Jonathan Dimbleby interviews Patrick Holden - 01/26/2007

Robin Maynard: Jonathan Dimbleby, our President, is going to politely but I think thoroughly grill our Director, Patrick Holden, on the Soil Association - its 60th year, present and future challenges. Thank you very much.

Jonathan Dimbleby: Thank you and welcome, as President, for the 19th annual Conference. I'm not going to be polite to the Director at all! I'm going to sound off myself for a little bit, then we're going to have a to and fro, and then we're going to invite anyone who wants to comment. You've got to endure if you will a brief to and fro between me and Patrick to set the scene, if you like, to share a couple of thoughts about the organic movement, past, present and future. I'm going to kick off because I've still got the microphone on me.

Last year it was our 60th anniversary, and it happens that this year I celebrate ten years as President. In that time, 60 years on and the last ten years, totally accidentally insofar as my role has been involved, there have been astonishing changes, accelerating changes. The ideas, the philosophy, the analysis of the founders of the Soil Association have been brought to a wider and wider, and more and more sympathetic public, and closer and closer to the heart of the most important debate that we on our planet face: a sustainable future in a grievously threatened planet.

We've been helped along, of course, by events that one would wish had not happened. The BSE, with the feeding of animal protein to ruminants, the issues of genetic engineering, foot and mouth disease and so on. We've also been brought sharply into focus by the very beneficial involvement which we were at the heart of and founding - the whole school meals debate and the, we hope, developing improvement of the way in which we feed our children.

In that process, we have begun to, but not completed, a definition as it were of the conditions for a sustainable agriculture in what should be a sustainable future for production, sale and consumption of organic produce. To me personally, though I've done some farming organically, I'd love it to have been slightly more successful but it was my failure not organic farming's failure. To me personally the most important thing that's happened in the ten years is that we've not only raised our game but we've also raised our sights.

I think that there is a really profound connection between the vision of our founders and our role today, as it is and as I think it should and could become. And again for me personally the really big questions surrounding organic food and farming can only nowadays be usefully, excitingly addressed within a genuinely global framework, a context that embraces both on the one hand, environment, and on the other hand, development.

Like an ancient mariner, as I'm afraid Patrick knows, I've banged on in one way or another about this for practically 20 years, and it's been frustrating, lots of others have as well, frustrating for us that it has taken so long for people to wake up to what I now think are almost regarded as some self-evident propositions. You can't have sustainable development without a sustainable environment, and you can't have a sustainable environment without sustainable development. They are, as it were, like love and marriage.

My belief is, not proven yet, but supported by a growing body of evidence in which the Soil Association has I hope a crucial role to play, that organic systems of food production have a central role to play in that sustainable future. It's not a message that some vested interests care to hear. That's inevitable.

The big industrial farmers, those who are knocking down trees, huge companies that benefit from the present status quo and don't really want to see a change even though they're being reluctantly forced in that direction, but how it is still possible that governments, our dear old Defra and our dear young DfID can somehow still believe that the future production of food in a sustainable way on a global scale should depend on chemical fertilisers and pesticides is, honestly, beyond my understanding.

We need to pay far more attention to the ways, now I say 'we', I'm talking about governments, to the ways in which the production of food on which we all depend in this hugely growing population of our world, can reduce amongst other things rather than increase our carbon footprint. Governments should not be continuing to feed the addiction for fossil fuels and non-renewables but seeking to wean us off that addiction.

And does the future of the world also really depend upon those who live and work on farms in the poor countries having to either move to the cities because some big farmer has taken over their land. Or if they're able to farm on those farms, producing their products at huge environmental and ecological cost, by sending them to the rich countries which could easily produce a huge proportion of those products.

Are there not, I pose it merely as a question, better ways of ensuring security of food supply in both developed and developing countries? These are questions that I think are critically in need of answers if the vision of our founders is to be as relevant and prescient in the years ahead as I believe its been up until now.

At which point, I stop, and he's going to say a few words.

(Applause)

Patrick Holden: Is my microphone on? Yes! I think that this theme of this conference, and therefore this conference, is the most important conference that the Soil Association has held in its history, because I believe it marks the end of a chapter of our history, arguably the second chapter, certainly from my perspective, and the beginning of a third.

And that chapter is best known, externally and within the movement for our development of, our defining of a prescription for the application of the principles of sustainable agriculture, which took many of us in this room into organic farming back in the 70s. Because we realised that if we were going to use, at the time we realised that if we were going to survive in a hostile policy and marketplace, we would have to define what we were doing and offer it to citizens who wanted to support us in the marketplace.

And by doing so, we've developed the most enormously potent mechanism for citizens who want to support sustainable agriculture to do so through their individual buying power. And that achievement I think is really important, and perhaps it's the most single thing that the Soil Association is not only known for but will be remembered for.

And clearly the stewardship of the standards, the maintenance, the ensuring that they are still remaining connected with the principles of sustainable agriculture on an ongoing basis (and by the way, I've been in a Standards Board meeting with our new Chair, Anna Bradley this afternoon) will remain an incredibly important aspect of the Soil Association's work.

