Patrick Holden, it has been said, has steered the Soil Association to prominence during his 14 years as Director. He is himself an organic farmer in west Wales, and numbers among his contacts such people of influence as Prince Charles, the agricultural editor of The Archers and Jonathan Dimbleby. The Soil Association was formed in 1946, but has roots going further back into the first half of the twentieth century. It is one of the leading guardians of the ethos and rules of organic farming in Britain today.¹⁾

We were very lucky to be able to hear him talk in the Town Hall, St Helier, on 9 November 2009, as a guest of the Slow Food Association, sponsored by the Channel Island Co-operative Society.

Patrick Holden began by noting that Jersey has a relatively recent precedent for having to feed itself - during the Nazi Occupation. During those years, people got by by virtue of the existing agricultural capacity and skills within the island. The island population was around 40,000 then as compared to 90,000 now, and in the intervening years we have lost most of the social and physical capital that enabled the island largely to feed itself at that time.

In recent decades Japan has built on all of their best agricultural land. That is a very dangerous thing to have done in terms of maintaining the ability to feed oneself, which thankfully has not happened here. Yet. Although we have allowed the social and physical capital to dwindle, the loss of the land itself must never be allowed.

The Second World War brought food shortages to mainland Britain too, and when Lady Eve Balfour founded the Soil Association in 1946 it was against a backdrop of 'digging for victory' and food rationing with the aspiration that food supplies in Britain should never be insecure again.

The origins of organic farming and the Soil Association go back to the experiences of Sir Albert Howard's experiences in what is now Pakistan in the first half of the 20th century. He saw local people living on the land, planting, composting, rotating their crops, and doing so with a remarkable freedom from pests and diseases. Their livestock were largely free of parasites and healthy. The people themselves were healthy. He realised that the health of the soil, the plants, the animals and man were one and the same. Healthy oxen could rub noses with diseased animals and simply not catch the disease. He wrote that health itself is a state, potentially much more than merely the absence of disease. In such a healthy living system, if there is a problem, that means that there is something wrong with the procedures or the management. In a mature and successful system there are no such problems, or they can quickly be remedied.

In the modern world of agri-business, nitrogen fertilisers produce an artificial stimulation of plant growth that leads to inherent weaknesses that directly lead to a need for fungicides and pesticides to control diseases. Organic growing exists sustainably outside of this merry-go-round of dependence on the products of crude oil. By the 1960s this ecologically sound, sustainable philosophy existed in Britain but practitioners found it impossibly difficult to compete in the marketplace with Common Agricultural Policy subsidised produce. By the 1980s, however, organic food had hit the supermarket shelves and the organic market has seen double-digit annual growth ever since.

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of the Transition Network²⁾ and he has inspired Patrick Holden to see that we are not just living off the 'fat of the land', but actually the fat of the cleared rainforests of Borneo, South America and elsewhere. By clearing these forests and growing soya, palm oil etc there until the land is exhausted, then moving on, we are using up in each crop thousands of years of ecological capital in a very short time. By fuelling the whole operation with fossil fuels and fuelling the land with oil-based nitrogen fertilisers, we are simultaneously using up millions of years of earth capital, geological capital, in the same short time. This is in addition to filling the atmosphere with greenhouse carbon, filling the waterways with polluting nitrates and stripping the structure of the soil so that it itself runs off into the rivers with the rain. Peak oil has been predicted for decades and is probably upon us about now. We can see where we are; we can see where we need to be by, say, 2020. The question that Transition Culture addresses is, how do we get from here now, to there by then.

As an individual we may feel fearful, guilty and dis-empowered in the face of these realities. The most we feel we can achieve are a few tokenistic actions at home such as changing to low-power light bulbs or lowering the thermostat slightly. Listening to people like Rob Hopkins we may come to believe that we may starve before climate change impacts our lives in other ways. Patrick Holden was able to say that as a farmer, he felt he could take the opposite course. He could feel positive. He could learn to live without the umbilical supplies of oils, electricity, special seeds, special straw, soya and palm oil that fed his farm. By learning to live without these things, gradually and step at a time, he was able to begin to rebuild the skills and the social capital that allows us to live off our land, not off the fat of the cleared rainforests and the dwindling oil wells.

There needs to be resilience in the food system. There was during the Second World War, but is it there now? The simple answer is, no. Professor John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, says that we have about ten years to rebuild that resilience. He says that if we do not, we will face a 'perfect storm' as “food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions”.³⁾ We need to grow and eat in-season staple foods locally. Are we nine meals from anarchy? This phrase was coined in 2008 by Lord Cameron of Dillington, a farmer who was the first head of the Countryside Agency, to describe just how perilous Britain's food supply actually is.⁴⁾

The whole of agriculture must give up nitrate fertilisers - 30% of global carbon emissions come from agriculture, so there are huge savings to be made. The motivation for doing this can be from inspiration rather than from fear. While the buying public have not been on the hearts-and-minds journey, then at the moment organic growers cannot compete in the supermarkets, but this is a transition journey for all of us - food consumers, distributors, buyers, sellers and growers. We must build resilience into the farming system, lessen our reliance on imports and other dependencies and so be prepared for the future.

If we can get this together from the ground up, then politicians and supermarkets will come on board from the top down. Politicians are totally dependent of the moods, the needs and the votes of the public. Supermarkets are equally dependent on the wants and spending power of the buying public, and need continually to meet those needs in order to satisfy the profit motives of their shareholders (who are largely us too, via our pension funds and other investments). The problem at the moment is that it is all going on, but it is happening just below most people's radar so they are not aware of it; but that will change.

Five million people joined conservation organisations - from the RSPB to the National Trust - during the 20th century. The purpose of these was largely to protect the landscape from agriculture. There is no need for that animosity: citizens and consumers can change the world rather than waiting for someone else to change it for them.

Organically grown foods are not an expensive 'lifestyle' choice, but are an essential part of the crucial hearts-and-minds journey from this fragile place forward into the 21st century.

If we ask, 'Can we afford to feed the whole world with organic produce?' the true answer is that in the next 20 to 50 years, we will not be able to afford to feed them any other way.

• Patrick Holden (2004) What is wrong with intensive farming? Watch a video of Patrick Holden making many of the same points in his own words. Bigpicture.tv
• The Soil Association (2009) Food Futures: Strategies for resilient food and farming The Soil Association outlines their strategy to enable the transition to a food-secure future.