‘What is Jersey, if not a potato?’ anon.

India Hamilton

In 2017 I attended a seaweed conference at the Grand Hotel, one of the St Helier hotels affected by the smell of the sea lettuce, an environmental change on the St Aubin’s beach. Like with all environmental changes, they have multiple interlinked causes making understanding the solutions very difficult. Often livelihoods are affected in industries that don’t cause the problem, the industries that cause the problems are often embedded in how others function, and certain groups with least power are greatly affected. Problems such as sea lettuce are challenging for a community, solutions call for collaboration where relationships might be ruptured through years of uneven success and the process can lead to finger pointing. As a new person to the agricultural community in Jersey, it was upon me to listen, and find the right question. During round table discussions with people from many different sectors, a gentleman with a long agricultural past piped up. “What is Jersey, if not a potato?”. That was it, I was hooked. The question, although I think was rhetorical, has put me on a journey of discovery. It has been a journey of identity, in understanding how island communities reimagine themselves, and as success mounts – how easy it is to forget how island prosperity is truly rooted in the geological formation of our landscape and a deep relationship with the natural world, the communities ability to adapt and the advantage that comes with our scale.

This article is my interpretation of Jersey’s agricultural history, learnt from informal conversations with anyone willing to talk about Jersey’s food system, reading history books and old policies and weaving connections that reach back 6,000 years. What I have learnt is that living on an island has a certain ‘islandness’ about knowledge, born from close quarters where assumed truths are developed from half sentences – it is from this quirk that I have woven my own story.

It’s often perceived that Jersey punches well above its weight, and that its success is more representative of a fibonacci scale than what would normally be played out in a market that relies on the concept of economies of scale. This can be seen in the distribution of the Jersey Cow. One of my favourite stories of this nature has been largely absent from the farming narrative yet is recognised by some as having the greatest impact on world food systems. In 1835, Colonel Le Couteur was trying to select the perfect grain for bakers wheat for a white light loaf. This was 24 years before the Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. A farmer in his little field hypothesised that different variations of wheat structures grew within a crop and could be selected for a particular type of processing. He worked over multiple seasons, using microscopes, understanding the microscopic changes in its physical expression was the key to better loafs. The only way he could prove that the visual changes created processing changes was through collaboration with bakers. What he discovered drew Darwin’s attention. His influence did not stop there as he was cited by Norman Bourlog in his development of the dwarf wheat that launched the Green Revolution, which was critical for reducing the impact of famine in India during the 1940s.

How can something so influential be so hidden by our current ideas of Jersey’s agriculture? It’s not until it is pointed out that our wheat history is everywhere; the little granite mushrooms and the rounded archways in old farms, for example. Le Couteurs’ wheat variety was kept by a seed bank in Scotland and is now back in production being cultivated using horse drawn machinery by Le Techeron Farm in Trinity.

In short Le Couteur had worked out how to observe the functional capability of grains grown from seed amongst anunimaginable amount of variation that is found in landrace production. He did this before common knowledge of genetics using basic equipment and in turn changed the world. Imagine what he could do today?

Once this settles in the mind it is clear that Jersey itself has been through its own form of colonisation from ‘industrial’ approaches to agricultural development that were invented elsewhere. We have lost the critical understanding of the importance of scale, self discovery and the ability to develop our own seeds. What Le Couteur didn’t foresee was that almost 200 years later, the Jersey Rural Economy Strategy would be setting the framework for a new debate on gene editing, this time to buy patented technology for seed potatoes that are resistant to fungus, and would be being sold back to the island farmers from universities that pride themselves on being the next generation of the green revolution. How did this happen – one has to ask?

