howard's way - agricultural consultant Sir Albert Howard

How should we move forward from the foot and mouth disaster? Patrick Holden draws inspiration from the teachings of Sir Albert Howard.

After the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease, the possibility of a `fundamental review' of our response to the disease and of the future direction of UK agriculture provides at least some hope that lessons will be learned. This is the least we can expect as the legacy of a disease that it is now being estimated will have an indirect cost to the UK economy of 20 billion [pounds sterling], has condemned up to three million animals to death, 95 per cent of which were perfectly healthy, has decimated our rural economy, tarnished our overseas image of a green and pleasant land and destroyed for ever genetic heritage in our livestock community which in its own way is as valuable as our ancient architecture and landscape.

But of what will the review consist? The danger is that our response will be as shallow and misdirected as official analyses of previous food scares have been. The Government will appoint an eminent scientist, in all likelihood someone who conforms to its own reductionist mindset. The objectives will be quite narrow; to identify how the disease got into the country, whether a different strategy should have been adopted and if we can prevent the next outbreak from causing so much damage. In other words it will be a ritualistic witch-hunt to identify the culprits. No one will be exempt -- ministers, MAFE scientists, the farmer's unions, the food industry. Individuals will be named, those responsible will be called to account.

The report may even go on to point out how it could have been different and produce a bland action plan for a more stable and sustainable agriculture and recommendations for a new disease control strategy based on vaccination.

But what would be the useful outcome, apart from our vicarious pleasure in witnessing other people's mistakes in deciding whether MAFF officials have acted like sheep, Nick Brown had lost the plot, Prof David King didn't know what he was talking about or Jim Scudamore was too slow to recognise he should change his attitude towards vaccination. After all, can one really think of anyone who could have possibly responded adequately to a request to oversee the organised mass slaughter of at least a million animals, supervise their disposal by burning and burial (both of which were agreed to be environmentally unacceptable), alienate half the farming community on the one hand and a growing body of public opinion on the other, preside over deep splits of opinion even amongst your own scientists and officials about how best to deal with the disease and then come out smelling of roses? No, inquests and enquiries will be largely a waste of time. The only useful legacies from foot and mouth, will be a speeding up of the process of radical reform of our agricultural policy and a change in our attitude towards our management of health and disease.

One of the best sources of inspiration in this field was a man called Sir Albert Howard. Howard was an agricultural thinker of huge stature and his ideas were so powerful that they had, and still have, the capacity to change the future of farming. Although Howard's work is not widely discussed today, he was probably the single most important influence which led Lady Eve Balfour to establish the Soil Association in 1946. Howard was an agricultural researcher of some eminence who had already developed a fairly wide sphere of expertise when he was sent by the British Government to India in 1905 to establish a research base to develop improved crop husbandry at Pusa in Bengal.

He observed that the methods of crop and livestock husbandry which were still widely employed among the more traditional farming populations improved soil fertility and produced crops and livestock which did not seem vulnerable to pest and disease agents even when these were present. He pursued the hypothesis that correct husbandry was the key to the health of plants, animals and people over the next 35 years at three research institutes, and in 1940 published An Agricultural Testament which is probably one of the greatest books about agriculture ever written. In it he summed up his life's work and advanced the views shown in the box below.

These principles, he argued, should form the basis of an agricultural strategy for the future in which we should cease to regard health as the absence of disease, but rather a vital state where an organism is in a dynamic equilibrium with its environment, this being the result of sound husbandry. One of his most powerful ideas was that pests, diseases and parasites are, as he put it, `Nature's professors of good husbandry' and that they should be seen as indicators of bad management and thus the best possible means of identifying mistakes and applying corrective management solutions.

