Mud on the Tracks
Organic Growers in 1970s West Wales
The 1970s saw a reversal in the century-long trend of rural to urban migration in Wales and its western fringe was one of the main receiving areas for inward migrants. Many of these were looking for a ‘Back to the Land’ or ‘Self-sufficient Lifestyle’ — so many in fact that one contemporary researcher labeled West Wales ‘Alternative Dyfed’ (i).
Forty years on, the 2014 Spring Exhibition at Aberystwyth Museum Towards the West, a Varied Crowd, provided a collection of images and artifacts and 57 accounts “from those who travelled West in the 1970s.” Each of these migrants provided an account of what they had been doing before moving to Wales, their expectations at the time and their first impressions on arrival.
The exhibition concluded with a symposium where speakers talked about the reaction of the local farming community to what some termed the ‘hippy invasion’, impacts on rural schools, early days at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth and the legacy of those times and their relevance for today. David Frost was asked to talk about the incomers and organic farming. This version of David’s talk includes selected quotes from contributors to the exhibition.
Some people say that it’s a curse to live in interesting times and looking at the extent of conflict in the world, you can see what they mean — but interesting times aren’t always a curse. There are times and places which have a sense of excitement and potential. People involved feel a real opportunity to live not the lives prescribed for them, but the lives they want to live, the lives they choose to live.
West Wales was such time for us in the 1970s. But it was different from similar times elsewhere because we weren’t in a World City like London, Berlin or San Francisco. It was a very rural space. The statements of the contributors to the exhibition show how much people valued the idea of moving to the countryside, living a rustic life, producing their own food. As another organic grower put it, “it was a social movement back to the land”.
Although most of the migrants to West Wales were wedded to the idea of self- sufficiency, there was a group among them committed to being organic food producers. These were the new organic farmers and growers. But who were they? Why did they come to West Wales? What did they do? What was their impact?
Who were they?
This is not about identifying individuals; this is a broader question about their social and economic background, their origins and their attitudes and values. The sources of information available include temporary accounts, media reports and questionnaire surveys. In the late 1970s, for example, PhD student Nicholas Ford interviewed 100 immigrants drawn from a list provided by the West Wales Soil Association. Now we also have the accounts of the 1970s migrants collated for the Exhibition, Towards the West — a Varied Crowd, by the curator, Jez Danks. Of the 57 respondents to the 2014 survey, nearly half (25) had been interviewed by Ford thirty years previously. Comparing the findings, it is interesting to see how little movement there has been in respondents’ values and attitudes over the intervening decades.
Geographically, the incomers were a heterogeneous group including a smattering of international migrants, but most came from elsewhere in the UK. Ford found that just under half of his respondents came from south-east England with nearly a quarter from London. Looking at the contributors to the exhibition — migrants who were (mostly) still living in the area in 2014 — we can see, in Figure 1, a similar pattern.
Moving in the 1970s could result in some rapid changes. As one erstwhile student recalled…
“ When we arrived from London it seemed very remote at first, and almost from another age. My wife and I appeared archetypal “hippies”. I soon stopped going to college and became part of the “drop-out” sub-culture. ”
The 57 contributors to the exhibition were also varied in terms of backgrounds as we can see in Figure 2. Academia, the arts, social and community work figure high in this list but others came from backgrounds in the professions, business, and the retail industry.
Although some organic farmers and growers were well financed, they chose a frugal life on the land. In this sense they led a thrifty life similar to those who were less affluent and who lived an often hand-to-mouth existence. Ford reported that “one fifth, 20% of the sample households derived an income from some form of state benefit, for at least part of the year…”. Despite differences in background and income, thrift and frugality were shared values. As a contributor to the exhibition put it…
“ Like so many of our generation, we were swept up with the dream to find a relevance to our lives away from the rat race. This crystallised in a dream to get back to basics and build our house and produce our own food in the country away from the endless materialism of town life. ”
Why did they travel west?
In the exhibition, the reasons given for coming to West Wales were primarily about wanting to change lifestyle and to move from the urban to the rural.
