Future Outlook and Scaling Impact

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It's everything your business needs in one place, saving you time, headaches, and serious money Paying for missing pieces Go to odoo. com. That's OdWo. com to learn more Hello, it's Ollieoug Morere here Wlcome to Radical. podcast where we have conversations about the global trends changing our world, and radical ideas for the future In my day job, I'm the executive digital editor of the new statemment this week I'll be standing in for a mole while he's up in Scotland, filming something called The Traitors oday I'm joined Andy Kat Farm, innovator and one half of Grove Armada for a conversation about rebuilding our food systems quite literally from the ground up. There's a radical change happening in the world of farming and Andy is on the front line He's also had a bit of a radical change in his own life as well, and he walked away from the music industry and sold the rights to his back catalogue take on one of the toughest challenges of our time to try and change the way we grow things and champion regenerative farming While traditional modern farming focuses on maximizing output and scale Regenerative farming centers on restoring ecosystems and building long term resilience to the problems of the twenty first century The changing climate and conflicts around the world impacting the flow of the fertilizers and chemicals needed, For mainstream farming method In twenty nineteen, Andy founded Wild Farmed. company which wants to help farmers transition to regenerative systems while staying profitable quuick reminder that if you subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds, you won't miss future episodes, including your radical questions which is our Q and A episode that comes out on a Monday Let'sickgin, shall we Andy, hello, how are you I'm very well, thank you. Good to be here Very glad to have you here We're going to talk about problem that we face in our food system, we're going to talk about solutions, challenges, all of that. I wondered if before we start, you could maybe just set out the scale of What's at stake here? You know, what are we trying to fix? I think We've seen The canaryies in the coal mine of the food system. I grew up in Barnsley when the coal mines were just about still open and so Caras in the coal minine start going over, you pay attention, you know? And so that's manifested itself in different ways. People will probably remember when the shelves were empty of certain products a few years ago We can see it in the cocoa price, which has gone up massively over the past few years. sameame thing with coffee And essentially, these are all symptoms of wild weather hitting degraded ecosystems and biodegraded ecosystems we can get into a bit about what that means at its most basic level when soil is healthy It will infiltrate rain and store it. And when it's not, it tends to run off and create flooding downstream and leave you with nothing when the rain stops. And at the sort of most basic level, that's what we're starting to see now. So It's absolutely imperative if we're going to have a resilient food system in a changing climate that we restore the health of our soils. But in terms of the the food system just zooming out to realize that there has been this kind of miraculous process, particularly since World War I where there was a genuine fear of starvation And these rather miraculous solutions were found to averting that But that was called the Green Revolution, a kind of chemical, high input based farming system But it was a system that was measured uniquely on calorific output And any other measure, whether that's actually the quality of the output or nature or resilience or the soil water retention that we were just talking about, none of that's been on the spreadsheet. What's your big idea? What's the elevator pitch for fixing it The elevator pitch, I would say is using technology in the service of biology rather than to fight it What does that mean In practical terms, what that would mean is that when we're farming at the moment, there is the sort of premise of subjugation and control And there's this a long philosophical line in human history, I think, about it sort of nature versus food. We need to get this nature out of the way so we can we can get what we need out of the system And we now have an opportunity to use technology to harness those biological systems rather than fight against them. So to give you a concrete example, We have a technology now called SAP analysis Sap being the sap in the plant And what that allows you to do is to do a real time readout of the microronutrients that are present or absent in a plant And when you get that response back, you can say, okay, well it's a bit short on manganese, it's a bit short on zinc or cobalt or whatever the thing might be. And so you can then correct that using sprays foliar sprays to put on these mut micronutrients in tiny tiny doses But what that means that you're doing is stewarding those plants to health proactively rather than reactively responding to disease with pesticides. sameame with us, in a human context, it will be having a really micro nutritionally balanced diet rather than getting sick and taking antibiotics. And just to be really clear about the difference here We've spoken a bit already about fertilizer heavy inputs, nitrogen fertilizers going onto the ground That often coincides with an annual sort of Digging up, turning over of the ground, right? We're talking really about changing the way that farming happens on a day by day year by year basis with this kind of technology Yeah So there are two you know, if you start the other way around, like what does if you look at what happens to soil in nature It's covered with plants all the time and it's not disturbed And when that's the case as any walk through a forest will demonstrate or even just an uncultivated meadow Nature's default setting is incredible abundance and resilience There's are great stories of when the Europeans arrived in what we now call California And they went into this landscape that was there were so many fishes in the river. they couldn't get the horses across the river. You know, the grasses were so high they couldn't see where they were going. There were whole valleys of incredibly productive fruit trees and nut trees And it was described by these Europeans as a wilderness, but it wasn't a wilderness at all. It had been tendered for tens of thousands of years by the indigenous population, but so It's I guess it's a sort of technological version of that principle harnessing this nature's tendency towards abundance. Tell me more regenerative practices. What are you doing that's different to other farms? The next farm over in Gascony, know tellell me the difference. Yeah. So we talked a little bit about introducing livestock on the land and if they graze properly, that