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A man with an organic mission - Michael Wale meets Craig Sams, of Green and Blacks Chocolate, on his small farm
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| Craig Sams, chairman of the Soil Association |
THERE are moments when you could be excused coming to the conclusion that without Craig Sams there wouldn't be an organic movement.
Whole Earth Foods, Green and Blacks, chairing the Soil Association - his mission for organics has been going on now for 40 years, and it hasn't stopped yet.
Visiting him in his house in the old part of Hastings, in East Sussex, you become swept along by his enthusiasm and energy. First, we chat seated in his garden, after he has picked and handed me berries from the late-fruiting massive mulberry tree. He points out a nearby apple tree with fruits as large as Bramleys, but it isn't. It is the Peasgood Nonesuch. Craig explains, "Like a lot of apples that are disappearing, they are picked and eaten at different times. The Nonesuch is picked in November and can be eaten in March. Another type would be picked in October and eaten at Christmas. They all add to their taste while being stored. Nowadays all the apples you buy in the stores are harvested at the same time, and can be kept in cold stores. In the days these original apples were grown, there were no cold stores, and houses didn't have central heating."
Recently he bought 27 acres on the edge of Hastings. Twenty acres of chestnut coppice, and seven acres of raw pasture on which he has created an orchard taking up two acres. Although he has already planted unusual varieties from Walcot Organic Nursery, he has also traced a local apple, the Saltcote pippin, which originated in nearby Rye in 1818. In 1927 it won a gold medal from the Royal Horticultural Society, but it gradually vanished. As Craig says, "At the end there was one guy who had three trees left. We've bud-grafted 20 and will plant them in the orchard this winter."
Even more proudly than showing me around the youthful orchard, with each tree bottom protected by a good covering of the hay that he had harvested from the same field, was the enthusiasm he showed for the hedge that he has planted on one side of the public footpath through the land he has bought. He explained, "The footpath was not properly marked out before so I decided to plant an unusual hedge. Some of the weirder stuff like Syrian haws, wild service and elder I got from the Agroforestry Research Trust. There is a Polish variety of elderberry within the hedge which produces berries as big as cherries, as well as sloes, dog rose and damson A lot of the hedgerow plants came from Alba Trees as they have a very good deal on orders over about 150."
The result is very much what I would call a "living" hedge with berries, blossom and all sorts of interesting growth pleasing both to nature and the passer by, and of great value to the birds.
His other plans on the land the other side of the path away from the orchard have not been so successful due to an invasion by rabbits. "We took the hay off it and prepared it for two and a half acres of horticulture," he said. "I got this sweetcorn variety from California. It's not a F1 hybrid, and stays sweet after harvest. We've been adapting it for the past 3-4 years, and I've got some growing in our garden that are succeeding. We planted 1,000 out in the field, but the rabbits got through two holes in the fence and destroyed the whole crop. Somewhere deep in the organic philosophy is that we should be able to develop seed not dependent on the F1 hybrid, using chemicals and mutation."
Despite the addition of his new plantation, and a fruit productive garden with a small greenhouse, Craig Sams retains his local allotment, which he took over when he first arrived in Hastings. "I grow sweetcorn and artichokes there," he said. "I have an angelica plant because I use a lot of it. It's six feet tall, like a giant fennel bush. I shred up the root and marinade it in alcohol. I had a lot of leeks on the allotment in the spring."
Not far down the High Street from his house is the family's latest enterprise, Judges Bakery, which they started in March 2005 to provide organic bread. It sells everything else organic that you might need, including beetroot from the new plantation. It is here they will market the orchard's future produce. Craig proudly gave me a tour not only of the shop where he held his own produce up as proof that nothing travelled very far to be on sale here, to the bake house at the back of the shop, where many loaves are produced by the slow proofing method that reduces the gluten as a certain amount of loaves are stored overnight in the fridges. Unusually, the bakery remains open until 7pm.
As for another of his jobs, chairman of the Soil Association, he predicts that soon he will stand down. He explained, "It was meant to be for four years, then they asked me to stay on for another year, then another. I think next I will be chairman of the certification part of it, which will be looking after the commercial side. It's going to be a big challenge for the Soil Association and stress for me, because you want to rope in as many customers as possible but push from the inside for higher standards."
The air freight miles of organic food imports could land in his lap, and he argues, "Brazil has a booming organic industry of its own, including sugar and palm oil, as a result at the outset at being financially fuelled by the West."
Having founded Green and Blacks organic chocolate in 1991, Craig and Jo sold out to Cadburys-Schweppes in 2004 for an undisclosed sum. They had already sold shares for a £4m investment in 1997 leaving the family with an 18 per cent holding. Craig negotiated a deal that kept the Fair Trade guarantees to his farmer-suppliers and kept him as president of the company.
Forty years on, I feel he is by no means finished with his organic mission.
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