A major new organics group, targeted exclusively at fruit and vegetable growers, has been formally launched. The Organic Growers Alliance describes itself as ‘a self-help group to its members and a liason with other orgaisations.’
“In general, it would represent the small-to-medium-sized grower,” Iain Tolhurst, spokesman for the Alliance, told Commercial Grower.
Tolhurst and a handful of other organic growers first began moving towards formalising the alliance after a meeting in Cirencester last December.
Membership fees are £25 per annum, numbers stand at 75, and are growing by around five per week.
The Alliance is promising an independent voice for commercial fruit and vegetable farmers. “We felt that as growers, we were being crowded-out in the organics sector,” Tolhurst explained. “All the big grants and political clout seemed to go to farmers. We wanted to find a way of getting our voices heard. We’re not trying to work outside the Soil Association. We see ourselves more as a go-between for the interest of our sector in the wider pool of the SA, Defra, and so on.”
Already, the OGA has established a working party with the Soil Association to develop an organic grower’s apprenticeship scheme and lobbied for continued funding of organic variety trials. Member support will be a key feature of the Alliance with a biennial conference and a number of farm walks each year in different parts of the UK. These events will be technical and practical in nature, but with a strong social element.
The group says it wants to return some of the ‘philosophical principles’ to the organic sector. “When customers think of organics, they associate it with high-quality, but obviously market pressures are now causing standards to slip. We want to make sure they don’t.”
Full membership will be open to all who are actively engaged in commercial organic growing, with associate members having an interest in the Alliance’s activities.
In terms of their lobbying agenda, OGA see generating more money for research as a top priority, as well as increasing the role of standards within the sector.
“In future years we aim to sponsor national horticultural events with high quality technical input,” the Alliance states. “There is no intention to supplant Soil Association or HDRA technical events, whose value we recognise and which we support.”
For the first year of its life, OGA will be run by a committee, after which elections will take place for office-bearers.
The committee consists of: James Clapp, Tim Deane, Jenny Hall, Roger Hitchings, Pete Richardson, Alan Schofield, Scott Sneddon, Phil Sumption, and Iain Tolhurst.
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