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From the Daily Mail 29/3/01THE PRICE OF FOOD
All this week the Mail has been serialising a powerful new study by John Humphrys, the presenter of Radio 4's Today programme. It comes in a week when the spotlight fell on the possible role of sub- standard pigswill in the disaster currently afflicting British agriculture. As both a father and a former dairy farmer, Humphrys is a passionate critic of the excessive usage of pesticides, poisons and intensive farming methods. In this final extract, he issues a rallying cry for a total rethink of British agriculture...

By John Humphrys

Farmer Mark Purdey who refused to use organo-phosphate chemicals.

MY BABY son Owen loves his food. He eats for Britain and The Great Food Gamble is
dedicated to him. I hope we have not betrayed him by the things we have done in the past 50 years. It is our children who have most to lose from the risks we have been taking.

My fears began long before he was born but they came to a head in the early Nineties when the full horror of BSE was emerging. Many people were beginning to ask serious questions about the food on our tables. It seemed to me we needed a proper national debate to address the most fundamental questions.

But that debate can take place only if the most powerful voices in the food industry stop scoffing at our worries.

They tell us we are being naive. They remind us that. choice is more varied and food is cheaper than ever before, then warn us that any other form of food production would lead to desperate shortages, skyhigh prices and disease-ridden animals.

Most of that is hysterical, self-serving nonsense. But those who disagree with them are dismissed as cranks.

Richard Young is one such crank, or so the farming establishment would have you believe. With his sister Rosamund, he runs Kite's Nest Farm in Worcestershire, which is owned by their mother, Mary. In many respects it is a time warp.

The cows have names rather than numbers, and the calves are never removed forcibly from their mothers.

When the mother's milk dries up, the calf is weaned naturally, but he will stay with her even when the next calf comes. They graze in pastures filled with the sort of plants that would have been killed off long ago if they had been.ploughed and plastered with synthetic nitrogen. They are rich in herbs such as wild thyme, clover and bird's-foot trefoil which the carefully select to feed on.

They don't need scientists to tell them where they should go to get the nutrition they need. They rely on instinct developed over millennia.

The farm is a botanist's dream. There are rare plants, including pyramid orchids and clustered bellflowers, that have long since vanished from most of Britain. In the woodland glades there are harebells and cowslips. You do not see these on a modem 'efficient' farm.

But old-fashioned as it may be, who is to say that this is not efficient, too? The cows live longer and are healthier because they are under no stress.

But they must earn their keep, and when their youngsters reach the right age they are slaughtered locally. The Youngs sell the meat in the farm shop.

Because of the way the animals have been reared it fetches a premium price and there is no shortage of buyers. The customers know they can trust this food.

When other farmers were forced to slaughter their precious livestock as a result of BSE, the Youngs had no fears. Mrs Young had stopped buying compound feed in 1974 when she discovered it contained chicken carcasses. She did not ask the men in laboratories if it was wise to feed a grass-eating animal on the flesh and bones of other animals. Just as well. If she had, they'd have said: 'Go right ahead.' As it is, the Youngs have never had a case of BSE.

The farm survives because its costs are low and it caters to a specific market. It is well managed and beautiful. On a spring day when the insects are stirring and the woods are bursting into leaf, there is a real sense of nature in harmony with itself.

The blind worshippers of science and modern farming by chemicals will say this is romantic twaddle, that there is no such thing as, nature'. There are trees and there is grass; there are insects and there are animals. And that's it.

They will tell you nature is to be manipulated. If we relied on farms like this we would all starve, they argue. It follows, therefore, that Richard Young is a crank, not to be listened to.

Well, let me invite you to leave his fields and spend an hour in his office. Here, computer screens glow, fax machines stutter out reams of paper and the filing cabinets bulge with documents.

Few of them have anything to do with the farm. Most are scientific papers, the sort that have been published by clever people with enough degrees to paper their walls. They are overwhelmingly concerned with the world of microbiology and, more specifically, the effect on bacteria of antibiotics.

Richard Young may not have a single academic letter to his name but he spotted the devastating assault, the overuse of antibiotics in food production was having on our immune systems long before many of the people who subsequently wrote these papers. For 15 years he has been gathering a powerful argument, trying to get people to listen.

The only qualifications he has are an inquiring mind, an ability to analyse a great deal of information, an intimidating capacity for hard work and a lifetime of studying the way animals respond when they are treated in certain ways.

Mark Purdey is another organic farmer. In the Eighties he looked at the 'scientific' solutions being offered by the Ministry of Agriculture and did not like what he saw. He refused to obey official orders to dose his cows with high levels of an organo-phosphate poison.

The scientists at the Ministry knew their policy made sense. It was the only effective way to deal with a pest known as warble fly, they said.

But Purdey thought it crazy to pour a poison derived from a military nerve gas along the s ine of every cow so that it would turn the animal's insides into a hostile environment in which no parasites could survive.

The Ministry took him to court to make him do it. He still refused and ended up in the High Court.

On one side of the courtroom was a government ministry, a powerful chemical manufacturing company and the might of the scientific establishment, all with the same message: organophosphates were harmless to man and beast, even at the high levels recommended, and only a crank. would argue otherwise.

On the other side was Purdey, a Somerset farmer, self-educated and stubborn. Purdey won.

