Guerrilla Gardeners Go Mainstream

There’s a wonderful organisation out there, a group of people who were considered a bit bonkers at the time they started , whose mission in life is to turn roundabouts into flower beds. They’re the Guerrilla Gardeners . The idea is that in covert, night time highly-organised operations they'd grab an unused and unloved piece of land, mostly in urban areas and beautify it with flowers. A sort of Alan Titchmarsh in `Milk-Tray Man' garb.

It’s the kind of thing that councils should be doing, but these days in many places they can’t afford to. The reaction to the Guerrilla Gardeners was mixed – Many communities welcomed them with open arms, but some local authorities were decidedly sniffy, citing things like `elf & safety as the traditional reason for wanting this outrageous behaviour stopped. It's the kind of thing that gives elves a bad name.

A garden plot at Linthorpe Primary School in Middlesbrough

Now though the principle of grabbing any spare bit of land going has become `legit’, and is even being encouraged, but not for flowers. With food price inflation hitting 12% and petrol heading towards £2 a litre many people, and indeed those in authority, are looking for new and cheaper ways to feed the ever growing population. Urban Farming has become the buzzword these days, with a slightly Utopian concept that you can feed the cities from land within the cities. It harks back to the `Dig for Victory’ campaigns of the war years and the allotment movement which both preceded and followed the Second World War.

In recent times many of those allotments have been under threat. A friend of mine has just fought off a plot (sorry) to take away the allotments where she grows food, to extend a golf course. Fortunately the local council stepped in and protected the land. Not everybody has been so lucky. Over the past thirty years, something like two hundred thousand allotments have been lost in the UK.

In the North of England there’s a different approach being taken, with the Urban Farming project set up in Middlesbrough under a series of events called DOTT 07. DOTT stands for Designs of the Times, and it’s all about community involvement. In the case of Middlesbrough more than two hundred and fifty scraps of land have been identified which can be used to grow vegetables... many of them small and unused.

The organisers admit that it won’t feed the people of Teesside, but it might get them thinking about growing their own. The quantity of food grown on an allotment can make more of a difference to the cost of feeding a family, and can go a long way to supplying the annual vegetable requirements for four people.

More than seventy schools in the borough are taking part, giving kids the chance to grow and eat their own food, and perhaps understand a bit more about how it’s done and the amount of work involved. And people in local neighbourhoods are being asked to identify patches of land which could be planted with vegetables. So the waste ground of Middlesbrough may be bringing lettuce to a salad bar near you soon, and it won’t be done by people creeping around at night either.

Making hay, if the sun shines.

It’s a new variation on scratch’n’sniff. Four Hessian sacks full of grass, and you have to pick the one you’d offer to the sheep whose heart you’d like to win. I picked the one which was made from lowland grass in an improved meadow.

The trouble is that in this context the term improved is roughly the same as applied to improvements in train timetables. All the flowers had been abolished as a necessary step towards a more efficient nutritional enhancement of the lives of sheep. In other words it does the job, but lacks soul.

The four bags of hay were part of an exhibition at St John’s Chapel in Weardale on the History of Hay-Time, along with some rather barbaric looking instruments, which preceeded the days of tractors, and, lots of pictures of Edwardian haymakers looking seriously over-dressed.

It’s Hay Time in Teesdale, well almost. Just a few weeks to go and the stunning carpet of colours which make this landscape so spectacular at this time of year will have been cut, turned, dried and baled into a food-store for winter. Weather permitting that is.

The North Pennines has a patchwork of flower rich hay meadows which are rare in the British Countryside these days. When it comes to the most valuable `species rich’ examples, there is just two thousand acres of them left in the whole of the UK.

And these meadows are a haven for some of the rarest plants in the land, such as Eyebright, Great Burnet, Bistort and Pignut and Lady’s Mantle. All of these were to be found in a field I visited with John O’Reilly from the Haytime project which is run by the North Pennine Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty team, think of an AONB as a sort of National Park `lite’. This gently sloping field close to the River Tees is a treasure trove of rare, precious and largely unspectacular looking plants which grow here and in very few other places.

The grass and the flowers grow here because the farmer is paid to take his sheep and cattle off this land at the end of March. The flowers, and the grass is then untroubled by teeth for at least three months before it is harvested. By the beginning of June, yellow, white, mauve and green jostle for the eye’s attention. By the end of July it’s gone, felled, and left on the ground to dry, being every day to make sure that happens.

But nothing ever goes smoothly in farming, and the curse of haytime is rain. Hay, as opposed to Silage is a dry feed. If it’s wet when it’s baled it can go rotten and could make the animals which eat it ill. So at the end of June and into July the farmers pray for sunshine, and have to move fast before it disappears, hence the old saying making hay while the sun shines.

