Bellfield Organic Nursery

Every week St Andrews students have the opportunity to order a veg bag from One World society – stuffed full of organic vegetable goodness, grown locally just down the road from Cupar. The carrots come caked in mud, the onions have that earthy smell and the cabbage definitely needs a good minute’s wash with water. Need I say real vegetables? There’s lots of debate about locally grown food’s sustainability and over the issue of organic or non-organic, so to get a few answers and see for myself I decided to strap on my backpack and road trip to Bellfield Organic Nursery.

Celery seedlings

Since its beginnings in the 1980s, Bellfield has prided itself on being 100% organic. And they mean just that – 100%, not your 92% means 100% sort of thing. Part of Jamesfield Farm, their jingle is ‘Chemical Free for almost 25 years’. Bellfield covers 24 acres, with a variety of fields and poly tunnels where they grow all sorts of veg from pak choi, radishes and cucumber to pumpkins, leeks and potatoes. And all of it’s cared for by human hands. ‘We get checked every year by the Soil Association to make sure we’re rotating our crops,’ says farm co-ordinator Derek. ‘And of course to ensure we’re pesticide and herbicide free.’

Last year they planted 180,000 leeks in their fields, but leeks take a lot of nitrogen out of the soil, so they’ve now planted clover to replenish the soil and return nitrogen to it. Good ol’ crop rotation, pure and simple. Of course it’s better for biodiversity to rotate crops even if you’re not organic, but lots of big scale farms prefer the lazier option of herbicides and pesticides. The result of this is eventually monoculture soil, and the craziest part of it all is that wildlife – insects, fungi and flowers which attract pollinating insects – can do the job we spend excessive amounts of money doing artificially. And, of course, humans can ‘weed’ plants and keep them fertile without spraying chemicals on them too. Derek enthusiastically takes me over to a huge, slightly rusty machine to show off their bed weeder. ‘Four people lie in here face down and weed the beds by hand,’ he says, pointing into the semi-darkness of the equipment. ‘And we use a wee hoe to dig out weeds as it moves along the rows.’

Derek on a tool for weeding crops

The farm is efficient too – they can plant 180,000 seedlings in 6 days in good weather. Grinning away, Derek tells me he works every day of the week (and that includes Sunday) and often will work from 5am until 10pm. That’s a whopping 17 hour day, which trumps even financial hotshots in the city. In terms of sustainability then, Bellfield farm seems pretty up there. Much of the work in the tunnels is done by hand – and if not, with fairly old-fashioned machinery – which saves on energy consumption, and they promote biodiversity through crop rotation and no use of herbicides. It’s true they have to heat their poly tunnels and use a tractor to plough the fields, but this is negated by the short distance over which the veg has to travel from farm to consumer.

Bellfield supplies only a box scheme to households, local markets and us, which means their food miles are limited to the Fife area. Years ago they grew little gem lettuce and tomatoes to sell to supermarkets but it ended up being unbeneficial. In the summertime supermarkets wanted 200,000 lettuces and tomatoes a day, but by August often they would get mildew which means the lettuces didn’t ‘look’ good enough for consumers. What’s more the supermarkets would suddenly stop buying their veg if the weather went bad because apparently less people would be buying salad as a result.

‘The tomatoes have to be the size of a 10p coin and just off-red in colour,’ Derek says. ‘And cucumbers and courgettes for supermarkets have to be dead straight and six inches long so they can be packed together. If you go in that field and pick, say, 1,000 courgettes, you’re lucky if you get 300 that are straight.’ So in supermarkets’ view, the other 7,000 are just waste. ‘Bonkers,’ Derek murmurs, shaking his head.

All in all, Bellfield farm provides fresh, yummy, locally grown and chemical-free vegetables, so can there really be any argument against buying them? One World’s veg bags are £6, usually include a combination of potatoes, onions, cabbage, carrots, parsnips and beetroot (and will be incorporating salad as it gets closer to summer) and can be ordered every Friday at the Union in the corridor next to venue one between 11am and 1pm. Or, if you can’t make it, just email [email protected].