Our roving Development Officer, Steven Jacobs, has sent back a couple of images from his time at Cereals 09 to share with us all.
He says that tea, biscuits and chat are the largely the order of the day on our stand:
The Organic Farmers & Growers stand at Cereals 09
Organic cereals are high on our agenda at the moment, with our National Organic Cereals 2009 event on the near horizon, so Steven took time to catch up on the trial plots that have been grown for this show.
Trial plots of organic wheat
In the picture you can see Dr Richard Stanley of Campden BRI Better Organic Bread. The crop is organic wheat populations (different varieties each complementing the other) as part of the wheat link project run by Organic Research Centre. That’s Zoë Haigh, of ORC, behind the wheat.
New research suggests that the production of organic bread results in 25 per cent lower CO2 emissions than its non-organic counterpart.
We like this kind of thing, not just because it’s good for the promotion of organic food, but because any credible scientific study that gives us hard data to back up what we believe to be true is always very much welcomed!
baking, bread, CO2
Scientists in Germany think they might have come up with a test to tell whether milk is organic or not.
Of course all tests that can give you an answer to a question (assuming they can be definitive) are to be welcomed. Although we can’t help but wonder if this is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Milk fraud is certainly not something we come across!
The sporty among us (when I say ‘us’, I probably mean ‘you’) now have a new organic option to keep those crucial energy levels up when doing serious exercise.
Our processor team has approved certification for a new range of energy drinks from leading manufacturer Science in Sport. These are serious people who provide energy drinks to many of the world’s elite athletes, including Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre, not to mention many of the Olympic gold medal-winning Great Britain team.
This is a first for OF&G, having never been asked to certify a product of this type before.
The new line of drinks seems to be garnering interest in the sporting media and we wish Science in Sport every success with them!
Now available are Organic Go Electrolyte Berry Burst and Organic PSP22 Fruit Punch.
You can feel it coming – the next push from the pro-GM side to win over consumers. The noise is building from the proponents who seem to be coming in behind the smokescreen of recession to talk doom and gloom about not being able to feed ourselves without GM crops. Which is patently nonsense.
There are assurances from people with the title ‘Dr’ and ‘Professor’ who keep appearing on Radio Four and the like saying that people have been misled on GM by its opponents. But what nobody seems able to do is point to good, hard, independent science that says we should not be in the least bit worried by man doing to nature what nature itself would never do.
Instead, if you look around, you come across findings which point to concerns. These only pop up from experts who have often had to battle the system to even begin to pursue their research – and it seems they often suffer personal attacks for having done so. Without getting carried away with conspiracy theories, it’s very hard to see a logic to GM crops which goes beyond profit for the few.
Which is why this piece from Steve Dube at newspaper-backed WalesOnline.co.uk is so interesting. Not the blog entry itself so much (it’s a follow-up to an older story) but the comments that follow in which Steve trades debate with some obviously passionate people. And the interviews and official comment he reproduces are both telling and fascinating.
We recommend you read the piece and all the comments. Give yourself ten minutes or bookmark it for later. It’s worth it.
gm gmo
The Telegraph reports that Swedish researchers have concluded that battery hens are healthier than free-range ones [something of a chicken theme developing on here today...].
Fortunately the Soil Association’s Anna Bassett was asked to respond and has put the nonsense in some perspective!
Some OF&G folk have spent the last couple of days at the Organic Research Centre Conference, held at Harper Adams University College.
We’ll try and get an update from them on what was seen and learned over the next couple of days and report back here. In the meantime, did you go? Would you like to share your thoughts on whether it was worthwhile, enlightening, depressing, or whatever? That’s what the comment section is for…
Between us there’s always someone out and about somewhere. Development Officer, Steven Jacobs is a prolific traveller and this week he paid a visit to a Suffolk site where research is ongoing into forest gardening, which I’ll let Steve explain:
Wakelyns Farm, Fressingfield, Suffolk is a joy to behold even in the freezing fog of a dull December afternoon.
60 acres of organic agroforestry. Lines of mixed trees either side strips of organic arable land. The land is fed (leaf litter) and protected (physical barrier) by the trees.
The arable yields are high. Although the norm can be five tons they have seen around ten tons per ha.
Martin Wolfe initiated the project over ten years ago and is currently assisted by Zoe Hague and Helen Pearce, with support from Bruce Pearce and the team at Elm Farm Organic Research Centre, at Newbury.
The idea that it is possible to show Forest Gardening on a field scale is fantastic. Martin told me that the trees are planted north south to make the most of the sun on their broad side. He has noticed that there are marked differences in the production of foliage on the eastern side and over seed or nuts on the west. This is to do with amongst other factors what he refers to as water stress; some of the ground was less than favourable and the area was defined as partially arid when they started the project. Summers (and winters) have been significantly wetter since then.
They have ground source heating in the office and a state of the art wood chip burner fed by their own forestry.
I left as the dark mists started to envelope the small holding. My satnav struggling to make sense of the Suffolk lanes and my head spinning with thoughts oscillating between Brigadoon the musical and Yggdrasil, the one tree of Norse mythology.
