Emma Heseltine: Alex, one of our Monday helpers and I are checking the ewes and lambs at Wallacefield. It doesn’t quite add up and I can hear a plaintive baaing coming from the vicinity of the river; someone is lost.
20 May 2012 |
0 Comments | Recommended by 0
Emma Heseltine: This week we get the goslings. They come up as day old chicks and we raise them for the Christmas market. I had one last year and it was a rare treat indeed. There is another farm locally who is getting some too so they go meet our man in Newcastle and then we pop over to get them from the farm. We have ordered 40, that’s the limit we can sensibly house. They are very free range and have the run of the farm on a day time, but like the chickens they need to be locked up on a night to stop our four legged friends running off with a goose-shaped snack or two.
09 May 2012 |
1 Comments | Recommended by 0
Liesl Truscott: A new report from Textile Exchange reveals a changing landscape for organic cotton. Previously, we’ve watched production figures rising yet felt a sense of unease about the number of critical issues brewing below the surface, masked by the great numbers we were reporting. This year that has all changed. But the story is not all bad. On one hand we have seen a significant decline of over 35% in production volumes (for reasons I’ll explain soon). On the other, we are seeing the resilience and expansion of organic cotton programs where robust and supportive business models are evident (more about this later).
07 May 2012 |
1 Comments | Recommended by 0
Lynda Brown: Like most people, I'm passionate about supporting smaller family farms: they're the living backbone of our landscape, rural life and food culture. If only, then, it were as simple as supporting them with your purse power. But it isn't. Tuesday's online Guardian ran with a story about Vion (no, I'd never heard of them, either) that illustrates the sort of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that we generally never hear about, but which could affect the future of small farmers much more than you think.
03 May 2012 |
0 Comments | Recommended by 2
Martin Davies: I feel very fortunate to be writing my first blog as Soil Association’s new head of farming. For those of you who don’t yet know me, I’m a farmer's son – originally from Shropshire – and I have been involved in the organic sector since 2000. I started out as a certification officer with OF&G, before spending six years’ in a producer support and market development role at Organic South West, based in Cornwall.
02 May 2012 |
3 Comments | Recommended by 1
Anna Louise Batchelor: I’m a crazy cat lady. There I’ve admitted it and got that one out of the way. All of my life I have shared my home with pets; from three-legged dogs to ‘stray’ ducks, but it’s having a cat around the house that I enjoy the most. It was second nature for me to have all kinds of waifs and strays around the place because my gran had been a volunteer for the RSPCA and often bought her work home with her. Growing up with a menagerie of pets and a gran who railed against animal cruelty gave me an utmost respect for animals. However whilst my care for these pets was foremost in my mind, it wasn’t until recently that I thought about the cruelty behind the meat that goes into the pet food I fed them.
02 May 2012 |
4 Comments | Recommended by 19
Emma Heseltine: We have nearly used all the silage at Wallacefield. Now I know the cattle love it but it’s a massive pain, we don’t have a tractor so we pull the bales apart by hand and fill the quad trailer with it, and then take it out to the cattle.
29 April 2012 |
0 Comments | Recommended by 0
Amy Leech: The first law of thermodynamics, and probably the only one I can ever remember, says that energy cannot be created or destroyed - it may be transformed or moved – but it definitely does not appear from thin air. Plants use a lot of energy. Every day they busy themselves converting all sorts of energy, gases and matter into the elements and nutrients they need to grow. The energy they have converted is then passed on to us via these nutrients – they make up the food we eat.
26 April 2012 |
1 Comments | Recommended by 1
Emma Heseltine: The spring barley went in last week on the Park at Wallacefield. It’s been rolled too, not by me this time and the next job is to get rid of some of the boulders that have turned up. We track back and forth picking them up then move onto the winter oats to get the smaller ‘combine breakers.’
22 April 2012 |
0 Comments | Recommended by 0
Kathie Auton: Whilst I probably can’t tell you in scientific detail what makes an organic carrot better than a non-organic one, I can tell you that it seems super-obvious which one you’d rather feed to a baby. I would think most parents would feel a strong instinct to introduce the very best and purest food to these teeny little digestive systems. And organic does feel like the best, even if I can’t tell you all the detailed reasons why and can only make vague noises about pesticides, chemicals and higher nutritional levels. The Soil Association can explain it better here, although I think their headline ‘no nasties’ pretty much sums it up.