can be a really significant boost to soil biology and get it bring life back to the land. When it comes to growing crops, if you look at any natural system soil is covered all the time with the diversity of plants. So at its most basic, regenerative farming needs to try and copy that So what that would mean is that, for example, after harvest in August time If you weren't then going to plant a crop till the following spring rather than plowing the soil and leaving it. Bear which would be a traditional practice for very practical reasons because what happens with the frosts and the rains is that it breaks it down into quite a fine powder. So when it comes to sowing the following spring, it's nice and easy, you know. But instead of doing that, as soon as the harvester crop has gone, plant was called a cover crop which literally covers And so you're constantly harvesting sunshine and feeding this soil microbiome And it means that you try and use as many different varieties of plants that you want. so that might be rather than just growing wheat, growing wheat with a bean plant or rather than just growing one variety of wheat grow a blend of different varieties. introduce flowering plants. I mean, any opportunity for look for diversity I want her talk about that in more detail as Our conversation progresses, but if I may Can I just rewind a little bit in your personal story because We're sat here talking about agriculture, talking about the food we eat, You did do something else before that, didn't you? I mean peopleeople who don't know Andy is you know, one half of Groove Armader incredibly successful to the world Just tell me about transition from going to basically being a rock star to being a farmer. it's quite dramatic Tell me about that change Well, it happened at random really. I was coming back from a gig in Eastern Europe I picked up an article, I picked up the only English magazine I could find in which was an article about the environmental consequences of food production and some of the things that we've been touching on I'd never really thought about that much. It was very sobering, it was brilliantly written and it had a line in it which said if you don't like the system, don't depend on it And there was something in that which sort of touched on my background in house music was in the kind of free party era Um, my cousin set up the DIY sound system cluesing the name. like do it yourself, you know And so there was there was something that really got under my skin there and persuaded me to try and start growing vegetables. We were living in France at the time We had a decent sized garden And so I went for it And from the moment that I saw seeds become plants and plants become food on the table Is this Miraculous process. The whole idea that sword is the only thing that can turn death into life later when I'll get to when I had a farm in France, when used to have these school kids would come aroundound gather aroundound a fallen tree talk about the fact that you could put every single computer in the world around that tree and it couldn't turn it into grass or daffodils or apples or wheat And so it's just such a remarkable process that should be my opinion, the first and last thing that we're taught at school Anyway, I went down a spectacular sized rabbit hole It culminated in taking a completely financially mad decision to sell my publishing rights to the songs I hadd written, which is a musician's pension to finance this farm and try and do it on a bigger scale. And when I did that, it went horribly, horribly wrong. There's so much in that answer I want to talk more about. Can we just dial in for a second on that we said there about the tree Be explicit, explain to people who listening now might not understand that tree falls, what happens? What is that process and how might that? soil, that moment of death come into something that is Regenerative alive again. Yeah, I mean, it's again, something that I'd never, never considered. and I guess most of us don't in our urban existence. when the tree falls, and' not a I'm not a biologist, so I'm not going to tell you all the different species at work But anyone has seen this, whether it's a tree or it's a leaf or it's your grass cuttings, you know There's an extraordinary army of creatures that go to work one after the other in this absolutely amazing and rather beautiful succession. that turn any what we would call wastes, but of course there are no wastes in nature. and if nature was as wasteful as we were, we wouldn't be here. So everything gets recycled into the elements that are the basis of of new life and just standing back to consider that and that we have this very, very thin layer of top soil in which this happens and the fact that without that, there is nothing is quite a changing perspective. To my mind, there are Many musicians, I might even say most musicians, the vast majority of musicians who spend their lives in pursuit dreaming of achieving creative satisfaction and commercial success, being able to pay you know, earn a living from the creation of their music. and I just really want to sort of zero in on that for listeners that You'd achieved that right. It it's entirely possible. I don't know, know the specifics, but off those royalties, like you said, it's a pension you could probably put your feet up and you might not never have to play a gig again. And instead you said, no, no, I'm actually going to sell the right and I'm going to buy a farm. I'm going from nightcubs fares. You know what like that is Can you just can explain that process for because I think it's incredibly brave and radical thing for you to do on a personal level Yeah, I mean, it's I suppose you know, there are lots of overlapping F factors in that. One was pure fascination. I did just love it and u and u Part of it, I think was and I noticice this when people come and come to visit and you know, helped a little bit in the veg batch or helped on the farm despite all the vile urban cocoon This there is a fundamental pull of the land, which is just still in us I think I really started to observe and really admire the kind of quiet independence of our farming neighbours although that independence will become a bit more nuanced as I understood a little bit more about how the chemical farming system worked. Like for example, one time I was came back from a gig in a beether where we' DJing for a high roller on his yacht And it was just interesting the conversation how it was just the same aspirational loop as the person who wants a new pair of trainers and can't afford them. you know, this year's yacht needs to be bigger next year. I've got one jet. I need to, you know, the same thing compared to Michelle My neighb at the other side of my first vegetable patch who one day said he didn't have a passport and there was more to see in the ten miles around his house than he had time to see in his