After having developed this hypothesis based on the study of plants and plant diseases he quickly realised that the same principles would also apply to livestock. So he obtained permission to acquire six pairs of oxen on his 75-acre research station at Pusa where he subjected them to a regime of good husbandry aimed at promoting their general health and well-being. This included sound nutrition based on good crop husbandry and spacious accommodation combined with good stockmanship, skills which he had learnt through his family background in cattle farming in the UK. Howard decided to expose these healthy animals to a range of diseases, all of which were endemic in India at that time, to test his hypothesis that just as he had observed in plants the animals would be able to withstand this exposure without contracting the diseases as a result of their positive state of vital health.

Before doing so he had to discourage, in his own words, `the official veterinary surgeons who often visited Pusa from inoculating these animals with various vaccines and sera to ward off the common diseases'. He went on to say: `I achieved this by firmly refusing to have anything to do with such measures, at the same time asking these specialists to inspect my animals and to suggest measures to improve their feeding, management and housing so that my experiment could have the best possible chance of success. This carried the day, the veterinarians retired from the unequal contest and took no steps to compel me to adopt their remedies.'

Howard then brought his animals in direct contact with diseased stock by allowing them to use common pastures on which diseased cattle sometimes grazed, or by allowing them to graze a field which was only separated by a low hedge from diseased animals over which the animals could rub noses. Howard observed: `I have often seen this occur between my oxen and foot and mouth cases. Nothing happened. The healthy well fed animals reacted to this disease exactly as suitable varieties of crops when properly grown did to insects and fungus pests -- no infection took place, neither did any infection occur as a result of my oxen using common pastures.'

He then repeated this experiment over the next 26 years on three different research stations (Pusa, Quetta and Indore) with several different groups of livestock. During this entire period the only time when the cattle contracted foot and mouth disease was during a summer drought in 1925 when 40 recently acquired cattle were subjected to a poor diet combined with heavy field work. He said: `I had to deal with a very few cases of foot and mouth disease in the case of some dozen animals. The patients were rested for a fortnight and given better food and the trouble disappeared never to return. From 1927 to 1931 these animals were often exhibited at agricultural shows as type specimens of what the local breed should be.'

It is arguable that this research gave Howard an insight and depth of understanding about the nature of foot and mouth disease which has not been replicated since and from which the world could learn much today. He concluded: `This experience convinced me that foot and mouth disease is a consequence of malnutrition pure and simple and that the remedies that have been devised in countries like Great Britain to deal with the trouble, namely, the slaughter of the affected animals, is both superficial and also inadmissible. Such attempts to control an outbreak should cease. Cases of foot and mouth disease should be used to tune up practice and to see to it that the animals are fed on the fresh produce of fertile soil. The trouble will then pass and not spread to the surrounding areas providing the animals there are also in good fettle. Foot and mouth outbreaks are a sure sign of bad farming.'

But how exactly should the lessons from Howard's work be applied today? The most important application is to ensure that his thinking influences the next chapter of our agricultural policy and practice. Much of his thinking would still be regarded, even by many of those who challenged the slaughter policy, to be radical to the point of heresy. The Soil Association was faced with this dilemma in its response to the foot and mouth crisis. We were familiar with Howard's work and our organic standards reflect the premise that the primary responsibility of all livestock producers is to manage for positive health, with veterinary intervention only being considered as a means of dealing with husbandry failure.

So the question arises why the Soil Association would be so widely associated with promoting a vaccination strategy, when leaving the disease to take its course would be what Howard would have advocated? The honest answer is that whilst not abandoning our principles (which permit the vaccination of animals only where there is a `known farm problem') we concluded that confronted with a national livestock population which were for the most part intensively farmed and overstocked, likely to be sickly and vulnerable to infection by a virulent virus to which their immune systems had had no previous exposure, that the use of a strategic vaccination programme to dampen clown the spread of the disease seemed the least worst option.

But this pragmatism has in no way altered the Association's deeply held conviction, which I have found to hold true during my own 15-year experience of organic dairy farming, that healthy animals do not succumb to infection and that our responsibilities as producers is to improve husbandry so that our

stock may be able to resist future disease challenges out of their own health and vitality.

