Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: If we're now recognizing that all of these unforeseen consequences of this way of producing food are really coming home to roost, and whether that's the 69% declining wildlife in my lifetime, or climate change, or whichever one you want to pick, but if we want to sort that out, which we can, then I think we have to not just put all out on farmers, we have to reimagine a new kind of system.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Annabelle Heseltine. I'm a journalist and broadcaster. And you're very welcome to the fifth episode of Hope Springs, a new podcast from the Resurgence Trust.
Today I will be chatting with pop star turned farmer Andy Cato, one half of the electric music band Groove Armada.
Shocked by the words on a billboard about the horrors of industrial farming, he sold his music rights in 2008 and ploughed the profits into some barren soil in the Pyrenees.
Dogged and determined, he fought loneliness, sleeplessness and stress to establish himself as an award winning farmer. And along the way, he realized a dream to support other farmers regenerating their soil and putting healthier bread on the table.
We'll talk about the real cost of food and why he founded wild farmed in 2018, and how to create a collaborative link between farmers and consumers to support and empower both ends of the food chain.
[00:01:41] Speaker C: So a couple of years ago, I was on the island of Iona and I picked up a book in a bookshop which was all about soil. And I read this quote, which blew me away. Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and his many accomplishments, owns his existence to a 6 inch layer of topsoil. And the fact that it rains, as I said, it blew me away. But I was wondering whether or not 6 inches of soil is enough. But there is a man who knows a lot more about soil than me and Andy Kato. Is it 6 inches or is it 18 inches?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Well, hello, first of all, and lovely to be here. And that's going to be very dependent on where you are in the world and even what field you're in on a particular farm, I think. But I think that the important thing, perhaps in that is that biologically active layer where ultimately it creates the atmosphere that allows us to exist. And it's the only thing that can turn death into life.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: You're one half of Groove Amada, the electric band, and 15 years or so, you basically signed over your music rights and bought a farm. Do you want to tell me why and what happened?
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, financially, it was a ludicrous decision, but essentially it was a testimony to the power of journalism. I was coming back from a gig and read an article about the environmental consequences of our current food system. And it was pretty sobering reading. It said, if you don't like the system, don't depend on it. Which is a quote that's got a lot to answer for. And I was inspired to try growing vegetables. I mean, I'd never done anything like this. I was urban dweller. I suppose we've all got farmers in our ancestry at some point, but certainly in living memory. My family were Londoners, and so, yeah, so I started trying to grow food for the family. I was living in France at the time, and it's a quite long story, but to cut it short, it didn't go well at all at the beginning because I didn't know what I was doing. But I found the whole process of seeing kind of seeds become plants and plants become food absolutely fascinating. And why isn't this the first thing that were taught at school? I have no idea. And, yeah, went down a spectacularly sized rabbit hole, which sort of meant the vegetable patch became a market garden. And then this fateful decision to sell my publishing rights to finance a loan to buy a farm in southwest France, which was absolute madness on reflection, I.
[00:04:03] Speaker C: Mean, it's tough farming, and I think it would be really interesting to know a bit about how tough it is and what you were trying when you were trying and failing and trying and failing and then getting it right.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, it's definitely two things I've learned about farming is one is just how extraordinarily difficult it is, how the vast range of skills required to do it are totally underappreciated by society at large. And that it's never a job that's done, it's always a work in progress. And when I took over the farm, as I say, it was a mad and hopelessly naive decision. And in the kind of tsunami wave of information that was coming at me from all directions about tractors and mechanics and grain cleaners and irrigation networks and all of this stuff, I sort of lost sight of some of the basic lessons that I'd learned in the vegetable patch about what I was actually trying to do about healthy plants, healthy soil and so forth. And there were some really, really dark days there. And trying to farm on heavily degraded soils, I wanted to do that without the chemical inputs as well. And, you know, basically didn't work. And the soils were much better suited to growing weeds than they were crops. And the reason why we see particularly, like sort of docks and thistles and so on, covering over old car parks and things, is because they're brilliant at growing in low fertility conditions. So if the fields end up in that state as well, then the same thing happens. So I was in a kind of race to the bottom, trying to sort of cultivate my way out of all these weed invasions and just wasn't working.
