Holding his ground

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

It’s National Organic Week and pioneer Josef Finke says we must be aware of the dangers from GM crops, writes Rose Martin

THERE’S a popular misconception about the organic farming fraternity — one that encapsules all organic enterprises as pie-in-the-sky, brown rice-and-sandals dreamers — well intentioned folk, but without a scrap of sense. Really, not at the races at all when it comes to ‘real’ farming.

Not so. In fact that image could be seen as a sort of black ops campaign by vested interests, particularly now as the organic sector enters into a titanic battle with the Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) lobby.

Enter Josef Finke, the man described as the Grandaddy of the organic movement, and a man who moved a lot of mountains in his time. And a man who’s now suiting up to take on Big Corpo.

But Finke is no stranger to this milieu — he built up his organic beef brand, Good Herdman, to a turnover of €4.5m and wasn’t so orthodox that he declined Larry Goodman’s AIBP when they came a courtin’. Josef Finke started farming out of nowhere, managed with beginner’s luck to sell his first year’s crop in one fell swoop, in the teeth of a recession, and never looked back.

Now retired, the Cahir-based farmer has built an international brand name out of his home base, Ballybrado, a stunningly beautiful, Victorian pile in the lush countryside of south Tipperary.

He was the main mover in the creation of organic standards here, taking on the establishment and going all the way to Charlie Haughey to press his case. It worked, and Haughey ordered a new organic committee in the Department of Agriculture.

Josef Finke’s story, beginning in Frankfurt and ending with Haughey, is some tale. Finke, his wife Marianne, partners and friends, loaded up children, food and machinery and moved lock, stock and barrel to Cahir, Co Tipperary, in 1983.

Even in the worst summer in living memory, driving into the farm today is a breathtaking experience. The old Victorian manor house the German immigres occupied was probably big and cold and hard to heat, but it has a magic that’s undeniable. And when you meet Herr Finke, it’s no surprise the enterprise took off as it did. His ebullient, good natured but focussed attention to the matter at hand extends into all areas of this life — he’s a natural business man.

It’s ironic, too, that he trained in marketing, but then fled the heavily industrialised, post-war Germany for a bucolic idyll — only to find himself doing a complete revolution 30 years later.

Now that he’s given up large-scale farming, he’s concentrating on the continuity of Brand Ballybrado.

“You develop an awareness of organics in a polluted country — we lived in the Frankfurt area and it was a hostile environment. We were near an American air base and the children would run into the house holding their ears. There were no fish left from pollution and we were told not to use public water for babies — it had high nitrate levels and led to blue baby syndrome.

“The first time we came to Ireland, we liked it, but it was a major decision for the family — not an easy one. But with this life we achieved more that we ever could have achieved in Germany.”

And when they came, Marianne planted the garden and they lived self-sufficiently from the beginning. The new farmers set oats the first year and when the crop was ready, and because there wasn’t a market for organic here, they pitched to Nestle who sent some technical types over to take samples of the soil and the crop.

Within a week, they asked for further samples, as the first results were unclear. Shortly afterwards, Nestle bought their entire harvest and the gas chromotographic result showed completely clear samples. No heavy metals, no pollution — it was why they wanted a second sample, just to be sure, and its purity was something they hadn’t seen in over 25 years, says Finke.

This further fuelled the farmers’ zeal — they began exporting meat — and were told by one processor that they couldn’t take the meat anymore because nobody would buy their own, local stock. Irish beef needs to be marketed under the organic banner, Finke firmly believes, because if it isn’t, we’ll be “bypassed by ships coming from South America, bringing organic beef everywhere”.

In the early days, there was a lot of naysayers, there still are, he says, and some of them are employed to promote organic agriculture, he says with scorn. His views on certain members of the Department of Agriculture and of some of our university faculties can’t be published, but they are actively against the organic movement, he says, and pulls out clippings from leading journals to prove his point.

How can someone be on the board of an organic group and then support GMOs, he asks. Because in Ireland, it’s happening, he claims. Finke believes it’s his duty to protect the sector that he helped to pioneer — and it must have been tough, going to fight for the tender, organic market at a time when farm advisors were telling traditional farmers to drop the old, embrace the new and produce at all costs.

Finke sums up his battle: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you and then they fight you — and then you win,” he says with a genial grin.

And he says that BSE was the turning point for organic farming in Ireland, it made consumers more aware of the choices they made. With increased demand, came a greater variety of organic food and the market grew.

But today brings new challenges: “Organic farming now struggles against huge international interests who are fighting for control over our food. In the first line is the GM industry, and we have to be vigilant as they pursue their interests with all means: corruption, false information (feeding the world), undermining our media, science, education and political decision making.

“I have witnessed such a level of ignorance among our politicians in Ireland that we have to be vigilant. And when I see scientific opinions in the media today, I first ask, ‘who paid for this study?’ If it wasn’t for the European consumer, GM would already be here,” he says.

“We have taken our eye off the ball, trusted our politicians and pillars of society, and we are paying dearly for this. Through our vigilance we must make sure that our politicians serve the Irish citizens and not some lobby groups.”

And Big Corpo is already trying to patent wild plants, he says, a way of owning food that grows naturally. If they control the seed, they control the food and multinational corporations should not have that sort of power. Now that he and Marianne have retired, the Ballybrado brand has passed to daughter Julia who is into large-scale manufacturing of quality, organic snack foods. Another oxymoron, you’d think, but the Finkes are already exporting and hope to launch in the Irish market soon.

The old vision of the organic movement is gone and in its place is a high-end, food brand that’s on a par with any other Irish product and with the potential to capture a huge slice of the continental market. And Ballybrado, still independent, is still at the forefront.

* National Organic Week runs from Sept 10-16.

* Read more:
GM trial ‘not at odds’ with organic promotion

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