Here's a copy of the speech I gave a while back (11 October 2014) on organic farming which raised a few eyebrows and got people thinking and talking about the future.
(It might differ a little to what I actually said - I get sidetracked sometimes and may have skipped a few bits and answered a few questions)
Thanks Neville for inviting me.
Good Morning everyone, What I'm going to talk about today is Organic Farming, what it is about, why do it and the situation we have at the moment and where I think it should be going in the future. But first I'd like to introduce myself, explain why I'm qualified to talk about this and tell about our own experience with running an organic farm.
I'm Gavin Edwards - also known on the internet as The Self-Sufficient Farmer™.
I'm a Master of Self-Sufficiency™, Master Gardener (Edible Plants)™ and Master of Seed Saving™. I don't talk about things I haven't done or don't know how to do.I'm a past member of : OGAWA, WANATCA, PAWA, HSCA, SSN, HSWA, HDRA, co-convener of Balingup Seed savers, founder of South-West Seed Savers and founder and director of Mama Earth Pty Ltd. I'm a UWA Science dropout and do private research into edible plants and sustainable food production techniques.
I've been a vegetable grower for 45 years. I've been passionate about growing vegetables since my grandfather had me thinning and weeding his carrots about age five. I'm sure I ate more than I thinned! Mum and Dad had a vegie patch down the back when I was a kid and since then I've always grown vegies. It's something I've never lost interest in, something that I've always loved to do more of, never less. To quote Wordsworth - "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her". I joined the Organic Growers Association of Western Australia (OGAWA) in 1989. I've never sprayed and I never will. I've not found it necessary to spray poisons on food or around food in my 45 years of growing.
As a kid I grew up around the art and craft industry which went hand-in-hand with growing food. My mum was a bit of a repressed hippy and worked in the craft shop in Shenton Park, so, luckily for me, I was exposed to a lot of handicrafts as a kid. It was the 70's and I was surrounded by macrame, spinning and weaving, tapestry, emboidery, candlemaking, lampshademaking, basketry, woodturning, etc, etc.
I spent 10 years as a partner in our family's business 'Crossways Wool & Fabrics', in Subiaco. We had three shops until Mum became very sick with encephalitis from a mosquito bite and we sold them off. Mum with her typical pioneering determination taught herself to talk and walk again.
In 1992 I used my share from the sale of Crossways and all my savings and bought the craft shop in Shenton Park that mum used to work in and renamed it 'The Craft House'. I went into the shop to get the money to buy a small farm. I had made gardens and grown vegies where-ever I lived but had always wanted to grow on a larger scale. I had lived about half my life in the city and half in the bush. The call of the bush was strong. In just over five years I had pentupled the business. I also studied martial arts at night (when I wasn't teaching craft classes) and after about 10 years became a Martial Arts Instructor and worked in the Security Industry.
I sold the craft supply business in 1997 and bought farmland in Balingup in the south-west of Western Australia (about 280km south of Perth and about 70km inland from Bunbury between Donnybrook and Bridgetown). My parents bought the peach orchard over the road and I ran their orchard for five years while I built a house and set up my own farm.
Between 1997 and 2012 I founded Balingup Sustainable Small Farm™ with my wife, Lisa McAndrew . We had started Australia's First Sustainable Small Farm™. The farm was an Organic Market Garden, Orchard, Seed Farm, Food Plant Museum™ and Edible Plant Nursery. It was also a Research Centre for Sustainable Food Production and a Demonstration site for Sustainability and Self-reliance. We maintained the largest seedbank of rare, heritage and heirloom vegetable seed varieties in Western Australia and taught classes in Self-Sufficiency and Sustainability (the real version - not the government's version). Naturally we attracted the ire of the government and it's big business buddies who then saw fit to compete with us, copy us and try to shut us down, even going so far as to offer free workshops in sustainability. Try and compete with publicly funded workshops being run for free!
We had a very hard time on this farm and I did every job going to keep it - carpenter, nursery hand, head gardener, tractor work, worked on vineyards and orchards, chopped wood, mowed the tennis courts, helped shear alpaccas - whatever was about. We had no power and were on candles for the first five years. We fought through illness - I had a "fatal" fungal infection from handling mouldy hay which I recovered from by taking an alternative treatment and Lisa had chronic fatigue twice.
We faced poverty, problems with neighbours, townspeople, community groups, the permaculturists, universities, the ABC, local, state and federal government and a trail of corruption leading to right to the top (but that is another story still to come out which we are writing about). We fought against the introduction of GMOs into WA and lost - BUT, we survived.
In 2010 Lisa and I founded Mama Earth Pty Ltd. - our company to do good and make a difference. We started a bookshop in Balingup and also an Op Shop.
I ran a Martial Arts Dojo in Balingup to teach self-defense and keep the local youth off the street and set an example. I also worked as a Licenced Security Officer but have now retired from this type of work.
After the introduction of GMO's we then couldn't do our organic seed farm without risk of contamination and so we sold the farm and have moved to Tasmania (which is still currently GMO-free).
We have now founded Good Heart Farm™ - Tasmania's First Sustainable Small Farm™ and Australia's First Community Farm™ in the beautiful farming district of Lapoinya. Our name comes from "Land in Good Heart", an old farming term for good, fertile land.
