For many people for many years, Adam Henson, presenter of the BBC’s flagship programme, Countryfile, has been the face and voice of British farming so it was a delight to welcome him to The FarmED Podcast studio to record our Christmas Special. 

As well as talking about Christmas at the Cotswold Farm Park, founded by Adam’s father over forty years ago, Adam talks to presenter, Alex Dye, about his career both in the field and in front of the camera. He discusses the changes he’s witnessed in agriculture and why he does not describe his own farm as regenerative. 

Adam talks about everything from measuring carbon footprints and exciting innovations in technology to challenges facing farming in terms of mental health and why he is hopeful for the future but as a tenant farmer, ‘cannot live on hope.’ 

Having visited farms and agricultural businesses all over the country with the BBC, Adam has some fascinating anecdotes and views on how education should engage young people in farming - perhaps by borrowing from the British Army’s advertising campaigns. He is passionate about the importance of communicating farming stories. 

Alex talks to cook, writer and veg grower, Kathy Slack about her book, Rough Patch, and how growing vegetables helped her recover from burnout. 

Kathy had a high flying career in advertising before she suffered a physical and mental collapse that left her ‘distraught, crippled by depression and grief and panic’. 

She explains how her mother coaxed her out of the house into the garden and she ‘would sit on the raised beds with my cup of tea and just watch the soil and the weeds and the bugs and the life there…and something about being close to the soil started to heal me.’ 

Then she just sowed a couple of seeds and watched them grow. She  describes to Alex the ‘sense of awe and promise and wonder’ of seeing ‘a tiny little seed turn into a radish in like three weeks’ and talks about how growing veg can be more empowering than growing flowers, giving a sense of the agency, of actually growing food to feed yourself. 

Her book includes recipes and Kathy also runs cookery classes, so she talks to Alex about how she plans her growing! Kathy describes working in the kitchen garden at Daylesford and writing food columns for lifestyle magazines and she offers advice for anyone who knows nothing about horticulture but wants to get going with growing some veg. 

‘I realised that I could mostly ignore the manuals and just experiment and now I'm a very messy gardener, not particularly proficient but I really embrace that messy ramshackle way of growing. There are so few places in life where it's okay to be a complete failure at something and you go well that's okay I'll just it again,’ Kathy says. She advises against jumping straight onto an allotment. ‘Start with radishes or lettuces or something that if it goes wrong, you can just sow it again. Then maybe if you've got pots and a warm balcony, maybe progress to tomatoes the next year.

‘So start small and get hooked on that joy of going, here I am picking a tomato that I've grown myself.’

Links:

https://www.kathyslack.com/

This episode of The FarmED Podcast is recorded on location, at Baddaford, Guy Singh-Watson’s farm in Devon. Guy, founder of Riverford, has been dubbed ‘the most brutally honest farmer in Britain.’

Here, Guy talks to Alex about how he finds regenerative agriculture a ‘difficult subject, because I absolutely welcome the sort of broad church approach that has drawn in farmers who, for whatever reason, felt antagonised by organic’ admitting that ‘we got it wrong somehow. We did alienate a lot of conventional farmers, the farmers who really we should have been getting on board.’ 

But it’s the ploughing vs glyphosate argument that he wants to see more openly discussed. He explains why he hates the term ‘food poverty’ and why his mission has always been to produce food ‘that's accessible and affordable by all,’ whilst also being fair to producers and the increasing challenges of that.  He also talks about his wrangles with the supermarkets, why he is anti-commodity, why we should all eat less meat and how his hopes for the future, for  ‘size and specialisation’ replaced by the mixed farming model. 

Something a little different for this episode of The FarmED Podcast, which covers computer systems and farming systems and a little agricultural history too. You’ll discover why farmers grow grass as well as what AI and beekeeping have in common.

Alex is joined by Paul Totterdell, who started his career studying IT and is now Director of FarmED’s sister company, Cotswold Seeds, which supplies 20,000 UK farmers with diverse seed mixtures that are good for soil health, animal health and the health of the planet. 

Around 75% of UK's land is farmed agriculturally, Paul explains,  and a huge proportion of that is grassland. ‘All the grass that you see out there in the fields when you're driving past, that hasn't just grown there by itself. We've had to plant that. A lot of people don't realise that grass needs to be planted.’

Paul tells us how the agricultural upheavals after the end of the Second World War created a reliance on fertiliser and high yielding ryegrass. Shallow-rooted, the plants struggle in the drought conditions we’ve seen this summer.  ‘Cotswold Seeds have been looking for many, many years at different novel plants that we can plant alongside the ryegrasses and sometimes without any ryegrass whatsoever,’ Paul explains. 