[00:05:35] Speaker C: So you were on a 110 hectare farm in the Pyrenees with a wife and children.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: And getting up at 5, 6 o'clock in the morning.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: And nothing was happening.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Well, worse than nothing was happening. I mean, the Czechs involved in farming have got a lot of noughts on the end, so it was worse than nothing happening. Nothing happening would have been fine, actually. It was a disaster.
And I was lucky compared to lots of people, insofar as I could go away at the weekend and play some records and I knew that we weren't going to starve, which was exhausting, sort of going between those two worlds. But at least I could do that. I was very lucky to be able to do that. But, yeah, it was very, very humbling. And now it forms part of a narrative which sort of gives a sort of flow to what followed. But at the time it was. I didn't know things might. And I couldn't begin to imagine that I'd be sitting here talking to you now. And so that's really marked me.
[00:06:34] Speaker C: What did turn it around?
[00:06:36] Speaker A: I suppose two major things happened. One was the first thing was coming across this amazing sort of cohort of writers, I suppose, roughly speaking, between the 1930s and 1950s, as a people like Albert Howard, Lord Northbourne, Newman Turner, Lady Balfour, of course, so that those foundational texts of the organic movement as it was and continues to this day, and actually they're the same text that a lot of what we now call regenerative farming is referencing. So I came across Albert Howard first and then from there, lots of these other fascinating books, and from there started trying some of the things that I was reading about. For example, the basic idea of, you know, grass is the great healer, and if you can make livestock move across a landscape as they did when the great herds of herbivores moved across landscapes, then that can have a very healing effect to more sort of recent ways of applying old ideas. So, like things like crimper roller. So this idea that you grow a crop, that you're not going to harvest a cover crop, and then you use a particular roller that can kill that and turn it Into a kind of mulch of the type that you might put around your tomato plants in the vegetable patch, but on a field scale and sort of drill through that. So you're conserving moisture and keeping weeds down and stuff like that. So I had another sort of decade or so of trying all kinds of different things to try and find a way forward.
[00:07:54] Speaker C: So I was just thinking about somebody who's got some crappy land. So basically it is an element of trial and error and then finding your way through.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Well, there is, but you know, obviously knowing what I know now, and one of the things that from the French experience that has been foundational in wild farmed is one that feeling of real loneliness and sleeplessness and stress and so on that I went through as a farmer. Let's build a community of support so that we can. Not everyone has to go through that. Some of the experiments that I did, I realized afterwards that other people have done them sometimes decades before. So let's try and avoid repeating ourselves. And I think actually now that there are a certain set of foundational principles which I would have done things completely differently and with a lot less heartbreak if I'd known then what I know now.
[00:08:46] Speaker C: We will talk about mental health actually in farmers later on, but what I'd like to do is go back into the history of why the soil is so bad.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think it's very important to dispel the notion that there's a sort of Darth Vader like villain in the wings in all this. And that if you take, you know, for example, Norman Borlaug, who was a botanist, credited as being one of the sort of foundational figures of what we call the Green revolution, which is essentially this kind of high input type of farming that dominates the landscape today.
And he was in Mexico for months in the sweltering heat, sleeping in these sort of mud huts, writing very touching letters to his wife saying we have to do something to help this local population who are just in desperate, desperate straits. And he did and he worked. And I think it's important to remember that a lot of those endeavors were to solve genuine problems with good intentions. I suppose the other thing to bear in mind in that is that his approach was so successful because he was dealing with degraded soils and it worked brilliantly in degraded soils because effectively it was a system that sort of bypassed the soil to an extent through the use of artificial inputs. But because of that perhaps, I think we forget the potential of non degraded landscapes. We've forgotten actually that before that there was a whole other state of natural abundance, which a walk through a forest will tell you quite how much biomass nature's capable of producing left to its own devices.
