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    <title><![CDATA[Blog]]></title>
    <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[Blog]]></description>
    <pubDate>Sun, 19 May 2013 22:45:06 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[organic horse]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/pesticide/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Our risk assessment on the farm lists the risks of bad things happening with an estimate of how bad it would be and how likely it is to happen. So knowing that 1% of processed beef products might contain processed horse (or processed deer) wouldn't make me less likely to buy them (though that's already pretty unlikely when our supply chain stretches only 200 yards from the field to the butchery). The horses and deer (more than some beef cattle) have been mostly eating grass, and (unlike most chickens or pigs) have had access to space and fresh air.  
On the other hand, knowing that between 50 and 95% of the 1400 products tested by the UK's  Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food in 2011 had pesticide residues, and that 2% of them were over the maximum residue level encourages me to keep eating organic food.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:07:13 +0000</pubDate>
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      <title><![CDATA[organic happiness]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/bhutan/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Organic happiness

Good to see that Bhutan, a small mountainous country rich in renewable energy, has committed to 100% organic agriculture.  They will be investing in spreading best practice among their small food producers, some of whom are already doubling yields with new organic precision farming techniques.  

The government also wants to see more people eating traditional food grown in Bhutan rather than relying so heavily on imports.  Self-sufficiency is not the goal, though: Bhutan is keen to export high quality produce to its larger and more populous southern neighbour India.

Of course, there are perfectly good reasons why this could never happen in Scotland, even with the Scottish Government’s commitment to an Organic Action Plan.   We have four times as many people as Bhutan, and four times more arable land.  We rely much more heavily on exogenous fertilisers and pesticides. We don’t have thousands of small farmers willing to invest time and effort in growing organically, and if we did they wouldn’t be able to access land anyway.  We don’t have their dress sense.  Our mountains aren’t high enough.  We’re better at rugby.

But lets be honest.  It’s a cultural thing: Bhutan’s measure of success is not GDP but ‘gross national happiness’.  Try selling that to Rebus.
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      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:50:10 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[repurposing the farm]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/vionclosure/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[ Repurposing the farm

Four years into the recession  with another six to go, and it’s time to stop waiting for things to get back to normal. 

Food in Scotland: that won’t be back to normal any time soon.  As welfare ‘reform’ bites, more families will be pushed into food poverty, choosing between food and fuel, food and a phone, food and Christmas presents.  

Up at the other end of the food chain, multinational food business Vion has just announced it is putting all its UK business up for sale.  This pulls out key links in the Scottish poultry, pork and beef industry.  In the dairy industry, Muller’s takeover of Wiseman creates the same vulnerability to rationalisation decisions taken in Europe, where our domestic market of 5 million people looks very small and far away.

So how could it be different?  Well we could look West, where Gus Schumacher’s Wholesome Wave Foundation works across 26 states of the union to connect farmers directly with low-income communities.  Mayors and their city-wide food policy councils are using their powers to provide non-stigmatising subsidies  to help famiies in food poverty buy fresh food direct from farmers through farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture schemes and local food hubs.  This alternative food movement is growing fast, and having a measurable impact on health.  Gus was in Edinburgh earlier this month to meet food policymakers and practitioners who came away thinking ‘well, if they can do it….’

What if empty units in Langlee and Castlemilk reopened as community retail shops, buying direct from farmers, with credit unions helping to manage large-scale community buying groups?  What if 500 new social entreprises emerged to bake bread, pasteurise milk, make healthy takeaways, and (slightly) healthy sausages?  What if urban and periurban land supported a new wave of small-scale growers, helped to work and learn co-operatively?  What if our public food led the way in sourcing locally and influencing diets?

Scotland couldn’t be better placed  to reconnect farmers with their historic role of feeding themselves and their communities.  It’s not just that we’re a food-exporting nation, growing more vegetables than we eat (and if we ever get to 5  a day, there’s plenty of room to grow more), as well as cereals, meat, dairy and eggs.  We’ve also got a robust and thriving social and community sector, good frameworks for bringing together councils, NHS and housing associations,  a national food policy framework and a tradition of mutuality.  

What’s stopping us?  It’s not money – feeding people well through short supply chains will create new jobs in social enterprises across all our cities, and recirculate wealth, as well as paying back many times over in improved health.

