How Good Is Vertical Farming? (Your Radical Questions with James Rebanks)

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2:01If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello. Well, this is a bit of a radical experiment. This is our first listener Q &A with one of our absolutely brilliant guests.

2:45your chance to engage directly with the super smart and interesting people that we have on this podcast and ask them about their radical ideas for the future. Let me just explain briefly. So our plan at Radical is to try and give you a heads up about who we're planning on talking to and the things that we're planning to talk to them about. And that gives you the chance to ask questions of our guests. We're after compelling questions and, of course, some radical solutions. Coming up, by the way, the next few weeks on Radical, I'm absolutely thrilled to say that I'm going to be talking to Jamie Oliver, chef campaign.

3:18I don't need to introduce Jamie. We know who he is. Jamie Oliver is going to be answering your questions. He's got some very big ideas about cooking, about healthy eating, also perhaps about dyslexia, which he's talked very openly about as well. So what questions do you have for Jamie Oliver? Please email us on radical at bbc.co.uk. You can WhatsApp us on 0330 123 9480. 0330 123 9480. The Radical team reads absolutely everything that gets sent in and we basically need you for this podcast. It's basically your chance to get much more intimately and deeply involved in what we're doing and get really close to our guests.

3:54Right. Let's get into our first ever Radical Q &A with the farmer and author from the Lake District, James Rebanks. He's the author of several best-selling books, including most recently The Place of Tides and also his memoir The Shepherd's Life. James, welcome to this monumental moment in the history of British culture, podcasting, the creative economy. How does it feel to be the first Radical Guest to answer questions from our listeners? It feels good. I'm glad you started with the farmer. Feels like a good moment. We can build from the bottom up, can't we? From the field up. from the field up right our first question james for you comes from one of the people who asked us to get you on the show by the way i should say the reason i think i didn't even say the reason you're here is because you are very much in demand we put out uh in some of our early episodes a request for people to come up with guest suggestions and a huge number suggested that james rebanks should come on radical and one of them was michelle hello amol this is michelle from rural cambridgeshire i'm so delighted that you have managed to persuade james away from his cows what can i stroke we who are not from a farming background or farmers do to support the likes of himself and his fellow farming community michelle thank you very much james over to you so i think there's two ways i need michelle to help me and other farmers the first one is political right people don't believe this works but i think you should email right to your politician to your mp hassle your mp tell them that you care about british farming you want a safe accessible resilient robust nature friendly farming system that can feed everybody right it feels like it doesn't matter give it 10 minutes ping the email off clutter their email uh boxes with this so they think it's a bigger issue we've got an absurdity in this country of acting like food farming and environment are peripheral or small issues we treat it like a joke it's like a tiny job on the edge of the cabinet for somebody loyal but dim that's that's ridiculous like literally ridiculous we're politically we all have to push this harder um same for you as a journalist who interviews these people just need this pushing way way up the agenda secondly i guess the heart of the question was about how can you help us when you go shopping and i would just say do the best you can i i've I've cured myself years ago of telling anybody who's really struggling financially to buy more expensive food no like just do whatever you have to do to get through the week if you're struggling on the wrong end of things there's no judgment do what you've got to do I would but a lot of us are better off than that a lot of us do have some agency a lot of us are able to make some choices where you can pay a little bit more attention to labels pay a little bit more attention to whether things are organic.

6:43The labels sometimes mislead or I don't like the implications behind the labels, but try and buy things that are organic or regenerative. If you're super lucky, super privileged, and you live somewhere where there's a farmer's market or you can drive down the road to a shop where a farmer's selling directly, do that. Or buy from, again, if you're super lucky to have this, if you can go to a local butcher, the ideal in a food system is that you can ask people questions. Yeah. Over the counter. What's an example of a misleading label that Michelle should be wearing off? There's a misleading label that really cheeses me off on lots of farmers is when things have been slightly altered in the sort of processing stage, you can call them British.

7:23But if you look really closely on the label, it might say something like made with New Zealand lamb. And you think, whoa, hang on a minute, how's that got a Union Jack on it? And they use these sort of little slips and tricks to get around it. It's sort of manufactured or it was packed in another place. So if you've got the time, you're lucky enough to know a little bit about this, put the extra effort in and try and buy British. I think my favorite bit is try, if you can do this, try to ask everybody questions. If you go in a nice restaurant and ask them, where's the beef from? Where's the chicken from?

