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The Future of Food and Farming: Creating a Resilient System

Friday – April 13-20, 2012

Teachers: Colin Tudge, Martin Crawford, Peter Harper, Bethan Stagg and

Rebecca Laughton

This course is open for bookings.

This course will explore food production in an ecological context which involves

working with natural and biological cycles rather than imposing high-input systems

on environments that they are not suited for. It will examine the vital role that ‘human

scale’ horticulture and botanical diversity can play, in intensifying production without

increasing environmental degradation, climate change or the consumption of finite

resources, and discuss the wider socio-economic context within which this transformation could occur.

News >> Schumacher College is proud to offer a unique postgraduate course in sustainable horticulture – MSc Sustainable Horticulture and Food Production –

growing low input, diverse and resilient food systems

The Course

This course is in two parts, the first focusing on new methods of growing food, crop diversity etc. and the second looking at the food economy. Participants can attend

either part or the whole course.

April 13-15 (weekend course): Diversity on the Land Bethan Stagg, Martin Crawford

Sustainable food production means moving away from monocultures to create farming “polycultures” where diverse crops are grown which build fertility and provide

habitat as well as feeding people. This course provides an introduction to the many different techniques, crops and innovations that are being trialled by growers at a

variety of scales from farm to smallholding to garden, including:

Grass-fed agriculture, herb-rich pastures and browse

Agroforestry and perennial crops

Fertility-building plant species and botanical diversity

Soil conservation and minimum tillage approaches

April 16-20 (Monday to Friday): Growing the New Food Economy Colin Tudge, Rebecca Laughton, Peter Harper

What would a truly sustainable food production system look like? This question encompasses a whole range of interconnected issues

of scale, markets, diet, lifestyles and resource use, all of which will be addressed during this course. We will investigate the close

connection between society’s economic system and its agriculture, and discuss the extent to which the free market is responsible for

unsustainable practices. We will look at new models of local food production and distribution and discuss the extent to which they can

feed current and future populations in a resource-efficient and carbon-neutral way. What does it take to survive and thrive on the land?

Using examples from around the world, we’ll discuss the challenges smallholders face and strategies for making it work. The group will

visit Chagfood Community Agriculture, a two-acre market garden that supplies the people of Chagford with seasonal fruit and

vegetables – using horse power to help with tillage and with deliveries.

Growing the New Food Economy – Course outline

Monday – Peter Harper. Land Use and Food in a Zero Carbon Britain

Peter Harper will begin the course by surveying the history of food and farming, and how it relates to cultural and dietary patterns.

Postwar increases in productivity and the growth of globalisation have made farming in the UK a marginal activity, but the prospect of

climate change will make a huge difference. He will discuss the critical role that land use will play in planning for a low-carbon or

carbon-neutral future, both in the UK and overseas, and ask what food security actually means. Can the UK feed itself, and what would

this involve?

He will move on to discuss different decarbonisation scenarios and their implications for each sector of human activity. What would a

low-carbon diet be like and how organic could it be? What would be the optimum allocation of land for purposes of food production,

energy generation or carbon sequestration? Peter will outline the areas where change is most crucial and could be most effective and

reflect on the implications for our diet, health, patterns of energy use and overall quality of life.

Tuesday – Colin Tudge. Enlightened Agriculture: How To Provide Good Food For Everyone Forever Without Wrecking The

Rest Of The World

Colin’s teaching session will start with the question of why it is that we need mixed, basically organic, skills-intensive farming (as

opposed to the kind we have now).

He argues that we need to feed 7 billion people now and 9.5 billion by 2050 – and go on doing that for the next 10,000 years (or indeed

the next million). So we need farming that is highly productive but also sustainable and resilient (able to adapt to changing conditions –

notably climate). To achieve this we need to emulate nature – which achieves long-term productivity and resilience by being diverse,

tightly integrated, and low-input. In farming terms this means polyculture (mixed farming) with everything feeding into everything else –

and basically organic.

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Future farms could be w onderful places –

very complex, endlessly interesting and

various, w ith lots of intelligent and highly

motivated people around to make it all buzz.

This is w hat w e need to aspire to! Colin

Tudge

and basically organic.

All this requires a very high level of husbandry – which means it must be skills-intensive, and follows from basic principles of morality –

it is good to try to feed people without driving other creatures into extinction; and from basic biology. The case seems open and shut.

Unfortunately, modern industrial agriculture is not designed to provide good food for everybody but is treated as “a business like any

other” with a mandate to be maximally profitable. But agriculture that is maximally profitable (in an age of under-priced oil) requires high-

input monoculture with maximum inputs and minimum labour – the precise opposite of what common morality, common sense, and

basic biology show are necessary.

Wednesday – Rebecca Laughton. Surviving and Thriving on the Land

What is human energy and why is it important?

