On Sunday March 28^th 2010, we are inaugurating the first of a series of exploratory workshops in the beautiful setting of Hardwick House and grounds, entitled “Taking Control of Our Lives.” These will be run in parallel with workshops at the ICPPC Eco Centre in Southern Poland.

The first workshop in the series will explore the main issues raised in Julian Rose’s controversial new book “Changing Course for Life - Local Solutions to Global problems” and will ask: “Is it time to establish a new platform for decentralised community based people power?”

The programme will start with a short introduction to the activities on the Hardwick Estate the majority of which has been organically managed since 1975.

Programme:

10:00 Introduction to the Hardwick Estate and walk in the grounds.
11:00 Tea/coffee
11:30 Workshop Session led by Julian Rose
12:30 ‘The Polish Experience’ led by Jadwiga Lopata, Goldman Prize winner and founder: International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside.
13:00 Organic Lunch

14:30 Open session/debate
15:30 Summary and conclusion
16:00 Depart

The cost of the day is £40 per person. All interested parties are welcome. We ask you to please pay in advance. Payment ensures your booking.

Please book early as workshop can only accommodate 20 people.

For more information please email Hardwickestate@btinternet.com

Address: Hardwick Estate Office, Whitchurch-on-Thames, Reading, RG8 7RD
Nearest train station is Pangbourne (2 miles from Hardwick)

Payment details: When you register for the workshop we will send you a PayPal invoice via email. Alternatively you can make a direct bank payment to:

Julian Rose,
Account number:         00440458
Sort code:                    30 96 96

I ran a doorstep delivery service of our own Guernsey organic raw milk and cream, and this inspired me to write a leaflet with a tear-off strip briefly proclaiming the positive case for raw milk. The purchasers then signed the statement and sent the slip back to AUMPC. This was reproduced amongst 150 raw milk producers and their customers. We collected 15,000 signatures and delivered them personally to the Minister of Agriculture.

The scientific case was greatly helped by a very useful publication, The Case for Untreated Milk, by Barbara Pickard. The other element in our favour was that the Prince of Wales is a keen supporter of raw milk and family farms. He was able to support our campaign with some well-chosen words, and this greatly helped in promoting the issue in the press.

I still have hundreds of letters of support from raw milk enthusiasts. They are outstanding for their passion and determination to keep the raw milk tradition - and associated family farms - alive. I can see that the same enthusiasm is alive and well in Canada and the United States.

But we are up against the intractable obstinacy of technocrats and more than that: a deliberate attempt to destroy independent mixed family farms by corporate/government cartels only interested in exercising total control of the global food chain. I have no doubt we will win this battle - “people power” once harnessed to a strong grassroots cause will always come through the victor in the end. With this can come a genuine “renaissance” of food and farming: real food and real farming.

The positive values of responsibly produced raw milk greatly exceed the negative factors. In fact, there are virtually no negatives when real milk is coming from well- cared-for family farms whose owners understand and apply the simple laws of animal and land husbandry.

The cream layer of raw milk has enzymes that are of the highest value to our health - highly protective of our immune system. Which is probably why “the industry” insists that butter fat is a cholesterol raiser and thrombosis threat. In the 1980s, Japanese firms were approaching British raw milk producers and contracting owners of high butterfat herds to sell them the cream off their standing milk in order to develop special anti-cancer medical products with these high-enzyme derivatives. As we know, pasteurization kills off the subtle nutrients and vitamins that our bodies must have for proper protection.

It’s a sad reflection on the bewitching powers of the reductionist “dead food is safe food” lobby that our supermarket-obsessed culture can’t even access real food any more. But it’s a sure sign of hope for farmers’ markets and other alternative marketing ventures that are burgeoning in the U.K. and beyond. There are new raw milk producers registering their farms every month, and public interest in acquiring their products (milk, cheese and cream) is on the rise.

More and more people are waking up to the reality that most of what is called “food” is nothing more than a synthesized conglomeration of quasi-food materials to which are added various synthetic chemical components, including colours, preservatives and flavourings, with the now added-value factor of genetic modification and nanoparticles.

Standing up for our rights to produce and consume real food is probably the single most important act of independence and responsible citizenship we can make.

Julian Rose
January 2010

In Changing Course for Life, Julian Rose spells out the truth of our current socio-economic context in a blatant and transparent acknowledgement of the ills of our society. It is easy to hide behind our ignorance of the finer and less savoury details of corporate greed, of modern industrialised agriculture, of the wide ranging effects of our unmitigated obsession with technological advancement. He explores just how and when our economies and societies departed from the objective of servicing our needs for a happy and harmonious state of existence with the natural world, to the point at which we now find ourselves: disconnected. A condition Rose aptly summarises as a state of being ‘subjugated to a sense of impotence by our own inventions’.

The book covers a broad range of aspects of modern society, from the disproportionate levels of power and wealth, to society’s single minded focus on technological advancement at the expense of labour enhancing techniques to the continuing loss of food biodiversity and steadily declining state of our soils.

But this book goes beyond merely pointing out how and where we have gone wrong. His clear objective is identifying a new way of living our lives. This encompasses a very personalised and spiritual consideration of the ends to which we devote our daily thoughts and energies. He acknowledges the need to realign our energies with the natural rhythms of the earth rather than directing them daily into the current model of degradation of our natural state of being. But he also discusses society at large, considering the necessary changes to our politico-economic environment, to agriculture, education, and greening our city lives. This book is, quite literally, bursting forth with ideas: ideas for change, ideas for how we can move forward into the next phase of consciousness, away from a mechanistic view of us in relation to the universe and the landscape, to a mindset that embraces the concept of living as a holistic integrated whole.

Rose writes with a palpable energy that is infectious. I found that no matter what frame of mind I was in when I sat down to read this book, when I put it down the energy contained within flowed through my veins and made me urgently aware of the need and desire to DO something. This book is full of idealism at a time when idealism is exactly what we need. It is perhaps our current tendency towards too little idealism and too much apathetic acceptance of the status quo that sees us trapped and stagnating as we are. So I challenge you to read this book, to awaken and to transform your way of interacting with the world around you.

(Louise Tait is an economist working in the environmental and development fields and has worked in both South Africa and the UK. She likes to read and think and engage with the world around her. She believes in the harmony of all things and strives to make this a reality.”