Time for the fringe to be back in fashion
A crisp winter day in the city of dreaming spires in early January. The next generation of ideas. But there were no mortar boards in sight. This wasn’t a bunch of bright young Oxford undergraduates. It was organic farmers, agroecologists, ‘real food’ lovers, activists, the odd academic - and me.
This was the Oxford Real Farming Conference – the fringe to the ‘mainstream’ farming event that took place earlier that week. It couldn’t fail to inspire you. Leading players from the world of real food and farming were there bringing new ideas and urging greater action. This year’s theme was “A Cross-the-board Re-think”. As Colin Tudge – the founder of the Campaign for Real Farming - put it, “If we truly want agriculture that provides everyone in the world with good food without wrecking the rest, we need to re-think farming itself”.
As I stood up to speak at a session with the unforgiving title of ‘What’s wrong with corporates?’, I braced myself for the rotten tomatoes. After all, we at Forum think that working with big business is a key part of the answer. But I needn’t have worried. The audience turned out not to be a bunch of baying wolves after all – challenging for sure, but certainly enlightened, considered and passionate about making our food system more sustainable.
I’d agree with Colin that the food system needs a fundamental re-think. I’d also argue we need to reframe the debate and to work out (quickly) what roles different actors can take in creating a better food system. And we need to include ‘the fringe’ - if I can clumsily for the moment lump lots of diverse views together - as one of those key actors.
The question that kept coming back to me as I took the train back down to London afterwards, was ‘how can we best benefit from a fringe?’ (and I’m not talking about covering receding hairlines here). If the current ‘alternative’ always stays niche, we’re never going to get where we need to in time. This might be red rag to a bull to some of those that were at the conference, but I believe we need to bring the best of the fringe into the mainstream. For you counter-culturalists out there, don’t worry, I think we’ll always need an alternative to stretch or challenge the mainstream. But we also need to scale up the best ideas from the outer edges if we’re to stand a chance of feeding a growing global population within environmental limits.
SCALE is a scary word. People often automatically assume you’re talking about industrial scale when in fact scaling can simply mean replicating a good idea in a different place. I’m a firm believer that we need to apply scale to the fringe.
The question of how to scale is tough and there’s clearly no one-size-fits-all solution. We don’t have all the answers, but we at Forum for the Future want to play our part in the mainstreaming of sustainable food. If you have suggestions on how to scale or if you come across good ideas that you think can be scaled to shift us to a more sustainable food system, do let us know.
I’m not a big reader of fashion mags to know whether growing a fringe is ‘in’ or ‘out’ at the moment. But I say bring on the bangs... and let’s get the best out of today’s fringe.
Comments
Dan, thanks for a great presentation at the conference. You're right to flag up scale as a challenging concept - many of those at the conference would at first glance seem to be anti 'scale', advocating a need for many more smaller farmers operating at local level. But larger organisations can fit into this by being facilitators - they can provide the structures and logistical support that enable small producers to efficiently and effectively get their product to market. Sustaination is a great example of the potential for scaling up using information, but there will also be a need for new physical and logistical infrastructure for transportation and retail - co-operative models like the French biocoop might be one way forward.
Thanks Julian. Absolutely agree that larger organisations can be part of the equation - providing structures, support (financial or otherwise) and expertise to help smaller players bring product to market. Conversely, the smaller producers can teach the larger players a thing or two as well - about agility and resilience (as per Ed's comment)!
If we want to push local food, then you're right that we need transport and retail infrastructure - we need regional hubs, the revival of local abattoirs etc. And certainly worth exploring new models, like the French biocoop you suggest.
Scaling won't be easy, but I do believe that many of the supposed 'insurmountable' barriers aren't really that insurmountable if we collectively put our minds to it...
As you say, 'scale' is not about the size of the organisation, it's about the size of the effect.
We are fortunate to live in an age when uniting to create an effective impact is easier than ever, and without requiring the false-economies of scale. Indeed, many larger businesses find their scale to be of a distinct DISadvantage increasing their costs and slowing their ability to respond to what is a very rapidly changing world.
There's some nice family history I can share here which brings an informative parallel.
In the run up to WWII, Prime Minister Baldwin proclaimed that "the bomber would always get through" and Britons put their faith in brute scale to get us through the war. As early as the Battle of Britain in 1940 this was shown to be an unrealistic hope.
Air Vice Marshall Dowding suspected such an outcome and had developed "the Dowding System" which was a network of (recently invented) radar stations, working together with on-the-ground observers, all sharing information through a network of buried telephone cables. He kept the fighter planes dispersed across the country, and always held back a reserve, knowing that resilience always wins.
Resilient, collaborative, and agile is the key, sharing information so we can all make smart, informed decisions for our individual and collective benefit.
It's the strategy which won not only won the Battle of Britain, but has been the key to all mankind's finest moments, from the first settlements, through to sending local market prices for food to a mobile phone in rural Africa to prevent famine.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but that does not mean we can not spot separate solutions which are more likely to work from those which are not.
Nature is an obvious place to learning about how to design resilient and prolific systems, and we can use our intelligence and foresight to mimic and build upon what we learn. Permaculture makes some very simple observations which apply equally well to business, society, politics, and economics as they do to the natural world. There's a quick summary here which I often reference: http://eddowding.com/blog/2011/11/permaculture-principles/
In developing www.Sustaination.co.uk, a collaborative map of our food-webs which makes it easy for businesses and groups trade more locally, we hope that we blend good business sense with resilience, cooperation, flexibility, and a humanity which befits and empowers us as we move into the 21st century.
I'm confident we'll see many other inspiring models come to the fore which provide a scalable solution to mankind's most pressing problems.
There is a huge opportunity
Thanks Ed - and thanks for sharing the family story - fascinating stuff. Hard to disagree with the need for resilience, agility and collaboration, and with the lessons we can learn from nature itself. You're right too to pick up on the vital role that information can play - hence why organisations like Sustaination sound exciting.
The only place I'd disagree with you is your last sentence. I wouldn't say there is just a huge opportunity; I'd say there are lots of huge opportunities!
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