lifetime. theseese quite profoundly different perspectives that really gave me pause for thought. And then as I got deeper into it There was just this realization that If we change the relationship with how we grow our food I'm we to use the word silver bullet, but I'm going to use the word silver bullet. It's such a silver bullet for the existential or some of the existential crises with which we're faced And when you've realized that and you've realized that it's possible and that we can do it and the only Barrier is choosing to do it O in my case what we set about was trying to prove that it was possible to do it at scale. can't really walk away from that. Do you think Michelle was happier than the high rooller I mean, it's manual labor, right? It's like's long, hard days, right? It's not it's not an easy thing Yeah, and I think it's very easy to romanticize it. And you know anyone who has been anywhere near a barley harvest or who's set off down a row of vegetables doing a particular task where the end just seems infinitely far that it's inconceivable that your back will make it Anyone has done that stuff when you look at those seppier photos on the pub wall of old farming scenes They know that this is not about a return to a romantic past. However, I do't there' a flip side to the hard labor of it which it undoubtedly is, and that is that we live in a society where we think that if you avoid labor you've won No if you can do something from a sofa I'll not have to get off the sofa That success my experience was that So long as it's part of a plan which you think is important, I'm not saying you know if you're a slave building pyramids, it's probably a very different story. But if it's part of a plan that you think is important, It feels coherent than hard physical labor is an amazing thing. like the sheer pleasure of like sitting down and having a piece of bread when you've really gone for it for five or six hours Um, you know, it's it's it's a magical feeling So tell me then, Andy, about those mistakes, about what went wrong Give me a sense of your own struggles trying to make it work. when I um put all the family silver into this farm in France I got a very humbling lesson in how hard it is to be a farmer, the absolutely vast arrow of skills It requires how hard it is to grow food on deegraded soils was trying to restore them and make some money It it was very humbling and you know now makes for some good stories, but and I was lucky because I could still go b the weekend and prop myself up playing records. So I had that financial buffer. It was tiring because I was going to bed at five AM at the weekends and getting up at five AM in the week Literally from sort of like space, Iith back back to your farm. Yeah, mean the most bizarre juxtapositions. My life has been one of the most surreal juxtapositions from you know, going from the space terrorist to a kind of Gascon farming equipment fair to you know, as we'll touch on later maybe, but you know, DJing at the Greg's annual conference. I mean my life is weird But it's quite fun don't But, you know, when it all u looked like it had failed and I was considering having to sell up for three years and I was completely invaded by weeds what we call weeds. I mean, it's the same, you know, when you see All the docks and thistles and bindweed taking over old car parks They're doing that because these are pioneer plants that are brilliant at taking really low fertility situations and bringing them back to life. So if you walk away from a car park, come back thirty years later and it'll be a forest And this is an amazing succession that happens to do that But of course, in low fertility feels the same logic applies, so they're brilliantly suited to growing Dock leef thistles, spineweed And and I battled and battled and battled and failed. and they were some really Lonely dark days there. You're making big decisions. you get one chance a year. choose the path that you're going down. And that really did leave a scar and determined how much later when we set up wild farmms how we would do that and how a farmmer community would be first and foremost. When you say dark talkalks to me about that, which is just talking about financially and emotionally, what does that mean Yeah, I mean, all of those things. I was I was completely exhausted. I was I was u standing in the middle of you know, the kind of writ large evidence of my hubris. and the sort of superpower of naivety had run its course I wasn't seeing the kids I was an overwhelming voice on loop in my head of like, whyy on earth are you putting yourself through this, what youre trying to prove into whom And u and a sense of just having taken the year that we bought the farm There was this freak record harvest after which everything had kind of has been on a very steep downslope ever since for farms across Europe in fact And so even like bailing out It was like, can I even sell this now? you know? So it was just yeah, even thinking about it now brings me quite close to tears Is there a little bit of the teenage boy in his bedroom practicing his chord progressions. wondering if he'll ever if I ever get to play them for someone and then you churning away in that field, tellell me if that's a reach, but I feel like there's a connection between those two things I think there is a connection in that, you know, I've been lucky in that I've never worked for anyone and You know, music, it was go out there find a way to make some stuff happen and come back when you've made it happen. And I've always done that and it's not been easy, but I've always managed to pull it off and this time it seemed I had managed to pull it off. So tell me about pulling it off then I mean what does it mean? Let's drill into it. What are you doing that's different? What is this regenerative farming? How does it work? Well, from the Nadir just described when I was on the point of giving up, that the reason why I didn't was this really freakish encounter with a book. I'm from What would it be a hundred years ago now, nearly by a guy called Albert Howard, who was an English guy sent to India And he was sent there ostensibly to sort of tell the local population how proper farming happens, you know, already fertilizer heavy and all of that. and actually had this incredible curiosity. and I should mention because she never gets mentioned, but it was very much him and his wife who did this. It was a joint project She was a botanist in her wr and right And they wrote this book called an Agricultural Testament, which essentially Um the disted message of it will be that nature works through a process of diversity plants and of animals and the closer that we can mimic those systems, the more resilient and abundant and healthy our farming systems will be. And from him he had a lot of disciples and I found a lot of very interesting people. It's a whole new rabbit hole for me. and I I set off