We are not a standard or normal organic farm. We are farming without a tractor and not using a mower on the orchard. I don't want to machine the land - I want to bring people back to the rural areas and have people work the land a bit like William Morris and the arts and crafts movement who's motto was "Make nothing that is not beautiful nor denigrates the maker". We are starting The Good Heart School of Self-Sufficiency™ based at Good Heart Farm™ to teach the 'ways of being' and gamut of skills needed for living in the countryside.
We are a Self-Sufficient Farm™ - that is we grow for ourselves first then sell the excess direct. We have an organic orchard and are in the process of putting in a small organic market garden like we did in Western Australia and we also sell organic meat when we have enough.
We won't be making our income just from produce. Apart from teaching self-sufficiency and Self-Sufficient Farming™ we are setting up a Food Plant Sanctuary™ and a seed farm to save and produce heritage varieties of vegetables and fruit trees. I'm also trying to set up a network of dedicated growers who want to help save rare varieties.
Enough about us -
What is Organic Farming?
Does anyone know what organic means?
There is some confusion over the term organic.
There are two definitions:
1 The scientific definition - made of carbon (or more correctly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen)
2 The gardening and farming definition - grown without the use of chemicals. In gardening, "chemicals" means poisons - pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc.
Organic gardening was coined by Sir Albert Howard, a British soil scientist around 1940 while studying composting as a way to improve farm fertility. It was promoted by Lady Eve Balfour of the Soil Association but didn't really start to take off until another scientist, Rachel Carson, wrote a book in the sixties called Silent Spring drawing attention the effect on the food chain of persistent chemicals such as DDT which was eventually proved to lead to birth defects in human beings.
People are concerned about what is in their food and they should be. Conventional farm produced food is laden with dangerous toxic chemicals, many banned in other countries. More chemicals are then added to produce supermarket food. Conventional produce also has less nutrients than organic food. The land also suffers from the way conventional farmers farm. Old farmers used to try and leave the land in better shape than when they got it, most modern farmers just want to make a dollar and that's the truth.
Why do organic farming? Because we love the land and we care about what we eat. You are what you eat. Because we care about people and we want people in the future to have a future. Because we love life and want to see life continue. You shouldn't do organic farming just for the money, even though organic farmers can make a lot (though there are much easier ways of making money). The money should be a secondary consideration.
The situation at the moment is a lot of people are talking about how good organic is and they say want to do it, but our experience is unfortunately the public don't want to pay for it because they can buy conventional produce much cheaper. The conventional produce though is full of chemicals which are effecting their health and cost them more in the long run.
Here's my contentious ideas:
Organic food should be about 100 times dearer than what it is and conventional (sprayed) produce should be banned. In pre-industrialization times, a peasant was paid a loaf of bread for a weeks work. Nowadays the average weeks wages is about A$677. Say the average price of a loaf of bread is about $3 - that makes a weeks wages 200 times dearer (an organic loaf sells for about $6, hence 100 times). The point I'm trying to make here is that wages have gone up many times in comparison to the cost of food. The price of food has been suppressed by competition (market forces) due to industrialized farming - due to oil. So city people's wages have gone way up in comparison to what they spend on food. Is the work city people do really worth that much more than the honest work of growing food by hand? If these people tried to grow their own food and provide for themselves they will quickly realize that this work is worth something and this is what I am proposing, that city people do just that - grow their own food themselves (in the countryside).
This is why small growers have been forced to get bigger, it's called 'economy of scale' - a bigger operation reduces the cost per unit. Generally, the quality also reduces in some way, and food is no different, the nutrients in agrobusiness foodstuffs are much lower. Conventional agriculture leads to land degradation - the costs of which are not taken into account and no-one yet pays for it. But someone will have to pay in the future. It is based on cheap fossil fuels to run the machinery and transport it to market. It also leads to an incredible amount of waste. About 90% of the food is wasted - in harvesting, processing, transport and distribution, in storage, and at the point of sale (anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows how much is wasted). There is no food shortage, what a load of rubbish, it's politics. Foreign aid at the moment is being used as a vehicle to get agricultural technologies, the chemical companies ones, into the undeveloped countries.
Just as aside to this, Does anyone know what happened in world war two? It was to do with the wealthy industrialists. After WWI the industrialists, mostly from the UK and the US had big loans to Germany and when the world went into depression they called in their loans. The German people were caught in a hard place and suffered. I don't agree with what progressed from there with Hitler but I do see how they felt economically. After WWII an amnesty was granted to the remaining Nazi scientists, some came to Australia and into what was to become CSIRO and into US military science research. [I didn't say this in the speech but the research data they obtained by experimentation on the Jews should have been destroyed - but wasn't]. From there, I'm still researching what went on but we can be pretty sure some of them went into agricultural science research and the chemical companies and this is where our chemical sprays come from.
I argue that the future of farming and living is to grow the food at or near home - for people to live in the country.
Organic farms, especially those like us that try to reduce our dependence on machinery, need more labour and so our solution is to have more people on the land - a Self-Sufficient Community Farm™ - where people work together to grow their own food and provide for themselves first. What we are doing is trying to make a new way forward for farming and living on the land, a new vision for the future.
Thanks for listening.
© Gavin Edwards 2014. All rights reserved.
The Self-Sufficient Farmer™, Community Farm™, Balingup Sustainable Small Farm™, Sustainable Small Farm™, Food Plant Museum™, Good Heart Farm™, Good Heart School of Self-Sufficiency™ and Self-Sufficient Community Farm™are common law trademarks of Mama Earth Pty Ltd.
