Antonia Ineson has leased two acres of land from South West Fullerton Farm since 2007. Her three organic polytunnels house salads and summer veg: beans, squashes, garlic and interesting leaves like mizuna and tatsoi. Weekly emails let customers know the current harvest – sign up via her website, place your order and collect it from the garden. She also sells from Montrose, Forfar and Coupar Angus farmers’ markets, and to local shops and restaurants.
In this post, Martha Smart from Bioregioning Tayside spoke to Antonia to hear more about her story.
Martha
Hello Antonia thank you for being here. Tell me all about yourself and Myreside Organics!
Antonia
Well, Myreside Organics is a small organic market garden that I’ve been running now for…I think this is the 16th year…and it’s on a bigger organic farm, so the ground was already certified organic when I took on the lease. I rent from Donald Clerk who’s an organic farmer of much longer standing. It’s about 125 acres so relatively speaking it’s a small farm. It’s also a mixed farm which has advantages for me in that sometimes I’m able to get cow manure.
Antonia, in the centre of the picture
The way I got here is a bit of a complicated one. I used to work in public health for the NHS in Lothian where I worked on a series of projects on different aspects of health, a very wide range of things, but one of them was when the whole issue about obesity really hit and I was involved in an obesity strategy. It was very comprehensive, we were looking at all aspects which ranged from the nature of people’s work, how much time they have available, inequality of all sorts, but also food and food production. I had been involved for many years on various aspects of food and health. I got pretty frustrated at the lack of real progress, in general I feel there had been a lot of “projectitus” within the work I was doing- you work on very small things with small groups and that makes a difference, or it can do, to a small number of people within a small scope. But the sorts of things we were looking at in the obesity policy required systems change. It required things like changing the design of roads, changing what happened in schools, changing how people use public transport, you know, a huge number of aspects. But we really weren’t getting anywhere. The other thing that happened was that I got a long service award, and that really made me think about how long I’d been working in the NHS and where I’d got to. So, I decided to take a sabbatical year. I went to New Zealand and ended up doing a course in biodynamic and organic agriculture and horticulture which was full time for over nine months. We worked on farms and market gardens all over New Zealand which was a really incredible experience. I’ve always gardened, throughout my life I’d always had an allotment and I’ve always thought of it as something that was a hobby, I didn’t think of it as something I’d ever make any money out of. Then when I came back, I decided that I’d seriously look for a bit of land and see whether I could do something myself which would have a more direct effect on food supply. It took a few years, when I came back to Scotland I worked on a voluntary basis on organic and biodynamic farms mainly around Edinburgh and then at Loch Arthur Camphill Community near Dumfries. I don’t know if you know about Camphill Communities? They are communities which are often farm based where people with learning disabilities and others live and work together. I did a couple of summers, the first season I was working with the grower and then the second one they asked me to sort of step in for a bit because he needed to be away. So that was a combination of working with people, trying to get people to do what needed to be done that day, getting food to the houses, and market gardening.
Anyway, there are all sorts of byways on this, but in the end I came and did a voluntary bit of strawberry planting where I am now which is Donald Clerk’s farm. And after a bit I realized that I wasn’t going to find anywhere around Edinburgh because the pressures on land are so great, any small bits of land are always snapped up by people wanting to put horses on them.