down a new path, which I suppose breaks down into two, if anyone's seen like Kiss the Ground or various regenerative farming documentaries, a lot of them are focused around. producing land back down to a mixture of pasture plants and put animals on it and graze it well and the thing will come back to life. And so I did a bit of that, which for a twenty year vegetarian was a challenge in its own right. Taking my first c at Aatoir was a moment of deep introspection But on the other hand, it's then how do you grow? in a way which is making things better rather than making them wor T takeake me, take me to the Abertoir W you that. I mean, take me inside your head. I know I've thought about this a lot myself about where my meat comes from. I think, you know Factory farming has many, many critics, there are other people who'd respond and say How do you feed a population this size, but for you to be a vegetarian in that moment, a cow that you've raised looved. and Abatos are not Nice places They're definitely. Tell me about it Yeah, well, I became convinced from the Albert Howard book that that integrating livestock was going to be a really critical part of bringing soils back to life. You know, when the before the sort of great plains of of the West of America were plowed up. There was this deep, deep black soil there. and the reason it was there was because of eons of herds of bison going across these grasslands and the symbiotic relationship between grass and herbivores grass eaters You know, if those grasses didn't want to get grazed, they would have evolved spikes It was a completely symbiotic relationship and leads to the extraordinary build upp of fertility over time And so I think it's important to say that We have a bizarre situation, which is one of the unforeseen consequences of the post World War I farming system. and the mountains of cheap grains that accumulated as a result of its Ostensibly a success which has created a whole livestock industry and feed lot beef and you know all the issues in the river Y and All of this grain, you know half of our grain harvest going into animals and That remains to me something which needs to be addressed And so I think when we talk about the phrases it's not the cow, it's the cow This is a very specific use of livestock as part of a grazing program properly managed. to bring fertility back. I was persuaded of that. I became even more persuaded of that when I saw it in action And but then a herd that's living a natural life with a bull that comes and goes gets bigger, you know, which I wanted it to because I needed a job to be done on the land And and the point came on I to take c to an Avatoir And you know where I was living in rural France, it's quite sort of fifties Britain, it's quite old school farming, all the barns are still used for the original purpose. It's a lot smaller And so I brought a horsebx and drove the cow to an aberattoir and I expected to hand it over to people in white coats who knew what they were doing. And I'd left it as late as possible. We have to take it the night before. I' left it as late as possible to try to reduce stress And there was one person left there lady and she just said, I'll take it round the back and drop it off. and I went round the back and there was all these these metal fences, modular metal fences and there' some lambs and there' some pigs there was a massive white cow, the local breed blondakiten And and I had my little Red Sussex And so I shuffled him around and I wanted him to go first in some sort of whatever that word is when you trans human emotions onto animals, but I jiggled it around and got into front of the queue and there was a couple of hours left before nightfall and I stood there and and just waited next to it and that was a moment of very deep introspection about whether I actually believed that this was essential because the place stank of death And it was awful U, but The fact was that if we zoom out into our relationship towards the natural world in the wider sense When you compared the amount of life on the farm when I was combining these pastures and livestock and cereals compared to neighbouring farms which were cereals only organic or not. You know, I would send kids down on the farm visors that came much later when the phoenix had risen from the ashes and sail anyone who can find a worm over the hedge there ed run on of the Pan of Chocola. and I knew they wouldn't find one. And even when you broaden it out to find anything that moves They wouldn't find one And when you come back into these pastures that were buzzing with life and all the birds and all the ecosystem cascade that flows from that It was a very difficult thing, but I was stopuck by that decision And is the challenge? not? does it not just come back to you As I'm sure you've thought about as a vegetarian that, you know part of the solution could be we need to radically reduce the level of meat consumption that happens in our society I think the answer to almost every problem with face is equilibrium im balance and one of the problems about what we're trying to build U with wild fararm now is standing up for nuance in a world of slogans. It's not easy I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Andy Kato If you are, then you can subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds, so you don't miss future episodes Also, if you do subscribe Make sure you've got push notifications turned on, and that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode so you'll never miss out to Andy What's the response being from the farming community. you're trying to get these ideas out there. What the people who run farms day today? What do they think of what you're espousing Well, I mean, I don't think a generalization be would be valid there. but no, no, no nuance on this, please But you know, we're working with an awful lot of farmers and an awful lot of farmers all around the world are working with these kind of ideas And I think that The flip side of it is that I spend quite a lot of time in conferences now doing talks and stuff all too often hear comments along the lines of, well hang on Regen farming means that farmers will use fewer inputs and the quality of their soils will increase Both of these things cavat if it's properly applied Aue So then given that the weather's going bananas and farmers are in such financial difficulties, well, they're just going to do this anyway and They're not just going to do this anyway because they're under just such enormous financial pressure. And when you're under enormous financial pressure, generally speaking, whatever you're doing, you stick to what you know and you hope for the best And given that farmers have been in the tightest of financial squeezes for so long where they price takers for their chemical inputs and their price takers for the commodities Both of those prices can shift wildly over the course