Is Regenerative Farming Getting Greenwashed? (Your Radical Questions with Andy Cato)

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1:04Oli Dugmore:Carvana! Delivery fees may apply. Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where I put your questions to one of our radical guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the super smart and interesting people we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. My name's Olly Dougmore, standing in for a mole this week. I'm the executive digital editor of The New Statesman. But if you listen to the main podcast with our guest, Andy Cato, you'll already know that. And if you haven't listened, make sure you do. We talk about Andy's amazing, possibly even radical transition from being one half of Groove Armada to becoming a leader and pioneer in the regenerative farming movement.

1:41Oli Dugmore:He wants to change the way we grow things, use different methods to traditional modern farming to protect soil health, restore ecosystems and become more resilient to the challenges of the modern world, like climate change and global conflict. Andy, are you ready?

1:56Andy Cato:There's nothing more intimidating before answering questions than being called super smart, but let's go for it. Let's find out if Andy is indeed super smart.

2:05Oli Dugmore:A few of you have been getting in touch about greenwashing, the marketing tactic of making a company product or policy appear more environmentally friendly or sustainable than it really is. We had an email from Mary Hogan, but also Eva Collins sent us a voice note, which I believe we can listen to now. Hi, Ollie and Andy. It's Eva here from Bristol. I've been impressed with the regenerative farming movement but one concern I have is for the potential of greenwashing without a regulatory framework comparable to that used in organic agriculture how can consumers be confident that farms marketing themselves as regenerative are genuinely applying the core principles?

2:41Oli Dugmore:And like I said we've also got an email from Mary who asks please can you ask Andy for his definition of regenerative farming the term is increasingly a greenwash phrase isn't it? How do you answer Andy?

2:53Andy Cato:I think both are fair. And my experience of this is that I farmed organically for many years. And so when we were getting Wild Farmer up and running and we needed to tell our customers what we were doing, we followed the organic model, which is the certification is a list of practices, essentially what farmers can do and what they can't do. So we drew up these third-party audited wild farmed standards, which followed that model. And again, sort of practice-based, you can do this and you can't do that. What are some examples of that? Well, so for example, if you're sowing a spring crop, you have to sow a cover crop over winter.

3:36Andy Cato:There was limits on nitrogen use, on pesticide use and so on. And as I was drawing that up, I was thinking, well, actually, after just my experiences of the last sort of decade or so, the one thing we can be sure of is that how we combine nature and food, how we deliver this regeneration, is continually evolving in quite exciting ways. So setting the practices in stone is complicated. And actually the dream was an outcomes-based system. Because with an outcome-based system, you say, well, this is what happened, and you leave the farmers more flexibility to respond to a drought or a flood or their local context one way or another to see how they deliver that.

4:22Andy Cato:And so the focus for us has been on building a framework which measures water quality, carbon, biodiversity, and one which often gets missed off, which is farmer welfare, because if there aren't good farmer outcomes in all this, then there's nothing else to talk about. So those outcomes get measured by third parties, and last year they were collated by NIAB, which is short for the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. And so we do still have some practices, some just you can't do this, but we're really trying to push this outcomes-based approach because ultimately if water quality is improving, soil quality is improving, biodiversity is increasing and farmer welfare is up, we also test all of our grains to be pesticide-free.

5:10Andy Cato:If all those things are happening, then your ecosystem is going in the right direction. the questions are absolutely right in that regenerative like natural or healthy is a word that anyone can use we have this once in a species opportunity in my opinion to make the food system a force for an abundant healthy and resilient future we cannot let it get greenwashed away and I think it's very important to ask people what they mean and what happened in their fields

5:40Oli Dugmore:Do you believe this is the only moment where the food system could shift? Give me some of that historical context. Give me the historical perspective. How does where we are right now play out with human history?

5:53Andy Cato:well i think there's a there's a a long-standing narrative which portrayed nature as something that was out to get us um rather than nature's default setting of abundance in fact there was a when um in the 70s during the last oil shock when it became clear the extent to which our our food system had become oil dependent and therefore the oil shock became a food shock but there was a there's an article in time magazine about that and it sort of begins about how you know ever since we sort of chased around after woolly mammoths and tried to scratch a few grains from the earth and all this you know the the threat of hunger has been on our backs and this real kind of thing of like this hostile nature and it's just not like that i've seen it in my with my own eyes many times just how how quickly nature comes roaring back if you give it a chance the land wants to heal if you give it a chance but the practical ramifications of that given how quickly rainfall patterns are changing are something that we need to kind of writ large on the landscape fast

7:01Oli Dugmore:i think thank you mary and eva this next question is a voice note from mark mark smith here my question for andy is how can regenerative farming realistically be adopted by all arable farmers when it requires long-term planning and upfront investment that many tenant or marginal farmers may not have? Does it risk becoming another niche market like organic farming? Thank you.