Donald Clerk said he wouldn’t sell land but he would consider renting me a couple of acres, and that was incredibly fortunate I must say, because I couldn’t have ended up in a better place. He’s an incredibly supportive, experienced, and good person to be working alongside. I then negotiated with the health service that I would work in the winter and I’d come and do the garden in the summer. Which was very fortunate again because it meant I could make a transition to do this without risking everything basically. I did that for…I don’t know many years now… but then I got cancer and so I was treated for that, and I just thought no, life’s too short I need to make the turn, it’s time retire from the health service. So, I did. It was only slightly before I was going to retire anyway so it wasn’t a big deal really. The other thing, which was also very fortunate, was that the farmer then said to me (all that time I was living in a caravan which had no insulation whatsoever, though it was fine) did I want to buy a house plot? So, I got planning permission. Accommodation is always an issue for growers. I’m fortunate in this as I’ve got my health service pension but it’s very, very hard to actually make enough money out of small holdings like the one I’m doing. To pay what are often very high rents or buying anywhere in the sorts of areas that people are growing is not easy. The area that I’m in is definitely ageing because of the price of property, it’s a place that people come and buy houses when they want to retire. The numbers in the local primary school are going down for example, in terms of sustainable communities it’s a real issue. I’m very fortunate in that I could afford to do it because I had a flat in Edinburgh which I sold. I got planning permission because I was working the Market Garden, I wouldn’t have been given it otherwise, so that’s a good thing because that does support rural activities when it works. There’s a history of that failing in Lothian because they had what they called the Lowland Crofting Scheme where you could get ten acres and permission to build a house, but it was never actually carried through so all the people built these enormous houses and just grassed the land, they had to plant trees down each edge but it was not a croft in any sense. It wasn’t supporting biodiversity in any way, it really failed. That was quite a number of years ago, I don’t know whether people are learning from that a bit now.
“I think the issue about access to small bits of land, which can be really productive in terms of food, is a big issue. Around here farms generally are very big and getting bigger. They also use quite intensive methods. There is a real issue about damage to soil and lack of biodiversity. All of which are of concern to anybody interested in organics.”
Martha
What defines an organic farm? You also mentioned biodynamic farms, for the benefit of anyone reading this interview, what do those things mean?
Antonia
Okay, well, organics is the one system of food production that does have a legal definition and that’s through EU law, which due to Brexit is now being taken into Scottish law. There’s something called the standard, a long document which defines all the aspects of organic farming, but at the center of it is the soil. “You feed the soil, not the plant”. In conventional farming you put on fertilisers every year, which are soluble, so a lot of that then goes into the water system which can causes problems with algal blooms, and too high nitrates in the water, as well as contributing to climate change through emissions. Whereas the whole aim of organic farming is to produce a farm ideally which doesn’t have any inputs. I produce my own compost from things that grow and plant wastes from within the Market Garden. I do get a small amount of cow manure from the farmer and I do buy in seed and get a small amount of potting compost. But the aim is to have a system which is sustainable, where you are building up the quality and biodiversity of everything in the soil. You’re not depleting it, you’re not affecting the water which leaves the farm because you don’t use soluble fertilizers. The organic standard covers animal welfare, I don’t have animals but it’s a very important issue and it includes things to do with exploitation of human labour as well as exploitation of the place. There’s a view that you should try to protect biodiversity and improve biodiversity on your land and I’ve been recently planting clusters of trees, which is partly about biodiversity but also about fixing carbon. Really then, it’s a systems approach, my job is to work with a system. It’s not to work against nature, it’s to work with nature. Another core principle is that you don’t grow monocultures. I have a rotation year after year, for example, the bean family will build up fertility in the soil so that must be in your rotation. If you grow things in the allium family, like leeks and onions, you have to have a gap. It’s also about controlling pests and diseases because if you move things around then you’re less likely to get buildup of diseases in the soil. But different plants require different things in the soil so having rotations helps with maintaining the quality of the soil as well.
Martha
Fascinating! You also spoke about biodynamic farms, is that slightly different?
Antonia
It is, it incorporates everything’s organics does but it’s a layer on top of that. I always find it very difficult to pin down but the idea is that biodynamic farms are working with forces that we don’t really know about, more cosmic or spiritual forces. I have a lot of time for it, and I have a huge amount of time for the people that I worked with during my course. I still don’t fully understand it, but they have a stronger concept of the farm as an organism, that the farmer’s job is to work with the farm, and that does exist with organics but it’s much stronger. They also use certain preparations to support the farm and what lives and grows on it. The farmer here is open to ideas like this, his partner was interested in biodynamics and in fact he used to do inspections on biodynamic farms. One thing we do at epiphany (at the beginning of the year) is have a walk around the farm and everybody involved meets up and has a nice day as an expression of gratitude to the farm.
