OF&G :: The blog

While we attend plenty of shows each year, it’s been some time since OF&G was at Natural and Organic Products Europe. So, with a renewed vigour we addressed that this year and set up a not insubstantial stand along with three of our licensees.

Our visit to this year’s show, at Olympia, London, was a roaring success. It was great to get face-to-face with existing licensees as well as to meet many, many potential new ones. The whole show team, Steven, Ruth, Joanna and (for one day only) Mark, found the whole experience very positive. The same could be said of the licensees who set up their displays with us and managed to give the whole thing the feel of a small OF&G marketplace!

They were: Miller, farmer and bread and cake mix maker, Rebecca Raynor, who heads her successful Glebe Farm brand; Brenda and Lucy Clarke with their team from Trevarno Organic Skin Care who showed of a great range of high quality products; Al Sharif, of Harrisons and Crosfield, purveyors of carefully selected, and beautifully packaged, teas.

Here are some pictures to sum up the show (click on them for bigger versions):

And the really good news? We’ll be back next year!

It’s very heartening to see the Welsh Assembly taking a strong stand on GM as it moves towards adopting a ‘polluter pays’ principle.

At OF&G we’ve been calling for this all along. It makes perfect sense that if you introduce GM to the countryside and end up contaminating crops of your neighbours (or even further afield) you should bear the costs.

For some reason Westminster seems dead against this and determined to make it as easy as possible for GM companies to pollute our countryside.

If an organic farmer gets GM contamination in their fields, their crop can no longer be called organic, meaning the loss of any premium and no return on the extra costs and efforts they have incurred. How can it be right that the person or company causing this should not be held responsible?

If the Welsh Assembly Government puts the onus on the ‘polluter’ it is effectively banning GM from being grown within its borders - that’s a brave and principled move which we support wholeheartedly.

The Food Standards Agency has announced emergency measures to deal with the threat of GM rice, known as ‘Bt63′, from China creeping into the UK.

A long list of rice and rice products coming into the country will have to be certified free of Bt63 GM contamination because it is an unauthorised GMO in the EU.

The FSA has notified local authorities who will be responsible for liaising with businesses in their respective areas that might be importing or selling contaminated products.

It’s good to see positive and decisive(ish) steps being taken, but from OF&Gs’ point of view, we fear this is just the tip of a pretty worrying iceberg. As more GM products are shipped around the world (and there are many of them now) it gets harder to avoid contamination of organic and non-GM products, no matter whether it’s accidental (or adventitious) contamination.

If this happens supplies of organic and non-GM products are going to be even thinner on the ground than they are now - putting even greater pressure on prices for animal feeds and milling grade cereals. Perhaps the Bt63 scenario will re-open the public’s eyes to the Frankenstein Foods debate…

We’re very excited at OF&G towers (eh?) about the launch of our snazzy new compostable carriers.

These are bags made from corn starch (corn grown on otherwise unproductive land!) which will start breaking down in a matter of weeks when composted. They’ll also disintegrate within a matter of months if released into the environment - unlike traditional plastic that takes hundreds of years.

After a lot of investigation into pros and cons by our unstoppable research officer, Stephen Jacobs, the bags we can now offer are a much better alternative to the traditional plastic carrier - and a type of bag that’s even an improvement on our previous degradable bags (which were a small step in the right direction).

We do accept that these are still not a perfect solution - is there one? Like anything, they will struggle to break down in landfill, but if they serve to encourage more homeowners to fill them with peelings and apple cores and drop them in the compost bin, we’ll be achieving a lot.

Don’t just take our word for it though. The news of the launch is being embraced by a number of publishers. Take a look, for example, at Natural Products or NewConsumer.com or read our own news release here.

The bags are available to anyone, not just licensees, so if you want to get your hands on some, follow this link…

Defra appears to have the perfect payment method - the debt that need never be repaid! According the Guardian the department managed to spend £230 million more than its actual pocket money from the Treasury. Apparently it was the only Government department to achieve this feat for the period 06/07.