[00:10:20] Speaker C: Well, I think we need to also put it in the context that in the 1950s, at the end of the Second World War, there was a huge food shortage, so much so that Nixon's Secretary of State, the agricultural Earl Boots, basically ordered farmers in America to either get big or get out. And hedgerows were taken down, they packed in the fertilizers, the pesticides. It was all about production to feed people. And there's an element of fear at the moment and uncertainty in the agricultural world with, you know, with the war in Ukraine, and of course, we've had Brexit and we've had Covid. And so in the context of that, you can understand there's no one person that's to blame. It was almost. It was a reaction against crises that have happened in the past, but now we have a different crisis. And let's now talk about regenerative farming and where you've come in with wild farmed.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, to your point, you know, when the UK was surrounded by U boats and the threat of starvation was a real one, the response to that was completely logical. You know, it's yield at all costs. And then for various sort of political and geopolitical reasons, that has been maintained as an objective. And farmers have delivered on that absolutely brilliantly. Absolutely brilliantly. I mean, they are the most resourceful people in the world. And then all of a sudden, now we're saying to farmers, actually, can you deliver a whole other set of things, please, now? But we're going to keep the whole of the rest of the food system, which is extractive and which has pushed farmers to within a penny of bankruptcy in a lot of cases, we're going to keep all that the same, but just ask you to do lots of other things as well. Well, that's ridiculous. And when you ask people to do that, what happens is what's happening in France, what's happening in Germany, what's happening in Ireland. And I completely understand that reaction. And so I think when, if we're now recognizing that all of these unforeseen consequences of this way of producing food are really coming home to roost, and whether that's the 69% decline in wildlife in my lifetime or the NHS crisis is basically a nutritional crisis or climate change, or whichever one you want to pick, but if we want to sort that out, which we can Then I think we have to not just put all that on farmers, we have to reimagine a new kind of system. So really wild farmed came out of the end of the story in France was that eventually the phoenix rose from the ashes and we ended up with a farm bakery and a farm shop and a local community that was supporting the farm and vice versa, which was great. And if the whole countryside could be organized like that, that would be lovely. But it isn't. And most people buy their food in supermarkets and in urban centers. So how can we recreate that link between farmers and consumers so that we can empower both ends of the food chain? Because one thing we can't do to get out of this situation is put everything on farmers and continue to use commodity markets. Because if you keep going through commodity markets where everything gets anonymous, how can you possibly drive positive change?
[00:13:25] Speaker C: So there's this sort of feeling that each individual needs to take responsibility for what is happening in our world. So how can the consumer show that responsibility in supporting a movement where we eat better and we pay possibly more? Do we have to pay more?
[00:13:42] Speaker A: I suppose. Well, you know, to answer the first bit of that question, if you're lucky enough to have access to local producers and you can afford what they produce, then that's, you know, an obvious one. And just engaging with people and finding out how they're growing things and creating those local networks. I think we've got to be really careful in all of this that we don't have an avoid the word versus is it local versus supermarkets or this versus that. We just don't have time for any of that, in my opinion, given the state of or how little ecological road we've got left. So I think we've got to go for a and both mindset rather than either or mindset. But if you're lucky enough to have those options, then great. What we're trying to do from a wild farm perspective through, through partnerships with people like AskPizza or Francomanca or M and S or you can go to the website and find all kinds of stockists, both large and small.
Is one to say to a largely urban population, if you're worried about health, biodiversity loss and climate change, and you feel like you're on a slow motion train crash, you can't do anything about it. That your food choices are a fantastic point of agency. But there's only any point in doing that if then people can locally conveniently go and get food from systems that are doing something about that. Crucially as you mentioned, at a price they can afford. And the whole true cost of food is a subject in itself we should probably go into. I mean, it's not that complicated really, but we can talk about that.
