Caravan

My gypsy caravan home in Cornwall for the next couple of weeks, while I do I a Permaculture Design Course.

Thimphu days 2-3

Text to follow

Postcard from Thimphu

Thimphu – 2300m Tues 4/3/14

Flew into Paro from Bangkok with a stopover at Dacca. The approach into Paro Airport is possibly one of the most extreme in the world. You spend 15 minutes flying between mountains (and sometimes above villages) before arriving at the runway. It can only be done in clear weather!

I suspect that, after three months in the tropics, I may not have enough warm clothes. It was so cold and windy the first night here that I went to bed at seven. It snowed in the morning. The first snow that Thimphu has seen this year. A far cry from the tropical splendour I have enjoyed over the past three months. The government declared the day a national holiday (in honour of the snow) a few minutes after the snow fell (it didn’t settle though).

Prince Charles would like Bhutan: it has a commitment to becoming 100% organic and also very strict planning / architectural laws. All the buildings here are designed along traditional architectural lines - I haven’t seen a building taller than 5 stories high so far. Thimphu is a boom town (attracting many rural migrants) – but half of the locals wear national dress. But it’s only the size of a provincial city – population around 100,000. (Bhutan’s population is only 700,000 in a contry the size of Switzerland). In some respects (the quality of its pavements and gutters) it still feels like a shanty town. And there are hundreds of stray dogs. The first night their barking woke me up four or five times. I like Bhutan (dog barking expected). The second night I slept through it (mostly).

I’m here for a conference on ‘Organic and Ecological Agriculture in Mountain Ecosystems’. There’s some ‘big players’ here from the organic world, Vandana Shiva, Hans Herren, the President and Chief Executive of IFOAM, Bhutan’s Agriculture Minister, the CEC of the Autonomous region of Ladakh. I’ll write more about that later.

Farm visits

One of the lovely things about going to agricultural conferences is the field trip. On this trip we visited a 100 ha goat farm, making cheese and selling goat meat, a therapy farm where monks from the Benedictine tradition make organic herb tea mixtures and a 1000 ha farm rebuilding on the abandoned infrastructure of a soviet collective farm. All organic of course. Afterwards we were treated to a feast and folklore evening.

The goat farm runs 500 goats on about 100 ha of land. The goats free range and the farm grows on the male kids to six months when they are slaughtered for meat (many farms will kill the male goats at birth). They try to let the goats display as natural behaviour as possible including not dehorning or them or castrating the male ones. (This is an important principle in organic farming - which is not just about not using pesticides or fertilisers). They also keep a few geese around the goat sheds which help control some parasites that affect the goats. I've heard of companion planting before (see below) but never companion herding!

Our second visit was to a therapy farm in the heart of the forest. Its a newly established venture though, judging by the age of the apple trees in the orchard, the land has been cultivated for some time. Here the monks and the people in their programme (with drug or alcohol addictions who want to - but don't very often- go clean) grow about fifty varieties of herbs and gather about the same amount (plus wild mushrooms) from the surrounding forest. They produce tea mixes, organically certified and apparently quite a well known brand name in Lithuania. Two things of interest (to me) from this visit: one was their use of companion planting (see second photo) using hosters to attract slugs away from their strawberry patch. This made me think that the Benedictines have several hundred years worth of gardening knowledge (predating industrial farming) and were one of the earliest groups of literate people in Western society. Their written texts will go back 500 years, so I bet that they have a few organic techniques tucked away in their libraries (research project anyone??). The second interesting feature was their solar drier. While they purposefully cultivate their gardens manually, they are not against employing modern technology in their processing. This dryer - with a surface area of 1400 square metres generates almost 50Kwh of electricity and is used to dry the herbs. Probes, sensors and software are used to set the system to get the tea mixtures down to the desired level of humidity - at which point the system is turned off (it probably turns itself off) and a new batch is loaded. An interesting mix of tradition and high-tech - and a delicious lunch to follow.