Last year the North Pennines escaped lightly when the skies unleashed a torrent of water on rural England. However it seriously disrupted the haymaking. The result is that the farmers have to use other methods of preserving the food. Silage is moist grass which is sealed into either silos or wrapped in plastic, where it ferments; producing acid which `pickles’ the grass, and stops it rotting. Another variation in Haylage, a relatively recent innovation where grass with a moisture content of about 50%, as opposed to about 20% for Hay, is wrapped in plastic and partially ferments.

Anyway, what makes hay really important for conservationists and botanists is that in an ideal world, as the grass and the cut flowers lay on the ground drying out, seeds are released as the hay is turned, thus refreshing the meadows.

Infact in some places, hay from flower rich meadows is brought to `improved’ land and dried there in an effort to `un-improve’ or restore these fields.

So valuable are these hay meadows considered by conservationists that they lobbied long and hard for the government to introduce a system to pay farmers to manage them for conservation.

In 1987 Environmentally Sensitive Area Payments were introduced to stop the loss of these habitats. Under the agreements farmers were required to remove their livestock from these fields by the end of March, the meadows could not be cut until the end of July, and artificial fertiliser was banned.

Although the schemes went some way to revitalising the upland meadows, farmers found them inflexible and the ESA agreements are now coming to an end. They are to be replaced by what it so endearingly called the Higher Level Scheme. The idea is that you, the farmer, draw up a series of nature conservation measures, and you agree them with Natural England who will then pay you money for implementing them. The first problem, which has apparently now been solved was that there wasn’t nearly enough money to fund the same level of conservation as before under the old ESA payments.

Now the difficulty lies with staffing. Because all of these `Higher Level’ agreements are individually tailored to each farm, the staff input is much higher, and there aren’t enough staff to go around. There is a real fear amongst those trying to halt the decline of hay meadows that farmers will find they have to wait to get onto the scheme, whilst they’re losing money on unproductive meadows which stand empty of stock for long periods of time, and go back to the old flower-free ways.

The worry is that if the species rich hay meadows are lost, they’re lost for good.

Where there’s muck there’s a way to survive the fuel crisis

A bit like the gruesome orange `You’ve been Tango'd’ advert. A harsh reality has crept up behind the petrol heads, and is busy slapping them about a bit. The oil price has gone through the ceiling, taken the lift up to the 16th floor and stepped out onto the terrace at the top of the building….and however strong our powers of persuasion it ain’t coming down.

This is what makes a press release from the Soil Association especially interesting. It says farming must break its dependency on artificial means of restoring the fertility of the land.

Organic agriculture eschews artificial fertiliser. Artificial fertiliser is hugely energy hungry - something approaching 90% of the cost of producing ammonia based fertilisers is made up the cost of the energy used in the process. This often comes from natural gas, but the price of natural gas is very closely aligned with oil. In the past year the cost of most artificial fertilisers has doubled.

Organic farming does not use these fertilisers, so ergo; organic farmers don’t have the added expense of these inputs into their farming system.

There is a problem though. With most organic arable systems the yields of the crops fall. That’s fine when cereal prices are generally low and growing organically can generate a premium…. However with the world price for wheat and other cereals at near record levels, it can be worth farmers renouncing their organic status to grow crops conventionally increasing the yields, and trousering the extra.

This in turn means a serious shortage of organic animal feed. One farmer I recently visited in Cumbria found the problem was getting so serious last year that she bought a small piece of arable land, converted it to organic and is now growingbarley, quite a courageous move so far north.

In the current economic climate it should pay dividends and she’s hoping to be quids-in.

In terms of the organic system this is only really feasible on mixed farms where the animals provide a natural fertiliser which can in turn be used on the crops.

It’s often little help to organic pig and poultry farmers who often have small units, and very little space, or suitable land to grow feed.

For those organic farms which are self contained, and have a complete farming system within the same unit, something which goes to the very core of the organic movement, the oil crisis could be very good news, but for others who have to buy in feed, the rising price will hit hard.

Nor is organic farming immune from the other impact of the rise in oil price. The cost of harvesting the crops, using oil driven machinery, or the distribution costs, which again are oil-based.

What the advocates of organic farming will be hoping for is that the stratospheric rise in the oil price, and the consequent rise in the price of artificial fertiliser, will make non-organic farmers think very carefully about their dependence on these inputs, and maybe cut down on their use. If that does happen the real challenge will be to find ways of keeping the yields as high as possible to feed as many people as possible, with lower inputs.

For commodity farmers the next few years could be uncomfortable, but only because the old certainties, have gone out the window, and they may have to re-learn some of the old ways of farming where nature and its healing powers replace the nitrogen quick fix from a fertiliser bag.

Get orrf my beach….

An open access sign holds up the sky in County Durham

I don’t know if you’ve noticed the sky falling in? I haven’t and it’s frankly quite disappointing. It was due to happen on the 20th of September 2004 with the introduction of the right to roam, or Open Access as it is correctly titled.