[00:15:10] Speaker C: Well, I yesterday went and bought some wild farmed bread from M and S in Victoria, where I lived nearby. And it was £4 75 for, I have to say, a very large loaf. And it was delicious. It was also very filling. So although it was more expensive than possibly another loaf of bread, one, I felt full after not eating very much of it. But the other thing is that I have a slight intolerance. I'm not gluten intolerant, but I just definitely feel a bit heavy. And I didn't feel heavy after eating your bread. And I was intrigued by the story you told me about the old seeds and that you were looking for seeds that were very old. And it happened in France, I believe.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So I was really interested in this idea of planting grains into pastures. The logic being that, you know, wheat is a grass. It originally sort of grew in the pastures of the Fertile Crescent, you know, so they're used to living amongst other plants. And one of the issues that we face when we want to grow things in natural biological systems is that most of the seed varieties, whatever the crop, that are available today, have been developed to be dependent on chemical inputs. And so trying to find varieties that are suited to low input systems is a preoccupation. So where I was in France, I was lucky in that this tradition of pays and Boulanger, which is Farmer Baker, lives on, and some of those pays in Boulanger just resisted. They switched to Green Revolution wheat varieties in the 50s and 60s and maintained their old, what they call population, wheat. So when you get lots of different varieties growing together in the same field. So I was lucky enough to be in an environment where I could get access to those. And that was really important given that I needed those characteristics of competitiveness, height, disease resistance, scavenging, all that kind of thing to try and do what I was doing. And this idea of what are the right varieties to take on this new style of farming with is a really, really important part of the jigsaw.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: And so let's talk about the cost. So the yield is a little bit lower, and so that makes it more challenging to be competitive, I presume. So how do you justify the extra cost of production which was obviously passed onto the consumer?
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, there's lots of aspects to that question. I suppose the first thing is that, like, what we're doing at Wildfarmer, we've got our growers operating to a, a set of third party audited standards.
[00:17:48] Speaker C: I read them. Very impressive.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Yeah, so they're quite radical, you know, so our growers aren't using any pesticides, they have to use companion plants or getting away from monocultures and trying to create these diverse plant communities. There's very strict limits on nitrogen to be slightly under a third of what you'd use on a milling wheat and it has to be delivered in small doses. And managing the nutrition of the plant based on its needs to try and keep things in equilibrium and so on and so forth. When you see the word regenerative, that's by no means the only version of that. You know, regenerative can mean anything to anyone. I suppose ultimately it's farming in a way where the environment's getting better rather than worse. However, we've been going down the road that we're on for such a long time that if you read the National Food Strategy, Henry Dimbleby's document, we've actually created a situation where the externalized costs of the food system today is about £70 billion a year in the UK.
[00:18:44] Speaker C: Can we unpack what it means? What are the true costs of food production today in the old way?
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Okay, so this is a big subject and actually the National Food Strategy is a brilliantly written summary of this. But essentially what they're saying is that if you take the health and environmental costs of the current food system and this isn't just the farming bit, this is all the way through to the processing and everything else, then it comes to about 70 billion pounds a year in the UK annually, which is about the value of total agricultural output. So it's an extraordinary situation and yet we're also facing a cost of living crisis. So it would be socially, never mind politically, completely unreasonable to start increasing the price of food. We just can't do that because we baked in cheap food into our modus operandi. So what do we do about that? Well, there's a part of regenerative farming where you can essentially, by sort of applying better observation, reduce your inputs quite substantially, try and become more profitable within these existing kind of commodity market prices, and do your best that way. What we're trying to do with Wild Farm and the Wild Farm standards, which are these third party audited standards that really have various things in them which bring nature and food production together. So the two things are happening in the field at the same time. And if as a farmer you can be rewarded for all those environmental services.
It means that you could combine good and fair net margins for farmers without increasing the price of food at the other end. And this is critical because we can't be in a situation where these kind of farming techniques can only make sourdough bread for the few. You know, it has to be food for everyone, or the long road to Greggs, as we call it in the wild farmed office.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: And then, of course, we have the health costs. I remember talking to a professor of intensive care at one of the London hospitals and he basically was talking about the poor health, poor food, poor living costs, and he said his intensive care hospitals should be maybe 80% less if we ate better. So that's a cost to the nhs, which is obviously coming through the fact that if people are eating better and eating higher quality foods. So, I mean, is that included in that 70?