Why I wrote “Surviving and Thriving on the Land”

The challenges faced by aspiring and actual farmers

Solutions

Wise choice of tools (presentation and discussion exercise)

Seven ages of men and women – how to juggle working on the land with other personal demands at different ages and stages of life

Together or alone – Weighing up the pros and cons of setting up an individual smallholding/farm versus joining/establishing a community initiative (presentation

and discussion exercise)

• Clear communication

• Livelihood strategies

• Siestas and fiestas – the importance of balancing work, rest and play.

Some examples – Case studies from “Small is Successful”: Fivepenny Farm and the Wyld Valley; Darthia Farm, Maine USA; Valley de Merens, French Pyrenees

Thursday – Colin Tudge. How to get from where we are to where we need to be

The logic of Tuesday’s discussions leads us to skills-intensive agriculture – lots of good farmers. But in hyper-

industrialized modern Britain and in the US only about 1% of the workforce is full-time on the land. Both countries

need about 10 times as many farmers as they have now – which in Britain means a million new farmers. We need

them quick, we need them young, and most of them perforce will come from the cities. So we need a route to turn

young townies into farmers – full time or part time.

In this session Colin will discuss how this can come about:

How individuals can move back to the land step by step

How established farmers/landowners can make their land available (which many are willing and anxious to do!)

The kinds of legal changes and the economic mechanisms (including ethical investment) that are needed to help things along

Friday – Facilitated session. Pulling it all together

Teachers

Martin Crawford runs the Agroforestry Research Trust. He has over 20 years’ experience of Organic horticulture, agriculture and agroforestry. The Agroforestry

Research Trust is a non-profit making charity which researches into temperate agroforestry and into all aspects of plant cropping and uses, with a focus on tree, shrub

and perennial crops.

Peter Harper is Head of Research and Innovation at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, UK, which he helped found and where he has worked for over

20 years (www.cat.org.uk). He is also a visiting lecturer at universities and other institutions around the world. His interests have ranged widely, including energy policy,

sustainable lifestyles, ecovillages, alternative sanitation, landscape design, organic horticulture, and composting (with which he is mildly obsessed – don’t get him

started). His publications include Radical Technology (1976) an influential early textbook of technical alternatives, The Natural Garden Book (1994) and Lifting the Lid

(2000) on low-impact sanitation systems. He was co-author of Zero Carbon Britain 2030 and has spent a lot of time thinking about how we will feed ourselves in a

world with very limited fossil fuel supplies. Click here for CAT Podcast: Peter Harper on decarbonising the food system

Bethan Stagg co-ordinates the garden operations and teaches on the Diploma and Certificate courses in Sustainable Horticulture at Schumacher College. Her passion

for plants started at the age of six, when she started to learn plant names and grow lemon pips, with the interest always being equally divided between native plant

ecology and plant cultivation. Bethan has a BSc in biology from University of Bristol, an MSc in Biodiversity and Conservation from the University of Leeds and fifteen

years experience in roles relating to ecology and local food initiatives, including allotment regeneration, production horticulture and farmers markets. Bethan also works

part of the time at Plymouth University, researching botanical teaching methods and lives in Ashburton.

Colin Tudge studied zoology and has since then made a living as a broadcaster and writer. He is the author of many books on birds, agriculture, natural history and

economics, including most recently Good Food for Everyone Forever, Feeding People is Easy and The Secret Life of Trees. In 2009, he launched, with his wife

Ruth, The Campaign for Real Farming (www.campaignforrealfarming.org), which incorporates the College for Enlightened Agriculture Then in January 2010,

together with Graham Harvey, they organized the first Oxford Real Farming Conference, which now has become an annual event.

Rebecca Laughton has always wanted to be a farmer, but really discovered her agricultural vocation while studying for a Geography degree at Newcastle University

(1993-1996). Since then she has blended practical work on a variety of organic farms and market gardens, with academic study (MSc in Sustainable Agriculture at Wye

College), writing and a spell working for Somerset Food Links. For five years she lived at Tinkers Bubble, a low impact community that manages 40 acres of gardens,

orchards, fields and forest plantation using only hand and horse drawn tools. This experience inspired her to visit a number of smallholdings and land based

communities around France and the UK to find out how other people balance their own needs with those of the land they manage, leading to her book Surviving and

Thriving on the Land. Rebecca also writes agricultural appraisals to help low impact smallholders gain planning permission for an agricultural workers dwelling and

works as a freelance researcher on small scale farming issues. She is currently trying to thrive, rather than merely survive, on the land as she establishes a small

market garden in West Sussex.

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market garden in West Sussex.

Related media

Colin Tudge: The Importance of Small-Scale Farms

Martin Crawford – A Forest Garden Year: Perennial crops for a changing climate

Peter Harper on Zero Carbon Britain

Course Fees

The Future of Food and Farming (seven day course): £750

Growing the New Food Economy (weekday course): £550

Diversity on the Land (weekend course): £250

Click here to access our on-line booking system

All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.

For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College

Apply

click here to find out how to book by fax or mail

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Reserve your place now

To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk

We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone

else if we have not received your application.