Martha
That is very interesting and not something I’ve heard of before.
You’ve explained that there were lots of different things that happened in succession which led you to start Myreside Organics, but can you expand on what your main inspiration was to do this.
Antonia
Well, that’s shifted slightly. I think at the beginning a lot of it was about the food. Now, I feel most strongly about climate change and loss of biodiversity. Both of those are catastrophic and I think we need to move to a system of organic farming. There’s increasing evidence that soil can fix an important amount of carbon and conversely, if you abuse it, carbon will be lost. Biodiversity collapse is around us everywhere and organic farms have far higher biodiversity than non-organic farms. I suppose there’s also an aspect that I sell locally and that means less energy use. Though the thing about food miles and energy is actually quite complicated and you shouldn’t always assume it takes less energy.
I must say the biodiversity and climate crisis is really getting to me these days. I’ve been increasingly involved in something that was called the Scottish Organic Forum (SOF) and in the Organic Growers Alliance, which is a UK level group for small organic market gardeners. I was the rep for them on the SOF, which produced the Scottish Organic Action Plan, setting out what needs to happen here in organics. The government was supportive but progress has been very slow, despite the fact we are way behind most of European countries in organic production.
“Recently the EU has produced a policy ‘From Farm to Fork’ with the goal of 25% of farmland being used for organic farming by 2030. It’s a very ambitious target and some countries are well on the way to meeting it. In Scotland, it’s between 1% and 2%. There’s a lot of rhetoric about how organics are increasing in the UK, but virtually all of that increase is imported organic food. The production of organic food in the UK is not really going up so there is a major problem here.”
There’s huge scope but it needs support. One of the ways that places like Denmark for example, which is one of the leaders of organic production, have done it is through public procurement. So, it’s food for schools, hospitals, prisons, nurseries, everywhere that mass catering is done. In Denmark you can just get organic food, it’s just normal. Here you have to search it out and it’s often not available.
Martha
When you talk about a systems approach, there’s also consumption and what the consumption of non-organic food does to our bodies.
Antonia
I’m always very wary of saying anything about health because the evidence isn’t really there. Whereas the evidence on biodiversity and climate change is there. I mean there is evidence, for example that if you eat non-organic food, you’ll have glyphosate in your body. But the question is, what does that do to you? and they don’t really know. It is more complicated too because there’s the glyphosate and then the surfactants, the things that are added to make the glyphosate stick to the plant. Therefore, you’re talking about two groups of chemical and it may be that the surfactants are actually more dangerous than the glyphosate, but nobody knows. I don’t think we need to wait for proof either way to choose to eat organic food. Personally, I eat organic food, partly because I think it probably is healthier, as well as the climate change and biodiversity benefits, but I’m always really careful not to make health claims. It’s up to people to make their own decisions. I do have customers who buy organic because they’ve had cancer, or they’re worried about cancer. What’s interesting I think is that a very high proportion of infant first food is organic now, which does imply some sort of idea that it’s a good thing. But then when the babies come off the first food it’s much less likely to be organic. Obviously, price is a big issue, so it is completely understandable, but it does suggest to me that there’s very high interest in the population generally in organics. What we’re not doing is making it easy for people to get affordable and routine organics and I think that’s what we need to get to.
Martha
Absolutely.
What kind of expertise or skills did you have or have you learnt throughout this process? I’m thinking about the knowledge that it takes to run an organic smallholding, you said you were always a gardener and you’ve done this fantastic course in New Zealand, so did you still feel like you had to learn a lot along the way or that you were prepared?