7:57What's the system? If they can't answer, they're not as good a restaurant as they think they are. And if it's the best shops are sort of butchers and things where you can say, OK, if I'm going to spend my money with you and you want me to come back next week, you need to tell me about the farm. But in the end, you think that actually to get the food system we need requires better politics above all. It's more on politics than it is on individuals. I think it's more on politics than individuals. But there's a whole heap we can do. Another great thing. A whole heap we can do. See what you did there?

8:26Hey, bish, bish, bish, bash. But there's another one. I'm alert to these puns, you know. Most bits of Britain now have veg box schemes from good organic farms. I mean, in the south of England, they've got sort of Riverford, and there's all sorts of other people now. They're generally pretty good farmers looking after the soil well with diversity. They'll tell you about it. You can get a veg box. And you have to put it with a bit of hassle, right? Instead of getting just what you want, you get some other vegetables. It's wonderful, and they look good, and they look real. And it forces you to think about seasonality and things like that.

8:55It forces kids to think, which is incredibly important. My wife's from Devon. We know Riverford well, and they are one of many who do that job fantastically. Let's stick with farming. Here's a question from Duncan. How does he see vertical and indoor farming as part of the solution, especially as we are increasing our supply of cheaper renewable energy as part of a more sustainable farming and food supply solution? Duncan, thank you very much indeed. James, what is vertical and indoor farming? I nearly said something rude. It's not for me. I would put me in the skeptical camp on this. Vertical and indoor farming are sort of various systems whereby you, in theory, could produce a huge amount of food by doing it in very particular conditions inside, in very sort of...

9:49Efficiency, sort of maximizing... Maximizing efficiency inside buildings with perfect conditions and perfect sort of nutrient application and things like that. Some people believe that's a really important part of the future. I happen to think that the best way we can, the most efficient way we can produce food is using sunlight, rain, and soil. I think they're the brilliant things that food system really rests on. And we now know that, I think, human solar panels that would power a thing like the question is implying, I think they take something like 30 or 40 % of the energy that's hitting them, right?

10:25But we know that green leaves of plants take something like 90 % of the energy hitting them. So to use a solar panel to power an indoor food facility to grow something that could grow in a field, for me, let's grow things amazingly in fields first. Let's have really sustainable, nature-based, biologically-based systems before we start getting too clever. One of the themes that came out of the recent COP30 summit in Brazil was we don't need to invest billions and billions and billions in carbon capture technologies. We've got a carbon capture technology. It's called the tree. The tree or the green plant.

10:59So a lot of the grassland habitats we manage, we can increase the soil organic matter and the carbon by 3-4 % very quickly just by changing the grazing to longer green plants, used plants better. I think that's a pretty clear answer to your question, Duncan. Thank you very much indeed. Daniel has sent this question specifically about sheep farming and its impact on the landscape. Hi Amol and the Radical team. I'm currently very much enjoying James Rebanks's books. What he's doing for farming feels so necessary and the knowledge he has so important to keep alive. But the bare landscapes that sheep create now depress me enormously.

11:40So my provocation is in two parts. Firstly, if sheep grazing is stopping forests from regrowing, shouldn't sheep farming go the same way as coal mining and number two shouldn't national parks be the first places we allow forests to regrow thank you oof so that's so that's really really good and reflects a point of view in the environmental sector about five years ago which was very very fashionable and very very loud which was effectively land sparing there's two ways of thinking about land land sharing where we do multiple things in the same place or land sparing and one of the theories is that if we do super intensive farming over there might be ugly might be monocultural might be highly technology and chemical based we can free some other bits up over there to be wild nature and i think that's reflected in the question um so as daniel says shouldn't sheep farming go the same way as coal mining yeah um no um sheep farming might need to change and there are some landscapes that are far too bare because of the sheep farming that's happened over the last 50 or 500 years uh there's much better solutions to this basically so also the question presupposes that our national park should be forests that that's ecologically what they should be it isn't i can tell you somebody who manages an ecosystem advised by ecologists all the time uh wetlands are better when they're open and not treed we have wet rush pastures which are better without trees i'm actively dissuaded from putting trees in we have other areas where we've planted 60 to 80 000 trees where it is appropriate where we're creating more woodland but often they're more biodiverse and function better when they grazed open light accessible landscapes so the question's sort of a little outdated now in this idea that the national park should just be forests and that forests is the best thing that we can have that's actually loads of different habitats in places like the landscape where i live and they all need managing differently often with grazing does that let sheep off the hook no we know that we probably have too many bare landscapes managed in a particular way by sheep but if you really want to if you're listening to this and you really want to do something about this help us right we in this country at the moment we can't we're not even sustaining the environmental schemes that would help farmers do slightly better so the idea that we're going to abandon and whole landscapes for some kind of perfect utopian solution is like for the fairies at the moment.

