Sam Henderson

Church Farm, Ardeley - 9th and 10th June 2012

Five Spades a-leaning at the Cork Street opening of 'Race Into Time'.

These large sculptures and other new works will form the Sculpture Trail at Church Farm Ardeley.
Sculptures that you can enjoy with your family. Bring your camera and a pen because some of them need you to be a part of and others for you to take part in.

See you there.

How To Feed The Olympics by Sam Henderson, Church Farm

The aim of this article is to suggest How To Feed The Olympics in a way that supports Real Farming (farming that's designed to provide good food for everyone forever without harming our fellow creatures or the planet). It is, no doubt, a tempting subject for all sorts of reasons, but before we start a couple of caveats are necessary.

The first is that the Olympics as they are currently incarnated are probably not the type of event that would be encouraged if our first concern was Real Farming. Real Farming must, by necessity, be endlessly sensitive to the subtleties of people and place, while the Olympics seems to have become a free-floating corporate bandwagon that simply plonks its homogenised self onto “host” localities once every four years.

The second caveat follows from the first – that this is not intended to be a realistic proposal, in the sense that I do not even vaguely pretend that the various Olympic organising committees would ever seriously consider the kind of approach I am suggesting. It is, however, meant to be realistic in that food for the Olympics could very reasonably be provided in the way I am suggesting, and probably should be, even though it never actually would be.

According to official sources, the London Olympics will serve 14 million meals over 60 days. That amounts to an average of a little under 240,000 meals a day, and does not include feeding the athletes or the construction teams.

Having worked with farms and small artisan food operations, I know that a fairly good day serving ready-to-eat food at a popular public event would mean takings of about £2000. If we assume that the average meal costs a fiver, that means 400 meals per day. Assuming that each stall does eight hours of trade, that averages out at 50 meals per hour, which also seems reasonable. So to feed the Olympics we would need 600 food stalls. Allowing for the need to cover a huge number of different locations and venues, and to ensure there is capacity for the busiest times, while also encouraging enough competition so that the very good do very well and the not so good do not so well, let's call it a round one thousand.

Now let's change tack. The original cost of the games to the UK taxpayer was estimated to be a bit below £3 billion. That was soon revised to around £9 billion, and recent confessions have suggested the actual figure will be closer to £11 billion. An investigation by Sky News into the full cost, including upgrades to transport infrastructure and other massive work programmes that don't get included in the official bill, arrived at a figure of around £24 billion. Over £1billion is to be spent on security alone, with vast purchases of new kit, unmanned armed drones flying over our cities, and the roll-out of new techniques for suppressing dissent and controlling public spaces ensuring that the people of Great Britain can be assured of a lasting Olympic legacy, regardless of whether they start playing more sport in their spare time.

So, in the spirit of those endlessly valid arguments that x number of new aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines could feed y number of starving children, let's see how £1 billion of the proverbial taxpayer's hard-earned cash could feed the Olympics while providing a real legacy for UK farming and the nation's diet.

Put simply, each one of the thousand stalls would be supplied and run by a new, fully mixed 'hub farm', which would receive an average of £1 million start-up funding. Each farm would be fully equipped with everything it needs to farm, prepare food and sell it direct, and they would each be linked to their own 'urban food hub', from where they could sell direct to town-dwellers, supply wholesale markets with surpluses, and generally provide a link to farming in the city – helping amateurs grow their own, supporting and buying from urban producers, and providing an educational resource for all.

Each hub farm would potentially be able to process and distribute far more food than it could itself produce, so would naturally encourage all sorts of new farmers and artisan food producers. The urban food hubs would encourge new producers in the city, while acting as the focus for a new culture of food and farming. With the farms and food hubs spread all around the country, almost everyone would be able to access real food and farming. In every locality, a unique food and farming system would be providing a complete diet, as well as natural surpluses which would ultimately be traded between hubs to provide variety, and which would form the basis of each hub's food offer at the games.

The use of public funds to capitalise these farms would justify an ongoing public duty. The farms would be required to provide extension services to other farmers - helping them to diversify what they grow, try new techniques and reach new markets - and to provide training, jobs and new business opportunities in the food and farming sector, while engaging the public and changing diet. As local hubs of the new agrarian economy, this would all act in their favour, stimulating both supply and demand.

