

How fantastic to be featured this week on Life by Me! (9/2/12)

In case you haven't come across it yet, the website Life by Me is dedicated to sharing meaning. It asks one question of all sorts of people – "What is most meaningful to you?" – and then every day it features one original answer.

I'm humbled to find my face amongst a real stellar collection of individuals, one that evens the playing field between, as they put it, world leaders and mums, Nobel Peace Prize recipients and fishermen and media moguls and prison inmates.

What links us is the power of a personal story to evoke a meaningful conversation. Please take the time to visit the site and be inspired.

Infrequently asked questions - a game for grown-ups

A big THANK YOU to Eric Francis and his wonderful colleagues at Planet Waves – the most complete, most innovative and most switched-on astrology site on the web – for giving such a generous plug to my new project Infrequently Asked Questions.

The IAQ project launch was featured in the Friday November 18 subscriber edition and then again on the Daily Astrology pages on November 22. I have been completely blown away by the huge response and the numer of people who have visited the site since then!

The project itself – which consists of two beautiful virtual decks of cards – is rapidly evolving. It is a game – but with a serious underlying purpose: to get us to ask more meaningful questions about our own personal and cultural issues. The decks are full of the kind of questions we often forget to ask when we are tired, stressed, overwhelmed or just caught up in the autopilot mode of modern life.

I hope visitors here will also take the time to explore the IAQ site, play with the cards and hopefully find it both interesting and enlightening. If so, let your friends know and please take a moment to tweet and facebook it so others can do the same.

A new natural health website

People who know me will know that I am an advocate of alternative and complementary medicine. It is my preferred first line of care for myself and my family and has been for decades.

I have built part of my professional reputation investigating and writing about healthcare, as well as the intersection of health and environment, but it is also a personal passion.

So I was really happy to be asked to help launch and edit a new project of Neal's Yard Remedies called NYR Natural News – a web resource dedicated to natural health and healing with news, articles, videos and interactive features.

Not only is it great to be working on a UK-based site of this kind, but for me it represents a kind of coming full circle.

I was one of the first customers of the first Neal's Yard store in Covent Garden when it opened in 1981. In those days it was called the Neal's Yard Apothecary and its focus was on herbal and homeopathic remedies, essential oils and books and information on a whole range of therapies and lifestyle alternatives. My first experience of things like acupuncture, shiatsu, hypnotherapy and psychotherapy were in the therapy rooms above the shop. These things changed my worldview and my life forever.

Although NYR has evolved over the years to become a world-class producer of organic beauty products, it remains a significant force in natural health, working with around 1000 therapists in its therapy rooms across the UK. It is this, and NYR's 30 years of experience in natural healthcare, that the new website draws on.

I hope you will take the time to visit.

Join me at the Battle of Ideas festival 2011

Is big business ruining food? That is the question some of us will be debating on Saturday 29 October, 10.30am -12.00pm.

The debate is just one part of this year's Battle of Ideas – an annual event organised by the Institute of Ideas and hosted by the Royal College of Art. The weekend event has a full programme of high-level, thought-provoking debate on issues that matter.

The Battle of Ideas festival, now in its sixth year, is very much about a public conversation. The emphasis is on audience participation, and the festival is open to anyone with intellectual curiosity and the courage to think critically. The weekend includes more than 70 lively debates which you can learn more about here.

I'm really looking forward to my tiny part in it all. Please come along and join in.

UPDATE: Listen to the full debate below.

And the Winner is...

I am very happy to be able to say that last night, at a very glitzy ceremony at London’s Victoria & Albert museum, the Cows Belong in Fields campaign I ran for Compassion in World Farming scooped the prestigious Campaigner of the Year award at the Observer Ethical Awards 2011.  (10/6/11)

According to the Observer review: "Thousands of people voted for Compassion in World Farming and its high-profile campaign against the Nocton "mega-dairy". I am told that it was a decisive win in our category (all the more amazing since the shortlist included chef and food campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and campaign group 38-Degrees). I'd like to thank everyone who voted for us. We were all really thrilled and delighted to be awarded what is widely considered to be the 'green' equivalent of an Oscar. Thanks goes once again to our partners on the front line in Lincolnshire, local activist group CAFFO, with whom we will be sharing this award.