[00:21:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's included in that. And it is interesting that the sort of repeated sort of drumbeat of NHS in crisis is never discussed in terms of food and how we eat and so on, which it really needs to be. The incidence of sort of cardiovascular disease and cancers have gone up 700% in the last 50 years or something. I mean, it's absolutely insane. You know, we're living in a world where one in two of us is going to get cancer when 10 years time the NHS is going to be spending more on type 2 diabetes than it does on cancer today. And on and on it goes.
[00:21:38] Speaker C: So Wild Farmed means. What is Wild Farmed? How does it work?
[00:21:41] Speaker A: That's a good question. Yeah. So essentially it's a regenerative food brand, I suppose is the easiest way to describe it. And what that means in practice is that we go to farmers and say, here are the Wild Farms standards, here's the wild farm pricing, here's the community support and so on that you. You'll get if you want to come on board. And then farmers who choose to join us, they will say, okay, well, I'm going to do my Wild farm crop on, on this area and we commit to buying the grain that comes from that area and then we turn that into flour or in the case of Ask Pizza, we turn it into dough balls or we turn it into whatever. And that then goes through to, I think there's about 500 customers from Artisan bakeries up to Man City and Liverpool first teams, all in this field to Plate Network. So Wild Farm sits in the middle of that community.
[00:22:28] Speaker C: And how many producers have you got?
[00:22:30] Speaker A: It's just over 100 now.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: And where's the future going? What's the future for wild farmed?
[00:22:36] Speaker A: Well, I mean we obviously want the community to build and build inside both ends. The bigger we can get this field to play community, the more agency it will have. We're doing loads of work at the moment around, for example, recognizing arable fields as biodiversity landscapes because this nature versus food narrative is a problem. So I'm a tenant farmer for the National Trust, but if I owned that farm and I chose to rewild it, I might be able to get £1,000 a hectare for biodiversity gain as part of rewilding program. But if I'm producing food in all of these pesticide free flower rich polycultures, I can get about 55 pounds a hectare for that. And so you can see why historically these arable landscapes aren't viewed as potentially biodiversity rich sites, but they can be and they should be. And it's a really important aspect of squaring this price circle. So really if we can keep building the farmer community, keep building the high street community, empowering more customers, empowering more farmers, then as a group, it gives us the sort of leverage to crack some of these solutions and people are going to want to work with us, then hopefully we can, we can show that there's a scalable alternative to the status quo.
[00:23:52] Speaker C: And part of that is education, isn't it? So one of your partners in wildfarmed is, has got grow, is it grow?
[00:23:58] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:23:59] Speaker C: And that's about educating communities.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So we do as wild farmed and as grow. You know, we're a small team of people. So it's limited and it's exclusively London at the moment, but working with schools and doing sort of little programs of growing wheat and clover by crops and turning them into bread and just trying to get this into people's day to day experience a little bit. But really, you know, going back to, right back to the beginning when I planted a seed and saw that seed become a plant and that plant become food on the table. It's such a miraculous, beautiful and humbling thing. You know, to live in a world where you can go through school and never see that happen is madness.
[00:24:37] Speaker C: So you're now you've got Collymore Farm, which is a 750 acres, I think.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a National Trust farm.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: And but how did you make the transition from a farm in the Pyrenees to a farm in Oxfordshire?
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Well, that was an awful lot of upheaval for my poor family. And so I mean essentially what happened was that we in France, we ended up with the, with the farm bakery in the shop and we had this field to plate, community and so on. And at this point I'd met Ed and George, who are my Wild Farm co founders, and our sort of thought process was, how can we make this field to plateau community work at scale.
And it quickly became clear that for that to happen, I would have to be back in the uk. And so I threw my hat into the ring for this National Trust tenancy without at all thinking that I'll get it, because it was very competitive and there was lots of people who on paper were much better qualified than I was. And so I was slightly astonished when it did come through. And there's very rapid looking for kind of schools and general upheaval and leaving the place in France was difficult for all kinds of reasons. But since then, and this community of farmers has grown and it's really, really inspiring to be part of that because it's such a broad church from organic growers to conventional growers who try something different. So many amazing minds and all that and it's got real energy about it. So, yeah, it's a great thing to be part of.