From July 2005, when London's bid succeeded and the 2012 games were confirmed, a three year selection process would have been open to every farmer, landowner and food entrepreneur in the country. Through an active process of elimination and matchmaking, a thousand local consortia would be selected, with a whole range of sizes and set-ups, centred around at least one farm and one location in a town or city, and based on criteria including geographical spread, the creation of ecologically sound, 'whole' farming systems, the accessible and affordable provision of a good, wide-ranging diet, and the quality and diversity of the surpluses (and so of the food offer at the games itself).

In the four year period of development that would follow, a whole generation would find new opportunities in food and farming, the countryside would come alive with new activity, a whole wealth of under-valued skills and knowledge would find new application, and a natural influx of expertise in agroecology, artisanal food preparation, appropriate-scale technology and direct marketing would create a groundswell of new ideas and approaches. Who knows, maybe even the supermarkets would want to get in on the action, using their expertise in logistics, stock management, and customer service to provide business-to-business services helping yet more farmers and food producers reach new customers.

By the time of the games, every hub would be up and running, with its complete farming system in place, all food processing operations functioning, and every route to market established. Whole communities would be engaged in the run up to the games, with each locality represented within the Olympics by its own food stall. The launch of the games would coincide with the full launch of each of the hubs and a national campaign, while the farms and food hubs all over the country would welcome Olympic Visitors wherever they chose to go.

Even finding the money would not be a problem. A lot of the logic of Olympic spending, especially the larger pot of spending that makes up the may-as-well-be-£25 billion figure, runs along the lines of “if you're going to spend money, now is the time to spend it!” The money is already there to support food, farming and rural enterprise, in the Common Agricultural Policy. Every year over £3.5 billion in subsidies are handed over to UK landowners, with 889 of the largest landowners pocketing over £250,000 each and 47 of them taking home over £1 million. Diverting £143 million a year over 7 years, which is just 4 percent of the annual payments, seems more than possible.

So the only question is why we didn't do it, which, in a circular way, brings us back to our caveats. For all its professed amateur ideals, the Olympics has become a decidedly corporate affair. What's bizarre is how comparatively small the levels of sponsorship income are – the London organising committee has raised £700 million. That's not an insignificant amount, but in the context of the billions being spent, its not exactly make-or-break. Nevertheless, no food or drink will be consumed inside the Olympic venues unless it has been sold by one of the sponsors.

That is the main reason that London's “One Planet Olympics” was always bound to avoid any truly innovative approach to food and farming, despite the sixth one planet principle, which aims to “transform the food supply to the point where it has a net positive impact on the environment, local economy and people’s well-being.”

In light of the London 2012 Olympic Motto, “Inspire a Generation”, that seems a shame.

Ah well... maybe next time...

The New Agrarianism by Sam Henderson, Church Farm

This article is about creating a farming system that benefits the biosphere and benefits people. It starts from the assumption that the farming system which governments, corporates and most mainstream media tell us is essential to “feed the planet” does not benefit people or the biosphere, in fact it is killing both, and it is not even capable of providing the food we need, let alone satisfying the greed it is designed to encourage.

I will begin with a confession. I still occasionally get tempted by a cheeseburger while stomping the drizzly streets of an anonymous city, without a proper breakfast. And I still sometimes find myself traipsing up a fluorescent aisle to grab a discounted pie to throw in the oven, with the light long faded from the sky.

I've been working on projects to change our food and farming system for over four years. I've been lucky enough to attend impressive gatherings of farmers, innovators and foodies. Yet more than once I've taken a strange delight in wandering straight out of some well-meaning meeting, marching through the Golden Arches, handing over my single pound coin, putting my penny change in the box for the McKiddies, and devouring my salt-fat-sugar dopamine hit before I'd reached the end of the block.

It's been a while since I was overcome by that kind of petulance, but that's maybe only because I'm now better able to express the kind of dissonance I was reacting to. It's all too easy to get carried away with our own ideas about how things might be, while tacitly assuming that all it takes to make-it-so is for other people to agree with us (which of course they all should!). We need massive systemic changes in the way we organise and think about our lives. There are serious challenges to overcome. We need to be brutally honest about why things are the way they are (as well as the fact that we're all complicit), and we need to think very big whenever we are considering alternatives.

The first thing to say is that, on an individual level, changing the way we eat is not as simple as choosing. Food that comes direct from ecologically sound farms is hard to find, because there's not much of it. More than that, the whole way we live our lives is intertwined with the highly-processed, mass-distributed, corporate-owned system that we currently rely on. People grab a burger and pop into the supermarket to pick something up. They either need something else to grab and somewhere else to pop into, which means small businesses competing to replace massive multinationals like-for-like, or they need to fundamentally change their habits and lifestyle. That takes serious effort. It's not just a choice.

