Soil Association Brand Guidelines: Haughley, 1946 & the 10mm Organic Symbol

A Suffolk farm, a comparison and a contested early circle.

The Soil Association is a British registered charity, and its story starts on one farm. In 1919, English Wikipedia says, Lady Eve Balfour and her sister Mary bought New Bells Farm at Haughley Green in Suffolk. In 1939 Balfour began the Haughley Experiment, a side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical-based farming, and in 1943 Faber & Faber published her book The Living Soil. The charity calls the farm its birthplace and says the experiment showed that organic farming did not compromise a farm’s overall yield. Wikipedia records the entomologist Deborah Stinner’s view that, by modern standards, it was more a “demonstration” than a true experiment.

The founding date depends on what is being counted. Wikipedia, citing Philip Conford and John Paull, says Balfour, Friend Sykes and George Scott Williamson organised a founders’ meeting on 12 June 1945, attended by about a hundred people, and that the association was formally registered on 3 May 1946. The charity gives 1946, and says Balfour founded it “along with a few friends, including Mary Langman.” Balfour became its first president, Wikipedia says. The charity lists its first concerns as soil lost through erosion and depletion, the nutritional quality of food, the exploitation of animals and the impact on countryside and wildlife. It says membership reached 3,500, from more than 50 countries, in 1957.

The early association also has a far-right chapter. Jorian Jenks, a farmer and writer, was a member of the British Union of Fascists from about 1934, its chosen candidate for Horsham and Worthing in 1936 and its agricultural adviser, according to David Sivier’s review in Lobster (Summer 2018) of Philip Coupland’s 2016 biography Farming, Fascism and Ecology. The review describes him as an antisemite who believed Britain’s Jews should be deported. English Wikipedia says he was detained under Defence Regulation 18B in 1940 and released in 1941.

Jenks joined the Soil Association in 1945; Wikipedia counts him among its founders, while the review says he was recruited. He edited its journal, Mother Earth. The review says he founded it as a newsletter in November 1945; the charity dates the first issue to 1946. The review also says he fostered links with organic groups in Germany that included former Nazis. Wikipedia, citing the historian Graham Macklin, says Jenks saw the association as a vehicle for keeping Mosley’s politics alive, that its membership was wide, and that the group later moved to the left and his role was marginalised. Jonathan Dimbleby, in a foreword to Conford’s history of the movement, called Jenks’s beliefs “foolish and foetid,” the review reports.

Standards first, then a symbol.

Standards came before the symbol. The charity says it published its first organic standards in 1967. Fresh Produce Journal called them the world’s first set in 2013, and the charity uses the same claim on its standards page, while its organic page says it was “among the first in the world.” In 1972 it was one of the founding members of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, formed at Versailles.

Soil Association Certification followed in 1973. The charity calls it a wholly owned business. Fresh Produce Journal reported that the vegetable growers John and Ruth Daltry were among the first UK growers awarded the symbol, in 1974. Lee Holdstock of Soil Association Certification, writing for Triodos Bank in September 2023, named Aspall’s and Rachel’s Organic among the early certified producers.

The charity’s timeline then moves from farms to shops and politics. It says Safeway became the first supermarket to stock organic products in 1981, that it campaigned against DDT in 1983, and that the office moved from Suffolk to Bristol in 1985. It says it founded Food for Life, its school-meals programme, in 2003 with Jeanette Orrey, and launched Innovative Farmers, then the Duchy Future Farming Programme, in 2012. Those are the charity’s own accounts of its work. Its journal Mother Earth is now called Living Earth.

Today the charity marks 80 years, and the certification arm reaches well beyond food. Soil Association Certification says it works across organic food and farming, forestry and nature markets, fashion and textiles, and beauty and wellbeing, with application routes for COSMOS and the Global Organic Textile Standard. It says it certifies the majority of organic food and drink products in the UK. In forestry it says it manages more than 4,800 certificates in over 70 countries, and it offers certification under the Forest Stewardship Council and PEFC schemes.

As a charity it answers to a board of trustees. Its website lists separate leadership teams for the charity, Soil Association Certification, Soil Association Exchange and the Soil Association Land Trust. Helen Browning, who farms under the Helen Browning’s Organic brand, is chief executive of the charity, and Dominic Robinson has led the certification business since 2022. King Charles III is listed as royal patron by Wikipedia, citing the charity in 2023.

How these schemes present themselves.

A certification mark does a different job from a company logo. It does not sell one maker’s goods; it sits on other companies’ packs, often in a corner, and asks shoppers to trust a set of rules they will rarely read. That makes these schemes unusual design subjects. The visible part is tiny, while the system behind it fills manuals, licence contracts and audit reports.

The manuals are often public, and they are unusually exact. The FAIRTRADE Mark Guidelines set a clear space, a size guide from posters down to labels and hang tags, and a minimum printed width. The Rainforest Alliance’s seal guidelines set a minimum size so that a QR code still scans, and forbid printing the seal across a fold. Fairtrade gives legibility as its reason and the Rainforest Alliance gives scanning, and in both cases the same mark has to work on a large pack, a label or a hang tag, printed by many different companies.

Around the mark sit smaller pieces of evidence. Schemes may ask for a claim beside the mark, a licence or producer number on the pack, or a web address that leads back to the standard. Fairtrade’s guidelines, for example, call for a producer FLO ID or a national reference code in some cases. Behind them sit audits and certificates: the Rainforest Alliance says only those who meet a standard after an audit may display its seal.

This group of guides looks at how these schemes present themselves: who founded them, who owns the mark, what each scheme says it certifies, and what its logo rules ask of the brands that use it. Where critics have challenged a scheme, the guide says so, and what the mark means is given in the scheme’s own terms.

A round mark with written rules.

The organic symbol comes with detailed public rules. Soil Association Certification says the symbol is a registered certification mark of Soil Association Limited, and that a business may use it only with a valid certificate of registration. Chapter 2 of the organic standards sets the rules, use is limited to organic products on the business’s trading schedule, and every use must be approved by a Certification Officer. The certifier calls it “the most widely recognised symbol in a growing UK market.”

The size and colour rules are plain. The symbol must be reproduced from original artwork, complete and upright, at least 10mm in diameter, and in black or white. The page adds that it works best at 12mm or more, and that a business must ask before going smaller or using another colour. It must stay legible over its whole background, for example on a photograph, and be no less prominent than the EU organic logo. It must not sit at an angle, inside an extra circle of outline or solid colour, in more than one colour, or with a different font or typeface.

Placement is covered too. The symbol should go on the main face of the label or pack, in proportion to the product description, and it must appear on the final consumer packaging of products the charity certifies, unless the certifier agrees a good reason not to. Examples given include temporary or off-the-shelf labels and labels so small that the symbol would crowd out information required by law. On stationery, promotional literature and websites, a business may use it freely only if its entire range is certified; otherwise it must say which products or lines the symbol covers.

The system has variants. Welsh and Gaelic versions exist, and a separate Approved Input symbol covers non-organic products such as salt and agricultural inputs, which may not carry the organic symbol. Artwork files for both are offered as downloads, dated April 2026.

For a design guide, Soil Association shows how a small round mark can carry a whole rule book at pack size. Compare Forest Stewardship Council, whose scheme its certifier also works with, and Fairtrade, another label read at pack size. For this guide we use moss, loam and straw with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Soil Association’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.