I seem to recall that the exact timetable for the countryside’s descent into hell consisted, in the first wave, of oiks blundering around accompanied by a synchronised display of falling into potholes. This would be closely followed by a second wave of raves… with all of these unwashed young people being smelly, and taking their `Class As, and their Es’ listening to their boom-boom music…. (actually if either Plastikman or AGF had been on the bill I'd have been down there with the kids myself)

This would then be followed by a rearguard action of Gore-tex wearing storm-troopers rambling across the countryside leaving sheep traumatised by being exposed to the fashion crimes of the middle aged.

I gazed at the sky, but it stayed firmly in place… eventually the sheep lost interest… that’s how sheep are…. dying is the highlight of the average sheep’s life.

Infact the biggest complaint from landowners seemed to be that not enough townies were coming out to trample the countryside and put money into the tills of teashop and B&B owners.

Undaunted by militant apathy, the hoards of barbarians have set their sights on another target. Having fought the battle to roam on mountain, moor, heath, down and common land….they’re fighting on the beaches next. The open access principle is to be extended to the coastline of England – all of it. In effect a linear footpath will be created thousands of miles long, hugging the coastal curves, and despite the fact that the government says that private gardens and parks will be exempt, landowners are not happy. For a start they won’t be compensated, and secondly the masses may well be allowed to wander onto previously private beaches. Then there are claims that lots of properties will be devalued. Would this be `devalued’ as in - property prices are tumbling anyway?

As with the previous open-access proposals the landowners aren't overly keen on the great unwashed traipsing across their land and they certainly don’t want them on their private beaches.

Would I want people wandering around next to my garden, with their noisy children and their vile mongrel dogs?

Well actually they do. Fifteen yards away from where I’m sitting, directly outside my front gate is a very heavily used footpath, what was, in medieval times, the main road from our village to the next. On sunny days like today dozens of people will walk along it, with their dogs and their children, and in the winter they might even wear Gore-tex. Am I bovvered? No actually I’m too busy watching the sky to see if it’s fallen in yet. Of course if the hoi polloi are let loose on the waterfront, goodness knows what will happen then.

I remember doing some interviews about this issue last year, and at that time it was actually very hard, if not impossible, to find anybody in the North of England with coastal land who was themselves bovvered, perhaps they’re just chilled and sky-gazing like me.

Time to take that woolly jumper off

It’s the hottest day of the year so far, officially today has been declared summer. But if you’re a sheep then life can be pretty hellish if you haven’t had your short back and sides…

This is the time of year strapping lads pose the usual question of ….`Been anywhere nice on your holidays then…’ to a succession of ladies, and a few gentleman who pass through their impromptu salons.

The trouble is that there aren’t really enough of these ovine barbers to go around, and any farmer who finds a good reliable contract shearer is best advised to treat them with love and care, to cherish them.

Like so many jobs on the land shearing isn’t that well paid… unless you’re really fast at it. But you have to be fast and careful, it’s bad form to remove the leg of lamb whilst the sheep still needs to use it. But even then the pay is only about £1.25 per animal and you have to do about 30 an hour to make decent money.

Traditionally much of the work has been done by gangs of New Zealanders, but since some sections of the tabloid press declared that all foreigners are bad, and all they want to do is come over here stealing our women, taking our jobs, and destroy our culture, HMG has been getting sniffy about Johnny Foreigner doing just that. Last year infact there was a proposal to increase the paperwork burden on these peripatetic `wool-dressers', although fortunately the government saw sense and withdrew the plan. Hostility to migrant workers is having an impact on farming, and especially food production.

The result is that crops go unpicked, as those who can come here without limit…i.e. the Poles and the Hungarians find they can now earn much better money at home, don’t have to leave their families and don’t have to live in a dilapidated caravan in the arse end of Herefordshire for months on end, and have a friendlier welcome from the locals.

Meanwhile with the pound crashing through the floor compared with other currencies a summer spent in Britain relieving pommie sheep of their wool isn’t that attractive, and there are precious few UK youngsters who fancy this backbreaking work.

So there’s a major drive by the British Wool Marketing Board to get home-grown talent trained up. As farmers get older and their offspring are exploring less arduous lines of work, the situation’s getting pretty urgent.

When the sun’s out you can just take your jumper off…. If you're a sheep, that’s not an option… you have to get someone to do it for you, otherwise you’ll just have to find a shady tree to sit under, and hope that the flies don’t attack you and lay their eggs in your wool and give you sheep scab.

Food for thought.

The headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the FAO, stands proudly overlooking the Circo Massimo, a sort of Roman running track, just around the corner from the Coliseum. Established in 1945 as a specialist agency of the newly formed United Nations, its headquarters moved to Rome in 1951.