Second, the existing system is founded on an economic model which treats agriculture as “a business like any other”, and assumes that all businesses must seek to add value and gain competitive advantage. Food is treated as a commodity. Farming becomes the extraction of raw materials. The idea is to do as much as possible of the 'high-value' stuff (like designing packaging and manufacturing ready meals) at the highest possible margin, and as little as possible of the 'low-value' stuff (like actually growing food) for ever smaller returns and with no real regard to the damage caused. You can see this in simple statistics. Since the 1970s, the profitability of UK agriculture has steadily fallen, while the profitability of the major supermarkets has steadily risen.

Which brings us to the third point. We are all doing the wrong stuff. By the most optimistic estimates[i] there are about half a million jobs in the wider “Agriculture Industry”, including sub-industries, suppliers and support services. For the sake of easy numbers, and at the expense of precision, let's call it 2% of the total workforce. Taking a very rough look at all the jobs in all the different industries in the UK[ii], there are around three times that many people (call it 6%) working in manufacturing that has something to do with food and farming[iii]. About as many again are involved in food retail[iv] and the same again in restaurants, pubs and catering businesses[v]. Almost half that many (call it 3%) are involved in food-related wholesaling, storage, transport and support services[vi] and there are a broadly similar number working in head offices, advertising agencies, or consultancies and other professional services that have something to do with food[vii].

Taking these very rough figures as broadly representative of our post-industrial food economy[viii], we could say that about a quarter of all jobs have something to do with feeding us, but only five to ten percent of those jobs have anything to do with actually growing food, while something like half of those have virtually nothing to do with directly caring for the land.

Ecologically sound farming means the creation of diverse, integrated, low input farming systems. These are bound to be more complicated than industrial monocultures, and we will need a lot of highly skilled people if we are to create them, yet the official line is that we only need 52,000 new recruits to Agriculture over the next ten years, most of those are simply replacements for people leaving the industry, and there's a greater need for sales and customer service reps than actual skilled farmers[ix]. For anything like a healthy food and farming system we surely need at least ten times that many.

The picture becomes even more dire looking at the government's breakdown of jobs by occupation, rather than by industry[x]. There are almost as many gardeners (164,000) as there are farmers (118,000), farm workers (65,000) and growers (26,000) put together. Meanwhile our nation boasts 108,000 “stock control clerks”, 125,000 “shelf fillers” and 257,000 “retail cashiers/check-out operators”. More than half a million people can be described as marketing and sales managers while just over 1.2 million count as sales and retail assistants. That's all to say nothing of the 3 milion or so that are currently unemployed.

Just these few figures already show how far we have to go to create a sane and healthy food and farming system, and they also take us on to point number four – what we are up against. How many people work in buying departments, devoted to paying as little as possible to the people who care for the land? And how many work in pricing departments, squeezing as much money as they can out of “consumers” while convincing them they're getting a bargain? What about the food scientists who engineer cheap snacks to make us want more? All the grant money dedicated to supporting and promoting local food systems in the last 10 years pales in comparison to the amount a single company might spend on an advertising campaign for just one of its brands in the run up to Christmas[xi].

Which leads into the final point, which is one of sheer scale. Riverford, or River Nene, is probably the largest, most well known independent box scheme in the country. Its total annual turnover is still less than the turnover of a single one of the largest supermarket megastores[xii]. Yet even at this scale, and however much better Riverford is than most other ways of buying food, there are criticisms and apparent compromises – the veg is longer in storage and transit, so inevitably loses quality. The farms are certified organic, but they may also still be input dependent and relatively mechanised and monocultural. As a customer, you can go on farm visits, but you don't really know where your food comes from and who produces it.

So we are left answering questions of a national and global scale in terms of initiatives that feed, at best, a few hundred or a few thousand people. And they don't always pay everyone involved a living wage, and they often depend on non-farming diversifications in a way that couldn't necessarily be scaled up.

What's worse is that it's not even that easy to dismiss my cheeky cheeseburger as “unethical” “unsustainable” or one of the other words we use to justify wanting to call something bad. All McDonald's dairy is organic, their eggs are free range. They even use meat from dairy calves that might otherwise be slaughtered at birth, which raises the interesting moral dilemma of whether vegetarians have some kind of responsibility to eat happy meals? Or at least not to think badly of them?

How can we bridge the gap between the most scaled up and ambitious food and farming enterprises that truly respect the complexities of human justice and deep ecology, and the most high-scoring attempts by the mega-corporations-who-run-the-world to tick their social and environmental boxes?

