OF&G :: The Blog

Google has announced a major extension of its Street View feature in Google Maps today. The level of detail is amazing, if somewhat disturbing to be able to see so much of everything. They claim to have 95% of the UK covered.

So, what do you do first with such a facility? Well, a bit like kids will always seek out the rude words in a dictionary, we reckon you check out your home and then maybe your place of work…

And we found this:

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It’s a view into our yard at the front of The Old Estate Yard, with a member of staff driving the long-since-replaced company car.

We can’t actually quite decide which member of staff, although we’ve narrowed it down, because whoever it was has either fallen asleep waiting for the lights at the adjacent roadworks to change, or couldn’t get Jeremy Vine off the radio quick enough…

Have you checked out your neck of the woods yet? Does it raise privacy issues? Surely it’s going to reveal evidence of people being places they shouldn’t have been? Let the fun commence…

But when all is said and done, it’s an incredibly powerful feature and it will be interesting to see how people come to use it.

The long running saga that is the Farmers Weekly jumper hoo-har draws to a close today – at least for us…

We’ve picked a winner from those kind people who made a donation to the RABI via our JustGiving page. We raised £57 in the end.

We thought it would be fair to let everyone see the draw take place, so here’s our short film in which you will discover the name of the winner, to whom we send our warm congratulations! Bad luck to everyone else who were keen enough to get their hands on it that they were willing to part with their cash!!!

This is very exciting! Having sent out many, many copies of the Farmers Weekly tractor knitting pattern to the enthusiastic knitters who have requested it, we’ve finally had an example of the finished product sent back in!!!

Tracy Williams was good enough to let us see this marvellous creation, which is her mum’s handiwork:

The Farmers Weekly tractor jumper. Sent in by Tracy Williams. Knitted by her mum!

Connoisseurs of this particular pattern will note the addition of the hood. A very nifty touch that has impressed us and, given the current weather trend, will be most welcome to Tracy’s son when he’s sporting this very special garment.

Our thanks to Tracy for sharing. We can think of at least a couple of friends at FW Towers who are also going to be thrilled to see this…

PS – you still have just a handful of days to try and win our own tractor jumper. Just go here and read the entry rules. Go on, you know you want to….

PPS – thanks to all of you who have already donated!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner in the EU organic logo competition!

And we can breathe something of a sigh of relief (at least we are here at OF&G) that the champ is the designer we considered to be the only real contender.

Here it is:

The winning design for the EU organic logo

The winning design was by German student, Dusan Milenkovic, so congratulations to him. From July 2010 this design will be seen on the packaging of organic products across the EU (there are caveats and grace periods to this, before anyone starts panicking they don’t have theirs sorted yet. Talk to your CO for details).

You can read the announcement press release for yourself here (PDF) and check out how the vote was split between the three designs here, and it demonstrates a scarily large amount of support for the strange hieroglyphic-like entry!

Now all that remains is to ensure everyone knows how and when to put this design to work on their packaging. Our licensees have had details on this on a number of occasions in recent months and we’ll be highlighting the issue again in our next newsletter.

There’s some interesting reading around at the moment. These three are a mix of the positive and, in the case of the Telegraph article, the scarily negative:

• The Telegraph reports that an Australian conference has been told that the world’s “most precious resource”, soil, could be devastatingly depleted in just 60 years, at current rates of abuse…
• It seems environmental groups have had a positive impact on the GM debate in Bulgaria, gaining government support for protection measures for organic and sensitive areas as the country revisits its laws on the subject. This from organic-market.info…
• And from the same source as the Bulgaria story, we turn our attention to Wales, where companies are being invited to tender for the opportunity to write a report on consumer attitudes to organics, an area of research that can definitely benefit from improved insight.

If you aren’t at the Soil Association conference in Birmingham, you can get a taste of what’s been going on by checking out the stream of relevant messages on Twitter.

And it’s well worth a look right now. There’s been a cracking debate going on involving the notorious Oliver Walston and SA director, Patrick Holden.

Click on this link to catch up now.

The day is nearly upon us. The day we will discover the one logo to rule them all.

If you’ll excuse the slightly nerdy Lord of the Rings reference, I am, of course, referring to the EU organic logo. The results of the competition held to choose this hotly anticipated item of packaging decoration are due out this week.

That’s not to say we will actually find out this week which of the three shortlisted designs have won, because this is the EU we’re dealing with. But they said we’d find out this week, so we’re cranking up the pressure…

These were the choices for the compulsory EU organic logo

You may recall that the three designs caused something of a debate around Europe as to whether the method of inviting and choosing them was entirely suitable and whether the options selected by the judges for the final vote were really the best they could find.

We had our own concerns as it appeared that the voting website allowed you to cast multiple votes. The normal situation with even the most trivial of online polls is generally to be told “No you naughty little cheat, you can’t vote again” when you attempt to show more support than is fair for one particular option.

In its most basic form this is often enforced by the use of a ‘cookie’ (a little bit of text dropped into a special folder on your computer that tells the website you have already voted). Alternatively it is done by recording the unique Internet Protocol (IP) address of your computer when you vote. Sometimes both, plus other safeguards.

We couldn’t see any such protection on this vote and were able to force sequential numbers for the amount of votes cast out of the page that was loaded once a vote had been made. This worried us. We couldn’t find any relevant cookies on our machines and there was no “Don’t be naughty” message.

So the question was, did whoever put the site together simply fail to create a page that said your latest vote didn’t count because you’d already voted. Or did they just not bother to protect the vote…

Obviously someone must have the answer to this, so we emailed the organisers of the competition at the EU asking the questions posed above and seeking reassurance.

The response was deafening in its silence.

So, no doubt by now, with the poll closed, we have winner. Let’s hope whichever logo it was, the result wasn’t unduly influenced by someone who figured out they could game the vote. And no, we didn’t.

Hopefully we’re utterly wrong about this and doing the organisers of the competition a great disservice. If so though, it would have been nice for them to tell us that.

We’ll let you know which logo was picked as soon as we do!

The Soil Association conference gets underway today in Birmingham (and yes, they have already been publicly ribbed about the industrial location, at The Custard Factory).

We have folk there, as do most organic organisations and companies. It’s generally a setting in which the more philosophical issues are dealt with and the temperature taken of the sector at this point in time – a kind of state of the nation event for organics.

Interestingly, this year it seems to have kicked off with the SA charity’s director, Patrick Holden, espousing better co-operation and less divide between organic and non-organic farmers. This is pleasing, because it’s what OF&G has been saying since it became the UK’s first government approved organic certifier in the early 90s.

Of course deeply held perceptions and prejudices do not disappear overnight, or merely on Mr Holden’s say-so. There has to be trust and understanding between organic and non-organic supporters and farmers, but hopefully this signals that more of those involved in organics are willing to be inclusive, rather than critical.

If you’re not at the conference, the best way to follow it is using Twitter. There are various people providing updates from the scene, including our own Development Officer, Steven Jacobs, and Deputy News Editor of Farmers Weekly, Caroline Stocks.

Fear not though, if you’re not a ‘Tweeter’ yet you don’t have to delve into this new world too deeply. Just follow one of these links to see a timeline of what people are saying about the event in your web browser.

Using the Twitter website: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23SAConf

Or using the Twitterfall service: http://twitterfall.com/?trend=saconf!%231F3547