It’s the way we think.  Received wisdom on food security: it makes sense to trust a handful of transnational food businesses to deliver on our public policy objectives while simultaneously maximising shareholder return.  Received wisdom on food poverty: let them eat cake (as long as it’s best before yesterday and doled out through a food bank) and make soup.

So what’s the alternative?  Food sovereignty is an idea born in the global South but making more and more sense in Scotland.  It puts feeding people at home well first, before food exports.  Yes, we need to send whisky and salmon round the world, just like Kenya needs to send mange tout peas and flowers, but we need to pay as much attention to what we eat and grow at home.

Unreceived wisdom: ‘the primary purpose of farming in Scotland is to feed people well’ and ‘we use public money to help make this happen’.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2012 13:49:34 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[tough on waste, tough on the causes of waste]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/foodwastearticle/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Food waste may have reduced slightly as a result of the recession and the work of campaigns like Love Food, Hate Waste – but we still each throw away around 100kgs of food every year, of which we could easily avoid two thirds.

We chuck out about a third of the bread we buy, and 8% of our milk – that’s around 4,000 cows’ worth.  Worse still, we bin the equivalent of 3 million chickens and 100,000 pigs – animals which we brought into existence, kept in often fairly miserable conditions and killed young.  (That’s also 2 million more chickens than we ate in the whole of the UK in the 1950s).

So yes, it’s about personal responsibility: but that is only part of the story in a wastogenic food system.  

It’s hard to care about anonymous food.  47 bakeries make 80% of our bread in the UK – they weren’t thinking of me when they made the sliced loaf I bought but never unwrapped, and I don’t feel bad about them when I throw it out.  

The ‘cheap and plenty’ retail and catering culture doesn’t help.  When we push bulk buys on perishable and  scoffable goods like muffins, when we plaster the shelves with 2 for 1 offers then it can overwhelm (as it’s designed to do) even the most diligent customer, equipped with shopping list and menu plans.

And there’s waste further up the chain too – not just the knobbly carrots, some of which at least end up in baby food – but for example in the dairy industry where in the interests of cheap milk we push the cows so hard they only manage a couple of years’ milking.  We still kill many of the bull calves as a ‘by product’ and a recent report on greenhouse gas emissions in the dairy industry couldn’t find out where the whey goes from cheesemaking – a massive 8,000 tonnes of crude protein equivalent to 5% of our annual protein requirements.

So time  for one of the supermarkets to step forward and make a commitment to designing waste out of the system from plough to plate (instead of designing it in as at present).   And in our small shop we’ll do the same.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:27:24 +0000</pubDate>
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      <title><![CDATA[record world harvest]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/whitmuirtheorganicplace/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The world's grain harvest for 2012 is estimated at a record 2.37 billion tonnes - up 1% on last year despite dreadful weather in many parts of the world.  Within this overall total, the wheat harvest is down slightly, from 700m tonnes to 675m tonnes.  But only one quarter of the grain harvest - 570m tonnes - goes to feed humans directly, with the other 75% going to animal feed and biofuels..

So if the price of a loaf of bread does go up this winter, it will have little to do with the awful UK summer and a lot to do with the machinations of the market..]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:41:08 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[What I tell you three times is true]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/blogpost/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[In response to calls made last week by the UK government’s environmental watchdog to tighten regulation and scrutiny on GM crops, over potential environmental and safety concerns, Defra effectively admitted that money, rather than science would govern its decision making on the matter of GM. 

A department spokesperson said Defra is concerned with ensuring “choice can be exercised and economic interests appropriately protected” and expressed the intention to “Leave the normal operation of the market to determine whether or not an approved GM product gains acceptance.”

There's something about governments that allows people to say things which are patently silly with enough gravitas and repetition that they start to acquire the patina of credibility.  So here's DEFRA pretending that the role of government in food is just to watch the market in a disinterested way ... so wonder why we bother having a Food Standards Agency, making it harder for people to smoke and drink, legislate against people taking drugs and so on..  ]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:11:15 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[rat among the pigeons]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/gm/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Research published today (see www.criigen.org  for press release) suggests major health problems for rats fed on a typical diet of GM maize, maize treated with Roundup, and Roundup itself (at low concentrations).  They developed more and bigger tumours.

The researchers followed rats for two years rather than the 90 days required for product licensing.