[00:25:59] Speaker C: Do you think that there is a huge movement? I mean, I know that you've spoken at Groundswell, there is the real Oxford Farming Conference. There seems to be a movement of people coming together in different ways, saying that there has to be a different way of doing this. And it seems to be grassroots. It seems to be coming from the younger generation. I don't know how old your children are, but my guess is they're in their late teens.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Good guess.
[00:26:23] Speaker C: And you say it's very, it's inspiring what is going on, but where do you think it's going in the future? Do you think it's going to get bigger? Are you optimistic?
[00:26:33] Speaker A: I think we're at a crossroads. And I think that the good thing about this regenerative movement is that it's open and it's accessible and all of that is really positive because to create real wide scale movements for change, you can't get into us and them. And so our mission, I suppose is try and be agents of change in all this and to avoid that greenwashing.
[00:26:59] Speaker C: Which has been accused of, hasn't it?
[00:27:01] Speaker A: And that's one of the reasons why the Wild Farm standards are so sort of radical compared to lots of other things that are going under the regen banner and the reason why they're third party audited. But part of that also, I think is just to be deliberately, really ambitious and try and create some scale around something which is quite far reaching, its implications of bringing nature and food together. So that if you can work for farmers and be affordable for consumers, then our hope is that that means that the sort of rising tide raises all boats a bit. You know, we can really harness the momentum for change in the food system moment to make sure it's real and transformational and does all the things that we needed to do.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: So you've talked about how through trial and error, you found ways to make poor land much healthier. There is a movement for wilding in the country and there seems to be a certain amount of misunderstanding about what that looks like in the sense that some people think that wilders just want to go and take the best farming country and turn that over to wilding, which isn't the case at all. It's much more about taking grade five, the poorest land and wilding that because it only produces 1% of the country's agricultural production.
But is there a room in there? Where do you stand on that? Because if you can make through the work you're doing, you're improving land, does that still hold? And what do you think about setting aside parts of the country for wilding?
[00:28:24] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I've read that analysis where certain areas are identified as being low sort of calorific output, if you like, and therefore these ecosystem services outweigh the potential calorific production. I mean, my particular focus is on avoiding nature versus food on the areas that we are producing food. Because I think that putting those together is not just to make it nice and pretty and like wishy washy, you know, it's because that nature's foundational principle is diversity. And so creating these diverse plant communities at the heart of our food production systems offer massive potential, I think, to really unlock a future with minimal targeted inputs to get the output that we want. And we need to be really careful at the moment because farmers have been pushed into such a tight corner. And if now when we start talking about all these environmental things that we want of our land, if we don't fundamentally recreate a new kind of system, a new kind of supply chain that isn't just these madly volatile commodity markets and madly volatile input costs, then in a way, why wouldn't you as a farmer start rewilding your prime agricultural land? Because the financial incentives to do that compared to all the other madness that you're being presented with is compelling. And I think we need to be Careful that we don't lose sort of food system resilience by not dealing with these difficult decisions that need to be made around how we're producing our food and how we're rewarding farmers to do that.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: So this sort of leads us into the question, where does the government come in with subsidies? How should farmers be subsidized? Where do you see that going in the future as there was so much competition now from the wilding movement?
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think that it's a question of equilibrium, you know, in everything. You know, from. From the fields to the subsidies. You know, we just need bal. And I think at the moment there's a degree of imbalance and I don't underestimate the terrifying complexity of trying to build a new farm subsidy system and the SFI and all this stuff that's gone on. And I take my hat off to the people who are pulling this off.
But I do think this nature versus food shadow is still hanging over it. And so the result of that is really consequential insofar as a kind of dialed down conventional farm. It's a reduced input conventional farming as opposed to a transformational new kind of system really based on biological systems.
The former at the minute is going to make you more money than the latter because there is this disconnect between food production and nature which needs to be sorted out.