In an interview, John Kelleher, an agricultural historian, stated that “Farmers learnt to make money early on”. When I look back over the industries and some of their sucessfull products, it’s been diverse, with salt cod, ship building, Aspall Cyder and Remi Martin, the Jersey Jumper and wheat. All industries share the same sort of issues we face today, balancing limited land, with external factors such as tax laws and war. It is understood by a few people that the spirit of enterprise was launched by the landscape, the proximity to London, the lean to the sun, the positioning between two fighting nations, and the ceremonial importance of the physical formation of the island. This island is profoundly enterprising and has a particular set of codes for business. A local business man points to two critical points in time where opportunities were at their greatest, and not bound by class and this was the 1830s and the 1950s. He highlights that creating something new in Jersey is difficult, preventing local innovation – therefore the only major force of competition has been about price of food and nothing else. As the conditions of the market started to set in, and economies of scale control the market therefore the next logical step for Jersey’s economy was to detach Jersey’s prosperity from its land size, just like the owners of Aspall Cyder worked out a 100 years earlier. There was a speech in the 1970’s that called for the change of tractors to Mercedes outside the State’s buildings, indicating the transition from farmer led to finance led. During the last century our farming industry has become increasingly fixated on potatoes, exporting, efficient and productivity utilising advancements in technology not designed for the uniqueness of Jersey. More has seemingly been lost in its relationship with scale. In a recent article a local farmer was quoted as saying “we are too big to be small and too small to be big?” – citing poor profits as a reason for closure. But I wonder if there is more to it?

An old farmer came into SCOOP to buy some turmeric and pepper for his arthritis, he walked over to the eggs and picked one up “the shells are a bit thin, get some seaweed off stinky bay and the grit should improve that for you”. The shop was quiet and I was hungry to know more about who this man was. It wasn’t hard to start a conversation, there is something about SCOOP that supports conversation. It turns out he used to collect seaweed commercially, running 2 tractors, “you always needed two tractors because of the risk of the tides” he said. A few decades ago his company was the largest commercial seaweed collector for the industry, he told me many stories of the trade, the near loss of tractors in the tide, the weight of his shovel and the hundreds of small-scale growers supporting one another.

The main growers had decided to shift to synthetic fertiliser and from that he lost the bulk of his business. He ran a campaign where scores of farmers signed a partition tosubsidise the seaweed collection to ensure that the small- farmers would still have a supply, they needed the seaweed for their agricultural practice but they were finding it too difficult to make the economic case for it. It didn’t work. The conditions of the market had changed and the small- scale biodiverse farmers had become irrelevant. 2022 sees the 977th farm close since the 1950s, and what is confusing is now it is the farmers who responded to the industrial processes. Is this enough loss to start to ask different questions?

When grown men cry in meetings because they mourn the loss of their cattle, the loss of their relationship with the land, livelihoods, language and resilience, these tears draw you into working out how to hold space for their wisdom. These people are nearing the end of their life, there is a sense of urgency to give them a voice, most of their practice isn’t written down. It is our indigenous practice, and like everyplace in the world it is only when the community experiences the loss directly, that it is recognised as important. The trauma caused by loss and the narrow route of modernity is one we share with almost every person in the world. A rupture from the land, isn’t just about making life easier and about buying in the resources we need to live, for a cheaper and modern life, it is a shift towards impotence and a clear journey to disconnecting people from land in which they live. As housing prices become too expensive for people who feel the jersey is their home, are we seeing the same impact happening in our financial services industry as we have our food system?

I draw from this a need to answer the first question – “what are we if not a potato?” to me the answer is this. We are a place governed by our natural landscape and we need to rebuild our relationship with it. We lament the possibility of a life post potatoes or I dare to say finance, but as history shows, we are an island of change and resilience. We never imagined what it would be like to be world leading, but we reached into our imagination, used our environment and our political advantage – and we’ve changed the world time and time again. What is important is the balance of change, and the understanding that we don’t need to get fixated on any one product, or industry. Every country in the world is being asked to re-address its food security, farmers are being asked to change their techniques and the environment is calling to be counted. I encourage the reader to look deeply at these images and imagine what our future could be like, if we look backwards to go forwards and rebuild our relationship with this ecologically gifted island. These photographs will provide some wisdom that will help shape our agriculture future, as we reconnect with our agricultural community and their relationship with the land that aims to build lasting prosperity. If we delve into place, and confidently shape our own future, we will change the world.