Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

Asia fish
Stiff fines no deterrent
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Sea cucumber. Pic: public domain.

Criminals fishing for sea cucumber to the south of Japan are ignoring the increasingly harsh penalties for their coveted catch. Japanese police arrested five poachers with a 625 kg catch of sea cucumbers last week. Valued at around 10,000 pounds, the haul was one of the largest in recent years. Sea cucumber is an overfished delicacy that faces sharp declines in population if current levels of exploitation continue. Unfortunately, there is no reliable way of calculating the sustainability of surviving stocks.

food manufacture food production raw UK
Investigating hydrogen
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For the past eighty years scientists have been rolling up their sleeves at the Glensaugh research farm and finding robust answers to the problems facing the agricultural sector. Perched on the east coast of Scotland not far from Aberdeen, the site is set to become a carbon neutral farming environment once its building programme comes on stream, pencilled in for 2025.

BBC journalist Nancy Nicolson visited Glensaugh for an edition of On Your Farm, which aired on April 30 and is still available on BBC Sounds. Water is the key to the project, using an industrial scale electrolyser to generate hydrogen that will power tractors and heavy machinery. This will in turn be powered by an array of green energy sources, such as turbines and solar panels.

A headline figure for the project is four million pounds: this is explained in part by the additional cost of being early adopters of technology that is still in development. This project will cast a light on the current operational energy needs of a one thousand hectare estate. Investment on this scale in one agricultural location is based on the assumption that the rest of the national economy will still be functioning in the future, in a recognisable form. We are still a long way from converting urban centres into sustainable economic entities.

Listen to Nancy Nicolson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001lhz1?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

food manufacture
Scale of sugar’s cornerstone role
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Modern sugar farming is potentially as bad for the planet as the food ingredient is for us. Take for example British Sugar, which buys in 8 million tonnes of sugar beet a  year and turns them into 1.2 million tonnes of sugar.

Ever since 1996, British Sugar has been developing a profitable business from a sugar beet by-product, namely the soil adhering to sugar beet arriving at the factory gate. British Sugar’s product range is marketed under the TOPSOIL brand and is sold by the lorryload to golf clubs, housing developments, parks and gardens.

pic: British Sugar

Some 3,000 farmers across the east of the UK are literally giving away their futures with every trailer load of muddy sugar beet. Nobody at British Sugar has any particular reason to worry. But the fact remains that the farmers concerned are losing 200,000 tonnes of soil a year from their core business — about 66 tonnes each per year as an average. If British Sugar was experiencing a comparable threat to its core business, it would probably respond differently.

British Sugar is the UK arm of the much larger AB Sugar group, which employs 35,000 staff at 27 locations around the world, including a Chinese sugar beet joint venture. The AB Sugar parent company is Associated British Foods, which supplies food manufacturers and retailers with an extensive range of ingredients and finished food products. ABF is the second largest processor of sugar and baker’s yeast in the world, as well as having a significant presence  in emulsifiers and stabilisers. Once a significant food retailer, its retail arm is now limited to the fashion chain Primark. This deliberate choice of non-food, avoids cannibalising the core food businesses.

Created with The GIMP

The roots of ABF go back to 1935, when Canadian Garfield Weston founded Food Investments ltd, which just weeks later became Allied Bakeries. It grew steadily through the war years and by 1956 had bought up 10 regional and national bakeries, selling 20 million biscuits a day in addition to bread.

In 2022, group profits were GBP 1.4 billion on a group revenue of GBP 17 billion. Now owned by Wittington Investments, ABF dominates the UK food sector with leading positions in key food ingredients and processes.

cultivation food production plants retail
Looking ahead
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Gaps in supply chains are set to become a regular feature of the UK economy. In April, supermarket chain Morrisons started limiting customers to two sweet peppers per shopping trip because of procurement difficulties for salad ingredients. Cold weather in southern Europe has led to shortages across the continent, while high energy costs have deterred UK growers from planting early greenhouse salad crops. Supplies of early season tomatoes and cucumbers have also been affected.

Traditional sources for these crops are Spain, Morocco and neighbouring north African countries. The combination of higher fuel costs for imported salad crops and the cold snap has wreaked havoc.

In March, the UK recorded headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation of 10% https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/consumerpriceinflation/march2023 But take a closer look at the Office of National Statistics data and consumers will learn that food inflation is running at around 19% (CPIH 12-month rate for March 2023). Climate disruption is just one of many factors that will have a generalised effect on future developments in many sectors. Animal products of all kinds have already been heavily impacted in recent months and the sector can be expected to see further upward pressure on prices if producers are going to stay in business.

soil renewal
From Sir Albert Howard to Richard Higgins
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It is time to unpack Sir Albert Howard’s legacy and what he learned in Indore. Howard was writing extensively about his composting system in the 1930s and on into the early years of the second world war. He died in 1944, at a time when when mixed arable and livestock farming was still the norm for European agriculture.

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UK economy
Real economic power
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The economy often appears to be a large, ramshackle institution, a law unto itself. This is partly due to the skills of those who really control it and partly because it is both a large ramshackle institution and a law unto itself. If the economy was only made up of money, it might be easier to make a case for saying that it can be controlled, if not managed, at some level. The truth is that the economy comprises much more than mere money and is constantly manipulated by economic factors that strengthen the relative strengths of one component over another.