The fact is that we probably can't. The changes we need are not changes we can simply assimilate. They must be disruptive. Which is not to say that the McDonalds and Tescos of this world have no place in the system that we need. It is to say that they will not be the ones to bring it about, and if they do continue to exist within it, they will exist in a radically different form.

So where do we need to get to? What are these disruptive changes? And if they're at all likely to flourish, shouldn't we already be able to see the seeds of future possibilities germinating amidst the compost of rotten economic models and decomposing ideologies?

At the centre of all this is a strange misconception. “Feeding The World” is not a biological problem. There is enough agricultural land to produce enough food for as many people as are ever likely to inhabit the earth without needing to rely on chemical inputs[xiii]. We already produce easily enough food for the 7 billion who are already alive, but we needlessly feed it to animals, frivolously burn it as fuel, waste a scarily large proportion of it, and use what's left very badly indeed – 1 billion are hungry, while 1 billion are overweight (both groups could be described as malnourished). 70% of food is still produced by small-scale traditional farms[xiv], and many of those could probably double their production with a few handy hints, better seeds, some simple technology and better access to markets[xv]. The challenge we face is not to overcome the limits of biology, it is to change our society, economy and culture so we are better able to thrive within those limits.

Starting with the UK, it is not too difficult to work out how our farms need to change. Based on a healthy, substantial and varied diet (which means eating less meat, less sugar and more vegetables) we can work out the necessary land use changes for the UK as a whole[xvi]. Over 2 million hectares of permanent grass would be ploughed up and converted to arable-ley rotations (providing cereals, potatoes, vegetables, meat & dairy, green manures, fibres and biofuels). Over 4 million hectares of rough grazing, and the half million hectares that are currently set-aside, would be converted to woodland (providing fuel, building materials, some edible crops and some meat) or to wild land (providing vital habitats, as well as wild meat and forage). Livestock would be used to make the system more productive not less productive, fed on fertility-building leys, excess cereal production (which is necessary to guard against bad years), wastage and scraps (though this would be much less than it is now), and the feed that is naturally available from “other” land (permanent grass, woodland and rough grazing).

But it is not enough to change the overall proportions of land use, our pattern of land use needs to change as well. Arable-Ley rotations mean farms need to raise both crops and livestock, and woodland, rough grazing, permanent grass and even wild land should be integrated with other land uses as much as possible, to get the most out of mutual interactions. Intensive horticulture should be concentrated around centres of populaton, and it makes sense to raise animals that can live off wastage and scraps (pigs and chickens) as near as possible to where those scraps are produced. All farming should be as diverse and integrated as we can make it, because that is how nature works.

This type of farming is necessarily complex, because it is designed to mimic the inbuilt complexity of natural ecosystems. To be successful, farming systems must be carefully designed and managed, which means they must depend above all else on knowledge and skills. Large farms might still exist, but it would be impossible for one man and a variety of massive machines to work 2000 hectares, as is currently considered best practice. It is inevitable that we need more people working in the countryside, in skilled, well-paid jobs that are directly involved in caring for the land to produce food.

That means more money has to go to farms. Which means the way food reaches us has to change. We need less middlemen and meddlers, skimming a profit for moving stuff around, portioning it up and creating a morbid illusion of choice. Real choice is personally knowing where something came from, how it was raised, who produced it, why it is unique. It is not deciding to pay a few pence more for the same standardised, anonymous, low grade pap, mixed with a different flavour enhancer and packaged with a different fake picture of smiling faces and green fields.

Everyone who grows, cooks and prepares food should have the opportunity to create a unique product, and to interact directly with the people who eat it. There might still be a place for large national-scale businesses that are masters of logistics, back-end web systems, and other efficiencies, but their main role would be to serve this army of small-scale food and farming entrepreneurs, not to corner markets, create monopolies, abuse suppliers and befuddle “consumers”.

Such a transformation in the nature of food retailing implies a major shift in demographics, altering both the patterns of activity within town and countryside, and the interactions between them. More people would be living and working in the countryside, villages would come back to life, the fields would be full again. And there would be constant comings and goings, from the towns out to the farms and back again. Cities would have newfound breathing space, and high streets would regenerate into newfound diversity. Rural life would have a cosmoplitan edge, while cities would discover their agrarian soul, with salad and herbs growing on balconies and rooftops, pigs in backyards, market gardens springing up on spare plots, and a constant flow of food, fuel and fibres serving as a reminder of the Fields below the Metropolis.

