Adding Value

If HRH the Prince of Wales can’t make a go of organic farming, I don’t know who might. In his 1993 book Highgrove: An Experiment in Organic Gardening and Farming, he and co-author Charles Clover lay out the expenditure of resources, including consulting from prominent Brits with expertise in gardening, animal husbandry, and farming, to convert his estate in Gloucestershire to organic production. While there were successes, the end result was they couldn’t completely and satisfactorily convert it.

Highgrove had three rules: convert from conventional to organic production cheaply, deal with the public direct when possible to keep prices down, and add value.

How does a farmer add value to their crops? One of the approaches Highgrove made was using organic grains to bake bread for retail markets. It was more expensive, but with the prince’s imprimatur they found entree and some sales.

Highgrove could not solve some problems with using all-organic bread ingredients grown on site. They had to blend Highgrove wheat with high protein, organically-grown Canadian wheat to produce the soft crumb British bread-eaters crave. There were also no known producers of organic palm oil needed to “give good loaf volume.” Prince Charles decided to go to market with some compromises, sufficing to say the bread was made using organic flour grown on the property and branded as the “Highgrove loaf.”

While we don’t need to be the future king of England to know it, adding value to common commodities is a ubiquitous practice. It is the foundation of capitalism. Have a few hundred tons of wheat? It will be worth more if it is turned into bread, biscuits and the like. Such added value and the revenue derived from it is used to offset higher input costs for organic vegetables and grains.

The book was a solid read, recommended for those in the contemporary discussion about alternatives to food production based largely on chemical inputs. While the Highgrove story is interesting in itself, it is a long setup for my main topic. What are we made of?

…in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Genesis 3:19, King James Version

While our lives are nourished by bread and everything around it, we are not the bread we eat.

Most of the elements of our bodies were formed in stars over the course of billions of years and multiple star lifetimes. However, it’s also possible that some of our hydrogen (which makes up roughly 9.5% of our bodies) and lithium, which our body contains in very tiny trace amounts, originated from the Big Bang.

The Natural History Museum, London.

We are stardust, literally.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Woodstock, Joni Mitchell

We are such stuff as dreams are made on…”

The Tempest, William Shakespeare.

I need to sleep more, think less, and get in the garden. Now that rain let up, maybe I can.