What future for organic agriculture?

Organic food produce faces market uncertainties?

Here is almost a near complete account of what is being achieved in the UK. The Soil Association of UK is the authority on the topic.  Is there much opportunity on the topic?  Is there much opportunity for organic farming practices?  The words, phrases, concepts like green farming, sustainable farming practices are all a mix of facts and faiths, it seems!  The current economic recession surging food prices world wide poverty, famine in Asia and Africa all have to be debated.

The search for Patrick Holden’s farm in deepest west Wales is not going according to plan.     We know where Bwlchwernen Fawr lies, still we find ourselves half-lost up tiny lanes, vainly seeking help from Welsh-language road signs.

Eventually I get a signal and call Holden on his mobile. It turns out we’re only 10 minutes away. We  find ourselves on a long, deserted track that leads to the farm Holden first came to back in 1973 as a 22-year-old member of a commune drawn to west Wales by its cheap farmland.

Holden strides across the yard to meet us.   Once he starts talking, he’s got opinions on all manner of subjects. For all his volubility, though, it’s hard to imagine him ordering people around. Yet as director of the Soil Association, he has led a small organisation to a position of real power: as one of the leading guardians of the ethos and rules of organic farming in Britain. The association’s standards are stricter than those demanded by other arbiters of organic farming, but Holden clearly relies on his eloquence to lend them force. Indeed, these days, Patrick Holden is the Soil Association. His 14 years as its director have coincided with the emergence of organic farming as a genuine force in the market – and the appearance of large quantities of organic produce in mainstream shops. “The first organic food Sainsbury’s ever sold [in November 1985] were carrots packed in my cowshed,” he says.

Holden has steered the Soil Association to prominence by consistently identifying whoever is the most important person to influence at any given moment and winning him or her over to the cause. He persuaded Anthony Parkin, then the agricultural editor of The Archers, that Pat and Tony Archer’s farm should go organic and in another coup appointed Jonathan Dimbleby as president of the Soil Association. The broadcaster, who studied at the Royal Agriculture College in Cirencester, and is himself an organic farmer, held the post for 11 years, handing the reins over to former Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don last year.
Holden and one of his young children on his farm in west Wales. He is, says his friend Jonathan Dimbleby, “a very serious person”

Dimbleby stood alongside Holden as the association grew to its present size and stature. “The profile of the Soil Association soared in that period,” recalls Dimbleby. “What was good [about Holden] was that he had a vision he was good at articulating.” Holden is, adds Dimbleby, a “very serious person. It can make him not an easy person for some people.”

Pre-eminent among Holden’s contacts is Prince Charles, who gained his Soil Association certification as an organic producer as far back as 1987. The two men met on official business years ago and have subsequently formed a close friendship. Holden now has a direct line to Charles, and a few months ago the prince visited  to open Holden’s son’s cheesery. “His contribution is beyond measure,” says Holden of Charles. “He is the global leader of the sustainable agricultural movement. No one has done more to promote the cause.”

A mixed farm, Bwlchwernen Fawr sits on 135 acres and is home to 65 Ayrshire cows. Until last year, Holden grew carrots. This year he had a good crop of oats. His milk supplies both his son’s cheesery and Rachel’s Dairy (the organic yogurt company based in Aberystwyth). Holden, his second wife, and their four young children (he has four more by his first wife) live in the main house, though Holden himself spends most of his weeks in Bristol, at the headquarters of the Soil Association. But he is keen to stress that his heart is here on the farm – with its twice-daily cycle of milking and its meadows that must be mowed for silage twice a year.

The Soil Association has its roots in the second world war, when the move towards intensive farming began. In 1943, as the wartime government ordered the intensive use of artificial fertilisers, Lady Eve Balfour wrote the organic movement’s seminal book, The Living Soil; but it wasn’t until 1946 that she and a group of like-minded scientists and growers started the Soil Association at her farm in Haughley, Suffolk.

Holden’s own outlook was shaped by his early exposure to alternative agricultural views. In 1970, when Patrick was 20, his child-psychiatrist father took the family to Stanford University, just outside San Francisco, for a year’s sabbatical. There, Holden says, he came across “deep green thinking … I was very influenced by a book written by Charles Rice called The Greening of America. I did some gardening out there, and became full of green idealism and interest in the community.”

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