Garden Organic ā Vision for the 21st Century Join Avon Organic Group, for a special evening with our Chief Executive, James Campbell. He'll be attending to give his talk on Garden Organic - Vision for the 21st Century.
We are delighted to welcome James Campbell, who is CEO of Garden Organic, for this special event in October, when he will talk about the role of Garden Organic (which grew out of the Henry Doubleday Research Association) in the 21st century
Garden Organic represents organic growers and gardeners - especially ordinary gardeners and allotment holders, community groups and not-for-profit growers - to protect and preserve the rights of organic horticulture, and to resist attempts to restrict and contain organic growing.
The history and influence of this organisation is a tale worth telling. It is the successes of the organic movement. partly attributable to the work of people directly inspired by the HDRA, that brings about about the need to keep revisioning the future - the vision that is needed to support and enable the next stage.
In the 1960s and 1970s there was an increasing interest in naturally or compost grown vegetables largely stimulated by the work of Lawrence D Hills. Hills published a series of books and pamphlets and also, in 1954 founded The Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA). He named it after the Essex Quaker, Henry Doubleday (1813 - 1902) who introduced comfrey to Britain in the 1870s. The organisation was first based at Bocking near Braintree in Essex, hence the name of Bocking 14, a variety of comfrey bred by Hills for its useful properties.
The HDRA had a profound influence on the interest in and uptake of organic principles, organic food production, and, importantly, consumption of organic food in the UK. By the late 1970s the UK was seeing a ācounter cultureā in some of its rural areas in the form of a new breed of food producer - people who were, by and large, new to any kind of farming and, in many cases, new to the countryside. These āback to the landersā were looking for support with the technical issues they faced with their growing, and joined the Soil Association which, which, at the time, was farmer orientated charity and did not address the issues relevant to organic growers. Consequently ten of the āback to the landersā formed the Organic Growers Association. They brought in their other skills - skills in areas such as marketing, media, publishing, and charity funding to the sector in general and put organic vegetable cropping in the UK onto a sound commercial base and created a new organic marketing ethos.
Nine of these ten people were members of the HDRA, and when surveyed about their inspiration to go āback to the landā quoted Lawrence Hillās books, along with Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), John Seymour (Fat of the Land), Craig Samms (Seeds of Change), Robert Hourrier (Getting Back Together) and Charles Reich (Greening of America). By the 1990s, the Organic Growers Association had brought together a new generation of people with the experience, knowledge, enthusiasm and drive to make a commercial success of organic production. Meanwhile, the EU and national legislation had given the Soil Association the responsibility for the annual inspection and certification of all organic producers and processors. The two organisations merged and the work of promoting and campaigning for organic methods is now in the hands of a single organisation.
With changes in public attitudes and new roles and perspectives in the Soil Association the HDRA was ready to change its own focus - ready to support the adoption of organic growing principles in a wider public. In order to help this along, it changed its name so that instead of an emphasis on research there would be an emphasis on gardening - hence āGarden Organicā. In this guise it is the worldās largest organic gardening association and offers visitors a ten acre organics experience at its ticketed-entry organic display garden at Ryton, near Coventry.
Garden Organic now works with a wide variety of like-minded organisations to promote the benefits of organic growing for plants, people and communities, to share best practice and to engage hard-to-reach and disadvantaged communities in organic growing practice, backed by scientific research supporting a range of beneficial outcomes.
Admission: Join Avon Organic Group to get the members admission proice of Ā£2. One-off visitors price: āĀ£5
(Much of the information above is taken from the following article: Frost, D., & Wacher, C. (2004) A New Incarnation āThe Role of the Organic Growers Association in Changing the Production and Marketing of Organic Produce. European Society for Rural Sociology, 20th Biennial Conference. Available online at http://orgprints.org/24831/1/ORra623%20A%20New%20Incarnation.pdf) ... See more