of a growing season and then you throw in the weather. farmers are better than the most and hoping for the best And so I think that the the opportunity that we've got from these practices to make farming aspirational again, to give farmers that agency back. to make it profitable because most farms in the UK are just not making money. So we've got a very high average age of farmers. We need to make it aspirational again that needs to be a coordinated program of empowerment and training and community and a sense of collective purpose. I think that's probably where the challenge and pushback comes, right? Because yes. There are these inputs, but the counter is that the way that we currently farm The study in twenty fifteen puts it about three and a half billion people are fed in this way. a great percentage of global births are a product of this fertilized based agricultural system that we have And so a system like this that is lower input. Lower yield How how do you square that equation? How does the output of the quantity that we need to feed the population that we have how do you square that circle? Can you square that circle? Yeah, you can And I think it's important to look that question in the eye because there's various bits of it. First of all is his yield, I think as've seen is yield over time So how much can we actually reliably produce for an infinite period And so it might be that by throwing the kind of kitchen sink at a system, you can get a little bit more for another decade, another twenty years or whatever but without U restoring the resilience of the ecosystem then that yield over time is going to decline. So we've got to take a longer term perspective than next year on how we define yield. and base it on How can we reliably produce on this spot of land forever And so over that period of time, that initial period where those yields might be lower who's fusing that bill? Is it the farmers themselves? is it? Well, the financeces will come back to the finance, but in terms of the can we feed the world thing, you know, so Um What we're also seeing already is that the under of Climatic Jureress these systems can often out yield conventional system. So Cluusarm for example, Last year, another year of wild weather. it was a dry spring. I think it was one hundred and thirty two years or something like that And u And he was using technology sort of drones and autonomous tractors on M of the farm Un the wild fararm field, we're going to year three of trying to build up this soil resilience, essentially just get more holes in the soil so we can store more rain which is what happened. And so on those fields, the yield was far, far higher than it was elsewhere. So already the kind of U just on a pure output level. It's not as simple to say there'll be a dip, you know, because it depends what the weather's doing. It depends how quickly you can get this Sow resilience bank. But also, even before we get into food waste, we touched on it before we've got half of all our cereal crops you know, fed to animals, We're making biofuels out of it all kinds of bits and pieces around the edges where if you need to make a fifteen percent change of grain use, then it's not you know you don't have to make many radical shifts for that to be realistic. Just to take Clarkson's fun, the key lesson I learned watching that program was at the end of each series when he sort of tots up the costs and he tos up what he's made and Lo and behold every year he he appears. to make a loss We've been talking about what value is, what's rewarding, how hard some of these farmers work. And are we seriously saying to them? I know you're already Breaking your back to ek out a living But now over the next two to three years, I actually need you to make even less by adopting these methods. I mean Let's talk about the finance, can you answer that challenge for me Well no. I'm not saying that. and an important really important part of this is that what absolutely can't work is saying, okay The food system did what we wanted to do post World War two. We've now realised that there's these unforeseen consequences. As a society, we now need the food system to do something different, build resilience, restore nature, give us an abundant supply of clean water and all the rest of it And so we're going to put that burden on farmers. That is just not going to work. It cannot work. It's completely unfair. Farmers have no margin. They've got nothing left to give And and I think we need to be really careful about making sure that farmers have a choice for a different option before making the current option even even harder. But in terms of finance The basis of a truly regenerative system is remaking the economics to reflect reality So if a farmer's soils is holding more water, for example then obviously the far will benefit from that over time in terms of their drrought resilience, but it's also a massive benefit to insurance companies who were trying to mitigate flood risk It's also of massive benefit to Water companies who need to improve their catchment without building really expensive reservoirs. that're going to take fifteen years to build you know, or similarly, if the farmer is because we're not talking about using no inputs So if we're using those more effectively, then we avoid that nitrate pollution in the water, which has huge value for the water companies. So as a concrete example of that wild farmed growers who in the right catchments are being paid by seeven of the UK water companies now per hexa fee because it's cheaper for them to avoid water pollution at source than get out afterwards And then we can do the same for nature on food producing land because this long legacy where you can't get paid for nature if you're producing food or and if you're not producing food. And so we build an economic model where between the banks, the insurers, the utility companies, society at large, all of whom benefit from growing food in this way, or contribute. And so that's an economic model that's actually reflecting reality rather than just pushing farmers to the wall on the one hand and pushing our ecosystems to the wall on the other. Your approach to farming Talks me how it's into play with food security? Do it Make the food security of the UK stronger, weaker, tellell me I think there's two bits. There's the supply chain and there's how it's grown And in terms of how it's grown then it's interesting, isn't it that Do Ukraine we talk about energy security or energy sovereignty rather And after The NATO shenanigans that are going on we talking about defence sovereignty and We're not very loudly talking about food tray yet, but I think it's next And so part of that is how it's grown. So if we are supporting farmers to Keep the sow covered with plants, harvest sunshine, fill the sow with holes again restore nature and the resilience of ecosystems we depend on all those things then that's