This is my attempt to bring the Guild of Agricultural Journalists of Great Britain into the 21st century.
The chairman's blogspot will be used to discuss my travels, promote ideas and tell you what is happening within the organisation. I might also use it to raise issues that we all have as journalists.
I realise that staying as I do in northern Aberdeenshire that I will be remote to many of you. I, however, hope that this little space on the Internet will allow some interaction and ensure that everyone can give me feed back.
My e-mail is joe.watson@mac.com and I will publish on here some of the responses that I get.
I look forward to either hearing or seeing you.
Regards
Joe Watson
Exercising Clydesdale foals at the Clydesdale Winter Fair at Perth
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5 comments:
Hey Guiseppe
Just read your first blog. Is it, or any future blogs, open to general comment or is it just for members of the Guild to air their grievances at you? Like the idea, hate the pseudo trendy format. What's wrong with good old fashioned black type on a white background? Makes the thing much easier for tired old farts like me to read! Niall
Open to everyone to read and comment upon. The more comments the better.
Joe
Glad to see you've entered the Blogosphere. Time precludes me from giving much response,I must say, but good to see you driving forward on the new media front !
Frustrations with Defra comms continues unabated I see. Back in the days I was a real journo (on Dairy Farmer) we used to do everything possible to avoid the then MAFF press office. Mainly because their sole function seemed to be to prevent communication. At least to prevent us from talking to the people we really wanted to in time to meet our deadlines. Managed (as I'm sure you have) to find some ingenious ways round - mainly through knowing people.
Just a comment on the old blog - RH column ....interesting to see under news stories what some topics throw up. Milliband is OK (always supposing anyone really cares about what he says), but MDC gives some interesting US links and the New Zealanders seem to have a monopoly on milk stores. Think we need to get Google sorted out of the right priorities.
All the best for now
George
George
Thanks for that. Yes we always find ways past the press office, but being devolved these days is difficult because there is such a high turnover of people at Defra, even in the old press office.
Appreciate your comment on Google, but it appears a sad fact of life that other countries are leading the industry, not just in news stories, but in terms of innovation, new products and drive. We still here live in the dream world that for help you should turn to the Government and others.
That ain't the way entrepreneurs work. They get off their own backsides and go and do it. We need a culture change in the UK; the complacency comes from too many subsidies for far too long. Get rid of them and you'll get a restructuring, radical yes, but at least those that are left are in it for the business of farming, not the business of chasing brown paper envelopes which could be argued are the ruination of British agriculture.
Regards
Joe
I have had the following e-mail from David Ashton.
Dear Joe,
Firstly let me say I did try to reply to your blog as you say: “I consider the blog to be an important in the communications process. You will find it controversial and thought provoking. I want your thoughts and I also want your comments ”. I do not find it controversial I think in fact it’s a very democratic process the problem is I have NO idea how a blog works, so I went in and joined up on the Google account and gave my self a username & password so I could send you my thoughts but they disappeared, when I sent it to you and I am certain you did not receive it.
But living as I do between two cultures and able to speak read & write several European languages fluently, I am able to follow the debate on the future of ‘ Food Production ‘ much of which is not reported in the main stream press in Europe or Britain but talking as I do too International Agricultural Journalists. I get lots of feedback on their concerns and worries. Mostly the comments I get are that EU & European Integration is a process, which is depriving European Nation States, Farmers & People of their national democracy and independence. Within each member state of the EU it like as if it entails a gradual coup by government executives, against legislatures, so politicians are against the citizens who elect them, and the various National NFU’s Executive talk to same language, party line which increasingly gets further and further removed from the reality of those on the ground trying to produce food and keep their business’s solvent. If I write any of this for main stream UK papers it will not be printed. As it seems the EU hollows out the Nation States, sucking the reality of power from its governmental institutions while leaving them formally in existence. They keep their old names like Parliament, Government, Supreme or High Court, - so as not to upset ordinary citizens but the traditional policy making decisions on all things but in our case on food production have been transformed their prime purpose is to be transmitters of EU Laws which are influenced by the massive lobby of Multi International Supermarkets, and Food Conglomerates there is no place for small scale producers or people like me beekeepers in this grand design.
I see it clearly with our bees and the struggle to keep them alive, as basic research into food production at Defra’s Rothamsted Research centre is cut, which according to Norman Carreck a former researcher on bees sack in recent cut backs. He says although the Government promised no more research cut backs in bee health over 600 scientist and research staff have lost their jobs in Agricultural Research in last 6 years. It seems as if the bourgeois ideologist have discovered a method of human beings living without food. According to the Danish NFU’s press cutting service food prices have reason approximately 30% since September 2006 due to grain, pulse’s and other essential food crop shortfalls world wide, of course they spend hours debating the reasons for this like ancient mystics working out how many angels can dance on the tip of a pin head. But one thing is clear 90% of beekeepers in the world are now aged over 60 years old, and between 80% & 90% of the food we eat and take for granted depends on pollination by insects mostly bees, according to what I hear and press cuttings my sister has saved for me over the winter UK & European beekeepers are suffering large losses of bees over 30% in hives full of honey have died. But it’s very difficult to have a rational discussion with any one in Government or the Food Chain about the problem. It like a sort of “ secret Keynesianism (or reverse keynesianism) were the government now does not have any responsibility for financing the infrastructure but the public in the various countries can go into debt to finance the state, and in future they can go with out food, or get into debt to acquire the reducing quantities of a commodity we have up until now take for granted “ FOOD!
