GRAIN REBELS: A FOOD REVOLUTION STARTS WITH SEED

Fred says, 
“I came back from college with my head alive. 
Chemical agronomy well aligned 
with everything I wished for.  
To do what granddad did, but better. 
Doubled the yield, tripled the pressure. 
Every solution agro-chemical, 
every plant, genetically identical. 
And so much expense:  
insecticide, fertiliser, fungicide, 
contact herbicide, molluscicide.  
All sprayed from the tractor that Granddad died on. 
Heart attack. But I’d forget that and drive on. 
5 years of misery – all work no breather, 
until the day I woke with stress-induced alopecia. 
I stared in the mirror 
and saw what I’d been straining against. 
My own farm! My own common sense! 
For once, I listened to the seeds. 
They were asking, 
“What does this land here need? 
What if we develop a wheat  
suited to these conditions, 
which we can’t do, if we’re not allowed to breed?” 
I cancelled my contracts 
and a few of us got together. 
Collected evidence and we lobbied Defra. 
And to our surprise we got the laws changed. 
Now we can make our own mistakes, 
grow our own strains of grains.

There is hope here, 
the power to regenerate the land. 
There is hope here, 
the size of a freckle on a hand. 
There is hope here, 
the soil still knows what it needs. 
Hush a minute, 
listen close to the seeds. 

The seeds say, 
“Us understands, 
Us, cos we speak as Us not Me. 
That the seed is a player in the Great Collaboration 
and Collaboration is the seed. 
More players  
mean more sets of skills. 
There are  
600,000 players in our field. 
Come find us: 
Wolf, Mariagertoba, Norregard,  
Ceccarelli, Oak Farm. 
Population wheats! 
Crosses between many strains,  
many genes, all jostling to be. 
Every crop so popping with abilities, 
it’s a metropolis, 
bristling with possibility. 
And most important, spray-wizard, we do not need  
your weird potions poured on our feet 
to spring into life. 
We are life springs. 
So chuck us in the dirt and step back. 
We are rising.  

11a.m. 
Cold wind. Young wheat swaying. 
A winter tree, like a brain on a brainstem. 
And look now in the farmyard; a bakery! 
And in it, a baker baking.  
Rosie. 
Smiling at the customers, she knows each, 
and knows country life can be lonely. 
But this business thrives on friendships, 
and they’re busy baking 
sourdough treats with this landscape in. 
The grains Fred grows, she mills right here. 
And this croissant 
tastes like heaven on earth. 
My word. 
Ancient and new. It tastes like actual food. 
And neighbours meet each other in the queue. 
All these dividends, 
returns on Rosie’s investments, 
and the money of course is handy. 
As the word spreads,  
now she sells loaves to Bristol 
and her work serves hundreds of families. 
And that feeds the farm, 
which feeds its seeds to the stone-mill, 
and the stone-mill keeps turning. 
There’s bread and there’s bread. 
Value and values. 
And these values are earning. 
And Fred? 
From the days of being stretched, stressed and scared, 
when every ghost-acre was grounds for despair, 
clumps falling out,  
now, his mission animates his soul.  
He swears by his thick long hair  
He says, 

There is hope here, 
the power to regenerate the land. 
There is hope here, 
the size of a freckle on a hand. 
There is hope here, 
the soil still knows what it needs. 
Hush a minute, 
listen close to the seeds.