going to make a material difference to the capacity for our food production to weather the climate extremes that are clearly coming at us as last F years have shown It also means that inputs are used more efficiently. So I mean, everyone's got an interest in that from from the farmer because of the costs. But again, if supplies are straightened, you want to use them more efficiently. So from a food security point of view from how it's grown There's no question about that then on the supply chain One of the consequences of how we've approached food after World War I, I'm speaking particularly from a grains perspective, but I think it's pretty generalized. is that it's commoditized and it's global and it's anonymous and that creates various issues One of which is it deprives consumers of all agency because you walk into a supermarket and you have no way of knowing how to grow your food And so in terms of building this collaboration for change, that makes it very difficult. The second thing is it makes it very difficult for this sharing of you around the food system from all the people who have a vested interest in farmers restoring ecosystems whilst growing food, people we talked about shorers and banks and so on. If you can't follow anything, that's very hard to actually make real. So one of the things that we've had to do is build a new kind of supply chain. We didn't set out to do that, but we just had to We had to do that to make that that value flow. So I think that when you combine how it's grown the resilience able to deal with wildly changing rainfall patterns ability to use inputs more efficiently And the traceability that we can get from these new kind of supply chains and the shared economic risk We can have a massive impact on food security for sure. I feel like going from growring your own vegetables and wanting to be able to say I know what's in that and I'm feeding my family with it has now extrapolated out to this point where The theoretical framework around what you're doing is verging on quite a substantial critique actually of the kind of socio economic setettlement that we live in as a society, the notions of value about how things are commodified finance, these are really macro themes that possibly boil down to a critique of capitalism itself I think it's a question of you know, we confate value we conflect price and importance quite often, don't we? And And I think redefining what we value is without question. a part of this But I don't think that we we can adjust economic incentives to work within existing systems. I mean that's the wild farmers predicated on that actually, I guess I move from if you don't like the system, don't depend on it if you don't like the system, change it And what we've found is that within the existing food system, as you would expect There is unbelievable expertise And you might argue that some of it's been solving the wrong problems, but there is unbelievable expertise. and so we're pretty committed to working within that and trying to build this collaboration between my expertise to operate around different economic incentives. Changing the economic concentives is hard But it's doable and it comes down to being able to measure it which is a big technological piece in this jigsaw as well. So how do you measure nature? What do you mean by that? you know how do you measure water quality How do you measure the ability to soils to infiltrate rainfall in a way that's affordable and scalable and easy. Well that's something that we've been working very hard on And then you can measure it And then you can prove the value. So that's the conversation that we've had with the water companies and that's the ones that were having at the moment around nature with other people and we can do this. Can you tell me more about how you think about value? I mean personally, what do you value in your life? or is it what does it mean to you I mean, certainly The last seventeen years moving into this world well, it's changed all kinds of notions. The first one that came into my head actually was notions of time. I'll come back to value. So's sitt in a recording studio and you think, okay I'm going to try out a new bass sound or whatever. and you just scroll through thousand bass sounds in ten minutes until you find one that you like or obviously the Google search you know, all the things are're familiar with and It really knocked me for six, even though it's blindingly obvious that when you go into production Every experiment takes a year And then you think, okay, well every experiment takes a year. And so now if I'm lucky, I've got twenty more goes as a sort of physically capable adult That really brings things into focus and and just notions of time and which of course is linked to therefore importance There's a there's a brilliant thing from Aldo Leopold who was I' going to say nature writer actually wrote very little, but what he wrote was amazing and he talks about this farm that he lived on for a similar amount of time that I've been farming and he thought of the farm as his own and he loved it and he was chopping down a tree to make some firewood And he describes how the saw' going through the tree and a couple of pulls on the saw and it's the entire time he's lived at the farm And it goes all the way back through to sort of pioneers of the American West and all the various adventures in between And he talks about how there are chips of wood foolding out from the soil on onto the forest floor And he says that the The woodsman calls it Swdust and the historian calls it archives But there's lots of examples of this sort of sense of perspective And I think from the sensive perspective the sense comes the sense of Value. And for all of the fact that it's just been so damned hard and tiring trying to just move this ship around and all of the people involved is saying Wild fararm have much, much easier lives than they do now There's something about the opportunity in this and the response of all the people who have come into this, whether it's people who've been operating massive commercial mills for years and have actually never visited fields where the grains have come from and are now really engaged in playing their part in this. or whether it's people sending messages from you know, picking up a loaf in the supermarket and realizing it goes all the way back to the farmers or The amazing messages from a lot of young people who get to the office all the time in search of hope and purpose and a sense of agency and getting that agency back. I mean, it sounds a little bit trry to say that that really is is just gold dust, but it is, you know, and this sort of being in the middle of this collective effort. has become the thing that's most special to me aggency, you mention it earlier, you mentioned it again and how it connects to to value. so. How does agency into play with regenerative farming? Well, I think