"Oh, I was early into organics myself," he said, spotting on the table the latest edition of Organic Matters. "Yes, when I was very young, we went to live in a biggish house on the edge of the city. There was a fine glasshouse, and my father, not a man with green fingers decided, anyway to grow tomatoes. My organic duties amounted to scouring the neighbouring fields with a bucket and collecting cow-pats, both fresh and dried. All went into a bigger container, water was added, and that mixture was applied to his plants. Tomatoes, he complained, when we later moved to a more central house, had lost their flavour. And that's my organic record." Well, the magazine carries an article by Gillies Mac Bain with the heading "No ecological saint? Just find your own level." And a further line: "No one is going back to the Stone Age." He begins with a parable. Walking down a quiet lane, he met a plastic bag, picked it up to put in a bin. "Help save the environment," said the bag. A sermon delivered by a plastic bag "Most of all I dislike being preached at by those who advise one thing while practising another. When Fukuoda, Japanese author of The One Straw Revolution, went to lecture in the United States, he went by Boeing 747 or Jumbo jet. He did not swim or walk or drift the South Pacific currents on an open raft. So much for the revolution! An environmental saint would have to renounce the use of all resource-consuming technology, industrial and pre-industrial, perhaps all the way back to the discovery of how to make fire, which is when the destruction of life-supporting forest first began."
And where do we draw the line, he asks, if such eco-perfection is beyond reach? He advocates a "mixed-media approach". On only 25 acres, he tells us, he sold the tractor and used outside contractors to cut, turn and bale the hay. Slurry? "We outwinter the cattle, so the slurry's on the land some months before everyone else's. Cleaning out stables to a dungheap? Dung fork and wheelbarrow. How long does it take? Not so long as it takes to earn the money to pay for tax, insurance and diesel for the tractor, not to mention the depreciation factor." His motor car is also a compromise. A "one litre 88 Micra is neither a towing vehicle nor a people-carrier" but a bicycle-rack on the back means that, for example, a child can be dropped at school and cycle back. It also draws in all his hay, slowly, 16 bales a time in a calf trailer.
He concludes: "Between ecological profligacy and ecological perfection, every household picks its own path . . . make your own creative choice. "Just don't get ordered around by a mere plastic bag."