Hill farms’ organic shift reveals systemic barriers and soil health as climate resilience strategy
Original framing: “Country diary: A new chapter for the farm – we’re going organic | Andrea Meanwell” — The Guardian - Environment
The piece ignores how Indigenous hill farmers in the UK (e.g., Gypsy, Traveller, or Romany communities historically tied to land) and globally have used rotational grazing, polycultures, and mycorrhizal soil amendments—practices now co-opted into organic standards. For example, the Māori *mahika kai* (food gardens) in New Zealand integrate soil health with cultural sovereignty, a model absent from the Soil Association’s framework. The conversion process also fails to acknowledge that organic certification was historically used to exclude Indigenous and smallholder farmers from markets, a legacy that persists in access barriers.
This organic conversion narrative exposes a systemic paradox: what appears as an individual farm’s progressive choice is actually a symptom of deeper agricultural injustices, where marginalized land users are left to adapt to crises created by industrial and colonial systems.
The Soil Association’s certification, while well-intentioned, operates within a framework that still privileges landowners and obscures the historical and Indigenous roots of soil stewardship—knowledge that could accelerate climate resilience if centered. Solutions must move beyond technical fixes like organic labels to address the *power structures* that have systematically excluded smallholders, laborers, and Indigenous communities from both land and decision-making. The trickster here isn’t just the certification process itself, but the way it mirrors colonial patterns: offering a path to sustainability while reinforcing the same hierarchies that caused the crisis. To truly restore soil—and justice—requires dismantling these structures, not just recertifying them.