14:06And if you want to help us, I've got a friend who runs a thing called Oldswater Catchment, which is a community interest company, brilliant guy called Danny and his wife, Maddie Teasdale. They're doing fundraising to work with farmers to restore habitats in appropriate ways right across our landscape. And I'm really proud of our landscape. And there's lots of ecologists involved in that. And it's good. But to go to Daniel's second question, where he says, shouldn't national parks be the first places we allow forests to grow regrow i hear what you say about national parks but if it's not national parks where should be james the first places we allow forests to regrow well we should have more sorry everything's this sounds like i'm ifing and butting but um we should have more forest in national parks i'm totally cool with that i'm i'm the person paying for and planting them i said in the last episode i'm 45 000 pounds out of pocket at the moment planting trees so i'm not against planting trees the issue is where they go how we do it and how it fits into what else they are and it there's an awkwardness at the heart of my answer and his question which is why are our national parks not about wilderness and nature right i get it i totally get it do you know what our national parks actually are they're a post second world war deal which is the state never took them over never bought them never took public ownership of them at all but instead said to people after the second world war now that you've got your first car now that you've got your first paid weekends and paid holidays you need places to drive to and enjoy possibly walk by the side of a lake have a footpath over a mountain you can have what people like wordsworth had a century earlier 150 years earlier that's the deal right this was not a scenario in which the state took ownership of the whole landscape on behalf of everybody to create wilderness they're actually privately owned landscapes in which people like me and my family own the land have debts against the land are trying to make a living on the land have in some cases thousands and thousands year old culture and practices which like the lake district to take the lake district is a world heritage site because of its amazing pastoral history and culture and how that's influenced the rest of the world through the conservation movement and even if you wiped all that away even if you made it wild would it function as a perfect block of wilderness on its own no uplands and lowlands always interacted, coastal areas and uplands interacted, what kind of wildlife would live in it?

16:28Would it be what the wild was in the past without large herds of migrating herbivores and carnivores? No, it wouldn't. So you end up, even if you sort of magically made this question scenario happen, it isn't wild. It may not have the biodiversity in it you want. I think a far better, far more realistic solution, given where we really are right now, is can you persuade the people of those landscapes to manage them way better for nature, to have the habitats and processes in that would once have been in them. And I would be right at the front of that fight. I'd say, not only can we do that, I'll do it.

17:00I'll show you what I've done so far. And if you help me through your taxes or you help my friend Daddy and Maddy who are running this community interest company, if people listening want to fund it, amazing. We'll build ponds. We'll build wetlands. We'll re-wiggle streams. We'll put forest in the areas where we can. Or thorny scrub. We'll put that in the places where we can. and anyone who i mean just go and look that stuff up look at my social media whatever there's a huge it'll be on your social media yeah there's masses of good stuff happening what's your twitter account so it's at herdy shepherd one and a lot of it's about nature restoration i'm really into that and you're on instagram at herdy shepherd one as well i'm sorry and the other thing there is there's also an implication that we don't need the food from the uplands that's quite an oft repeated claim not actually too like um uh we literally in this country eat tens of thousands of sheep every week if you believe if you listen to some of the environmentalists they'd say we don't and and that might not be white middle class people it's often going into places like bradford and manchester into the british asian community who eat lots of mutton and lots of meat as part so there's a sort of slight bit of arrogance in this that we don't need to shut a sheep meat from the uplands anymore we absolutely do it's a key part of our food system daniel i I hope that answers your question.

18:12And I'm very pleased to hear that you're reading and enjoying James's book. Thank you for James's books, I should say. Yeah, thank you, Daniel. I didn't mean to give you a hard time. All right, let's have another question from Emil, who is a hospital dietitian. Emil has been in touch to ask, what should the government do about the rise in obesity in the UK, which has quadrupled from 7 % in 1980 to now 28 %? So I would refer people to Chris Van Tiliken and his book, Ultra Process People. What have we done with our food system? And one of the things we've done is we've allowed corporations to persuade us that a lot of highly processed junk is food.