A department spokesman is reported to have said: “The budget for 2008-09 has not been reduced by any clawback of over-allocations in previous years.”

Now that’s the kind of loan we’d all love to have!

Read the original story here.

…get your facts straight!

Opponents of organic love to trot out ‘facts’ that attempt to detract from the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face realities or organic systems.

So when Robert Johnston decided to ‘explode’ the ‘five myths’ about organic food on The First Post website there was something of a stir created.

Fortunately a comprehensive rebuttal has now appeared on that same website courtesy of the Soil Association’s Robin Maynard. We’re posting this here because it’s a neat and fairly painless way to re-cap both sides of the argument ready for the next time you’re challenged in the pub!

It has been said that working at OF&G is a dangerous job - however we never thought we’d have to resort to biohazard outfits!

No - there’s actually a very good explanation: Members of the team visited a poultry farm as part of an animal welfare training day and of course the suits were the required uniform.

This is, in actual fact, a thinly veiled excuse to publish a photo of Nicola (left) and Jen as they have never been seen before (and wish never to be seen again).

Something we don’t get to do as often as we would like is get face-to-face with our licensees, but it’s by far the best way we have of learning about how we’re doing.

So to improve on this we’re trialling a programme of informal local meet-ups when members of our team are on their travels around the country. We’re always on the move, but quite often we’re in and out of an area faster than the proverbial rat up a drainpipe.

But when there’s a bit of breathing space or an overnight stay, we’ll be offering licensees in the area the chance to sit down with us for a drink and a bit of two-way feedback. Whichever member of the team happens to be in your neck of the woods won’t always be our expert in your field, but they will be happy to take your comments and questions back to HQ to be addressed by the right folks.

Kicking us off on this programme, Certification Officer Katie Owens will be in East Lothian on Thursday (Feb 21). We’ve tried to contact as many licensees as we can in the area, but if you haven’t heard from us and would like to meet up with Katie for a drink, chat and to meet some of your fellow licensees, please feel free to drop her line at katie.owens@organicfarmers.org.uk.

Hopefully we’ll see many more of you in this way over the coming months.

…or The Ski’s the Limit… Terrible puns aside, just a quick note to congratulate Certification Officer Jenny Bibb on achieving her Grade A qualification as a skiing instructor. Having already gained grades C then B this, it would seem, is no mean feat.

Combine the love of the slopes with Jen’s horseback skills and we cannot help but wonder if she should be dubbed ‘Sporty CO’ (but that opens a worrying door to suggestions for what we should call the others and I’m not sure they’d like it…).

Famous (or infamous?) words, but very relevant to modern farming. Like a mantra almost, people have been chanting for ages about how we have to get the public reconnected with the land and the production of their food. It hasn’t necessarily had the impact we might hope, although some groups have been working hard to achieve this all along, and doing an admirable job.

However, it feels like it’s only now that some real impetus is getting behind this movement and we’re all for it. More and more interest is being shown in food provenance, led largely by the growth in organic. As an industry we should now be capitalising on this.

OF&Gs’ Development Officer, Steven Jacobs, has been making sure we keep pace with a number of educational initiatives, because organic farmers can have a huge role to play in teaching children (and the public generally) about sustainable farming.

We’d very much like to see more of the public being shown how organic farmers use smart solutions alongside centuries-old methods to produce their food. But it’s great when kids, their parents and their teachers come into contact with ANY farm.

That’s why the work of one OF&G licensee, David Thompson, has to be recognised here. David, who farms near Alnwick in Northumberland, has been made Assistant Director of farm education charity The Country Trust and is no stranger to having groups of kids from inner-city schools on his farm. He’s been featured by Farmers Guardian (an article well worth a read) and we hope to catch up with him soon to see how OF&G can help.

