Features

The quest for sustainability

In another corner of Devon live Zac Goldsmith, the millionaire Conservative candidate for Richmond Park, and his wife Sheherazade. Their quest for sustainability was complicated by the listed status of their farmhouse – being Grade I listed, its architecture cannot be violated, even to help save the planet. Fortunately, traditional building methods were well-tempered to the sometimes blustery Devon climate. Walls are “massively thick”. Additionally, the Goldsmiths laid natural wool insulation under the floorboards and in the attics: the Energy Saving Trust emphasises that householders should put reducing heat loss before adopting green energy technologies. Sheherazade also found that “there were lots of fireplaces that we could put wood-burning stoves into”. There were also some ancient cast-iron radiators, built on the same Herculean scale as the walls. Whoever installed them knew a thing or two about conserving heat, always placing them against inner walls, never against outside walls or under windows. “We kept the radiators, and with them and the woodburners we find that the house will become hotter than we need,” says Sheherazade.

There was nothing to constrain the Goldsmiths’ green ambitions outside the house, but it hasn’t all been plain sailing. “I’ve tried for three years to keep the geese safe from the fox,” confides Sheherazade. “My last idea was to build a house for them on an island, but we were having a walk one day when we found they’d all gone – except one, who had hardly any feathers left. We had to buy our Christmas goose from a shop.” After last year’s floods came a plague of slugs. “We went out with the children in the evenings with buckets to collect them. They love anything that is mucky and disgusting.” This bears out the truth of her contention that organic farming “makes you feel more involved. It is a learning curve, and more fun. With climate change everyone is having to adapt to new ways of doing things. You become very imaginative.” One consequence is that Sheherazade has edited a book on green living for beginners, A Slice of Organic Life: Get Closer to the Soil without Going the Whole Hog.

The good life

Ever since the days of the Roman poet Virgil, city people have yearned for a simpler life, amid Nature. More recently, the desire to bring up children in healthy, rural surrounds has persuaded many parents to put their London existence behind them and buy a country house. Now, that place in the country may also be the testing ground for green technology, with owners feeling that they can do more to adopt an ecological lifestyle there than in town. True, the occupant of a terraced house may have a head start over the owner of a detached property as regards thermal efficiency, and country people usually find themselves driving around a lot because shops and services will probably be some miles from where they live, but a well-sited wind turbine on a breezy hill is likely to generate a more useful amount of electricity than one on a roof in Notting Hill.

Wind power relies on the wind, and it doesn’t always blow. Sunshine, in the British climate, may seem an even more elusive commodity, but (difficult though it may sometimes be to believe) we are getting more of it. Furthermore, solar photovoltaic systems (PV) require daylight, but not direct sunlight, to generate electricity. Again, the country home may provide more places to site them, particularly bearing in mind the possible need to obtain planning permission. While they are probably best located on the roof, they work just as well on the ground (hidden in a walled garden), although, as Matthew Slack of the Centre for Alternative Technology advises, “It’s important to make sure they aren’t overshadowed.” It is easier to dig a trench or bore hole for ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) in a big garden than in an urban back yard. If you happen to live near a fast-flowing watercourse – think mountain torrent rather than placid trout stream – ‘micro hydro’ might generate enough electricity to power a whole village.

Making the most of waste

Biomass is a slightly alarming word for organic matter and at one point seemed to throw a lifeline to farmers who were struggling to make a livelihood from growing food. The forward-looking landowner Lord de Ramsey, who has experimented with growing fields of waving miscanthus, or elephant grass, on his Huntingdonshire estate, is doubtful about the long-term prospects of such alternative crops. “The current bio-fuel crops only work because of an EU subsidy and are therefore an unreliable investment,” he tells me, but for the countryman whose land holding includes a coppice or woodland, a ready source of biomass lies to hand: logs. They work best when shredded into chips. The Prince of Wales is introducing a wood-chip heating system at Highgrove.