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City life cultivation food production
City life 3.0
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On the surface, urban life appears to be very deeply compartmentalised, when large populations find themselves living cheek by jowl while maintaining social separations, such as class, race or status. However, there is no separation in nature, the planet has a single atmosphere, a single ocean, not to mention shared land masses. Ultimately, all nature’s resources are shared, with an often over-generous share being taken by humanity. The planet does not respond or challenge this phenomenon, but continues to meet all demands made of it, by human and animal alike, on a first come, first served basis.

Wherever humanity has left the by-products of its plundering, such as ash, exhaust gases or radioactive residues, these have accumulated and degraded down the centuries. Nature does not judge polluters, just keeps their dirty little secrets on view for all to see. To avoid eternal shame, humanity actively needs to work in harmony with nature, instead of emptying the sweet jars in the planetary candy store.

There have been civilisations which have lived in harmony with the natural world, spanning millennia, sadly we have very limited knowledge of their cultures, or indeed the roots of their eventual demise. Managing soil fertility was doubtlessly a cornerstone of their endeavours, making a closer study of the Indore project a high priority. It is time for subscribers to unpack Sir Albert Howard’s legacy.

City life cultivation monoculture
City life 2.0
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Food production has to compete fiercely for space in any urban environment. In a bid to escape these constraints, some food producers have gone up in the world, literally. Welcome to the world of vertical farming, a high tech adaptation of hydroponics, in which plants are raised in row upon row of troughs, each level illuminated by a blend of artificial lights that add up to a passable semblance of continuous light. Vertical farming has the squeaky clean credentials of a rising star in the food industry, earning extra points for season-free crops of strawberries, salad leaves and baby spinach leaves.

Converts and supporters of vertical farming point to the careful use of environmentally friendly electricity, the green credentials of the indoor space management in commercial growing operations that can supply high grade salad crops to supermarkets in a continuous production cycle.

The BBC has visited a leading exponent a number of times. Here is what they reported in August 2022 (https://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-62491123). The Bristol-based Jones Food Company is preparing to launch the biggest vertical farm in the UK. There is a lot of high tech green know-how at work in the business. However, while its carbon footprint is doubtless beyond reproach, one is left wondering whether there is any role for nature in this high tech warehouse. After all, there is no commercial requirement for nature to be a part of any business plan.

The Jones Food Company website argues that its core business is farming sustainably, without some of the “hazardous substances” associated with field farming. By cleaning and reusing water up to 30 times, water intake is one tenth of what a conventional field crop would need. JFC also argues that in-house water hygiene allows the company to operate without toxic crop treatments, saving money and improving the flavour of crops.

This is an activity that sets out to be part of the solution, if not all of the solution, rather than any kind of problem. The basic assumption that what goes on in the wider world is either too distant or irrelevant does not hold water. There is a duty of care to the planet to give some thought to the whole ecosphere, when planning what goes into a growing space, however small.

Seen from that angle, the emphasis changes in a subtle shift towards a planetary view. To be sure, assuming that the vertical farmer is so close to her customers that food miles cease to be an issue, whereas procurement of fluorescent tubes probably requires a longer trip around a continent or two. It may be that the calculation of food miles needs to be done on the basis of inputs as well as outputs.

City life cultivation domestication
City life 1.0
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The foundations of any society must needs be its harmony with, for want of a better term, nature. There is simply no way we can live outside nature, so we have to recognise that we are part of it and live accordingly. This is easier to say than to do, so my apologies for not having ready answers to the torrent of issues such a line of thought unleashes.

The inescapable paradox is that our cities are built to normalise anthropocentric lifestyles. Nobody is to blame for such a situation, it has just happened this way and would probably do the same again if we were to reinvent industrial society. In simple terms we lack the skill set needed to give the natural world a proper hearing and it is a moot point to suggest that we just need time to do so. We have had an incentive to learn for millennia and have spent that time dipping into finite planetary resources in the process.

The earliest settled cities devised elaborate systems for governing both city and hinterland, documenting their transactions with painstaking detail. Literacy was restricted to the ruling class, but every citizen had to be environmentally savvy if the metropolis was to survive, let alone prosper. History bears witness to the long term success of Sumerian cities such as Girsu or Ur, where archaeologists talk of habitation during millennia, an achievement that is unlikely to be matched by the modern industrial economy. Stumbling from environmental crisis to ecological impasse, the industrial economy has played fast and loose with nature, not to mention urban food chains, the subject of this blog.

More pressing than to understand the fate of early agrarian societies is to understand what they did correctly for centuries. There is good reason to suppose that they had sustainable sanitation of a sort that Sir Alfred Howard envisaged while working on the Indore project. A renewable, natural cycle producing humus within a month would go a long way to explaining the soil’s fertility in the world’s longest-surviving agrarian societies.

Asia cultivation
The Indore project
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Sir Albert Howard,
pic Wikimedia

Between the wars, Sir Alfred Howard was the director of the Institute of Plant Technology Indore. Later hailed as a guiding spirit of the organic movement, Howard’s vision of agriculture was one of interlocking sub systems that functioned as an integrated whole.

Between 1924 and 1931, Howard perfected the Indore process, naming it after the state in Central India where he had been working. The Indore process takes animal and/or human waste and combines it with vegetable waste to generate field-ready humus in just four weeks. The process runs at such a high temperature range that bacteria and insect larvae are literally cooked to death.

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