The phone immediately started ringing at his farmhouse, with fellow farmers telling him: 'You're right. I've been using organo-phosphates just as the Ministry ordered for years now and it's been destroying my health.' They all had symptoms consistent with some kind of disease of the nervous system.

But it was the effect on cattle that Purdey wanted to pursue. He had observed a link between BSE and he use of one particular organophosphate. Nobody listened.

He tried to get some money for research from the Ministry but was turned down because he was not a scientist. Even so, he kept working away at his theory. He used his own money to embark on the most extraordinary detective hunt in this country and abroad.

He found there was a particularly high incidence of BSE in areas where the organo-phosphate for killing warble fly was most intensively used, and that there was no record of cows dying from BSE if they had been born and raised on fully converted organic farms where the chemical was not in use.

His theory was that one of the effects of this particular organophosphate was to reduce copper levels in cattle. If that was simultaneously compounded by an excess of manganese, he believed, it could lead to BSE.

So he looked for clusters of BSE type diseases around the world. He found them in areas where there were abnormally high levels of manganese in the soil and vegetation, and low levels of copper.

He also found human versions of BSE were more likely to afflict people -where there were high levels of manganese. In Chile, where manganese oxide is mined, the mine workers are affected by 'manganese madness'. It is, in many respects, remarkably similar to variant CJD.

All fascinating stuff, but it has been decided officially that contaminated animal feed is the single reason for BSE and that's that. Well, maybe, but decided 'is not the same as 'proved'.

Contaminated food is, in the minds of the scientists, the most likely explanation. They have been unable to prove it for sure, still less to prove that there may not have been other factors. But they dismissed Mark Purdey's research.

David Brown is more difficult for them to dismiss. A researcher at the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University, he read Purdey's findings and tried some experiments.

He has now shown that when manganese is added to cell cultures in the absence of copper it bonds to normal protein to create the 'rogue' prion protein that is found in victims of BSE and variant CJD, and which is widely accepted by the scientific community to be the cause of degenerative diseases of the brain.

As Purdey points out, BSE arose during the Eighties when cattle farmers were forced to use a specific organo-phosphate on their animals that depleted the copper in their systems. At the same time, cattle feed was supplemented with chicken manure from birds dosed with manganese to increase their egg yield.

After years of being ridiculed and vilified by Ministry officials, Purdey has now had his findings published in serious scientific journals and been given research money to carry on his work.

We should be grateful to men like him because without them we would be totally in the grip of the biotech companies. It is these firms, rather than the state, that pay for most of the academic research that goes on in this country. They not, only have their own research departments but also fund research in universities.

The paymaster now is almost always a company with a specific enterprise in mind Most of the results are kept secret in the interests of commercial confidentiality.

Some research, of course, goes into safety but not much. It seems your health and mine are not always high in the list of priorities.It is time scientists listened to what ordinary people are saying.

We have had one agricultural revolution in living memory. As this series has shown, it began in the Fifties and its effects are with us stilL

It gave us bigger harvests. It also gave us environmental destruction and pesticide residues and the horrors of mad cow disease.

The more we have learned about the way food is grown and processed, the less we trust it. Now we are being invited to embark on another revolution - genetically modified foods - with consequences we can only wonder at.

But we must not make the same mistake again. We must think seriously about what we expect from food and the way it is produced. Our starting point should be that agriculture is, in effect, the nation's primary health service.

Good health is more than just the absence of disease-. It is what we see when we gaze at a healthy, happy baby. He lies there, with.a full stomach and an empty nappy, gurgling and chuckling away for no particular reason and it just makes you feel better. He's full of life, bursting with some indefinable force

If we get it right, the food that baby eats for the rest of his life will contribute to his health. Yes, we all know that if he, eats enough fresh fruit and veg and not too much fatty meat ,he is less likely to have an early heart attack.

But that's just the absence of disease. Good food - grown in healthy soil and rich in vitamins and minerals - will promote his health. It will strengthen, not weaken, his immune system. If we deny him that we betray him.

Mine is not a counsel of despair There are many farmers, food producers, even politicians who accept mistakes have been made and are searching for better ways of doing things. (Tony Blair himself acknowledged as much to me only yesterday.)

I believe the British people will insist on it. We are no longer prepared to take our food for granted. The nation wants a serious debate and there is no way of stopping it. But it should be about more than the merits of one group of farmers over another, more than apportioning blame and praise. We should move on from that.

My contention is that we need a fundamental shift in our, thinking. We need to be less arrogant and accept that good agriculture should not simply be battling against nature, but farming-in harmony with it . We should also accept that good food is about more than calories and vitamins.

You don't have to live in a commune and wear rope sandals to accept all of that. Nor do you have to go back to Aristotle who believed that every plant, let alone every animal, had a soul.

It is possible to accept the basic scientific principles of cause and effect and believe in the holistic view of the world as a living organism.

What is impossible to believe in is the arrogant notion that we can do what we damned well like with our food and to hell with the consequences. That would be the silliest and riskiest gamble of all.

ABRIDGED extract~ The Great Food Gamble by John Humphrys, to be pulished by Hodder & Stoughton on April 12 at £12.99.© John Humphrys 2001. To order a copy at the special price of £10.99 (incl. p&p), telephone 08701610870.