Opinion: Charles Redfern
Fresh off the back of his participation in Planet Organic’s panel talk on regenerative versus organic, Organico Realfoods founder Charles Redfern is back to pen his thoughts on the two approaches and what they can learn from each other.
In the EU more than 10% of land is certified organic. The Farm to Fork strategy sits front and centre of the European Green Deal and is proactively supported by Parliament, the Commission and the Council with organic agriculture at the hub of its ambitious vision for 25% of all farmland to be organic by 2030.
Austria has already exceeded this ambitious target with Estonia and Sweden not far off. Of the ‘big’ countries, Italy is at 18%, Germany and Spain just over 10% and France a little further back. Needless to say all are significantly higher than the UK! In sales terms, in Denmark, Austria and Switzerland organic sales exceed 10% of the market.
When I started out in organics, some 30 years ago, France was much like the UK, maybe even marginally behind. We had Planet Organic, Fresh & Wild, the precursor of Whole Foods, King Charles, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and a big fillip from mad cow’s disease. Yet by 2022, French organic retail sales were over €12 billion – four times bigger than in the UK. Schools and public authorities, as in many parts of Europe, are obliged to serve a proportion of organic food. This July I visited around 80 pure 100% organic food stores armed with samples and POS kits on my bike over a four-day period. All sat proudly within the inner ring of Paris. In the whole of France there are around 3,000 dedicated small supermarket organic stores with up to 750 sq m of pure organic retail space.
By comparison and in stark contrast, the UK resides somewhere between the dark ages and being perpetually stuck in a limbo. There’s one brilliant way around this dilemma and that is the way that Patrick Holden – ex head of the Soil Association, founder of the Sustainable Food Trust and a veteran organic farmer – has chosen. He substitutes the word regenerative for the word organic.
Now, as you know, everyone is talking regenerative. The supermarkets and press love it and our big corporation can’t get enough of it; Unilever, Nestlé, Cargill, Danone and many more besides have all got regenerative policies in place where they talk cover crops, mulching, biodiversity, bio-diverse corridors, carbon sequestration, water quality, crop rotation, and above all bow down to the simple aphorism that a healthy soil is vital to feed the planet.
So organic has won. Everyone is up for it. I have, of course, my doubts. Andy Cato, founder of Wildfarmed – which is making waves as a ‘regenerative’ product in supermarkets – is himself an organic farmer, but on Clarkson’s Farm gave a rather pithy description of organic as being just about rules of things you need to avoid. Andy Cato himself is an organic farmer, as are many of the Wildfarmed farmers. So, what’s going on? There are broadly three regenerative predilections.
First, organic and ecological pioneers who think organic rules were not going far enough and/or have suffered a ‘corporate takeover’
Second, and with considerable overlap, are people who think organic might be divisive, or that every little bit of good is worth doing and so we shouldn’t get too stuck on rules
Third, and most problematic, is the meme value of regenerative; it’s basically a fabulous word with great mood association. No wonder sustainable intensification, the preferred term until now of the agro-industrial lobby, has been quietly ditched – just as ‘carbon neutral’ begat ‘net zero’.
Going forward this is going to be the problem for regenerative. The rules that organic has made have been carefully, argumentatively, painstakingly and cooperatively built up over decades, right across the world. It is a standard like no other because it is a standard that involves three parties: government, and therefore the civil or collective ‘we’; companies that trade and are a business; and the pioneers or believers in a different way of doing farming. Basically, there is a bigger gulf of opinion between those regenerative organic pioneers who think that organic regulations don’t go far enough and the corporate policy makers who have created their own regenerative rules and principles.
“ It’s time now to affirm that no-one has all the solutions, everyone is learning and there are many great initiatives going on.”
The US approach of ‘organic + regenerative’ with organic certification as a non-negotiable base is one solution. The other is a proper eco-labelling scheme, independently managed and controlled, based on sound science but with its direction of travel firmly pointed towards the needed ecological transition. That transition, with its multiple complexities, is the one expressed legislatively in the European Green Deal which puts organic centre stage.
As an aside, the right eco-labelling scheme is the one that we at Realfoods have adopted and are first to launch in the UK: Planet Score. Such a scheme allows consumers to cut through greenwashing and compare claim versus claim fairly. It also allows operators right along the food chain, from our farmers and growers through to the retail choice pickers, to make better environmental sourcing decisions. The icing on the cake would of course be awesome government leadership using eco-labelling benchmarking to address the myriad of health and sustainability problems our free-market food system propagates.
There is a useful aphorism that the best organic farmers are regenerative and the best regenerative farmers organic. IFOAM and Regenerative International both base themselves on four core principles: health, ecology, fairness and care. It’s time now to affirm that no-one has all the solutions, everyone is learning and there are many great initiatives going on.
Organic has unquestionably come a long way. I understand that some people might not want to offend or sound condescending when talking about organic but that’s more on a farmer-to-farmer level. For those of us that are further along the supply chain and closer to the consumer, it’s time for us to reclaim sustainability as ours and to say loudly: “I’m proud to be organic” – or as they say in French, “Stop mépris bio!”
By Charles Redfern, founder, Organico Realfoods