For my part I take it not just as a vote of confidence for our campaign, but a strong statement about the public’s abhorrence of factory farming. Compassion in World Farming has made a bold commitment to end factory farming by 2050, and with the public behind us this commitment cannot fail.

It was ironic to be standing on the stage with my colleagues and our celebrity supporters, TV presenter/conservationist Bill Oddie and campaigner/vet Mark Abraham, accepting this award less than a day after the National Farmers Union issued a disturbing, rather sinister and grossly out of touch press release congratulating itself for its part in quashing a Women’s Institute resolution against factory farming. 

The NFU is doing all it can to avoid the necessary conversation about where our food system is heading. At the same time we have a government, indeed we have had successive governments, that have formulated their food and agriculture policies on the idiotic assumption that if we can only make our food system big enough it will eventually be too big to fail (come on folks…where have we heard that one before?!). 

As anyone can see from stories of rising food prices, failing crops, contaminated vegetables and farmers going out of business at an alarming rate, our food system is already failing. It's failing our farmers, it's failing consumers, it's failing the environment and it's failing our animals. Making it bigger will only make it a bigger failure. We can feed the world in a way that is ethical, sustainable, safe and compassionate. CIWF aims to be a leader in this important reform and to be the ones to really get that conversation going.

This award will be a great conversation starter!

Observer Ethical Awards 2011

Hurrah! The campaign I ran for Compassion in World Farming to fend off the Nocton mega-dairy has been shortlisted in the Observer Ethical Awards 2011.

OK I admit it I am really thrilled. Giddy even. Environmental campaigners don't get many 'wins'. Very often we have to dig down deep to find the will to keep going year after year with only incremental progress to show for our efforts. But Nocton was a decisive 'win'. Compassion's Cows Belong in Fields campaign was, of course, one of many against the dairy, but it was a very public, very hard fought campaign. There was no doubt that we were seen by the dairy owners as their main adversary, and seen in the media as the voice of reason. 

I'd like to acknowledge that the campaign was ably aided by local campaign group CAFFO and Compassion has already pledged that should we win we will share the award with them.

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for us. For more about the Nocton campaign scroll down this page.

Related news: Congratulations to Philip Lymbery CEO of Compassion in World Farming who was this week nominated as one of the 100 most influential figures in the food industry by The Grocer Magazine. According to the Grocer: "It was the Environment Agency that put paid to Nocton Dairies' dairy mega-herd plan, but CIWF's Cows Belong in Fields campaign was key to pitting the public against the venture." (23/5/11)

From the Archives

I see avian influenza, or 'bird flu', is bubbling under the news headlines again...

The first time around I must have done 40 different radio and TV programmes. This 'bird flu' special from the BBC World Service was definitely the most interesting and the most fun. Here are some excerpts from the hour-long programme which went out sometime around the end of 2006. This edition of Have Your Say was hosted by Robin Lustig and broadcast to around 11 million people via television, radio and the internet. I was the studio guest and Dr Samuel Jutzi of the UN Food & Agriculture Organization in Rome was a guest via satellite. The programme invited comment from, and guest interaction with, people from all over the world. Here is a 15-minute edited version of just my bits.

Stop press...Nocton Dairies' plans put out to pasture

On February 16 Nocton Dairies threw in the towel and withdrew their plans for the UK's first mega-dairy.

In a short, rather terse press release the proprietors cited the objection made by the UK's Environment Agency as the main reason for their decision (and took a rather pointless and petty swipe at the NGOs and animal welfare groups which also opposed them). This focus on the Environment Agency, however, presents a very narrow and distorted picture of the sheer weight and volume of well-researched and hard-to-argue-with objections against the mega-dairy model.

In fact, the Environment Agency submitted two comprehensive objections to the plans. Other serious objections were raised by Anglian Water, the local Sustainability Officer, the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, and by North Kesteven District Council's own environmental consultants, AEA. The 120-page objection submitted by Compassion in World Farming – the group I have been working with (scroll down for more details) – highlighted numerous problems with the proposal, which the applicants had failed to address.

Shortly after Nocton Dairies' announcement North Kesteven District Council issued a press statement saying that it had been minded to reject the proposal on six significant grounds.

And that really is the point. After more than a year, and two separate planing applications, and millions of pounds invested, Nocton Dairies still didn't have the answers to the legitimate questions they were being asked or the legitimate concerns raised. On one of the radio interviews I did on the day the presenter said the defeat was probably, partly, my fault. I certainly hope so! The campaign I was fighting was aimed squarely at highlighting the well-documented problems of the mega-dairy model, mobilising significant resistance to these plans and stopping them. 