18:45Why? Because they make my money from that. They make the reason that the middle aisles in every supermarket you go in are full of the processed package stuff is because that's what they make the most money out of. And if you notice, that's never the stuff they give away for almost nothing. The outer aisles is stuff from farms and that's the stuff they give away for nothing because they're giving away the farmers produce. One of the main ways for us to deal with this is to eat real food. real food from real fields that are real plants or were real animals you make your own ethical choices in that um that's what we should be eating that's definitely what we should be feeding people in hospitals and schools etc not highly processed junk or fast food and things which is what's actually being given to people we the massive error here is that we've allowed corporations to take over our food system make it make highly addictive unhealthy stuff be the norm for many many people particularly the poorest which is even more obscene um and we've gotten away from a system based on real food but there's also individuals individuals do have agency here don't they i mean don't we need to make smarter better choices well partly but i think if chris van tolican was here and he was talking about ultra processed foods sure they're deliberately making that stuff addictive they're just they're deliberately using uh by using chemistry to mess with your brain signals they're deliberately making this something that you can't stop putting in your mouth and there's a wonderful bit in a documentary that chris van tulik had made where he's talking about the bliss point and they're talking about things like um i don't know if i'll actually mention the brands but the sort of crisps that we eat uh that um that sort of melt in the mouth there's apparently a trick with human psychology which is something which is crunchy and hard on the outside but immediately becomes soft in your mouth that gives you a massive hit of salt and fat is like the sort of trifecta that lights up your brain you're making me hungry for my signature carbonara right now.

20:37They're deliberately using science to play people. So do we have agency? Of course we do. We have to be grown-ups when we go to the canteen as much as we can and make good choices, not bad choices. But it's absolutely in the context of them messing with us. Thank you very much, Dean, for that, Emil. Final question from Seth. Oh, I think I know who this is. Hi, Amol and James. It's Seth Dello here from Somerset down in the West Country. The question I have for James is really about his state schooling and his education and what that was like for him. I remember reading his book and I really related to him in terms of his experiences at state school, some of them quite horrific from what I was reading and obviously quite traumatic.

21:17And I think the thing is, how can you go from that to then go to Oxford and being very famous as he is now? That's a journey that I find remarkable and I think it's incredible what he's achieved. and I think if he could just explain a bit more about that it'd be really interesting. Thank you so much, Seth. Just before you do that, James, can I just say Seth is one of the most remarkable young men I've ever met and I should explain. Seth, Seth Dello, got in touch with me on Instagram which is one way in which people can send in questions and it was a delight to see his name because I met Seth a few years ago when I made a documentary series called How to Crack the Class Ceiling about social mobility and Seth is, I mean, he, like you, Went to a Russell Group University, got a first.

21:58I hope you don't mind me saying that, Seth. Super, super, super bright. And in that documentary, he talked about his concern that rural communities weren't necessarily benefactors from the great push towards diversity. His concern that accents such as his from rural Somerset might hold him back. But also the degree to which he was massively inspired. Though he didn't mention you in this context back then. I didn't know that you were one of the people that he looks up to. But he's massively inspired by people like you from a rural background. You've got a great academic pedigree and now write books and go on podcasts.

22:29So his question, I should say, I've ranted about Seth because he's amazing. His question is, how did your state schooling influence your career? It's one of the toughest, I'm not doing it. It's not a poor me story, but it was one of the toughest bits of my life. I've never felt, I actually felt scared quite a lot of the time. Why? Just because it was, I'm not even sure that the teachers were aware that there were kids in the school that were scared. it was just a sort of slightly rough like 1980s vibe like there were you felt like you were going to get like I think this is probably normal to loads of kids in school maybe listening to this now I saw bits of it in like the adolescence film just like people elbowing you in the corridor sort of genuinely slightly sinister vibe where the big kids could probably get away with beating you up if they wanted to like Kez for the Ken Loach film I love Kez and I think it's probably an exaggerated version of how I felt in school just like what am I doing in this place like it's crazy it's it's values are my it's values are not my values the people here some of them seem to be violent and a bit nasty and did you get beaten up uh probably avoided it by being the sort of joker but I definitely remember thinking for god's sake don't be too clever like that's that's a good way to get beaten up and how did that go to Seth's question how did that influence your career um i think i think i'm not sure about career i'm not sure i think of myself as having a career but it's definitely made me really aware that our education systems or even our way of thinking about people loves to put people in boxes and i've been in so many boxes now i'm just laughing at the system which is like you've told me i'm stupid you've told me i've got learning difficulties you've forgotten about me probably when i left a school to work on a farm, did like a manual job.