Its like as if the EU Integration has thus turned the State itself into an enemy of its own people while clamping a form of financial feudalism on European people with increasing personal debts. It is to me who grew up in Liverpool with a Scottish Gaelic Speaking Mother during the blitz and spent some time with her literate family in Lochranza, Isle of Arran away from the bombs. As if we are moving into the profound crisis of democracy that many of my Liverpool childhood friends parents talk about when they escaped from Europe to try to get to USA in 1930s and funds ran out in Liverpool so they got no further than a look at the Pier Head, and the liners sailing too USA, they called this crisis fascism! It is challenging people everywhere to join together locally in a growing international movement to restore national, and local democratic accountability and national independence across our continent Europe!
So when I write about the problems of Blue Tongue in Northern Europe or Q Fever for a well known Scottish publication my article is ignored. Yet I have just this week received a very worrying report, in Danish from Danish School of Veterinary Science, about Q Fever from the Netherlands Agricultural Attaché too Scandinavia, Nijland Renske. She Nijland, says that both Q Fever & Blue Tongue are now worrying every one in Northern European Agriculture, as to how fast they are both spreading its getting out of control, see this story which I attach. About Blue Tongue. But the big denial factor as I discussed with leading European Academics and diplomats in February over lunch at the Danish Cattle Congress, is “ Peak Oil & Food Production” were is the debate about this topic in our main stream media?
Peak Oil It's not about running out of oil so much as it is about running out of cheap oil. My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel. The above quote is a popular saying used by Saudi Arabs to remind themselves that the boom brought about by the switch to oil as the energy source of first choice will be short lived-- spanning only a few brief generations. What most Westerners fail to grasp--or refuse to grasp--is that the insight contained in this quote applies not only to the citizens of petroleum rich nations in the Middle East, but to everyone else-- including ourselves. While they may extract the fossil fuels, we rely on it for almost everything we have in modern society. It helps to understand what oil has meant to civilization over the past 150 years by thinking of it as a resource with near magical properties. Imagine having a black box with a slot on top. Every time you insert $1 into the slot and shake the box, $100 appears which you can then spend as you wish. A $100 return for every $1 invested is a fantastically high return. So it has been with oil for the past 150 years. For every barrel we invested in extracting additional oil, we got back 100 more barrels on average. However, this ratio has begun declining over the past few decades. Some estimates state that it could be as low as 10:1 in 2006. No one knows the true ratio for certain but all agree that it's decreasing steadily and will continue to do so. Every barrel of oil is estimated to provide the energy equivalent of eight adult human beings working full-time for a year. In addition to providing humanity with the cheapest source of energy in its history, oil has also enabled us to produce tens of thousands of products that were not otherwise possible to bring into existence before the discovery of fossil fuels. Practically everything we eat, consume, and use has fossil fuel in it in one-way or another. Fossil fuel molecules permeate almost everything our society relies on to function. Specifically, fossil fuels (i.e., oil and natural gas) and their derivatives are used in the manufacture of medicines, agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, plastics, alcohol, building materials, cloth, detergents, synthetic rubber, glycerine, sulphur, solvents, nylon, paints, polyesters, food additives, dyes and supplements, explosives, and insulating mater
The oil we eat (from Harpers Magazine by Richard Manning February 2004)
Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.
Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
Energy cannot be created or cancelled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.” The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”
If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.
As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark—a conservative portfolio of investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to “sponsor its own fertility,” to use visionary agronomist Wes Jackson's phrase. This is the plant world's norm.
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seedeaters such as us. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, and provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, and the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a mouldboard plough. A robbery was in progress.
When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar's satchel.
I've already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe's primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when ploughs destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it's mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can't eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.
Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalise.
Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the Caucasus Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for linearbandkeramik, the German word that describes the distinctive pottery remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along what is now the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros Mountains. This is the centre of domestication for the Western world's main crops and livestock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.
Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same time, one cantered on rice in what is now China and India and one cantered on corn and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is tropical and its expansion depends on water, so it developed only in floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as voracious as wheat; the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of Spanish conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people's coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated the motion and violence that we know as imperialism.
The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a “blitzkrieg.” A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn't need, suggesting the possibility of coexistence. That's not what happened, however. Both genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters. The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.
Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain spear points that originally belonged to the farmers, and we can guess they weren't trade goods. One group of anthropologists concludes, “The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile.” The world's surviving Black feet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca, and Maori probably have the best idea of the nature of these interactions.
Wheat is temperate and prefers ploughed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain in something like their native state today. Only 1 percent of temperate grasslands remain un-destroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.
The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the United States, Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the European plain into the sub-Siberian steppes. This area largely describes the First World, the developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the habitat of wheat and beef but also the globe's islands of Caucasians, of European surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the temperate grasslands, the neo-Europe’s, accounted for about 80 percent of all wheat exports in the world, and about 86 percent of all corn. That is to say, the neo-Europe drive the world's agriculture. The dominance does not stop with grain. These countries, plus the mother ship—Europe—accounted for three fourths of all agricultural exports of all crops in the world in 1999.
Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:
What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man . . .. Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.
Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centres of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and Western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.
Well Joe as my Danish Agricultural History teacher told me when I studied Danish Agriculture in the early 1960s “ The secret of knowledge is not knowing the right answers, but having the ability to ask the right questions and go to the right sources “. Or As Bertal Brecht says “ So many questions and so few answers “. It seems to me that unless we start asking the right questions, and getting some of the answers published in the agricultural press we face a massive crisis in next few years of fuel, and food shortages.
By David Ashton Agricultural Journalist © GAJ email: beeman@post.tele.dk Tel: 004597491227
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