One of the motives for people moving out of the city was the yearning for an idealised countryside. These quotes are typical…
“ Having been brought up in a town and city, I longed to bring up my daughter in the beautiful open space of the countryside. My first impressions gave me the idea that I could live out my dreams here, and I have… I thank my lucky stars every day. ”
“ We wanted out of the rat race, and to be able to grow our own food. I wanted to be near the sea. ”
“ Our reasons for the move were, like so many others at the time, to gain space, fresh air and what we considered to be a healthier environment for our children. The reasons to leave the Greater London area were pollution, traffic and something called the ‘rat race’. ”
The reasons people give for moving reflect their personal agency, the area of life over which they have control, but there are also structures, forces beyond individual control which determine the conditions in which we make our choices. And there is a relationship between language, agency and structure which we can understand using the concept of discourse. In the early to mid 1970s, there were discourses — sets of shared ideas and beliefs that construct how we think about the world — that influenced, consciously or unconsciously, how migrants decided to move to West Wales.
Starting with the negative, there was the Cold War discourse. Fear of ‘the bomb’ was still around and the threat of a nuclear exchange between the West and the USSR seemed a real possibility. The threat of nuclear annihilation caused many to feel a sense of futility when it came to planning a long-term career and to reject the period of delayed gratification spent training that such careers required.
Dating from the late 1960s there was also the discourse of a ‘Population, Resources, Environment’ crisis. Urban-industrial development and world population growth had resulted in increasing global loss of biodiversity, destruction of habitats and pollution of the environment. Then in1973, came the OPEC Crisis with oil embargoes and rapid price rises. One exhibition contributor remembered how…
“ This was a time of the worldwide oil crisis and growing concern about the finite nature of oil — a small group of crazy idealists were trying to create a more sustainable way of living in an abandoned slate quarry near Machynlleth. Our imaginations were fired. We wanted to get involved, so we came to Wales. ”
Concern for the environment linked to a discourse about the destruction of the countryside — about the social and environmental costs of the post-war agricultural revolution and the development of agribusiness. These included the destruction of ecosystems and loss of species; the decline of agricultural communities; nitrate pollution and eutrophication of watercourses; soil erosion; and pollution of the air, water and soils. For some, these concerns were still around in 2014 — just as they had been in the 1970s…
“ We both wanted to farm. Urban life and office work held no appeal and the threat of environmental apocalypse felt as close then as it still does! ”
This linked to the discourse on food and diet. As a popular slogan from the 1960s pointed out, “You are what you eat” — diets were too high in refined and processed food. They were lacking in nutrients and fibre and high levels of pesticide residues were being discovered in fruit and vegetables.
But there were also more positive themes, starting with the alternative life-styles discourse that is so clear in many of the exhibitors’ contributions. This was about ‘escaping the rat race’ and rejecting materialism, careerism and bourgeois life- styles and for many it also meant growing their own food and being self- sufficient. Many of us were attracted to the idea of self-sufficiency and followed the example, mentioned by many exhibition contributors, of its leading proponent John Seymour who moved to Fachongle in Pembrokeshire in 1964. This brings us to the organic food and farming discourse — and the movement since the 1920s in Europe and America which saw the launch in the UK of the Soil Association in 1946 following publication of Lady Eve Balfour’s, The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment in 1943. In many ways the organic movment was transformed in the 1970s as it became embedded in this wider network of transitional discourses.
What did they do when they arrived in West Wales?
As many of the photographs from the 1970s on show at the exhibition testified, Pam Ayers was close to the mark when she said, “In the seventies self-sufficiency was about going off to Pembrokeshire with a goat and weaving your own cloth”. Even the migrants keen to become organic producers were mostly new to farming and growing, so the first thing they had to do was to learn methods and techniques. This meant adopting basic principles such as integrating livestock and crop production and moving in the opposite direction to the dominant agricultural trend to specialization.
In the case of new organic growers it meant finding ways to produce crops in a wet climate on often thin, rock strewn acidic soils; how to grow good crops without using fertilizers; and how to protect crops from weeds, pests and diseases without insecticides, weed killers and fungicides.