He goes on to talk about a new scientific research project which Cotswold Seeds and FarmED are both involved in, known as CHCx3, which is looking at how plants can capture carbon from the atmosphere and mitigate climate change. 

Paul also talks about how all of this relates to bees. Paul’s apiary was the very first project to be introduced at FarmED, long before the other livestock and crops arrived. 

Watch on YouTube and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please do give us a like or a follow and leave a review. 

Links: 

Cotswold Seeds 

https://www.cotswoldseeds.com/

CHCx3

https://www.carboncapturecropping.com/

‘We are a rainforest people, who live in a rainforest nation,’ says conservationist and writer, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, speaking to Alex Dye on The FarmED Podcast and explaining why these ancient forests are so vital for combating climate change as well as for our own wellbeing. 

In his bestselling memoir,  ‘OurThe Oaken Bones,’ Merlin talks about how, while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan,  his armoured vehicle was hit by a landmine that momentarily blinded and deafened him, leaving him with PTSD. His wife Lizzie suffered several miscarriages and his father was hospitalised with Covid. 

‘I felt so extremely lucky and privileged to have the farm at home and to be able to go and hide and retreat and heal within what we knew as the old oak woodland at Cabilla,’ Merlin explains.  It was thanks to Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforest of Britain and David Attenborough who talked about rainforests in his Wild Isles series, that led to the discovery that the forest at Cabilla was much older than they’d originally realised, part of the Atlantic temperate rainforest, mythologised in stories and legends, which would once have cloaked much of Britain.

When Merlin and Lizzie moved back to Cabilla seven years ago they wondered: ‘How do we make a living from this land? How do we restore the land as well?

Agricultural consultants advised them to cut down the trees but instead they planted another 100,000, tripling the rainforest area, and brought back beavers. 

‘The whole point is that it turns into a lower-yield conservation-grazing agroforestry scheme,’ Merlin tells Alex. ‘Atlantic temperate rainforests are a pinnacle habitat in the UK for a number of different ecosystem services. For example, they are one of our most effective carbon sequesterers. So at a time of climate crisis when we need habitats that absorb and sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere, nothing does that more effectively terrestrially in terms of what we can protect and restore than Atlantic temperate rainforests.’

Merlin and Lizzie have created a wellness retreat at Cabilla, so that others, including veterans and NHS staff suffering from burnout, can benefit from the psychological and physiological restorative properties of the rainforest. 

They have also established The Thousand Year Trust.

The Trust is so named because it aims to pull people out of short-term thinking, ‘You see a lot of articles at the moment saying things like, can we reverse climate change by 2030? We absolutely can't. But could we reverse it by 3020? Well, yes, we could. We can set the conditions and it will be something that the next 20 generations will work on and then we'll get back to a place of climate health. And I think that the ability to think in multi-generational timeframes is really important.’ 

Hear how The Thousand Year Trust is also crowdfunding to build Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research field station, a place where scientists from across the world, can study these extraordinary habitats. 

Discover More:

Cabilla Cornwall: https://www.cabillacornwall.com/

Thousand Year Trust: https://thousandyeartrust.org/

This month on The FarmED Podcast, Alex Dye talks to acclaimed author and producer/presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, Dan Saladino. Dan explains how his childhood in the citrus and olive groves of Sicily led to his ‘passion for telling stories of food and flavours’ and just why these ‘wonderful stories’ are ‘the richest subject for any journalist’, a lens through which to look at ‘politics, power, science and culture.’ 

It was The Arc of Taste, a slow food project to save the world’s most endangered foods, that inspired Dan’s celebrated book, Eating to Extinction, and Dan recalls some of his ‘favourite food memories’ created while researching the book. These include time spent with the Hadza people in Tanzania, Africa’s last hunter gatherers whose extraordinary relationship with the honeybird demonstrates the perfect 'collaboration between humans and animals’. He talks about why the drink made from endangered Perry Pears, is ‘the champagne of England.’

Regenerative farming and its focus on increasing biodiversity and thereby increasing resilience, is crucial to our future and the future of food security in an age of conflict and inequality, Dan believes. ‘We’ve enjoyed huge productivity but it’s been at the cost of resilience,’ he says. Our ‘dependence on cultivated plants’ and ‘a few species of food, in an increasingly unstable and fragile world’, makes us dangerously vulnerable to climate change, diseases, and upheavals in world trade. He talks about how ‘shocks to the system’, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and food price inflation have already had huge social and political impacts. Looking to the future, water shortages could be catastrophic for food production. The answer is to build resilience into our food systems.  