there's u fromom a farming perspective, the agency comes from There I guess this is a parallel that goes across a lot of society, isn't it? That's one of the consequences of a chemical based system been handing over A degree of control as a farmer to specialists So I would with my neighbor Michellele in France, you know, there's nothing he couldn't fix. They never went to the shops. They were completely self sufficient. They were farming this huge aa of mazize every year with every chemical weapon in the farm toolkit. And it was completely understandable because You know, soils, European soils have been tired for a very long time. You know, we talked about the Romans losing so much soil that their seaports for miles in land So when the chemical revolution arrived It's important to understand that it arrived on soils that were really, really tired and damned hard work to get anything out of And so for these people who on the front line of that All of a sudden you have a transformational increase in growth and no need to go hand weeding anymore Um, you know, I mean, what a Miraculous thing it must have been. abbsolutely miraculous And so Michelle, my neighbor, you, sort of lived through all of that, but then there was a strange contrast where he would He's the master of Everything from you know the intricaces of a tractor engine to where the mushrooms grow in his local woods and it knows every inch of everything But on the other hand, then you'd see the agronomist. So that's the person who it's quite a strange setup where agronomists generally provide you the advice and then send you the chemicals that the advice requires And so they would come around generally quite young Generally quite a smart car and sort of sign the chit of paper and sel we' just do it And so there's this But On the one hand he had agency because he was looking after all his machines and he was going out plowing and doing all the rest of it. But on the other hand, a lot of the stewardship had been sort of had handed over And so I think under these systems where we're using technology in the service of biology, it's much more a observation based system again, there's a greater independence about that making your own decisions and recognizing the fact that we're looking at local solutions. So what's happening in this field, what's happening in this crop? What does that need? you know, and that's going to be different to what that one needs over there and getting out of these kind of more prescriptive down approaches So that's the farming perspective, I think, and it's just very, very exciting being in the middle of that stewardship and you can see it in terms of you know, the number of younger generations who want to take over from farmers who are doing it like this who didn't want to do it when they were before because they were forced into a corner basically being operatives in a kind of factory that they didn't want to be part of I'm assuming that Is it within that then that you find hope and inspiration because The picture can be quite bleak. In fact, I started the interview by saying to you, what's at risk here? you know what's at stake? because If we're talking about the survival of the species, the viable viability of the planet because of the climate that's on it population growth by twenty fifty, you're looking at probably about ten billion people, necessarily increased to food production, maybe sixty, seventy percent in order to facilitate that. It could be a quite bleak picture, but over the course of this conversation, Andy, I'm not getting the sense that you necessarily think about it in those terms the framing that you have I actually think is Q quite a positive one Absolutely it's a positive one. I think if the you know, if the if the last a few years have shown me anything is that we can have Fields full of abundant crops despite wild changes in in rainfall patterns We could have, you know, imagine this, we could have annual reports of species recovery rather than species decline we reward nature in food producing landscapes We could have farming as the cool and aspirational job that it absolutely needs to be. And all of those outcomes don't need any inventions, don' need any technologies, we just need to choose to do it. Sorry, say that last sentence again So we don't need any new technologies, no new inventions, we just need to choose to do it The technology exists It's all there. The knowledge exists Yeah, it's all there. Why is it not happening because The job that needs to be done, I think is twofold and it's completing this turnaround of economic. incentives and we're working very, very hard on that. So that, you know, the water payments we talked about werere close to doing the same thing for valuing nature in and food producing landscapes just to be explicit about that. You can get paid for nature if you stop producing food at the moment So you can get paid for Biodiversity in that game credits that house builders have to purchase to offset the biodiversity loss on the building site You can only be paid for those on non productive land But we've been measuring for years that you can double inseet biomass, you can quadruple bee populations on food producing fields bonkers. farmers go and get payid for that. But I think we're close to cracking that. So some of the work is in changing these economic incentives. Some of the work is, you know, we've built a farming community where there's amazing peer to peer learning both online and in person. there's farm visits, there's this you know collective sense of purpose. But that's just farmers that we work for. we need that to expand across all farming networks so that farmers really feel empowered to have a new way forward. You know, these these are we're reversing quite a lot of cultural long standing habits, a moment of profound economic peril for farmers. so that needs to be managed properly When you're talking about economic incentives. I think you're just of making reference to subsidies and the way that Defer has approached some of these issues And whilst there might not be specific subsidies for regenerative farming that actually what the view of the government department would be is that in isolation, various component parts of the way that people farm, we do provide subsidies for those specific things. How do you answer that question I mean, let let's put it in this context, you know, from the when cheap grain started coming in from around the empire Farming has really only stood in its two feet during two World Wars And the rest of its time there's been been horrendous agricultural depressions and with unspeakable misery as a result Or there have been various forms of subsidies, know and so that goes back to the cor laws. or in the nineteen thirties there was fixed wheat prices or there was agricultural Act in nineteen forty seven, which guaranteed prices And then that became the common