24:16Then you decided I'm clever and you sort of fetishized me and sort of held me up as if I was poor or from a worse background than I really was. And then you slightly lionizing me because I write books. I'm a bit guilty of that. Yeah, we all do that a little bit. I think it's cool. That's all right. But what is, I forget what the American guy's name is, who talks about meritocracy. Daniel Markowitz or Michael Sandel. Michael Sandel. The tyranny of merit. There's a sort of tyranny involved in that, which is when you fetishise me and say that I'm super special now, the flip side of that is you've forgotten about everyone I came from.

24:49You think they're scum. Sandell's argument is that meritocracy, which is, I think, the most interesting word in the English language, because it was invented by Michael Young, the author of the 1945 Labour Manifesto, is invented as a warning, a satire against, he was warning against the rise of the meritocracy. It's an unbelievably prophetic book, because he talks about how in the year, it's written in the 1950s, talks about how in the year 2030, we're going to be ruled by what he literally calls the populists. And he says it's not very smart. He was a egalitarian socialist. And he says it's not a very smart way to run a society, to split it in half and say to half, you're great because you're credentialed and clever.

25:22And to say the other half, you're stupid and you deserve your place at the bottom. If I'm being really honest, I think in the Tony Blair years, that's what happened in this country. I think we said to people, education is everything. And you're either like winners. You go to university or you're kind of not. And I think it comes back to haunt us in all sorts of things like Brexit and stuff. people there's a visceral outside of the world of books and media and things that when i go home when i'm in my local town i'm listening to people talking i think in some quarters there's a sort of visceral hatred of cleverness because you got one up on us you think we're dirt like what do you think they're going to do when they get a chance to vote against you that they're going to take it they're going to punch you in the face politically aren't they do i want any of that to happen or exist no not really i want to live in a more i i maybe this is idealistic i want my friends at home who do proper real jobs to be respected as me for writing books would you go into politics um no because i end up talking about politics lots people think that's a natural move i i don't have any desire to do that whatsoever i suspect you and seth could get together run the country i think seth might be a better candidate than me you could do it you could seth for prime minister Seth Dello for Prime Minister, James Rebanks for, you could be the Agriculture Minister.

26:36But also, maybe I'm making too much of this, but when people make too much of me now, they're flagging up that they didn't think I was much before, in a way. People say to me all the time as a writer, they're like, oh, you learned to write in Oxford. And I go, whoa, whoa, back up. Why do you assume I learned to write, that I learned to write in Oxford? Because in their minds, clever people learn clever things in clever places. I was a good writer before I went to Oxford that's how I blagged my way in You read books as a teenager? Yeah, I'm a writer because I read books you don't have to go to the clever place to do that James, thank you so much for being a magnificent guinea pig not you're a guinea pig, you're the actual person who's been our first Q &A which matters a great deal to us, thank you very much for those who don't know, your latest book which is called The Place of Tides is a reflection on an amazing journey you took to Norway which is involved spending a lot of time with two incredible women and actually finding out a lot about masculinity along the way but people could also read English Pastoral and Inheritance or The Shepherd's Life which is your memoir or they could just listen to this podcast many many times to get a sense of what you're all about James really really appreciate your time Thank you for having me

27:50I hope you enjoyed our first listener Q &A episode I'll be back on Thursday with another interview and then we'll have another Q &A episode on Monday full of your questions. Please send them in. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.

28:15This advertisement feature is paid and presented by Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When you're thinking about where to scale your business, think Poland. As one of Europe's fastest growing economies with a large talent pool, it's the ideal place for your business to grow.

28:33My name is Thomas Renault. I'm the CEO of Iliad Group. Iliad is the number five telecom operator in Europe. When we expanded into Poland in 2020, we knew it would be a successful venture. Since then, we have invested over 4.5 billion euros in the Polish economy and become the country's leading mobile operator with Play. Here, we have access to over a million graduates with skilled professionals across IT, software, tech, engineering, and manufacturing. And on top of that, we benefit from favorable business regulations in order to support telecommunication network deployment, in order to push digitalization in the public sector.

29:20We also have direct access to global markets. I like to think of it as the Silicon Valley of Europe. Poland has a culture of innovation and that drives business forward. Poland embraces technology early. Digitalization is progressing rapidly in both the public and private sectors. And that's why we are here. To innovate, to invest, to grow together. Global brands and rising scale-ups alike choose Poland as their base for smart, long-term growth. Poland, the place where scale-ups become standouts. Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com

30:09If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. you