20 April 2012 |
7 Comments | Recommended by 0
Molly Conisbee: Soil Association is going to be doing a couple of events at the Hay Festival this year – do come and join us if you happen to be there on 3 or 4 June. We’re going to be discussing how cities can feed themselves (with Andrew Simms from nef and Carolyn Steele, author of Hungry City); then President Monty Don will lead us in a discussion called (a bit flowery, but from the EF Schumacher quote) Health, Beauty, Permanence: What is farming for?
19 April 2012 |
2 Comments | Recommended by 0
Beck Woodrow: Building all the venues and landscaping for the London 2012 Olympic Park was going to take a lot of timber - in the final count, over 12,500 cubic metres – so the Olympic Delivery Authority wanted to be sure that it all came from responsible sources. And they wanted to have an independent check to show that their claims had the backing of a trusted certification name, so they asked Soil Association Woodmark to do a Project Certification – the first in the world for such a huge, complex site - using both Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) standards, to show that the timber had been tracked from forest to site. After several audits and much number crunching, the certificates were awarded on the rooftop of the Olympic Control Centre at the end of March.
18 April 2012 |
1 Comments | Recommended by 0
Emma Heseltine: I’m at Willowford and one of the Dorset’s is having her lambs. I bring them into the shed as the weather is foul, hail and wind, not good lamb weather. The second of the lambs is looking a bit limp and lifeless, it’s moving about but without much enthusiasm.
16 April 2012 |
5 Comments | Recommended by 1
Amy Leech: In the debate on food security, there’s a lot to play for, finding the right answers is the key to our existence. But any good scientist will tell you that the answer you give is only as good as the question you’re asked. Pictures of people starving, and projections of a rocketing world population certainly make you gulp, and wonder, how on earth are we going to feed everyone? It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we just need to produce more. Let’s look at the bigger picture.
16 April 2012 |
4 Comments | Recommended by 4
Tim Young: Easter is a busy time in the year for the allotment, and ours is no exception – weather permitting we’ve been getting down to the plot most weekends, and our house and garden are full of seedlings in various states of growth. We’re in relatively good shape at the moment – most of our beds are dug, we’ve got spuds, onions and some squash in the ground, a bunch of brassica, pea and tomato seedlings at home, and we’re still enjoying the last of our purple sprouting from last year – which is absolutely delicious. The most exciting thing recently though has been planting an apple tree. It’s a semi-dwarfing Fiesta from Walcot Organic Nursery, and although at the moment it’s more of a stick in the ground than a tree, there was something particularly satisfying about planting it.
14 April 2012 |
2 Comments | Recommended by 0
Emma Heseltine: I’m moving some of the ewes and their lambs to the hay meadow at Tarraby. They stay in the pens a couple of days so we can make sure that the lambs are okay, that the ewe is mothering them properly and we can give them a pedicure. Then they can go out into the field and enjoy the new grass. I’ve been doing some of the foot trimming and I can tell you it is not easy to tip a mule, they are big sheep and they are most unappreciative of my efforts. It’s a fairly easy job loading them into the trailer, the ewes will follow their lambs so we just pick them up and pop them in and the ewe follows.
13 April 2012 |
1 Comments | Recommended by 0
Lynda Brown: Me and my keffir have finally moved - yes it was utterly cathartic; yes, I ate a lot of organic chocolate (if only I had known about the latest award winning raw choc superfood, Pulsin Beyond Organic Bars); no, I'm never, ever, ever, moving again; and yes, of course I've moved to Stroud, or rather Box, a tiny village nearby. Which is why yesterday finally caught me having a milkmaid moment walking to my local organic dairy, Woefuldane Dairy in the centre of Minchinhampton, swinging my very own mini milk churn to fill up with their delicious full fat organic milk straight from their Shorthorn cows. Cost? 90p a litre (try finding that in your supermarket). Plus I can buy their own butter, cheeses, cream, yoghurt and eggs. Needless to say I'm in organic dairy heaven.
11 April 2012 |
2 Comments | Recommended by 1
Emma Heseltine: We have started the week with more excitement at the Croft. The other week I had a phone call from Tim Perrett at the Soil Association. I met him at a seminar during the winter and he was telling me about a project based on the very popular lambing live which was on TV the last couple of years.
05 April 2012 |
2 Comments | Recommended by 4
Ben Raskin: It has been a while since my last blog. The main reason for this is that the landlord from whom i was renting my 2 acres went bust. This meant I had to dig up my trees and look for a new home for them.
04 April 2012 |
2 Comments | Recommended by 1
Charles Redfern: Supermarket organic sales are down again. Sales of supermarket own-label organic are down by 9.5% and organic brands sold in supermarkets are down by 2.9%. The shelf space for organic products has been reduced and so have the number of organic products on offer.
03 April 2012 |
3 Comments | Recommended by 2