Despite their enthusiasms, new grower-migrants found that West Wales posed unexpected agronomic challenges…
“ I was obsessed with the idea of growing vegetables organically but I found it a hard place to grow crops compared to the Thames Valley and to Bedfordshire (the county of my youth). ”
As the first Chair of the Organic Growers Association put it in his contribution to the exhibition…
“ (I) decided to try to grow vegetables using only organic methods …l had not a clue how to do what l intended doing… I expected it to be difficult but l did not anticipate the mountains of boulders and rocks which lay beneath the surface of the beautiful level pastures l had acquired. ”
To meet the challenges of soil conditions growers experimented with raised beds and ridge systems. They made and applied composts, used systems of crop rotation and green manures and combatted weed, pest and disease problems with mechanical weeding systems, biological controls, compost teas and disease resistant crop varieties. They also found that crop growing could be made a sight easier by adopting protected cropping systems and putting up polytunnels. Having produced organic food in an area remote from large-scale urban markets the new organic farmers and growers had to sell their produce. In West Wales, they started to build what later commentators labelled ‘short food supply chains’ with organic retail shops, wholefood shops, organic wholesaling, cooperatives and latterly box schemes and farmers markets. Inevitably perhaps, many enterprises were short-lived and even the most successful were subject to take- overs and mergers. Nonetheless in Aberystwyth and in Lampeter there are organic businesses whose origin dates back to the 1970s that are still trading decades later, albeit under new ownership.
What was their impact?
From a non-existent market in the 1970s organic food sales in the UK peaked around £2 billion in 2008 and were back after the recession to £1.7 billion in 2014. Much impetus for this growth — especially in fruit and vegetables and dairy — has come from West Wales. As one high-profile Exhibition contributor put it…
“ During the period that I’ve been at the farm, West Wales arguably became what the broadcaster John Humphreys described as the ‘cradle’ of the emerging UK organic food movement. ”
Compared to the situation in the 1970s, both the UK and Welsh Governments have accepted much of the case for organic farming. Although the rate of growth has been checked recently, Wales has seen the largest proportion of agricultural land area farmed organically in the UK. In 2013, 7.6% of total agricultural land area in Wales was managed by licensed organic producers, compared to a UK- wide average of 3.5%.
But why did they come to West Wales?
This is a question about the conjunction between individual choices and broad social movements. In the 1970s, West Wales provided a haven, safe and distant from the extreme excesses of materialism and environmental degradation, and a place where houses and farms were affordable. As a 1973 in-migrant put it…
“ At £3 a week, I cared little that my dilapidated Trefenter chapel house was cold and damp — I was free at last. ”
The new arrivals had a dream to live on the land, in a community with shared values where growing organically was taken seriously. Few had any idea that they were moving into a farming community with a distinct culture and language, but whatever thoughts locals held, the newcomers were allowed space to develop their ideas on the ground and space to live their dreams. An exhibitor who has moved in and out of the area often over the years put it more lyrically…
“ A nucleus of alternative people came together to rest in one spot…Having been attracted to the area by a love of landscape and wilderness, they respected and nurtured, created environmental projects, cultivated the land by sustainable methods and made positive changes. ”
But we shouldn’t be too misty-eyed. Life was often hard. Property may have been inexpensive but the cheapest ‘derries’ as they were known, were in a state of structural dereliction, lacking basic amenities with no running water and no mains electricity. Most migrants were at the family building stage of their lives and needed to balance work and child rearing. Not everyone stayed the course and not all the enterprises succeeded. Nor did all our campaigns meet with success. ‘Organically grown’ was barely understood in the market place and organic standards were undeveloped and lacked legal status.
Over time the community fragmented so I was surprised at how many came together during the exhibition. The symposium was packed and part of the evening was recorded for a Welsh radio programme. The Producers wanted to probe whether, after forty years, the ‘pobl daeth’ (people who came) felt English or Welsh. But they rejected the question, preferring loudly to voice their opinion, “ We’re locals! ”.
(i). Dyfed was then the county that covered present-day Ceredigion, Camarthenshire and Pembrokeshire in Wales.
