Site established 4 April 2008
last updated 26 September 2008

This site is not the official PFAF website, which is still www.pfaf.org . This site was acquired as a holding site for the domain name plantsforafuture.org.uk, and is now being used for news and information about the Plants for A Future Charity, and maintained by me, Chris Marsh, as PFAF Charity trustee. Comments always welcome to chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com.

Charitable Purposes – Something to Think About – comments and contributions, please. 26 September 2008

Link to project involving two people also engaged with PFAF: Planting Nut Trees in Totnes 25 September 2008

Steward Community Woodland call for support 23 September 2008

Interesting link: La Via Campesina 21 September 2008

The Vegan Issue 15 September 2008

Plants for a Future – Raison d’être, and Another Green Revolution 14 September 2008

Another contribution to our discussion, this time from a ‘radical vegan’ 14 September 2008

What is ‘the [PFAF] Charity’? 11 September 2008

‘Vegan-organics’ or ‘Plant-organics’? – two discussions 11 September 2008

PFAF and the DEFRA consultation/discussion paper 10 September 2008

PFAF is legal again! We have a new trustee, Jon Kean, joining George Sobol and Chris Marsh. We are thinking we would like a team of six to eight trustees, and of having a meeting in October to which we will invite the five other new people who have expressed an interest in being trustees. 3 September 2008

What is the ‘New’ PFAF? 19 August 2008

Progress Report, 17 August 2008

Website & Database Proposal invitation, 8 August 2008

Swidden, an ancient model of land use for the future, 25 July 2008

Report of PFAF meeting, 20 July 2008. Agreed priorities, 9 August 2008

Three world change visionaries, 19 July 2008

Research and Survey TOR (or MS Word download), 27 March 2008

The Charity

Plants For A Future

Registered Charity No.1057719, 9 Priory Park Road, Dawlish, Devon EX7 9LX,

email: chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com, tel: 01626 888772, websites: www.pfaf.org, www.plantsforafuture.org.uk

The Charity’s Objects are to advance the education of the public by the promotion of all aspects of ecologically sustainable vegan-organic horticulture and agriculture with an emphasis on tree, shrub and other perennial species; and the undertaking of research into such horticulture and agriculture, and dissemination of the results of such research.

First Thoughts, 20 April 2008

‘A Future’ implies that this is one future amongst other possibilities. The others might involve GM foods, and a continuation of monoculture deserts, supermarket hegemony, and British people wracked with guilt (they should be anyway) because they are exploiting land that should be used for the people who live there, and disrupting the climate due to continuing dependence on fossil-fuel powered machinery, transport and agrichemical production. PFAF’s concept of our Future is possibly the only sustainable future, a future of food security for Britain, secured by a transition towards more plants foods, cultivated vegan-organically – stock free, because the land of Britain could obviously feed the 60 million population on its 60 million acres, but not 10 million cattle (the size of the UK herd) as well, and goodness knows how many millions of other livestock too. See below for an exploration of how Britain might feed itself.

The site was acquired by me, Chris Marsh, trustee of Plants For A Future, the Charitable Company on 4 April 2008. [At the time of writing I was] the sole trustee willing to take PFAF forward. Two other trustees [had] done sterling work in the past, but need to move on. I am seeking people to replace them, and there is already interest, possibly on a quid pro quo basis: people working for another organisation have invited me to become a trustee of their charity on the understanding that they will be trustees of this one. This will mean new trustee work for me, and so, for PFAF, I shall want to shrink back into the proper trustee role: determining policy, taking strategic decisions, rather than doing any of the administration. ‘Make yourself redundant!’ Rob Hopkins, of Transition Town Totnes, urges the ‘core group’ of a new Transition Town initiative. Excellent idea! I shall appoint myself Transition Manager of PAF, and aim to delegate all the important tasks to others ASAP.

My one strategic decision – agreed to by the two existing trustees – is to commission and fund a piece of research work, focused on the PFAF research site, a 28 acre piece of land at Penpol in Cornwall, incongruously called ‘The Field’. The Terms of Reference for that work can be downloaded here, and anyone who is interested in getting involved is welcome to email me.

Can Britain Feed Itself?

An interesting article by Simon Fairlie was published in The Land 4 Winter 2007-8 18: http://transitionculture.org/2007/12/20/can-britain-feed-itself/

Simon begins with: ‘In 1975, the Scottish ecologist Kenneth Mellanby wrote a short book called Can Britain Feed Itself? His answer was yes, if we eat less meat.’ He goes on to explore the question in some detail, looking at diet and various approaches to cultivation, including vegan-organics and permaculture.

I posted the following comment on the ‘transitionculture’ website:

Simon’s article is useful theory, and thought provoking, but theory is often a long way from practice. I came across Mellanby’s book recently when embarking on an overdue indexing of my library. Next to it was Andrew O’Hagan’s The End of British Farming (London: Profile, 2001), describing the author’s travels around Britain to witness ‘the death of farming’. Put that with solutions being put forward by food technologists, such as cloned cows (Observer, 2/3/08, pp.16-17), and public apathy: the same article says that ‘More than 30 per cent of people claim to care about companies’ environmental and social records, … but only 3 per cent reflect these beliefs in their purchases.’ The latter provides an interesting rule-of-thumb for any descent from ideas, theories or intentions to doing anything about it.

My own back-of-the-envelope examination of how permaculture could engage with feeding Britain was to start with our one million or so acres of gardens (private-house-and-garden-owning being really big in Britain), and apply one of the very few measures of yield in edible biomass per unit area: Michael Guerra’s tiny urban garden (on 80 square metres 250 kilos per annum can be grown, [over five times the yield typical of Standard Farm Practice] using methods such as intercropping and stacking), suggests – astonishingly! – that we could grow all the food we need, ten times our body weight p.a., on tiny amounts of intensively cultivated land, and if permies had aimed at educating the garden or allotment owning people in this country twenty years ago, instead of … [won’t go into that], who knows, we might have all Britain’s gardens crammed with food by now. And, remember, Bill Mollison originally said the aim was hugely to increase the yield of food per unit area in order to release most of the land back to the wild and other species (Permaculture [the big book], p.7) – and also help the land regenerate because it’s been so buggered it can’t do that on its own. People like Ken Fern and Chris Dixon have shown how, with a bit of help, ecological diversity, biomass and soil depth regenerates to natural abundance in less than 20 years. (Chris Marsh, 3/3/08)

Agreed priorities following PFAF meeting on 20 July 2008

Added to this site 9/8/08

(This list is based on an internal document with some details altered to avoid referring to people personally.)

1. Initiate the research project (see TOR) by asking for a scoping study to be carried out.

2. Looking at what the Charity might do to facilitate our founder’s planned move abroad, where he plans to extend his research into tropical plants with a view to creating a tropical plants database.

3. Seeking someone to take over management of the PFAF website and database.

4. Investigating the legal status and future development of the PFAF Land Club.

5. Resurrecting and managing the PFAF membership scheme.

6. Pursuing the possibility of getting planning permission for people to stay longer than is currently allowed on The Field, PFAF’s experimental site in Cornwall. This would require the preparation of a business plan to make the case for the site having commercial potential, probably for plant propagation and sales, and/or for further research into unusual plants which could usefully be grown, from which it may be possible to argue that the value of the plants and special tending they need does require 24/7 care for at least part of the year.

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