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Back in the 1990s, when I was still striving to appease supermarket buyers, I was appalled by the waste that inevitably resulted from pursuing their fickle favour.
This is coming from France where the soil is ‘full to the throat’ and has been since June – it has almost been as wet as in Devon. In response we have our brand new, two acre, large football pitch sized tunnel which is already planted with 40,000 lettuces plus chard, spinach and pak choi. All should be in your boxes in March, two months ahead of the UK season, helping to fill our ‘hungry gap’ and to give you relief from parsnips and swedes. After less than a week the roots are reaching out into the soil and the leaves are putting on new growth.
About five years ago we took the decision not to sell crops grown under heated glass. Burning fossil fuels to maintain a temperature of 20°C inside a single glazed greenhouse in the depths of winter is environmental insanity. According to our work with Exeter University, even after accounting for transport, it is ten to twenty times less damaging to import peppers and tomatoes from Spain, where heat is not required.
15 years ago I took the government to the High Court in London to challenge the legality of some GM maize trials bordering our farm in Devon. Encouraged by my father and a group of Totnes radicals, I read a stack of scientific papers and felt sufficiently concerned to accept support from Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association and hire a lawyer. We lost in court but won in the papers, which turned out to be more important.
Have no doubt, there is a cost of producing food to the standards most of us want. There is an even greater cost to taking the trouble of doing it yourself or only buying in from people you completely trust. We live in a world of brands where everything, bar designing the tick, is outsourced to the lowest bid on the world market. Sometimes there is a good reason why something can be done more cheaply by someone unknown on the other side of the world. But sometimes it is because they are doing things that are convenient for you not to know about.
Issue 12: Fairness and five years.
Find out more about Wicked Leeks and our publisher, organic veg box company Riverford.