[00:31:16] Speaker C: I went to see a farm where they are doing regenerative farming and I was blown away by it. For instance, I didn't realize that you must always have a crop growing, something to protect the soil. And then you're looking at the width of the hedgerows and they're looking at the seeds. They were using rotational crop to support the diversity, the biodiversity. And I think this draws us towards the end is that regenerative is a very positive concept. It's about bringing things back, restoring. And it has to be a win win doesn't for the farmer as well as the land. And you know, farming is very hard work. It's very long hours. It can be very lonely. And so it seems to me that we're looking for a way where everything is working better and more coherently. And is that very much where you see wild farms?
[00:32:09] Speaker A: It's absolutely that. I think it would be a real.
And you're seeing this starting to happen already in all of these sort of protests that are going on. But it'll be a really great shame if by imposing environmental wishes as a society on a really extractive farming system that's completely unfair. On the farmer. If that therefore means that these in quotes, environmental ideas get filed under hassle, annoying bourgeois nonsense. Whereas actually what we can create here by harnessing nature's sort of default setting of abundance and health is a biology based farming system where the farmer's back in control, where it's a fascinating way to grow crops, where the farm comes alive again with birds and insects, and where we can de risk and build resilience because we can talk about yields and feeding the world and all the rest of it. If we don't have soil that's capable of storing moisture and delivering plant nutrition in increasingly wild climactic swings, then we're not going to be feeding anyone. And so I think there's a real sweet spot there where, as you say, everyone wins from this. And I just hope that this really positive message is the one that triumphs over all of the sort of clamoring and shouting and this tendency we've got at the moment to start sawing off the branch that we're sitting on.
[00:33:44] Speaker C: So you sort of answered it, but I'm going to ask the question anyhow. Your music is about taking people out of their heads and into their bodies and grounding them. And it seems you're doing exactly the same with Wild Farmed. I see you as a visionary and somebody who, with both the music and now with this movement, you're taking us forward and I think that's amazing. So what is your hope for the future?
[00:34:11] Speaker A: My hope for the future is.
Well, I mean, I can only, you know, everyone sees life through their own lens. So the last sort of three years of full tilt Wild Farmed action has been, to be totally honest, absolutely exhausting and incredibly difficult. Every day there's something that needs, you know, or many things actually, that needs sorting out and seemingly intractable problems one after the other.
But the overwhelming thing to come out of it is just what huge potential. I think what we've managed to get together with WildFarm is just this amazing team of people, most of whom in the office at least have come from very, very different worlds and are bringing all kinds of different perspectives to crack this most sort of essential of problems. I think from that comes a collective energy which is really unique and that goes all the way across the, the supply chain into the most unlikely corners of the biggest companies. You know, there's a. There's a willingness there to make things better, but there's an awful lot of understanding that still needs to be developed and ideas need to be shared and so on. So I'D like to think that the conversations that we and others are having, the example that we're giving in different places, unlocks the door to all kinds of other groups of people doing the same thing. Because these principles, it doesn't matter whether it's wheat or carrots or raisins, you know, it's the same thing. So hopefully this can be exponential and once we get this working in one area, it can roll out from there.
[00:35:46] Speaker C: Andy Kato, thank you very much.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: It's a pleasure. Thank you.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please leave us a review wherever you're listening and recommend this series to anyone who you think might enjoy it too.
Next up, I'll be talking to the comedian Ruby Wax about mental health. She's got a Masters in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University, an OBE for her work campaigning for mental health awareness, and runs a charity, Frazzled Cafe, enabling people to open up about feeling frazzled. But she still doesn't believe she's a mental health campaigner. My money says she is, but I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
[00:36:35] Speaker C: What does humanity do when they get fearful? They declare war.
And we're at war with ourselves. Here we're burning out from thoughts.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: This episode was produced by Pete Norton and brought to you by the Resurgence Trust, a movement, a magazine and a manifesto for hope.
To find out more about their work, click the link in the show notes of this episode. I'm Annabelle Heseltine and thank you for listening to Hope Springs.