However, the world is changing and it seems to me that for the 21st century, there will be new factors around which the development of agriculture will revolve. Three of the most central, I believe are:

• Climate change, fossil fuel use and its decline, and I'd like to come to that in a moment, and greenhouse gas emissions
• Food security, and thirdly I think
• A shift away from the last chapter of agriculture where you could argue that developments were led by governments and corporations to a much more cellular basis of activity, where the power of the individual expressed in various ways, both through the marketplace but actually increasingly directly into their own lives will be the most powerful agent of change, and it will progressively become more powerful than the combined activities of government and corporations

And I think that the Soil Association has a responsibility and is very well placed to devote a great deal of energy over the coming years to address those three issues. There are other issues as well: there's the issue of soil, and it's high time that we gave more attention to the central importance of soils in sustainable development, in carbon sequestration and much more besides, and of course their connection with water.

There's the issue of our genetic heritage and its survival, and the need for that if we are going to be able to continue to practise sustainable agriculture in a much, much more re-localised and involved way, and there's the issue of reducing, and obviously this is connected with global warming, the footprint of our food production and our distribution.

Those issues, I think are bigger than organic farming, and yet what we've done in defining and developing the organic farming model is a central part of the jigsaw puzzle of sustainable development. So I'm not suggesting we should move away from that, I simply think we have responsibilities now to go wider.

And the reason why I argued very hard to have the theme of this conference, 'One planet agriculture and the post-fossil fuel future', was, and I'd just like to, we've got time for me to speak for a few more minutes, tell a little story because it goes back to March 2006 when I was at Schumacher College, I'd never been there before.

Satish Kumar had invited me to go and speak there and I was there for a couple of days and the evening I was there, there was a lecture given by a man called Rob Hopkins on peak oil and I went along to that lecture because I didn't know much about it.

And that lecture made me think in the most profound way about the way in which I farmed, and the way in which I realised I would have to change my farming, and therefore I realised by extension, or at least this is the proposition of this conference really, that we would all have to re-think the way we farm and the way we relate to our food over the coming years.

And you'll hear much more about that story, and the reasons why it became clear to me during that hour that actually I needed to think much more deeply about this, because of course I was already worried about climate change but strangely enough I had this slight feeling of well, everyone's saying climate change is inevitable, there's not much we can do now to stop what's going to happen before 2030.

I knew I had to turn down my television monitor, fly less, drive a bit less, and I also had a vague feeling I needed to do something with my farming, but somehow realising that we are on the threshold, potentially, of a post-fossil fuel era made me think about it in a very different way, and not in a fearful way.

It made me feel slightly inspired, strangely enough, because it made me realise I needed to do something myself, and I needed to do something for my farm and my business and all those, the food community around me, if we were going to avoid a dreadful catastrophe potentially, when suddenly things get serious. And I think it could get serious much sooner than people realise. And that really is what was explained to me.

I thought that it was worth expanding that. So we've got arguably some of the world's leading speakers on these themes that will address this conference tomorrow morning, who will take you on a journey. Obviously you will be the judges of how serious this threat is and whether in fact it's depressing or strangely inspirational.

So that's why this theme, and why I believe that for all that we've done and achieved, we have to recognise that there are bigger forces now confronting us and that we have to stand in front of those and recognise our responsibilities in front of them. So that's where I am tonight.

(Applause)

Jonathan Dimbleby: Patrick, I made it pretty clear that I am extremely sympathetic to the way in which you're developing the conference, and in fact I think I'm right, we could have sold, we could have had twice as many delegates here as we've actually been able to accept because of our space, which is a measure of your broad judgement.

But, a whole conference devoted to this, when there are those who, one understands very well, producers for instance, who are saying we've got some real today's problems, tomorrow's problems, and look what's happening to our prices, look how we're being squeezed by supermarkets, look how we're being squeezed even by organic wholesalers, our price is being borne down.

How are we able to stay in business? How are we going to resolve those battles? How are we going to do the battle with Defra to get a better deal? How are we going to ensure our standards? What level of standards should we have in order to attract more people to produce organically without losing the plot in the process? So what's your answer to the thought that it's all very well, but you've bitten off more than you or I should be chewing?

Patrick Holden: I would say that our day job, as it were, in the Soil Association will be to continue to address many of the issues you've just run through and we are already doing. I mean an enormous amount of work is going on, probably not enough of it made public, as well as all the conferences and events that we run on specialist subjects through the year to address many of the issues you've just mentioned and I think you probably ought to question me on specific issues if you want me to elucidate.

But it seems to me that we're standing in front of something here which is far, far bigger than that. It's going to completely threaten all the systems that we take for granted at the moment. So if you take, for instance, my farming system, I thought I was quite radical, I thought, you know, it's been established 30 years, we've got a dairy herd, we try to feed them from the farm, they're a native breed, we're growing special carrots with a story and all the rest of it.