Ours is currently a one-to-many food system, with four companies controlling 80% of the food we eat[xvii]. What we need is a many-to-many system that can genuinely reflect and respond to the complexities of human behaviour and our interactions with the biosphere. Everything would be radically distributed and hyper-connected, not centralised and didactic. Self-organising food webs would connect farmers, cooks and entrepreneurs with an ever-evolving marketplace, in an endless series of overlaying patterns. Constant interaction and feedback at a human scale would mean that materials would be able to cycle around, creating closed-loop systems in place of linear production lines and allowing everyone to be more or less involved in the production of whatever they use. Instead of a passive, consumptive, manufacturing economy we would have an active, participatory, service economy. Every household would have a direct, personal relationship with at least one farm.

We are at a juncture in human civilisation where we have the opportunity to create a fundamentally new cultural paradigm. This is not a retreat from all the woes of industrialisation into the romanticised drudgery of the past. Where the industrial age has relied upon vast quantities of cheap, freely available energy, pre-industrial societies relied largely upon labour. Life was hard. The economy and culture was undoubtedly more agrarian – better connected to the land and its productive use, to the seasons and the patterns of particular places – but only because it had to be. And although there was an implicit ecological sympathy in many of the ways things were done, things were simply done the way they were done because it had been shown to work over generations. The possibility now is for us to create a New Agrarianism that is based on the applied understanding of biology and ecology, and which relies on knowledge, skills, and the appropriate application of clever technologies, instead of on cheap energy or labour.

There are two crucial developments which make this New Agrarianism new, and which mean that it is possible now in a way it never has been before. The first is new science, and in particular the developments in complexity theory and biology over the last twenty to fifty years. A truly nuanced understanding of ecosystems and genetics is only just beginning to be applied to farming, and the results are already promising, exciting and intriguing.

The emerging innovations include: genetically diverse, self-selecting populations of cereals that adapt rapidly and resist the shocks of disease and weather, while always optimising yield and quality[xviii]; “grass farmers” using a precisely husbanded succession of ruminants, chickens and other animals to mimic the ecosystems of the great plains, concentrating on the health of the soil and grass so they can use the land to its fullest[xix]; and countless other new designs that mimic nature's most abundant patterns with perennial vegetables, diverse crops, trees, shrubs, poultry, livestock and even fish, all integrated into clever polycultural combinations and rotations[xx].

The second crucial development is new communications. We are in the midst of a revolution in our ability to share knowledge, skills and information through the instant connection of the internet, and through physical transport links that connect the world like never before. As well as enabling us to debate, develop and disseminate new ideas, these links make it possible to share existing expertise and experience globally. So the study of ancient methods of fish-farming on smallholdings in Cambodia can lead to the design of an indoor aquaponics farm in London[xxi].

New communications also mean it is possible to buy and sell in completely new ways and, crucially, they mean that any place can potentially be at the cutting edge of anything. We no longer have to be in the city to keep abreast of current affairs, connect with a marketplace for a specialist product, collaboarte with specialists and experts, influence important decisions, or keep up with the latest trends. This doesn't only influence what's possible for our food and farming systems, it also means a rural life becomes a completely different proposition – the traditional reasons why anyone with “talent and ambition” wanted to flee the countryside no longer apply.

One of the surest signs that this New Agrarianism isn't just a minority's pipe dream, is the natural sympathy that already exists for the world it would create. For a start, everyone wants farm-fresh, home-cooked food like never before. To prove it you only have to take a cursory look at the majority of food packaging. We are bombarded by labels and adverts with pictures of open fields, images from homely kitchens, names of certain places and particular breeds, specific details about how something was raised and prepared, or family names and personal histories. But these mirages of meaning can never come close to the satisfaction of really knowing the people and places that produced your food.

More than that, a growing number of people crave some sort of connection to the countryside. On-farm camping holidays are booming, farm open days are more popular than ever and a visiting farm animal in an urban park is guaranteed to draw the crowds – with the parents usually struggling to pretend that their kids are more excited than they are. More people in the UK are now moving out of urban areas to the countryside than vice versa. Those that want to stay in the city are demanding a cleaner, greener, healthier way of life. A good start would be to get rid of some of the people and plant some vegetables.

