Vegan Organic Network

The Vegan Organic Network is celebrating the success of its Stockfree Organic Standards, with four UK growers now carrying the certification alongside their Soil Association symbol.

Food grown using stockfree methods is being dubbed “Organic Plus” because of its high quality, its healthy profile and its contribution to greater sustainability through efficient land and water use. Stockfree growers are required to avoid not only artificial chemicals and fertilisers, but also animal manures and slaughterhouse by-products.

Iain Tolhurst of Tolhurst Organics in Berkshire supplies 400 boxes of stockfree organic produce a week to local customers, with a carbon footprint of just 8 tonnes a year, equivalent to that of an average household.

With Sir David Attenborough becoming a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, attention is finally being focussed on the previously taboo subject of over-population. Alongside human population, politicians should also be looking at the population of farmed animals which is growing at an alarming rate.

World meat production has quadrupled in the past 50 years and livestock now outnumber people by more than 3 to 1.1 The UN’s 2006 report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” recommended an immediate halving of the world's livestock numbers, in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. A typical European omnivorous diet requires 5 times the amount of land required for a varied vegan diet.2