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Organic Farmer & Panel Speaker Theo de Jager, on,viable Organic Farming and the power of the End-consumers choice in the Value Chain to support global sustainable conservation farming.
The most important people are the house wives and journalists. The housewife who stands in front of the stove, decides what the family will eat that night, because she is at the end of the value chain. There is a very good reason why value chain is spoken about in agriculture. It is because you cannot push a chain, you can only pull it, and the pulling force is the market. It is that housewife who buys the product which is at the end of the chain. And we must get to her ear, and that is why the journalists are so important.
This issue must be communicated to our markets, and create pressure from our market side, because farmers are all captains of their own ships. They will make decisions based on what the market demands from them, and they will do what is profitable to do. He also farms organically, for one simple reason; it is a profitable thing to do. And because farmers live so close to the earth, we all eek out a living with our fingerin the soil. They cannot seperate themselves from the environment. And farmers will do anything to maintain and protect what they have. There is no better champion for this cause than the farmers. Keeping large numbers of livestock on small pieces of land, intensive farming. They have nothing to do with it, because they only know extensive farming. Which is not true. In Africa, you will find many members of their own constituency, who keep large numbers of livestock, for years and years without slaughtering them. They have it for cultural reasons. They only use it for weddings and funerals. Those cattle live for 10 to 12 years before they are slaughtered.