So we've won the battle, but probably not the war. There are other plans afoot for other mega-dairies elsewhere in the UK and we all need to be involved in making sure that Government, the National Farmers' Union, dairy processors and retailers understand that industrial farming is a symptom of, not the solution to, our problems.

Read Compassion's press release here.

cows belong in fields

For anybody who has been wondering what I am currently up to...and why the blog hasn't been updated so frequently lately... 

In September 2010 I took on one of the most complex ongoing campaigns in the UK – the campaign against Nocton Dairies.

Working as a campaign manager for Compassion in World Farming, I have been fighting hard to keep CAFO-style farming – which has done so much damage to the environment and public health in the US – out of the UK. The current proposals for the UK's first so-called 'mega-dairy' are to house 3,770 cows indoors all year round, with almost no access to pasture. Cows kept under such conditions are prone to a range of health problems in their short, exhausting lives. If the proposal, which is still being deliberated by local planning officers in rural Lincolnshire, goes ahead, and is a success, the owners intend to keep more than 8,000 cows in the same conditions in this grim-sounding industrial facility. Giving the go-ahead to Nocton Dairies also opens the door for more of these unacceptable factory farms here in the UK.

The campaign against Nocton Dairies is a particularly challenging one. So far the local council has received more than 16,000 objections to the proposal, including a damning letter of objection from the UK's Environment Agency. But as any campaigner will tell you, it's not over 'til it's over. There is still a great deal to do. 

As it has gone on it has become clear that this isn't just a local issue, as the UK's farming ministers keep insisting. It goes right to the heart of animal welfare, sustainable livestock farming, the economics of dairy farming, the role that supermarkets have in controlling those economics and the intersection of environment and agriculture. It touches on consumer behaviour, ethical food choices and even on the concepts of healthy and sustainable eating now and in the future. The Nocton Dairies campaign is a testing ground for all of these issues and stopping it means that a lot of people are going to have to find the wisdom and the will to do the right thing. Here's hoping...

You can read a bit of the backround to this issue here.  Find out more about the Compassion in World Farming's Cows Belong in Fields campaign here. Find out what local campaigners CAFFO (Campaign Against Factory Farming Operations) are up to here.

Stuffed Goes Online

Stuffed Online - a great teaching resource

Stuffed Online – based around the issues in my book Stuffed: Positive Action to Prevent a Global Food Crisis – is a vital teaching resource provided by the Soil Association's Food for Life Partnership. It sets out debates about the future of food, allowing teachers and students to explore the issues surrounding how our food is produced and what impact this is having on our environment, society and animal welfare. Each debate has resources – relevant articles, weblinks and information – that will confirm or challenge your understanding about the impact of our current food production and consumption.

Check it out here. For more about Stuffed see my books pages.

Deep Fried Planet Special - Ecocide

An special edition focusing on the crime of ecocide, November 15. 

The current series of Deep Fried Planet has ended. But we're not quite finished yet! In this extended special edition I speak to the initiator of the Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, barrister turned activist Polly Higgins, about her campaign to make ecocide a crime. Can we really use the law to take us, as a society, from ecocidal to ecocentric? Join us for an in-depth discussion of an important topic.

Click here to find out more about previous programmes.

Healthy Planet Eating

Check out my new report on sustainable, healthy eating for Friends of the Earth. (19/10/10)

I was really pleased to be asked to produce this report for Friends of the Earth. It pulls together pretty much all that is known about healthy eating, and provides a roadmap to where our modern meat/protein heavy diet has gone wrong. It also incorporates important research by Oxford University's Department of Public Health, specially commissioned by FOE, which shows that eating less meat would mean 31,000 fewer deaths from heart disease, 9,000 fewer cancer deaths and 5,000 fewer deaths caused by stroke in the UK each year. What that means is that a chnge in our diets isn't just necessary for the health of the planet, it's necessary for our health as well. You can read the report here.

Update: In February 2011 the UK government finally began to catch up with what many of us have been saying for a long time. New nutritional advice, issued by the Department of Health, recommended that people who eat lots of red and processed meat cut their daily intake in order to reduce the risk of bowel cancer. You can read that advice here.

Older updates can be found here.