I take your point also about the main focus of your blog being quackery; we all have to cultivate our own jardin. And yet …

I can’t help feeling that your excellent criticism of the Mckeiths of this world would look better if placed in a slightly larger context. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the narrowness of your focus undermines the strength of the important case that you are making. As I tried to imply.
Paul C

This is a web site about quackery. I hope it can be judged in that context.

And I do think that the undermining of the respect for science by the likes of McKeith is a very central problem. Rational thought is not an optional extra in solving big problems. Science gets chipped away at in the margins and then makes it impotent in the big issues. We see many ‘leaders’ using the rising anti-science (or endarkenment) to promote their own agendas.

Just doing my bit.

The real threats to food security are climate change (probably), and very certainly, the current push for biofuel, driven by the increasingly irrational neo-conservatives and industrialists who dominate USA policy, which is distorting global food production. In 2006, US farmers diverted 14m tonnes, or 20% of the whole maize crop, for ethanol for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of maize. US exports of maize are 70% of the world total, and are used widely for animal feed. The shortages have disrupted livestock and poultry industries worldwide, and are driving up food global prices. This in turn is causing instability in a number of 3rd world countries, and contributing to serious malnutritional issues.

As Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute thinktank, recently pointed out, “The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its 2 billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue.”

Now why don’t you tackle a few of the serious themes? Homeopaths and quacks are easy targets …
paul C

Well indeed — more suited to, for example, making nice wine in whatever hocus-pocus manner, than to feeding Africa or stopping Western childhood obesity.

Andrew.

On your main point I would say that, yes, I am sure that any form of low-intensity farming (I will resist calling it organic) has the potential to create a superior product. However, production costs will be higher and hence, we have to ask if this approach will ever be little more than an indulgent choice of the middle-classes? Can low-intensity farming offer good food for the many, the poor, and the developing world without using huge amounts of natural resources in land, water and labour? Does good animal husbandry only come at the cost of wildlife and forests?

Questions like these are important, and the low-intensity farmers have a role to play in answering them. However, if they base their knowledge on astrology, witchcraft and quackery, it is not going to be a very sensible debate, is it?

The Organic Movement and the Soil Association still have strong vestiges of this sort of mumbo-jumbo. They are not evidence-based approaches, but prefer to fossilise much of their ’standards’ on the early thoughts of people like Rudolf Steiner and the Biodynamics movement. I think it is a big shame that the vanguards of progressive farming have been hijacked by supporters of irrational philosophies and marketing myths.

Interestingly, I was first told about biodynamics by a friend who’s a wine merchant (and an engineer by training). He worked on a biodynamic vineyard for a while and swears that despite the clear lunacy of their methods, they must be doing something right by accident, because the movement is renowned for making some bloody good wine…

Andrew.