Reblogged from the Pen and the Plough
Amina Khan visits Willowbrook Farm in Oxfordshire to find out more about the UK’s first Halal and Tayib farm and the Radwan family’s approach to sustainable farming.
‘Those who take agriculture seriously enough and study it long enough will come to issues that will have to be recognised as religious’, writes the farmer and writer Wendell Berry in his foreword to Lord Northbourne’s Of the Land and the Spirit. A leading figure in the organic farming movement and a prolific writer on comparative religion, Lord Northbourne coined the term ‘organic farming’ in his book Look to the Land. In this forgotten classic of organic farming, written twenty-two years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, he warned against what he called ‘chemical farming’ and lamented at how ‘soil fertility was being mined.’ His writing went on to influence Thomas Merton, E. F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry, amongst others.