But then I realised that actually, when my food gets to the farm gate, it goes into a centralised distribution system which is entirely dependent on the existing, fossil fuel-driven, national distribution infrastructure. And if this scenario of this progressive descent of fossil fuel energy which could halve it or maybe even reduce it to a quarter or less than that by the late 2020s happens, I'm going to have to re-think all that.

Which means maybe, I'm going to have to re-think how the food is sold, which begs the question can I get loyalty of the citizens who live around me, because at the moment they're buying food on price or they're buying commodity food.

So, there are huge issues that come out of that and I'm not saying that we should abandon the issues that we're already working on and we really do, our staff are doing so much work on so many fronts to help the price issues and the standards issues and all the rest of it.

But faced with this issue, surely we couldn't just stand and look at it and not actually devote some serious thinking time. And one of the things I want to say about this conference is that we've got tomorrow morning which is plenary sessions, and then we've got the rest of the conference effectively over to you.

Because these workshops are intended for us to discuss together the various aspects and the ways in which this will touch our lives and hopefully, what we will be able to do is for your ideas to be amplified through the conference proceedings because although we've got the conference handout, we've got a One Planet handbook which isn't yet complete, because we hope to capture some of the stuff that comes out of this conference in it and publish shortly after the conference ends.

So, I take your point, but I think it was a bigger force and a bigger need than just our usual work.

Jonathan Dimbleby: One other point for anyone else who wants to then say something, one other point to make is that, do you sense at all that there is a risk? Everyone, as it were, is forced to deal with the issue of climate change to a greater or lesser degree.

A lot of people are, as it were, jumping on our bandwagon, but they may well find that they want to steer the wagon in slightly different directions from the direction in which we have gone. Do you see a risk that those core values, in the process of coming to terms with and to grips with the bigger picture, could erode the very essence of what makes the Soil Association an organisation which knows what it means, and knows what it is, and knows what it believes?

Patrick Holden: I think that will inevitably happen and I think it's happened with the organic movement. There are some people who think that the organic movement's lost its way, lost its soul and has become its opposite and in America, there's a lot of talk about real food, slow food, artisan food and the organic industry having parted company.

But it seems to me that with any radical movement, which the Soil Association was in the early days before there were any standards or a market, we were driven, or they were driven, because this is before my time, by a set of really powerful ideas and a philosophy. And once that philosophy and set of principles starts to go into the mainstream, it is inevitable, because it has been throughout history with every radical movement that there will be dilutionary pressures on it.

And I think the question is whether we, the people who are upholding the values and who sign up to them on a deeper level, are strong enough to check, to make sure that we're not deviating from the path of the founders, and to keep making sure that we pull back to where we really need to go.

So I don't think that we should be shocked that these pressures are on us. It's about worldliness, and I think exactly the same thing with this new direction. Yes, there will be people who will want to slightly deflect from the radicalism of let's say, giving up all trade in food, which certainly that's more radical than I think, because there will continue to be trade in food.

It's a question of what kind of trade and under what circumstances. For instance, should it all be organic? It'll have to be organic in my view, because the price of fossil fuels will price fertiliser out of the market. But I think it's our job to try to be stewards of the principles as applied to this new direction.

Jonathan Dimbleby: Okay, you assert that powerfully. One very brief question. Answer this question - how many – you have a milking herd?

Patrick Holden: 61 cows.

Jonathan Dimbleby: 61 cows. Do you know how much methane they produce?

Patrick Holden: No.

Jonathan Dimbleby: Do you know how important methane is as a contribution to global warming?

Patrick Holden: Very.

Jonathan Dimbleby: If you are persuaded that it is unsustainable for us to use animals, ruminants, in the way that we do, because of the contribution that they make to global warming, would you be willing to give up your dairy herd and grow more carrots? Without the use of fossil fuels to tractor your carrots?

Patrick Holden: Could I answer your question by...

Jonathan Dimbleby: As you like, you can, you don't even have to answer it.

Patrick Holden: No, I do want to answer it. I mentioned that there are a number of challenges which are not specifically about organic farming but which extend beyond it, which the whole world has to address.

Now, livestock is one of them. It's not just about methane, although that's pretty central, it's also about red meat and white meat, it's about how many livestock should be part of sustainable agriculture, and what kind of genetic basis they should have.

It's about welfare issues. It seems to me that the way in which the Soil Association should address, say the livestock issue, but also the soil issue and the other issues that I mentioned, is not simply to try to think we can solve these problems ourselves, because then we would be guilty of falling into the trap of thinking that we can do everything that you were worried about.

But if we reach out to others who are experts in their field, who are already leaning in our direction, make common cause with them, perhaps set up some think tanks with them, and produce reports from the Soil Association's philosophical perspective on those issues, I think that would be a good contribution to make towards sustainable development.

As you mentioned the sustainable development in so-called developing countries, arguably they're going to be seen as the more developed countries when all of this happens. What is our role there? The Soil Association had strong views about this for a decade, we've never been at the top table, now perhaps the moment is to reach out and recognise that there are other organisations doing parallel work and we have to find common cause with them. So I think that's one of the things that ought to come out of this conference.

» Listen to the podcast [mp3, 8,088 KB]