It's possible that the mechanism responsible is common both to the maize and to Roundup in that the gene which confers Roundup resistance and the active ingredients in Roundup may affect the body in similar ways.

This is the first peer-reviewed study and the researchers call for changes in the requirements for safety testing of products which end up in the food chain and mandatory labelling of products with GM ingredients (for example, non-organic cows, pigs and in some cases chicken in the UK will have been fed GM animal feed).  And of course their dung will have been spread on non-organic cereal and vegetable crop fields.

Look out for robust denials and much flim-flam in the coming days from UK government, FSA, supermarkets and so on..

]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:08:53 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA["I just care about local" pt 2]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/austria-gardens/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[In 1986 Lower Austria decided that the region should have its own capital city. Up to this moment the government and all the administration was situated in Vienna. (Remind you of anywhere?)

When the planning phase started it was decided to use some land for all the administrative buildings next to a river where small gardens from private people were situated.  They analysed the soil of this gardens and discovered, that they could not use it any more for all other purposes and had to burn it, as it was so contaminated with pesticides (and mineral fertilizer). 

This was the start of the officials to think about how to change the behaviour of the people in their gardens. In 1999 the vice-governor of the region founded the initiative of “Nature in the Garden”, which now has about 100.000 members. Everyone can apply for a certificate and if she fulfils the criteria she gets  a sign “Nature in the Garden – keep healthy, what keeps us healthy” (to put on her fence or wherever she wants).

It would be great to see more people growing fruit and veg in their garden, but like Monty Don and the Austrians we think 'organic good, local and organic better']]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:53:01 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[joined-up policy]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/five-a-day/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Teaching children about five a day while surrounding them with sugar and fat is a bit like teaching them the Green Cross Code and sending them out to play on the M8]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:39:40 +0000</pubDate>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[organic coffee]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/organic-market/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Time to wake up and smell the organic coffee

Scotland’s a successful food exporter, and Scotland Food and Drink’s key branding is ‘health, premium and provenance’.  

Across the world, organic sales continue to grow almost everywhere except the UK.  Take France, where organic sales rose 12% last year, and where the number of organic farms grew by 55% in the last three years.  It’s our main destination for food exports, accounting for 25% of sales.  

The next three top destinations – Spain, Germany, Italy– were up 12%, 9%, and 12% respectively. To put those figures in perspective: organic food in Spain is 74% more expensive (a much bigger gap than in the UK) and Germany already has an organic food sector 4 times larger than the UK.   In the USA, an important market for Scottish food and drink, the organic food sector grew 8% against a 1% growth in the conventional food sector.

And what about the emerging economies?  Russia – up 25% in two years.  China – organic sales have quadrupled in last four years, expected to quadruple again in next three years.  Organic sales in India are doubling annually, and were up 40% last year in Brazil.

Health, premium and provenance?  Time for an ambitious organic strategy for Scotland.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 Jun 2012 22:14:32 +0000</pubDate>
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      <title><![CDATA[Pete goes to Brussels]]></title>
      <link>http://www.whitmuirtheorganicplace.co.uk/news/food-sovereignty/</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Wow! I know I don’t get off the farm enough these days, but it’s still quite exciting to be in a room with a bunch of small farmers and farmers organisations from 25 different countries – Ireland to Azerbaijan, Portugal to Norway – talking about building the alternative to corporate control of the food system.  It was a wonderfully democratic meeting, and so a bit woolly at time especially when the simultaneous interpretation went for a coffee.  

Lessons for Whitmuir?  Well, we’re bigger than we think, given that the average farm size in Europe is 35 acres, and the Polish NGO linking farmers to consumers is working with 5 acre farms in the south of the country.  There, organic food costs twice or three times the less sustainable stuff, so I felt better about our prices.   

Hazelnuts grow better in Turkey.  Community supported agriculture and organics are growing  steadily across many countries, and in Germany they got a turnout of 23,000 people at a demonstration for sustainable agriculture.  In Serbia, people who did well from the Milosevic regime are buying up land from small farmers hoping the price will go up when Serbia joins the EU.  And in Norway, there’s a debate about how much food it’s worth growing, and how much of the land should revert to trees and bears (now, that would liven up the farm walks!).

And on the way I stumbled upon Le Pain Quotidien in St Pancras, where they sell freshly made organic artisan bread from a little bakery round the corner…  
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:48:27 +0000</pubDate>
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