The best way to achieve this change of attitude towards positive health would be to adopt a new set of principles which should inform the development of all future agriculture in Britain. These should be based on the production of high quality safe food using farming systems which build soil fertility, minimise any use of non-renewable inputs, conserving wildlife and the environment, treating livestock with dignity and respect, encouraging diversity of cropping, protecting the indigenous nature of our plants and animals, encouraging decentralised distribution systems, involving and interacting with urban populations and enhancing the wider cultural diversity of the countryside.

Such systems should become the norm rather than a niche in the next chapter of our agricultural history. Organic farming, as a well developed representation of these principles, would prosper if they are adopted, but we should be constantly vigilant that the pressure of the expansion of the market does not water down the standards in the chase to satisfy any short-term undersupply of the commodities which consumers are demanding after all the recent food scares.

That said, there must be a degree of pragmatism mixed in with our ideals because it is inevitable that in the short-term at least all our stock will not be healthy as they will be effectively convalescing both genetically and physically from the long chapter of industrial agriculture that lies behind us. In any case, even organic animals sometimes get diseases and all `virgin stock' are vulnerable to the occasional invading virus to which they have had no previous exposure as we know from the experience of the St Kildan islanders when they encountered the flu bugs of Victorian tourists to which they had no immune resistance.

So we need evolution, not revolution. But the ideal must always be management for health so that when disease does strike, as will inevitably sometimes be the case, the thinking must be based on the least draconian form of intervention most compatible with the concept of management for health.

From this viewpoint, death and disinfectant represent the most unsophisticated and peculiarly British disease treatment strategy lying at the furthest end of the spectrum. At the other end is the promotion of health through sound management. In between, if and when good husbandry fails, we should start with herbal and dietary supplements which enhance the immune system, moving on to homeopathy including remedies such as borax then vaccination, and finally more draconian and longer lasting drugs such as antibiotics. If Howard's principles were properly applied we would only kill animals either to avoid suffering or to prevent transmission if there is no useful life ahead for the animal concerned.

Whether all this comes to pass will depend entirely on whether a sufficient number of people become aware that the chain of the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible. In 2001, time is on our side as it wasn't in Howard's day. He was witnessing the birth of industrial agriculture. Fifty years later, if we are lucky, we might be experiencing its death. The public are so alarmed, that it has become a political necessity for some kind of fundamental change to be announced as part of the post-election agenda. But the real question is will it reflect Howard's principle of positive health. I believe it could and indeed it must. Occasionally there are moments when major changes are possible, often after disasters. Foot and mouth has provided an immense shock and in doing so it has precipitated the conditions for change. Such circumstances must not be wasted.

Chain reaction: the principles of Howard

The birthright of all living things is health.

This law is true for soil, plant, animal and man -- the health of these four is one connected chain.

Any weakness or defect in the health of any earlier link in the chain is carried on to the next and succeeding links until it reaches man.

The widespread vegetable and animal pests and diseases which are such a bane to modern agriculture are evidence of a great failure of health in the second (piano and third (animal) links of the chain.

The impaired health of human populations (the fourth link) in modern civilised countries is a consequence of this failure in the second and third links.

This general failure in the last three links is to be attributed to failure in the first link: the under-nourishment of the soil is at the root of all. The failure to maintain a healthy agriculture has largely cancelled out all the advantages we have gained from our improvements in hygiene, in housing and in our medical discoveries.

If we are willing to bear in mind Nature's dictates a) for the return of all waste to the land, b) for the mixture of the animal and vegetable existence, c) for maintaining an adequate soil reserve system for feeding the plant, we shall rapidly reap our reward, not only in a flourishing agriculture, but in the immense asset of an abounding health in ourselves and in our children's children.

Patrick Holden is director of the Soil Association.

COPYRIGHT 2001 MIT Press Journals
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group