Features
Growing for Profit
Growing organic vegetables commercially is a very different kettle of pickles from growing for the kitchen. A kitchen ('normal') gardener selects crops for their variety, nutritional value and flavour which will mature gradually and hold well 'on the field': high quality veg, tailored to fit the requirements of the individual family.
Wholesale demands
A commercial ('deranged') gardener or grower has other considerations, unfortunately. Nobody can earn his keep by selling a dozen lettuces here and a sack of carrots there, no matter how nutritious and tasty they are. You might manage to bring in perhaps 10% of your cash needs selling this way, but in order to earn a modest living, vegetables have to be grown and sold wholesale, and this means growing crops and varieties that suit the wholesaler. If he can't sell Jerusalem Artichokes (and he can't, by the way), then there's no point in you planting them, except to make delicious soup with your own Roma tomatoes (which the wholesaler won't want either). Asparagus peas? Purple carrots? Namibian camel yams? Forget it.
And when he wants boring old lettuces, he wants hundreds at a time, week after week. If he can't rely on the grower to come up with good, regular material, he doesn't want to know.
The only way to grow to this sort of specification is to use Fl hybrid seed, which will produce a uniform crop, flushing in x days precisely, allowing for programmed sowing and cropping. I once asked a major seed firm for a cropping programme for protected lettuces. By return of post they sent me a sheaf of charts and tables that would not have looked out of place in the Logistics Plan for a shuttle launch. High-tech veg.
There is an obvious problem here. If strains are selected for uniformity and reliable cropping above all, what is sacrificed on the way? Surely something is?
No taste
All too often it is nutritional value and taste, and, by the way, genetic variety.
This is not to say that all Fl's are valueless and tasteless, but the tendency is there; witness the pallid orange skittles marketed as carrots by the chemical growers (forced into straining their crops and land by the abysmal rates paid them by the supermarkets). Organic growing can maximise the potential of these soulless varieties, but can only do so much. What can you expect to do with Moneymaker tomatoes, for example, which were bred to have thick polythene skins to minimise transit damage? Or sprouts that have been so in-bred to be suitable for machine picking that they have lost virtually all natural resistance to disease?
Organic breeds
It would be nice to see some serious work done by the big breeders towards producing varieties that are high in nutritional value and taste, perhaps at the cost of absolute uniformity of shape. But as the cost of seed development and registration is so high, this is not going to happen until there are a lot more organically minded consumers, who will make the supermarkets sit up and take notice of the fact that food is for nourishing people and not for decoration. And that won't happen until the public is persuaded to shop with its intelligence rather than with its eyeballs. Now there's a challenge… How do a handful of impoverished organic growers counteract billions of euros/pounds worth of advertising by the Chemo-Biological Metabolic Input industry?
Cosmetic specimens
We have a vicious circle to crack here: growing organically costs a little more than growing chemically, and the profit margin often lies in the 'mis-shapes' which are assiduously rejected by the supermarkets. Thus, in order to show a profit, the price of the 'perfect' specimens must be raised. And while organic produce on the supermarket shelf costs so much more than chemical goods, the shopper's intelligence will usually guide him or her into buying the cheaper, 'bargain' goods. In a nutshell, the supermarkets' addiction to cosmetic vegetables is what keeps the cost to the public so high that new buyers are permanently discouraged. Maybe new consumer group movements will help to destroy this foolish monopoly. More 'box sales' would help raise the supermarkets' awareness too.
Symbol costs
Meanwhile, small organic growers and allotment holders will be further discouraged from producing high quality local vegetables by the Soil Association's decision to raise the cost of the SA Symbol to £475.87 per annum, even for an allotment holder or someone with a window box. The SA has done a fine job in getting its excellent Standards accepted as the norm by the UK Government, but it seems to have been done at the expense of the small producer. Why is it not possible to devise a Symbol scheme for gardeners that everyone can afford? Has anybody tried? What has happened to 'Small is Beautiful'? The phrase was meant to refer to the scale of organic operations, not the growers' livelihoods.
Gillian Westbrook has been appointed to the new position of
General Manager with IOFGA. Coming from a background in the regulatory area...