Antonia
A huge amount! There’s two bits to it. One is the gardening and the growing of the plants, I was on stronger ground with that, but there’s a transition between being a gardener to being a market gardener. A transition in thinking, scale, planning and all the rest of it. I learnt a lot by working on other people’s farms and gardens. But the other one is running a small business, and that’s the bit I had no idea about at all. I learnt a lot when I was on the course in New Zealand because that sort of aspect was covered. Then when I came back to Scotland that was the thing I was trying to pick up when I went to various people’s places. You know, how do you market? How do you plan for marketing? How do you price? How do you keep your records? How do you pay your tax? I always thought I’d be fine if I didn’t have to sell stuff and I could just grow it! But actually, I was surprised how much I enjoyed selling it. It’s just sometimes when you’re doing your VAT and income tax it gets a bit of a pain.
But that feeds back to what I was saying, I should have said that the SOF has now become the Scottish Organic Stakeholders Group (SOSG), which I’m very much involved in at the moment. We’ve expanded it so it involves more broader organisations like Nature Scot, the NFUS, the SRUC, to work together to try and get something done. Obviously, the next election is very important. One of the things that we’ve identified throughout is a severe lack of training in organics in Scotland. The Soil Association did an excellent series of farm-based training events for organic horticulture, but that doesn’t happen every year and hasn’t happened for some time. That training was dependent on market gardeners having the time and effort, and confidence I think to have groups on their place and to teach. Not last summer but the summer before we had a Scottish conference that I helped to organise on an organic farm in East Lothian. We had between 40 and 50 people come and there was a huge wish to have more of those sorts of things and have a much stronger network of organic farmers, because the other thing that’s a problem is that we’re very spread out in Scotland. When I talk to people who are in places like Bristol, there’s small organic market gardeners all over the place so if you’ve got a question, you have neighbours that you can go and ask. Here, I have good friends but there’s one in Aberdeen, there’s one near Perth, they are a long way away! There are other things that you can do if you’re closer together like sharing equipment, sharing transport, sharing marketing perhaps, and none of that’s possible at the moment because we’re too thin on the ground. Sorry I’ve lost track of what your question was?
Martha
No, I think that you’ve answered the question really well, it was about knowledge and from what you’re saying there’s quite a significant want for more learning and networking opportunities.
Antonia
Yeah, which if you look at other countries again, like France has incredible resources for organics. I went two years ago to an organic event in Valence which had people from all over Europe, it had demonstration fields where people could develop their skills, and the level of resources to build up knowledge exchange networks at local levels was really impressive. The technical development was also there, for example they’re developing small scale machinery and tools which are suitable for market garden level working. If you’re buying stuff here you’re importing from Europe or America which obviously is expensive. There’s nobody doing that in this country, it’s all big, huge tractors. Why shouldn’t we be producing appropriate tools in the UK!?
Martha
How would you describe your relationship to place or to the natural world around you and the environment that you’re living and working in?
Antonia
It’s an interesting one because I was brought up in Gloucestershire which was very different, both socially and in terms of it’s limestone bedrock – here it’s not limestone and that does make a big difference. I feel very at home here now and that’s partly because the reason I came here is that I’ve got a friend who lives locally and she put me in contact with the farmer. The farmer then put me in touch with the person who was running the local farmers market who was a friend of theirs. The farmer knows everybody and everybody knows him, he’s very well respected and so if I met people and said I’m renting from him that was a way in. I think if I didn’t have that it might have been more difficult. I suppose I’ve lived the bulk of my life now in Scotland because I was at university in Edinburgh, so the natural world here is quite familiar to me and I’ve always been very keen on botany, plant identification and stuff. The climate has changed so much since I came here that I don’t know if you can say you feel at home with the climate anymore. Diane, Donald’s partner, used to say, “wait until the end of the first week of June before you can be confident that you’re not going to have frosts”. You know, she had dates where she would expect things to happen and I don’t think we can do that anymore. It’s far more chaotic. So as far as being at ease with that, I think that’s increasingly difficult to experience.
