Features
Seeds of Discontent
A recent EU directive demands that from now on an organic grower has to make contact with at least three seed suppliers before permission to use non-organic seed will be granted.
How does this affect a small commercial grower in the west? Our main income derives from a successful stall we have been running for the last twenty years in the vibrant Galway Market. A local weekly vegetable box and the supply of some local restaurants make up the other 40% of our turnover. Our customers expect us to grow a fairly wide selection of quality vegetables and we enjoy this challenge. We grow about two dozen main crops which includes up to one hundred different varieties.
While I certainly love to work the land, there are a few jobs I hate to do. One of these is to sit for hours over seed catalogues and filter all those mouth-watering descriptions. Finally I pick, what I think, are the right seeds to make sure that I get a satisfying start into the growing cycle. ..I know it's all my fault. I should simply concentrate on six crops for the supermarket chains. Believe me, the new regulation doesn't make life easier for the small organic producer.
Eating habits
Irish eating habits have changed dramatically over the last twenty years. The average household consumes much less cabbage and spuds and more salads. Twenty years ago a head of lettuce meant butterhead. Then Lollo Rosso came into fashion and children liked it. Now there is a huge demand for a wide range of lettuces to fill a colourful salad bowl.
This year we used twenty-three varieties of lettuce seed and ten of those were untreated conventional seed varieties. While trying hard to change over to to organic seeds for the last five years, these ten varieties are simply not available as organic seed. Will they be available in 2002 ?- no, except for one.
Mildew resistance
Kings offer seven new organic lettuce varieties in their 2002 catalogue, none of them mildew resistant. But any serious Irish commercial lettuce producer, whether conventional or organic, depends on Bremia resistant varieties for reliable crops for the August to November period. Marketing directly makes it probably even more important to offer lettuce in spring when the customer is tired of eating winter vegetables. May/June is the time when our lettuce sales are at a peak; thirty to thirty five dozen heads are sold on a Saturday morning. Given our climate it is a necessity to select seeds that produce reliable indoor crops. Neither Kings, Hild, Advance or Europrise offer one single organic indoor buterhead. I am reasonably happy with Dustin and Larissa (Hild), but they are both unavailable as organic seed.
Appearance
Indoor grown red oakleaf or lollo rosso often fade in colour. While there are now reliable, colourful varieties they are not available in the organic range yet and I can't tell our customers in May to wait another six weeks until I can sell them the first outdoor red oakleaf.
Until a few years ago I grew Raisa, a red oakleaf of compact size, with acceptable appearance on the outer leaves but a disappointing brownish centre and very pale as an indoor crop. This year Hild introduced a significantly improved red oakleaf, Nun 9672, resistant to twenty-two different strains of bremia, dark red (indoor/outdoor) with a very attractive slightly wavy leafage. As always this variety was first tested on the market as non-organic seed. If successful for the company an organic variety might follow later but not in 2002. It's wishful thinking to expect multinational seed merchants to field test new products on the much smaller organic sector.
Slow bolting varieties
Eraclea is Kings new organic green oakleaf in the 2002 catalogue. It is not bremia resistant. Their description 'sow little and often as it does tend to bolt' sounds to me like a high risk seed for mid-summer crops. I definitely need slow bolting varieties on my light sandy soil.
There is no such thing as the average European grower with average size acreage, climatic and soil conditions between Naples and Oslo, Warsaw and Clare. Twenty years of experimenting with hundreds of different lettuces resulted for us in using certain seed that suit our needs - full stop.
All of us have to keep experimenting with new varieties all of the time to keep in touch with changing eating habits and to protect our lettuce from new strains of mildew.
Globalisation of the seed trade
Experimenting keeps us in a more flexible position whenever the globalised seed trade buys up established companies resulting in ever changing lines of seed. As recently as 1999 Rijk Zwaan of Holland had the widest range of suitable organic lettuce seed, available through Hild in Germany. Then Nuuhem (Holland) bought Hild, brought in its own range of lettuce seeds and Rijk Zwaan was gone. An Irish agent for Rijk Zwaan was supplied with only a fraction of the Dutch produced seed. The Irish market was too small. The German and Dutch branches refused to supply me.
Its up to the Irish organic movement to convince the three organic certification bodies that our climate, the size of our holdings and our disadvantaged location within Europe need a very flexible handling of the new EU regulation.
Gillian Westbrook has been appointed to the new position of
General Manager with IOFGA. Coming from a background in the regulatory area...
