Nothing new in green crops
- http://static.expressandstar.com/millennium/1900/1925-
1949/1931.html
CAPTURED MAY 2022
The vegetarian craze and organic farming may appear to be a nineties discovery. But in fact it
dates back decades.
A far thinking farmer, David Clement, from Broome Farm, near Stourbridge, decided to go organic
in the early thirties - and the first health food shop opened in Birmingham in 1898.
The idea of organic farming germinated in the then 22-year-old Mr Clement's mind in 193l when
he joined the Rudolf Steiner Sunfield community for disabled children in Selly Oak, Birmingham.
He had gone straight there from Oxford University and was a great admirer of Steiner's philosophy
of bio-dynamic agriculture during a decade of increasing mechanism in farming.
Early the following year Mr Clement, now aged 88, moved with the Sunfield community to their
new home in Clent, not far from Broome Farm, which he took over in 1933 to develop his organic
ideas which had been fermenting in his mind since 1931.
He decided he was going to grow the best quality food for man and beast. His first move in this
direction was to make Broome Farm into a self- contained unit.
He maintained that a farm should be a good balance of the right number of crops and the right
number of stock for the land.
"It was like a symphony," he claimed. "We had cattle, sheep, hens geese, pigs, We fed them all
ourselves, We didn't buy in any food. It's great to get the right relationship of grassland to arable
land and it's a completely fascinating system because every animal lives also on the waste of
another animal."
Mr Clement said the farm tried its best to be self-supporting, which no farm did in the thirties. The
farm did everything on the basis of what was cheapest.
"But we tried to feed our own animals completely which no one else was doing," said Mr Clement.
He added that he accepted the idea that "nature spirits" were a reality and treated everything in
nature with more respect.
He was dealing with spirits as well as physical things.
"The gnomes work upon the roots, the undines upon the leaf and stem of the plant, the sylphs
upon the flower and the salamanders on the forming of the seed," he stressed.
His belief was that spiritual beings were life, beings that push the plants up out of the ground. He
added that they were difficult to appreciate today because people were far too materialistic in
their outlook.
"We imagine that everything is physical but in the old days people experienced them," he went
on.
Because of the belief that planets have an influence on all plant growth, in subtle ways, the whole
farm had to be a complete organism in itself.
The farm composted all its manure and vegetable matter. "One always strove for harmony on the
farm - a feeling of well-being." he said. When there was disease about homeopathic remedies
were used on cattle.
David Clement's idea was to supply nourishing organic food to Sunfield's community for disabled
children. His approach to farming was influenced by a strong belief in nature spirits.