Martha
It’s amazing that you can really feel the tangible changes of the climate, I think that’s the difference between people who work with the land and people who don’t. I’m fascinated by the extent to which you have to hone-in to the systems at play, to the soil, what’s happening in the soil, the plants themselves, and to the weather. You are really holding knowledge of all of those systems, something I think it’s easy to feel very separate from in everyday life.
Antonia
My mother was an amateur botanist and so I was brought up identifying plants, that’s been a lifelong thing. But that was one of the really interesting things about being in New Zealand actually because there the natural world is one or the other. You’ve either got the native bush which is what was there originally and then you’ve got the cultivated bit where most of the weeds have been imported from Europe. And people are really struggling with managing that and how they think about that. I found that while I loved being there, I didn’t feel at home in the natural world in the way that I do here. I suppose it’s a slightly artificial distinction really, because it’s more that the cultivated areas in the UK have been cultivated for a long time. Like on this farm, a friend gave me copies of the old maps and there was a big bog, the Myreside, then a drain was put in around the 18th century and you started seeing smallholdings. The drain is still there pumping water out! I’ve always been interested, though I’ve never followed it up, in looking at how the soil has changed over that period.
Martha
Thinking more about the climate and biodiversity crisis and how that’s increasingly coming to the forefront for you, I wonder if you just wanted to expand on how much that informs your work or impacts the way you think about your work.
Antonia
Well, going back to what you were saying, the ironic thing is that most of my growing is now in polytunnels, that’s partly because it’s more manageable for me but it’s also because of the change in the weather. The first few years here I was growing outside and there were periods where the soil was dry enough for me to be able to work it, but as time has gone on it’s just become wetter and wetter at the times when I need to do stuff. The soil here is quite heavy anyway so it’s really difficult to work until it dries out a bit. But I’ve taken over another bit of land to plant trees, and I’m trying to learn how to manage that in a way which is best for biodiversity. I planted about 150 trees and I’m hoping that’ll bring in more biodiversity as well as fixing some carbon. I’m going to be doing some sowing of wildflowers this year too.
Martha
I think you have covered some of this already especially regarding the need for more skills, knowledge, and resourcing around organic farming but do you think there are top priorities regarding the climate and biodiversity crisis that everyone should be focusing on?
Antonia
I suppose at government level the thing that we’ve struggled with is getting departments to think across departments and around common objectives that don’t cut across each other. I think that the Scottish Government has got better targets than down south, but it’s such a danger that it’s all too little too late and we do need huge resources going into all aspects of a real green recovery. People say sometimes, “oh, well, what difference is going to be make when really huge economies aren’t doing it?”, well we can do what we can do, and we need to do it as fast and as strongly as we possibly can. Having some real statements of what Scotland is going to do at COP I think is going to be really important.
So, I don’t think it’s one thing I think it’s the whole system.
Martha
You’ve spoken a wee bit about the past and how you’ve wondered what the soils used to be like on your patch, soils really exist on a different timescale than we do don’t they? I’m interested to hear about your conceptualisation of time, what you think about time, and also how you feel about the future, especially when we consider these horrible crises?
Antonia
I do think about time quite a bit because I’m getting old. You know, at the moment I can still do it physically but I know several people who were part of that first wave of organic market gardening, and those people are all in their late 60s and 70s. Actually getting people who are able and skilled enough and willing to take over market gardens is not easy at all. It goes back to the training thing partly, but it’s also finance because a lot of market gardens have somebody involved who works off the place who brings in money. There’s a lot of use of voluntary labour and a lot of internships. I think actually getting into a situation where you can make a reasonable living without killing yourself from a small-scale production would be great but I don’t know how we get there. The work I did on the health board was about inequalities and poverty, I don’t know how you get around that but perhaps if people had a universal basic income that would free them up, then they might have space to do something like market gardening.