Highgrove is also famous for its natural sewage system. All the waste water from the household is filtered through reed and willow beds, eventually emerging, via a pond, as clean water. The reed beds are a paradise for dragonflies. Farmers can contemplate the benefits of anaerobic digestion, making use of animal dung to produce methane, which in turn generates electricity (and also reduces the amount of methane, a very damaging greenhouse gas, which is emitted into the atmosphere). There are several hundred such schemes in Germany, but merely a few dozen, as yet, in the UK. Followers of BBC Radio 4’s The Archers will know the ins and out of the economics: suffice it to say that with a 40 per cent government grant on offer towards the £1 million cost, even Brian Aldridge thinks it’s a good idea.

More modestly, the joys of composting are only waiting to be discovered by the new owner of a country house; worms are the pathfinders of a green future, and it is forgiving stuff. As Ken Thompson comments in a new book that is simply called Compost, “Even if you do everything wrong, you will still make decent compost eventually.”

Take the compost and spread it liberally on your vegetable garden. Fertilisers, which add nitrates to the soil, are extravagant users of carbon, because of the heat used when extracting nitrogen from the air. Over the past decade, city buyers have been increasingly interested to buy farmland, to protect their own views from development and because land looks like a worthwhile investment (it has useful inheritance tax advantages too). Naturally, they will study the carbon calculator (CALM, which stands for Carbon Accounting for Land Managers) pioneered by Savills and the Country Land and Business Association. CALM is a web-based calculator designed to help land managers work out the balance of greenhouse gases emitted by their farming business, and carbon stored in their trees and soil. After calculating the emissions from their business, land managers can be given advice on how to manage carbon balance more effectively in future. For more information, contact one of Savills’ agribusiness teams.

Going organic

Eager greenies will want to go organic, certainly if they listen to Patrick Holden, the eloquent Director of the Soil Association. “The world’s changing,” he says. “Sustainable agriculture, reconnecting with food and the story behind it, increasing our sense of identity with place through eating food that has been grown locally – these things are no longer marginal, they’re mainstream.” Sir Anthony and Carole Bamford (of JCB) at Daylesford, the former Formula 1 driver Jody Scheckter in Hampshire and Peter Kindersley (founder of the publishing brand) in Berkshire (see opposite), may seem like hobby farmers, but with Daylesford Organic, Laverstoke Park and Sheepdrove Organic Farm, they have all turned organic convictions into big business. The green movement has come of age.

The organic challenge

In 1975, Dorling Kindersley published John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. It impressed the co-founder of the firm, Peter Kindersley, so much that he bought a dilapidated cottage called Sheepdrove on the chalk downland above Lambourne in Berkshire. The farmland around “had been chemically farmed for many years by the Milk Marketing Board”, he remembers. By the time he had sold Dorling Kindersley to Pearson and pocketed £100 million in 2003, he had built up his own farm.

“It had no downland in permanent grass, no hedges, few woods and definitely no dew ponds. We’ve added 25km of hedges, 50 football fields’ worth of woodland, around 25 acres of wildflower meadow, three dew ponds and 200 nest boxes for bats, birds and bees.” The ancient woodland has been brought back into what Peter calls “proper management and coppicing”, and by recycling seven million litres of water per year from a borehole into a small lake, a habitat for newts and other wildlife has been created. As a result of all this activity, what had previously seemed like an irreclaimable wasteland has been made to bloom again.

However, as is the way with entrepreneurs, Peter found Sheepdrove Farm evolving from a private passion into a business. “The basic idea was to have a chemical-free zone, so over the years any land Juliet and I have bought was to make into a place for wildlife and proper downland. Somewhere along the line I got into farming, as you do, and then the ambition became producing food in a way that worked with the environment, free of harmful inputs.”

They don’t use nitrogen, so nutrients are introduced through manure, produced by animals. “With a butchery, a meat box scheme and two butchers shops we need the whole range of animals – pigs, cattle and sheep.” Originally, Peter realised the farm would need the weekly income provided by either milk or chickens. “My wife loves chickens and because she hated industrially farmed chicken chose them over milk. It was a huge exercise, partly because we wanted the chickens processed on our own farm. Now we are in processing.”

While the Kindersleys are proud owners of no fewer than four G-Wiz electric cars, along with two Toyota Prius models, they have not as yet succeeded in building a windmill: in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the planning process is “tediously slow”. In London, however, they are moving to a house in Notting Hill where “We are going to cover the flat roof with solar panels.”