Professor Martin Wolfe was a great friend and mentor to us. A true pioneer, Martin pursued his research into agroforestry, co-cropping, crop populations, new crop trials and more at his Suffolk farm Wakelyns.
Believing that sustainability depended not just on a whole farm approach but on radical change to the whole food system, he shared his expertise widely and generously. Martin died peacefully at home earlier this month. He leaves a lasting legacy of work, not least his YQ wheat population, and his memory will remain a guiding inspiration to us.
Our great friend, inspiration and mentor Professor Martin Wolfe died last weekend after a short illness. We’ll miss him terribly, but take heart in knowing that he was exactly where he wanted to be, at Wakelyns, the 60 acre Suffolk farm that he and his wife Ann designed and established in the 1990s to research and demonstrate agroforestry and diverse cropping systems. Martin came to Suffolk after a distinguished career as a plant pathologist, initially at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge and latterly in Zurich where he held the Chair of Plant Pathology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
The principles that underpinned all Martin’s work at Wakelyns and his vision for lower input, lower impact farming and food systems took shape during his years in Cambridge and Zurich and are simply captured in one word: diversity. And diversity is on display everywhere at the farm, between species and within species, in the woody rows that divide the annually cropped alleys and in the annual crops themselves – perhaps most famously in the cereal populations that Martin developed in his role as Principal Scientific Advisor to the Organic Research Centre (ORC).
Martin took this philosophy beyond the agroforestry alleys. The farm played host to a huge number of wild species and Martin found great joy in them all (except perhaps the squirrels that ate all his hazelnuts). He firmly believed that food systems need to be diverse too, that monocultures exist not only in fields but in the businesses that control seeds and move and sell food. His work on cereal populations, to be exchanged freely between farmers and grown without the strictures of intellectual property rights, reflect this system-wide perspective.
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Posted on 19th March 2019
We were sad to hear of the recent death of our colleague and friend Professor Martin Wolfe. Martin was an integral part of the team at ORC for over 25 years where he pioneered the development and organic systems through scientific research as well as practical example of farming at Wakelyns Agroforestry that he established and ran in partnership with late wife, Ann and their family.
Professor of Plant Pathology Martin worked for 28 years at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge, followed by nine years in Switzerland and since 1998 and ‘retirement’ worked for the ORC and latterly Coventry University. Since 1997 he, his late wife Ann, and his family have been partners in and run Wakelyns Agroforestry, a highly innovative, integrated (organic) agroforestry farm in Suffolk, east of England.
Martin had a B.Sc. (Hons Agric. Bot.) University of Reading, 1960 and a Ph.D. University of Cambridge, 1963 and a life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. It was a career of research in and into agricultural systems. Martin was a pioneer in working in multi-disciplinary context and an agro-ecological framework, with first-hand experience of both crop and livestock research as well as farm management and the environment. This came together, and can be seen in his legacy, in his passion for an equitable and sustainable food system and on the ground at Wakelyns.
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Additional information:
Flour power: meet the bread heads baking a better loaf [10.10.2019]
Photograph: Anthony Cullen/The Guardian