Going “back to the land” can be dodgy territory. Images abound of impractical hippies communing with nature and growing a few tomatoes while living off their trust funds, or of ageing celebrities and retired bankers becoming gentleman farmers. Yet more people than ever have a genuine desire to get their hands dirty, to simplify, and to build themselves a more honest and rewarding lifestyle. What seemed impossibly alternative when The Good Life was on telly is now downright trendy, with reality shows following wannabe farmers and famous chefs boasting about their herb gardens. How many people are bored of their jobs, staring at spreadsheets, dealing with endless complaints, or stacking shelves? What would they think of the possibility of making a good living with their head, hands and heart, by farming, preparing food and selling it direct? How many have already daydreamed of such a life, but have so far dismissed the idea as unrealistic?

The challenge is to turn all this natural sympathy into massive change. We truly are living through a time when another world is possible, and changes are already taking place. I may still get entangled in the corporate food matrix from time to time, but well over half the food I eat comes straight off the farm where I live and work[xxii]. There are new enterprises and initiatives springing up everywhere. We only need to reach a critical mass of people actually doing things differently, which is commonly reckoned at about eight percent. After that, with a bit of luck, change just happens, as if things couldn't ever have been any other way. Certain localities and regions will probably get there first, and change can spread virally from there.

This is not a matter of changing people's values, it is far bigger than that. We are on the verge of a whole new cultural paradigm, and it will take all sorts of individuals to bring it into being, with all the vast diversity of attitudes, values, temperaments, abilities and interests that you'd expect from a healthy, flourishing ecosystem. And these are early days. If we define ourselves as a misunderstood minority, if we act like grumpy naysayers, then that is what we will remain.

We are pioneers, prophets of a new era, and we should act like it. We should see inevitable change springing up everywhere. We should gently scoff at those who are stuck in an old mindset, rather than labelling them as sinister, obstructive or perverse. And we should celebrate anything that might be part of the New Agrarianism, whether it's intended to be or not, rather than losing ourselves in petty criticisms of all that we should be supporting.

Maybe we can learn something from the rise of personal computers, that other great disruptive innovation of our time (although the change we're talking about entails a far more profound transformation, both practically and culturally). Maybe getting into food and farming now is like getting into computer programming in the early 1980s, when no-one really knew what it was, let alone what its implications might be. Maybe when we say that every household should have a personal relationship with at least one farm, any derision we meet is the same derision that once met the idea of “a computer on every desktop”. And just maybe, occasionally ending up in a fast food joint or a supermarket is like getting stuck on a clunky old mainframe computer and just having to make the best of it. Not so bad when you've seen the future, and quite quaint really, when you realise its gross inefficiencies and fundamental limitations.

It's impossible to conceptualise an entirely new culture and economy from scratch, but that's no reason to stop dreaming. Not everything we do will work, and there will be compromises and unintended consequences along the way, but that's no reason not to try. It's amazing how quickly the things we take for granted can change. The most important thing is to begin.

[i]     LANTRA Agriculture Factsheet 2010-2011 – figure based on Standard Industrial Classifications

[ii]    ONS Annual Business Survey 2009 – figures based on Standard Industrial Classifications – all relative figures and comparisons have been approximated from lists showing all jobs by each classification – a more precise analysis was out of the scope of this article

[iii]   Including manufactuire of: food and beverages; fertilisers and agrochemicals; agricultural machinerty; food and drink processing machinery. There are as many

[iv]   The vast majority are in “non-specialised stores with food, beverages or tobacco predominating”, which presumably includes all supermarkets. There are only 2,000 official jobs retailing food and drink “via stalls markets”.

[v]    Split approximately 2:1 restaurants/food stalls/event catering to pubs/cafes

[vi]   About half of these are in road transport

[vii] Very approximately, allowing for the proportion of these activities that relate to food

[viii]

[ix]   LANTRA Agriculture Factsheet 2010-2011 – “skilled trades” (including e.g. stockman, sprayer operator) account for 53% of jobs in agriculture – 52,000 new employees are needed by 2020, including replacements and expansion – the priorities will sales and customer service (11,000) elementary occupations (9,000) and managerial occupations (8,000)

[x]    ONS Labour Force Survey 2009 – breakdown of jobs by Standard Occupational Classification

[xi]   Local Food Grants v. McCains

[xii] Need turnover figures

[xiii] Colin's Saheel calculations

[xiv] Patrick Mulvany facts

[xv] IAASTD

[xvi] Simon Fairlies calculations

[xvii]         Big Four market share statistics

[xviii]        Martin Wolfe

[xix] Joel Salatin + similar UK examples?

[xx] Other polycultures – Chris Smaje?

[xxi] Ref FARM:shop London

[xxii]         Church Farm