Our final farm visit was to an industrial scale organic farm, based on the ruins of an old soviet collective farm. They've renovated parts of the infrastructure and got some rather state of the art farming kit (see second photo), courtesy of European Rural Development funding. They have 1000 ha (technically two farms of 500 ha each as the Lithuanian government has just passed a law forbidding farms larger than 500 ha in an effort to prevent land grabbing/speculation/consolidation) where they grow buckwheat and peas in a simple rotation (on very sandy soil) - which are largely exported. With such modern equipment they must be the envy of the neighbours - which is probably why they have had to resort to putting a chain link fence around their diesel tanks and installing two very fierce Rottweilers to guard it. I guess that solves the problem of a 'leaking' diesel tank

<

We ended the day at a village just a kilometre or so from this farm. All clapperboard houses and pretty gardens, a nationally recognised cultural monument. A night of feasting and folklore was arranged in their village hall a garage converted into the village hall for the night. They proudly showed a film about their local village traditions (weaving, singing and folk music, traditional baking, a communal sauna, bath-house etc). We were treated to a wonderful display of folklore traditions dancing and singing and a feast of local foods (preceded by speeches by the local mayor, district development co-ordinator, head of cultural affairs etc., etc. etc.). The village clearly pulled out all the stops to make 100 or so guests representing most European countries feel welcome.

The film about the village that we were shown at the start of the evening also spoke proudly about the modernisation of their village which has a clinic, a library with books and a fire engine, yet as the evening wore on and mother nature exerted her call, it also became clear that the village lacked flush toilets as one had to use a wooden outhouse. (I suspect it also lacks piped water as every house had it's own working well). Ecological indeed, but perhaps uncomfortable in the freezing depths of winter. While not unused to using dry toilets it came as surprise to me to be in a village less than two hours drive from a modern European capital city where facilities that most Europeans take for granted are not available. Lithuania experiences a double brain drain - from the rural areas to the cities and then from the cities to other European countries (it has lost more than 10% of its population to migration in the past twenty years). One wonders how many of the boys and girls who put on the dancing display for us this evening will still be in the village in five years time.

Bye bye Biofach / Fun fun fun on the Deutsche Bahn

Post-modern railway architecture: Liege

Two weeks ago Kraftwerk played a week long residency at the Tate Modern. Tickets were much sought-after. It encouraged me to revisit their music. Normally this would have meant digging out tapes and my tape recorder from the basement, dusting them down and connecting them up the hi-fi. These days we have Spotify (more about them later). I enjoyed a whole evening of synth-driven Krautrock and realised how much I liked them – especially their songs about motorways and train journeys.

A propos of this I found myself on a long train journey last week – when I actually went past a rather dated set of train carriages shunted into a siding with the immortal words Trans-Europe Express emblazoned on the side – (and I thought the TEE was apocryphal). These days we have ICE, Thalys and Fyra (the less said about that the better). They are comfortable fast and modern. The only draw back is that they are far more expensive than cheap airlines.

My journey from Brussels to Nuremburg (and back) was fast and comfortable (though with too many changes – one of them with a four minute turn around at Frankfurt – which was kind of tight). Previously my travels to Nuremburg have taken me over the Eiffel, a hilly area on the Belgian border. But this time, coming from a different place I had the joy of travelling along the banks of the Rhine for I guess an hour and a half– from Koln to Bonn, Koblenz and most of the way to Mainz. We also passed through Liege and Aachen.

It was a beautiful journey passing through many places I still intend to visit. This is a historic trade route. I have long wanted to travel it - on a slow boat, preferably a goods barge plying its way from Rotterdam up river. Still the view from the train gives a good impression. Very wealthy mansions along the riverside, castles on the tops of bluffs to protect the trade routes and vineyards planted at impossibly steep angles up the hillsides. Contrary to everything I know about agriculture they plant in vertical lines as opposed to horizontal ones – which should help reduce soil erosion – still what do I know compared to hundreds of years of practical experience. It would be a photographer’s delight – if one weren’t travelling at 150+ km/h + and it wasn’t raining.