The building is white, and marble clad. The kind of utilitarian monolith which was created from the egos of Italian Fascists and would not have looked out of place in the set of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.

Last week it hosted a major international summit tussling with the major twenty-first century totems of food security, climate change and bio-energy. To say it was a bun fight is something of an understatement. There was in excess of a thousand journalists, and their technicians from every corner of the world. They were outnumbered by the delegates by about three to one.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon tells delegates the world needs to produce 50% more food by 2030 to avoid starvation. ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

As a journalist this is a strange type of story to cover. The proceedings of the conference were streamed online, headphones connected to a receiver connected to a radio loop were provided. There were sound feeds, provided to record, and there was an internal picture feed provided by the conference organisers.

What there wasn’t, was any kind of easy access to delegates. There was a red carpeted walkway between two parts of the building along which delegates, and various dignitaries, of varying degrees of importance walked amongst us. The really important ones were shielded from the prying questions of the assembled hacks by a mixture of suits wearing a badge saying `security’ and different Italian police persons, who ushered the fourth estate out of the way with a wave of their arms. It was all rather futile, and achieved very little.

One gaggle of protestors did evade this layer of impermiability. A group of European small farmers held up paper placards drawn with a marker pen, drawing attention to the massive role of big agribusinesses in the demise of the small farmer, and the increase in world hunger…. Although the content of the message wasn’t immediately clear, it looked quite powerful with them standing silently in line holding up about six placards.

Rather conveniently for this hot and bothered hack, several of the suited securitaté chose a moment when the rolling microphones, and the nearby cameras were well within range, to snatch the placards away, and assertively bundle these quite peaceful and innocent looking farmers away. Again little achieved by the organisers, but some good radio and television footage.

And the conference itself. Well it raised a lot of issues, and there was much talk of something being needed to be done, and there was money announced, I think I recall the figure of £1.2 somewhere in the welter of communiqués and press notices, and all the talk of a new approach, and impeding crisis and conference dinner discussion. In short the issue hit the news agenda for all of two days, and nobody could agree on whether bio-fuels were the curse of the starving classes. The message at the end was a call for greater investment in agriculture, and it seems that the penny has dropped that this doesn't mean simply sending lots of bags of grain to Africa, but investing in the technolgy to enable Africa, and lots of other places to grow more food.

Will anybody’s life actually be saved by the deliberations here? I suspect not. What will probably happen is that business opportunities will present themselves, and a sort of equilibrium will emerge in years to come, where the developed world will realise that if it doesn’t do something to help the developing world, the consequent problems will overwhelm those of us who have a nice comfortable life-style untroubled by hunger. If in a decade's time there are still two hundred and eighty five million people living in hunger in the world, and no more that can be judged as a small measure of sucess of a kind.



And the elephant in the living room, is actually a pair of nellies… One of them is genetically modified, and the other is sitting there pointing its big fat trunk at the ever increasing population we have to feed. This summit conference was the opportunity for the enthusiastic supporters of GM technology to advocate it as the magic bullet which will feed the world’s poor, where as most of the European Politician tread the rather more careful line that it is one of the technologies, which in the fullness of time, may possibly be one of the weapons in the armoury. As far as controlling the ever increasing population in the world is concerned, the Vatican Secretary of State, delivering a message from The Holy Father, was strangely silent on that one.

The other rather inconvenient truth which did get some coverage, although it makes much of the farming industry in the developed world feel rather uncomfortable, is that there is actually plenty of food to go around, if we stopped eating meat, and distributed the cereals we grow evenly amongst those who need to eat them.

And did the members of the press, who had trooped out to the eternal city in oppressive temperatures through countless cordons, and checkpoints, actually get to ask any awkward questions of those with the power to make any decisions?

To do that you had to catch the eye of the official controlling a very tightly controlled press conference almost barely audable in a packed room with insufficient time to scrutinise the decision makers. There was little opportunity to actually talk to the delegates. Different coloured ID badges made sure that delegates were untroubled by pesky hacks.

I had a nice pizza in the Trastevere, and I got very hot and bothered in a city which is dysfunctional at the best of times. However under the security closures of roads, metro stations, and tramlines, surrounding a major international conference, it borders on being a complete basket case.

So did the summit conference actually achieve anything, for the people that matter? It’s difficult to see what decisions could have been made in this environment, other than by contact between the different delegates, in non-smoke filled rooms, away from the prying eyes of the press. If there is sufficient food in the places in which it is needed to feed the people who need to eat it in five years time, then the answer is yes…. Breath will be held.

Welcome

My name is Mark Holdstock, and I work as a journalist writing and broadcasting about food, farming, rural affairs, and transport.

I've created this blog as a way of writing at greater length about many of the topics I cover in my work. Please feel free to comment on anything you see through the comments button at the bottom of the page.

Mark