Rise of the vegan vegetable: the farmers who shun animal manure | Patrick Barkham

Vegans are increasingly looking for ways to grow their fruit, vegetables and cereals without animal manure

"An olive orchard cultivated in a conventional manner is a bloody wound in nature," declares Johannes Eisenbach as he drives - fast - south along the gleaming new Greek motorways towards Kalamata. The olives are harvested, the branches are burned, and all these nutritional elements leave the olive grove and never return.

Eisenbach is an ebullient German with a Bluetooth receiver in his ear, constantly switching between Greek, German and English as he takes calls from big German supermarkets including Lidl. He runs the Organic Marketing & Export Network, a group of 800 Greek and Cypriot organic farmers who sell to northern Europe. He's also the accidental inventor of a new kind of compost that could kick-start vegan farming.