agricultural policy And then that became the post Brexit Ems scheme. so for a very, very long time The economics of food production have just not reflected the reality And so what we're talking about now when we're actually rewarding the building of resilience, restoring of nature water quality water availability. is finally building an economic system that reflects the reality. So we have to actually build it around economic incentives, I think. But the SFI of the Sustainable Farm Initry, which is the latest in this very, very long line. of a farming support post Brexit had this phrase public money for public goods. and so it's much more focused on you know environmental measures and all of that. But nevertheless, there's lots of good things about it within it There was still this underlying assumption a couple of exceptions, but an underlying assumption of it's e the nature versus food. So if you're going to do flowers pay you for how much you would have earned theory because most people don't. struggle to make money from arable crops. It will pay you how much you would have earned if you planted barley there or whatever. It's called income foregone So replacing one with the other And I was spent many, many hours with DafA officials trying to reward fields where the two things are happening. in the same place at the same time, you know, but I think we just need to move beyond the word subsidy. and recognize that actually investing in the resilience of soils, investing in the restoration of nature 's just an amazing financial opportunity. And if we take it from that macro level down to the microbe to the sharp end, someone in the supermarket who's trying to buy loaf of bread for the week and buys the one that they do because it costs them about a quid Is there a risk that this? ends up like organic that it becomes Yes, something that perhaps Most people might want to by themselves, but at the end of the week onnce the canncl tax and the electricity' gone out If you're faced with the life of commercial bread versus the artisanal different version of value How does that person rationalize that choice? Well, there's a couple of things in there. I mean, One is it goes back to what you're saying about agency So at the moment, as we mentioned, and when you go into the supermarket customer by and large has no way of making the choice that you've said Because the commoditized nature of grain supply means that you'll have no way of knowing who grew the grain in your loaf of bread and how it was grown and what that means. There are a couple a couple ofceptions to that, but not many And so in terms of giving people agency back That's where this supply chain comes in where you can actually say, well, this is this is where this is coming from. And if you byy buying this, you're participating in this thing And but that also unlocks this value thing. So If you imagine a scenario where and which werere not far off, by the way, where insurers are contributing to a to a farm because they're saving money on flooding And the nature restoration that the country needs to hit is twenty thirty nature targets. That can only happen if we involve farmers and that's legally binding. So that rather than going to non productive land is now flowing onto productive line. because we've got AI systems to measure it, which we have And water companies are paying the farmer because they want to save some money downstream because he's using nitrogen more efficiently And then all of that shared value. means that there's absolutely no reason for the loaf in the supermarket to cost any more than the one next door T to just make it a little bit more personal to you. We've spoken about macro, what might happen in the next ten, fifteen, twenty five years What are you expecting to happen on your farm in the next few years, The farms that you're working with are wild farm, What is the? im mediate term outlook look like What' I'm now a tenant of the National Trust, so with a very heavy heart and we decided to set up wild farm to try and do this stuff at scale, essentially from a sense of urgency. a realisation that we just don't have much ecological road left and we need to get on with it So I left France And I was very fortunate to get the lease of a of a national trust farm near Swinden And I think on the wider in terms of the wider community We set this thing up to scale. The first thing we wrote on the office wall was the long road to Greg's. And I did, as I mentioned earlier, end up DJing at the Gregs annual conference in a strange twwist of fate that no one saw coming. But that was a very deliberate intent And doing that has meant building a supply chain and a platform in which all of this data. that generates value can flow easily and efficiently and be this conduit between an ever growing farming community and the people who want to invest in a resilient food supply chain. So That's our focus is to make this easy and accessible and unlock its potential as quickly as we can. What did you close your Greg set with D you remember? Yeah, well I do remember and it had to be super stunlning because there was uproar on the floor, so yeah. Andy, than you much. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I think you're going to hang around and we'll answer some listener questions in the Q and A. I just wanted to thank you. Thank you so much. an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me Well, Andy has just left the studio and I'm trying to study, understand, analysee Everything that he has just said is so information dense, so rich in its level of analysis that I think there's two strands, right? which are obviously Andy's ideas and then Actually, I think the manner in which he communicates them are reallyally quite striking as well. I mean, just on the point of what he is talking about, clearly there is a really, really significant problem. When we're thinking about issues like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz or a war in Ukraine, and Clearly the ramifications that spiral down from that into something like where your toast comes from, the piece of toast that you may have had for breakfast this morning and so How you address that and how you address that with the agency that he's describing, right? his his journey, his personal story and it really does seem like he's been on a bit of a one man mission or crusade to try and fix this thing is quuite inspiring, I think, regardless of you know the merits and the weaknesses in the arguments that he makes and there are cases on both sides for that on a personal level, just who is. I think his story is a really quite brave one to turn down the rock star royalties and put his feet up and go, what do you know, I'm actually going urn to manual Labour is an inspirational thing, and that bleeds over into the way that he talks. He is really matter of fact. I don't think he shied away from any of the challenges