Ahhhh..... Valentine's day

what a time of the year. It's a time you rarely hear people moan about the true spirit being lost, eh? No 'let's get back to the essential meaning of the day' really, is there? Instead, it's one of the most blatantly commercial celebrations there is: it's really just the first real excuse to spend after xmas. And don't they really push a particular type of wine in the supermarkets for V day? All those wines with blurbs on the back about soft tannins, fruity, velvety smoothness....wines that are in fact bland, characterless and at the same time globalised and heavily promoted.

I mentioned commodity fetishism recently, which I'd describe as the masking of important and otherwise objectionable unpleasantness, or occasionally horror, with frivolous aesthetics and surface attractivness. In this context, let's compare the love Valentine flowers are supposed to represent with the production of said flowers. Whether its the environment or the people who work the fields or in particular the green and glass houses, the prettiness of the flowers often mask the reality on the ground....

The thing is, organic has won the battle of language. Whatever about sales levels, whatever about organic being used to display or represent esteem, or status, or distinction, flowers on Valentine's day will never be the same again unless they are organic...and more and more articles seem to pop up each year making this point: Often in the US sometimes even with twee and transparent flash movies

But no one quite does it like PAN, the pesticide action network . (I'm not sure if the whole greek god of nature, and possibly an origin of the devil thing is played on deliberately by them in their choosing of the name PAN....)
Here's a typical one from their yearly offerings...ah go on, it's valentine's day you deserve another one
Just spreadin the love, baby

Techno-progress: Me, fred and foul farming

At last, I stumble along and make a wee bit of techno progress....
This site as you'll hopefully notice, looks a bit better and has some extra features now. I couldn't even turn on the comments ppl had made til now (!)

So I wasn't being rude, just a bit fred flintstoney (wasn't that car of his the best little eco motor? He still got the whole flash car buzz, probably had a massive loan on it, and didn't cause a negative ozone-depleting emmission...he toned up and only emmitted his own sweat....runnin along pretendin to drive....classic!)

And then to the news....obviously in the UK and Ireland at the mo it's bird flu. First things first: there is one place full of absolute must reads. With all the hysteria, it's worth considering how exactly this deadly strain came about. Are wild birds the victims or the vectors? What role do intensive factory farms and transport routes in various parts of the world play?

And what are the limits to what we as a society are willing to change to stop the spread of the bird flu? On the one hand, various people will be made to jump through life-changing hoops, and mass slaughterings will occur, while on the other, various options are completely off the adgenda.

One of the proposed answers, putting all farmed birds indoors, may be the cause of the problem in the first place. This is deeply troubling on a whole number of fronts. What of organics, and outdoor, backyard foul - keeping outdoor birds feeds feeds hundreds of millions in not billions of people in the majority south?

At times like this, disaster capitalism, and the death of nature spring to mind. Alarmist-sounding terms to be sure, but the ideas behind them are worth developing an understanding of.

But do check out the first link, to get a better picture of just how manipulated, contoured and pre-ordained the limits of the possible can be. It all reminds me of my old 1, 2, and 3 dimensional power days/daze in undergrad politics....

Power is best expressed when some ideas aren't known of as even being an option

The mouth revolution short film, put up here on 26th Jan, is great fun, and the guys who made it, free range studios, do lots of good work. (Can you see it comin....?)

However I did think for a while before puting it up, because i was uneasy about one thing I thought I'd seen on one of their shorts.... right in the middle of a recent 'watering down of organic standards' scandal in the US, I was sure I saw the Organic Trade Association logo on one of the films. An overview of what happened from what could be called a movement perspective is here

though the situation may at least be more complex; click here to also get into another blog on organic food and beyond, and enter the wonderful world of Tom Philpott

I contacted Free Range studios, to ask them about their connections to the OTA. They got back and said they'd ring, but haven't as of yet. Not sure why they wouldn't replay via email, and it's been a couple of weeks at this stage.

As you'll have seen if you clicked on any of the links, the debate on standards was in many ways about large agri-business corporations and the general conventionalisation of organics within the food system (my own academic work deals with the occurance or otherwise of this in some detail - a previous post has all my academic work listed - I'm not allowed just post them up here for copyright reasons, though may sum some sometime soon -

(ever noticed how you don't get a fumbletongue when you think rather than say a convoluted sequence of words?).

Anyhoo, for the OTA to sponsor something that advocated local, small scale organic farming, in a context where they were being accused of being a corporate front seemed deeply ironic, and a previously unimaginable form and level of commodity fetishism

I looked around their site again, and it turned out to be store wars the OTA sponsored -
Aggagh! Of all their cute short polemicial films, this was the one most against the corporate takeover of organics...and in 2005, the year the standards debate was happening - bad timing to say the least

here's what free range have said about their involvment with OTA on their own site

Now, as I said, I think they are creative, fun guys (free range that is!) and they could in particular be turning on kids to organic food, and a more sustainable food supply system....
so I put the link up to their most recent offering....which is the most professional and creative to date, I'd say...

and this is being shown on primetime TV!
Tonight!