I’m left thinking about what happens to my place in the future, there’s been lots of questionnaires and things going around farmers saying, “what’s your succession plan?” and most people say, “haven’t got a clue, I’m gonna die in my boots!”. My mother lived in France in a small village at one point and the people there did die in their boots, they went on with peasant farming, looking after their sheep until they died, and that was fine. So that does have a lot of attraction but that’s not really thinking about it as a business.
Martha
What needs to happen to get farmers on board?
Antonia
I think the truth is a lot of farming is subsidy led, if you changed the way subsidies worked that would have an effect. There are farmers who are converting, there is a bit more going on around here and that’s because they can see there’s a market for it. So, I think a combination of changes in the subsidies and a target on food procurement. There’s huge experience in places like Denmark, it’s how that’s then fed through to an increasing number of farmers converting, they need help, support, and training to do that. In fact, one of the things we were talking about in the last meeting of the SOSG was the farm advisory service and the need for real organic knowledge and advice. That is contracted out and the contract is coming up soon so one of the things the group is going to try and do is make sure that contract says you must be able to provide organic conversion and practical advice. If you write that into the government contract they then have to find people who are going to be able to do that. It’s quite simple really, a lot of it is money lead in that way. And then as I say, a public procurement target I think it’s key. There’s an interesting example in Glasgow called Locavore, an organic shop owned by someone called Reuben Chester and he is just amazing. He started out with this tiny shop then thought, “right I’m going to get somewhere that I can start growing vegetables to feed into the shops”, then he did crowdfunding to expand it. Now he has plans for about ten shops, he’s increasing the amount of growing, he’s training growers- it’s staggering what can happen! It is a great example of somebody who has just got such vision and has really developed it. He’s providing a lot of employment, he pays reasonable wages, he’s had placements for asylum seekers to get work experience, he’s done all sorts of really great stuff.
Martha
Wow I’ll definitely have to check that out.
Are there things you would develop or love to do if resources were unconstrained? Or if they were managed differently?
Antonia
It’s a difficult one that because I’m feeling a bit knackered and I’m putting all my energy into the farm at the moment. One of the things that I think would be interesting though is beginning to understand how biodiversity corridors might work over the whole of Tayside. You said you were talking to Bamff, they’re doing quite a lot of tree planting, I’d love to talk to them. Taking owls for example, they need quite a large area to hunt so is there a way of looking at the geography of the place and thinking, well this is where we’ve got rough grassland, where’s the gaps? Are there key points missing that would make the whole thing more viable for wildlife?
Another thing, although I don’t think there’s enough growers, would be to have a shop which was somehow collaboratively run and where local produce could be sold. There are a couple of zero waste shops opening up but the problem for me is that if I sell direct I get the money, If I sell to a shop it’s much less. That’s reasonable because the shop has to survive, but for small growers it has to be direct selling at the moment really. That bothers me because I think if we’re going to normalise organics then shops are where people buy food.
Martha
In your journey to this point, is there a particular moment or a memory which really meant something or energised you in a way that stays in your mind?
Antonia
I’m not sure this is quite what you’re looking for, but I think one thing that was very significant to how I look at nature was a teacher I had at secondary school who was called Mrs. Friend strangely enough, and she used to run walks on a Saturday morning and was incredibly knowledgeable, she was a really good naturalist. Small groups of us used to go on these walks and just really look at nature and, you know, you’re learning the names of things but you’re also looking at how things grow together. This was in Gloucestershire, so I particularly remember the sorts of plants that you get in an old woodland and her talking about indicator plants and so on. There was a similarly strong emphasis in the biodynamic course on observation. I think that’s really important for organic growing. One of the things we did was with a lupin seed, you planted it and then every day (they grow really fast) you looked at the pot with this little plant in it for a few minutes and then looked away and drew it. Every day it got more and more difficult because it got increasingly complex. It is the importance of that awareness of what’s around you, observing it, and understanding it a bit, maybe learning the words, but just seeing yourself as part of nature.
You can connect to Antonia via her facebook page.