Ultimately hopeful, Dan explains why we should all ‘seek out and explore the diversity of foods in our own locality,’ and ‘think like the Hadza’.

He also reveals to Alex his favourite take-away dish!

Find The FarmED Podcast wherever you usually listen to your podcasts. Do please subscribe, like and leave a review.  Follow on @thefarmedpodcast

Links

Read more about Dan Saladino and his work: 

https://www.dansaladino.com/

Read about the Arc of Taste: 

https://www.slowfood.com/biodiversity-programs/ark-of-taste/

Following the huge success of her book, Rooted: Stories of Life, Land, and a Farming Revolution, Sarah Langford has become a voice for the regenerative farming movement and she talks to Alex about her writing and career, her belief that regenerative farming can change the world and what’s next for her.

For nearly a decade, Sarah Langford was a criminal and family barrister.  While on parental leave to have her two children she wrote her debut narrative non-fiction book, In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law.  Part memoir, part narrative account of cases she was involved in, the book sought to shine a light on the unseen, untold stories behind the world of law. In 2017 she moved with her family from London to the Suffolk countryside, expecting to stay for six months. In the end, they stayed for two years, taking on the running of her husband’s small family farm. Their story is woven around the stories of other farmers she met in her second narrative non-fiction book, Rooted: Stories of Life, Land, and a Farming Revolution. Part-memoir, part narrative account of a selection of farmers from around the country, it seeks to shine a light on the world of farming at a critical point in the future of the countryside. Rooted was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for conservation writing. 

The latest episode of the FarmED Podcast is all about bugs! Presenter, Alex Dye, FarmED’s resident entomologist, is in conversation with fellow entomologist, Dr Geroge McGavin.George McGavin was an academic zoologist for 30 years before becoming a television presenter. He is widely recognised throughout the UK as a regular contributor to the BBC One Show delighting viewers with his bug-life and ecology reports. He is the author of numerous books and renowned speaker, regularly inspiring and educating audiences about insects, ecology, evolution, conservation and exploration. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and Honorary Life Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.He also has several insect species named in his honour, all of which he hopes will survive him! George chats to Alex about the links between regenerative agriculture and entomology and the vital role that insects play in the health of our planet.

The latest episode of the FarmED Podcast is all about bugs! Presenter, Alex Dye, FarmED’s resident entomologist, is in conversation with fellow entomologist, Dr Geroge McGavin.George McGavin was an academic zoologist for 30 years before becoming a television presenter. He is widely recognised throughout the UK as a regular contributor to the BBC One Show delighting viewers with his bug-life and ecology reports. He is the author of numerous books and renowned speaker, regularly inspiring and educating audiences about insects, ecology, evolution, conservation and exploration. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and Honorary Life Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.He also has several insect species named in his honour, all of which he hopes will survive him! George chats to Alex about the links between regenerative agriculture and entomology and the vital role that insects play in the health of our planet.

Guest: Abby Allen, Director of Farming at Pipers Farm

Host: Ian Wilkinson, Founder of FarmED

Abby talks about her role, how the Piper’s Farm model can be upscaled and her views on the future of regenerative farming. There’s a hopeful takehome message too.

The FarmED Podcast seeks to offer ‘hopeful conversations around farming, food, nature and the environment.’ At this crucial moment in time, when biodiversity loss and climate change is at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we hope these entertaining and important exchanges of knowledge with specialists in their field will offer thought-provoking ideas and inspiration.

Please follow us on Instagram @TheFarmEDPodcast

About Pipers Farm: Pipers Farm was founded by Peter and Henri Greig in 1989 as a reaction to the increasing industrialisation of farming. Pipers Farm works directly with a network of 50 small, independent, family-run farms, rearing high-quality meat using nature-friendly practices. At the heart of Pipers Farm is the belief that livestock should be reared ‘in harmony with nature’. It champions pasture-fed, native breeds and passionately campaigns for small-scale abattoirs.

www.pipersfarm.com

@pipersfarm

For more information and a full transcript, visit:

https://www.farm-ed.co.uk/news/57/the-farmed-podcast-episode-2-abby-allen-director-of-farming-at-pipers-farm

About FarmED:

FarmED is a living textbook of regenerative farming, on a 107 acre demonstration farm in the Cotswolds, a place for learning, meeting and eating.

www.farm-ed.co.uk