RTE 2 at 8 o' clock

http://www.thefutureoffood.com/

this should be shown on prime time TV

http://www.mouthrevolution.com/

Housing from a green party perspective:
Green Party hold public meeting
'A Home of Your Own'
8pm Tuesday 23 January 2007

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What: The Green Party is hosting a public ideas meeting on making
housing available and affordable in Dublin

When: 8pm Tuesday 23 January 2007

Where: Cultivate Centre, Essex Street West, Templebar, Dublin

Who: Ciar�n Cuffe TD (Green Party)
Green Party's Environment & Housing spokesperson
Prof P.J. Drudy ( Trinity College Dublin)
Co-author of Out of Reach - Inequalities in the
Irish Housing System
Bernard McNamara (Property developer)
Managing Director of Michael McNamara Builders, one
of Ireland's top property developers
Jim Power (Friends First)
Chief Economist with Friends First and former Chief
Economist at Bank of Ireland
Cllr Bill Randall ( Brighton Green Party)
Founder editor of Inside Housing in the UK, UK's
Housing Journalist of the Year 2000

Details: House prices in Dublin South East, Dublin South and Dun
Laoghaire are among the highest in the country. Green Party TDs Ciar�n
Cuffe, John Gormley and Eamon Ryan are jointly hosting a public meeting to
discuss ideas and solutions on how to tackle the housing crisis faced by
first-time buyers and others in need of housing. A host of experts will
debate the crisis and take questions from the floor.

organics and rural living

here's an article i wrote in 2005 on the effect of organic farming on rurality, summarising research done by Matt Lobey

A new report from the Centre for Rural Research in Exeter (UK) on the benefits of organic farming to rural communities has just been published.

The report finds that organic farmers are breathing new life into rural communities, while bringing new skills and innovative ideas on marketing into agriculture.

The report was commissioned by DEFRA, (the UK's department of environment, food and rural affairs) and also had Elm Farm Research Centre (EFRC) as project partners.

Of the 640 farmers surveyed, 31 per cent beginning to farm organically had never worked in the agriculture before. This compares to 21 per cent for non-organic farms.

The above reflects the fact that for many, organic farming is a chosen lifestyle option. While it is easy to be dismissive of the word lifestyle, what it means here is that organic farmers are organic farmers because they choose to be, not because they inherited a farming business that they may or may not be interested in.

Organic farmers are also younger, more likely to be university educated, and more likely to have been born further away from the farm they own than conventional farmers.

66 per cent were aged between 35 and 54; for conventional farmers, the figure was 45 per cent. Just over half of the organic farmers surveyed held a degree or a diploma; 30 per cent of conventional farmers did. 29 per cent of organic farmers lived more than 100 miles from where they were born compared with 17 per cent of non-organic farmers.

There are obviously positive and negative aspects to this last point. Being less embedded in the local community and established rural life on the one hand contrasts with being part of the revitalisation of rural communities, with new ideas, interests and practices.

Another important finding was that organic farmers are much more likely to be involved in different marketing strategies and on-farm activities than conventional farmers. This has knock-on effects, both for the farmer and the rural community.

�Some 21 per cent of organic farms had diversified trading enterprises on them compared to just 5 per cent on non-organic farms. And on organic farms that diversification is far more likely to be connected to added value food processing and retailing rather than the conventional model of farm contracting or other services,� according to EFRC�s Lawrence Woodward.

He also points to a greater level of uptake of grant aid by organic farmers in helping fund diversification (64 per cent) compared to less than 50 per cent in conventional farm businesses as a sign of the business awareness and focus amongst the organic sector.

In trading terms, organic farmers are making the most of direct retail sales to consumers with very short supply chains. All farms in the study (conventional and organic) with direct sales showed a much higher value of sales per hectare, but this increase was far more pronounced in the organic sector.

�On average organic farms with direct trade generated sales of �4983 per hectare. That is three times the level of sales, recorded at �1654 per hectare, for all farms without any direct sales�

This on-farm diversification, along with the innovative retailing initiatives leads to higher levels of rural employment on organic farms; organic farms accounted for 46 per cent of the sample but employed 57 per cent of all people employed in it. However, there were a greater number of casual/part-time jobs on organic farms.

Naturally, there are similarities and differences between the UK and Irish experiences of organics, and there has not been a piece of research like the one just outlined conducted in Ireland.

However, such research as there is both in Ireland and from other parts of Europe, suggests that there are more similarities than differences. This holds for direct sales, place-of-birth, age, education and gender (there are a greater number of female organic farmers, proportionately, than female conventional farmers, according to most research which examines this area)

In the context of an aging and decreasing conventional faming population, this new report shows how organics can contribute to the revitalisation of rural communities.