We are aware that quite a number of our licensees are involved in educational visits. If you’re one of them, why not drop us a line and tell us what you’re up to…

OF&G Chief Exec, Richard Jacobs, talked to Radio Four’s Farming Today about the percentages of organic matter in pig and poultry rations plus the impact feed prices are having on producers.

If you’d like to listen you can download today’s programme from this link.

Richard’s piece begins just before the 4 minute mark.

Just on the cusp of the New Year I think there’s still time for some seasonal stories - and fortunately they seem to be good news:

A couple of items in Meat Trades Journal caught the eye. Firstly it seems that while Waitrose sent £10 vouchers to customers likely to be disappointed when the store’s turkey suppliers were hit by AI, 80% of those customers (1,000 people) returned them requesting that they be passed on to the farmers affected. Wow! That’s kind of mind-blowing and suggests that shoppers (at least those of the Waitrose variety) haven’t entirely lost touch with, or sympathy for, the farming community. Fingers crossed the ten grand makes it to Gressingham Foods nice and early in 2008…

Also noteworthy on the turkey theme is the MTJ’s reported fact that Marks & Sparks shifted 40% more organic turkeys this year compared to last. That doesn’t tell us anything about the actual figures (or, actually, even whether M&S offered organic turkeys last year!) but it sounds like the kind of healthy growth we want to see.

So that’s us signing-off for 2007. Happy New Year from all at OF&G.

Maybe it’s a bit of a Scrooge-like attitude to have, but don’t some aspects of Christmas seem to have a bit of an environmentally unsound tinge these days?

We’re all very conscious of climate change and of the fact that we’re roaring through resources which are finite to the planet. So it seems pretty wasteful to be sending many millions of Christmas cards which the recipients will look at once, say “ah, thanks” and then shove on a desk or shelf until it’s time to bin them in the New Year.

The good news is that more of us recycle now, so more of those envelopes and cards will go into recycling bins along with some wrapping paper and over-the-top gift packaging. But the fact is we’ve used no end of power, trees, ink, sticky tape and more to produce them, not to mention shipping them around the world (or at least from China…) and driving them around this country.

Tonnes and tonnes of food is wasted in this country each Christmas, even after we’ve gorged to excess. And don’t get me started on the OTT lightshows on homes that seem to be spreading faster than bluetongue!

There are some interesting Christmas-related facts and figures collated by Wiltshire teacher “Mr O’Callaghan” on his blog that make for thought-provoking reading.

It’s still a great time of year; a chance to sit down with family and (at least for many) some deserved extra time off work, but in these days when we’re supposed to be conscious of waste and mindful of reducing our consumption, couldn’t Christmas do with an eco-makeover too..?

Funny how things come full circle. The use of wind power for ships could be making a comeback if the maiden voyage of a new cargo vessel goes well.

The Beluga Skysails is setting off across the Atlantic with a giant high-tech kite attached. The theory, which seems eminently sound, is that the kite can be deployed to harness the stable winds high up and pull the ship along - saving on the amount of power needed by the engines and therefore cutting emissions.

The kite is computer controlled and can run on rails around the ship to ensure optimum use of the wind.

You can’t help but feel that this has a lot in common with organic farming; using what we’ve got in nature for everyone’s benefit while cutting back on the artificial and harmful. Fingers crossed for a successful voyage and wide deployment of the Skysail…

Find out more at the Skysails site
or
Read the story from The Times

So widespread is the use of genetically modified soya and corn in the US, it’s becoming nigh-on impossible to avoid the stuff unless you buy organic (and it’s getting harder for the organic food producers to find non-GM supplies).

Given this wholesale adoption of GM over the pond, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that a couple of US Senators have managed to put the brakes on the latest emerging abhorrence ‘Frankenmeat’ - or the use of cloned animals for food.

The situation seems to be summed up nicely in this report from thedailygreen.com:

Senate Says No to Frankenmeat (and Frankenmilk)

It may only be a delay for now, but if nothing else it should open up the debate, rather than have GM meat sneaking in through the back door.

I feel another heated debate (and costly lobbying on all sides) coming on…