I was hoping to buy a good novel for the journey home. German bookstores – even those at train stations- have a surprisingly wide selection of English language books – and at competitive prices. Often Murikami is well-represented. He has a big following in Europe – I even saw a Dutch (or was it German?) language Murikami diary last year. I hadn’t read his latest opus yet and was half hoping to find it. I like his magical realism based in a post industrial society: all the other magical realists I know seem write about pre-modern societies, so its good to feel that something ‘magical’ can still happen in our over-planned technological societies. But the last book of his that I read ‘felt a bit like all the others’ and I was hesitant to go buy the new one – but everyone I have spoken to says it is really good. Turned out that the book store at Nuremburg BH didn’t have any books that interested me (crime and romance mostly), so from Nuremburg to Koln I sat down to read the latest annual edition of the 200 page guide to the world of organic farming, produced by FiBL and IFOAM . I’m a sucker for stats. There’s plenty of those here – and reports and analysis of developments in the world of organics over the past year. Some of the reports I have seen before (we previewed them in Ecology and Farming over the past year) – but there’s still much that I didn’t know:

The US eclipsed the EU as the largest market for organic produce in 2010
The UK and Ireland are the only two EU countries where the recession has led to a dip in organic sales
Overall sales of organic produce in the EU rose by 9% in 2010-11- despite the recession
Scandinavian and Germanic counties continue to be the leaders in terms of market share
The share of organic land in Belgium rose by 20% last year (now there’s an interesting story line worthy of investigation) and in Ireland it went up by 13%. It's always interesting to find out whether such changes are led by subsidies or markets. While subsidies are important (to compensate for – temporary -yield losses) they tend not to be sustainable.

I do find a copy of IQ84 at the bookstore at Koln station, but by that time I am so engrossed in the world of organic statistics that I decide to save it save it for a rainy day.


Industrial railway architecture: Koln

Biofach Impressions

(Please read part one, below, first. This is a continuation)

I have two meetings arranged for the fair – both to discuss ongoing projects – and not strictly necessary – but it certainly helps oil the wheels and promote understanding. There’s also a project bid where I haven’t yet met the client (I will be a sub-contractor on that one). I also edit a lot of magazine articles by organic players I haven’t actually met. I get to meet several of them. It’s good for me to not only put a face, but a personality and set of interests, behind a name. But mostly it’s good to be there and catch up on gossip.



There’s a tradition on the second day to have ‘post-fair stall parties’. It’s a ligger’s delight. As the second day winds down I pass the Irish stall, where the Irish ambassador to Germany (who has travelled all the way from Berlin) is encouraging ‘the troops’: speaking of Ireland’s reputation and quality foods (and of it being one of the few countries in the world that has a trade surplus with Germany).

Further down the line I meet the obligatory lunatic. There’s always more than one at these shows and he hid it well. It wasn’t until ten minutes into our conversation that I reasons there were good reasons why no-one was funding his research proposals about the energetic pathways between soil and plants. Unfortunately we’d gone through the card swap ritual before I realised this! I could regret that.

Having managed to shake him off I get to the Portuguese stall where one of my colleagues is based this year. I get a lesson in the complexities of Portuguese wine-making, get to taste a brandy based on the strawberry tree and then another colleague turns up with a bottle of brandy distilled in (get this) Iraq. Everybody said he was crazy and would never get away with getting that production line going. (Having tasted it they might have still have some way to go with refining the process – but I guess they don’t face much domestic competition). One of the Portuguese farmers appears with a leg of acorn fed smoked ham – which causes some logistical problems as no-one has a knife large or sharp enough to slice it – but someone finds a solution (exceedingly pissing off a top Australian chef- whose knives were used in his absence and who apparently threw a tantrum the next morning). With brandy and pork in their bellies the Portuguese farmers are soon in song – regaling us with songs (about tractors or just love found/lost?).



There’s some talk about going to Fusser Bar - a Sausage and Steiner place in the old city centre – in a brick vaulted cellar that holds about five hundred people, which the organic community traditionally ‘invades’ on the Thursday night of the fair. But it’s already late (after nine) and I remember the difficulty of getting a seat or served at that time. Someone invites me to the Demeter stall party – which I have never been to before- and has a DJ spinning real vinyl and is still serving alcohol- At some point I get introduced to the Bavarian Minister of Agriculture (who was distinctly unimpressed by my tentative link to Renate Kunast). The day was long but I had to say goodnight at some point.

Viva la mundo biologica. A world of diversity and possibilities.