7:26Andy Cato:Well, I'd say that, first of all, I'm a tent farmer, and I'm not sure I agree about, certainly in terms of kit, because I think that one of the things that's come out of working with all these amazing farmers in the community over the past several years are the sort of 20 % of actions that give 80 % of the results. And so before anyone gets into changing any kind of kits, if there's a systemic use of cover crops, if people are using SAP testing, if people are dividing up their fertilizer applications into smaller doses, there's huge strides that we can make without the need for any massive investment.

8:03Andy Cato:We have to operate in a world where we don't have to make massive investments because as the questioner knows, farming margins are just so tight. But the farmers that we're working with are generally speaking conventional farmers. They're often running two systems side by side and comparing the outcomes. So for me, it comes down to giving farmers the opportunity to participate in these peer-to-peer learning communities and to participate in supply chains that value them doing this. because as we said in the main episode this has to be a collaborative effort and it has to recognize the fact that by doing this farmers are not just you know building their own soil resilience and ecosystem resilience but they're having huge societal benefits that we that we

8:50Oli Dugmore:need to contribute towards and as as has been mentioned already you know some farms will have contractors that come in and do their combining for them they may lease the equipment they might not own one themselves and would it be the same with the necessary equipment to fully adopt this regenerative approach can they lease the equipment they have to buy how does that work well as i i

9:09Andy Cato:think that you know you're right to flag up the equipment thing because one of the consequences of the unbelievable financial squeeze that's been placed on farmers and the uh the increase in the cost of the equipment i mean you would you would not believe the number of zeros on the end of farm equipment even when i came into it uh 17 years ago outside of a farming family so i had to you know buy my own gear you know even then it was eye-watering post-covid is absolutely insane

9:36Oli Dugmore:so if you wanted if you wanted a tractor i don't know it's the standard model for a couple a couple

9:41Andy Cato:hundred acre farm what are we talking about 150 grand you've got combine harvesters at three quarters of a million quid now you know i mean it's it's it's absolutely insane so one of the one One of the consequences of that is a need to cover a vast amount of acres with a piece of machinery to even come close to paying off the loan repayments and have a little bit left for yourself. So contractors are incredibly brave in putting their necks on the line for this equipment. It's all weather dependent, of course. But what that pushes you towards is you need to standardize operations. you need to do the same thing across uh 500 acres on the day when the sun's out you know and um and so we need to be mindful of that that's you know we could say that's not where we want to be but it's where we are and so what are the 20 percent of um regen actions that can generate 80 percent of the outcomes uh and i think we know what those are and they can work within the constraints that we're talking about thank you for that question mark here is a question from joy

10:42Oli Dugmore:Hello Andy Cato and team. I'm Dr Joy Rooney and I'm interested in whether implementing regenerative farming will also increase the likelihood that the UK will feed itself, given UK farmers' production has declined over the past 25 years. And if so, at what cost to farmers thank you so joy's asking about how regenerative farming could damage food production and farmers livelihoods what's the answer andy well again you know i think you know as the as

11:20Andy Cato:the lady mentioned we are seeing declines in harvests over recent years because of increasingly extreme weather in terms of feeding ourselves it's of critical importance that we have soils that are able to infiltrate rainfall and store it so that we can get through these periods where our climate, which used to be sunshine and showers, and it's now delusion followed by drought, and the only way we can hang on in there is if we have these porous sponge-like soils, and the only way to create porous sponge-like soils is to make sure that they're full of life, and the only way to make sure they're full of life is to keep them covered in plants and harvesting sunshine.

12:02Andy Cato:So I can't see, you know, a lot of the times when we say, well, should we do this or should we do that, there is an assumption that business as usual is an option. And I think we have pretty overwhelming evidence from the fringes of the food system so far, but that business as usual is not an option.

12:19Oli Dugmore:I'm noticing, Andy, in a lot of your answers to these questions, you're identifying and highlighting assumptions that exist quite often in what's being asked of you. and I just wonder if it ties back to something we were talking about in the other episode which is that educational cultural change is perhaps as much as in if not greater importance actually than the necessary sort of practical agricultural ones that are happening on the ground that the idea or the frame that people have about what this means and what we do currently perhaps isn't disconnected from reality but it's perhaps I don't know slightly out of focus.

12:54Andy Cato:Yeah I think there's a quote isn't there about that that change comes from persistence and telling better stories you know and so you need the actual thing that you're talking about to be buttoned up and to deliver but movements happen because of stories and the great thing about this story is that I've sensed that we live in a hope in a world that's short on hope and purpose

13:23Oli Dugmore:and this offers such immense hope and purpose thank you for that question joy here is another one from James. Hi Andy I'm totally on board with regenerative farming as a rewilder I'm keen to know how do we go further and truly restore our ecosystems how can we blend rewilding with farming to create landscapes that don't just sustain nature but actually bring it back to life. I feel like people who don't perhaps aren't that familiar with the countryside that they have this iconic idol right when they think about britain's countryside and they look out across the rolling hills and there they are maybe some oilseed rape and it's a lovely yellow patchwork yeah and without necessarily realizing that what they are looking at broadly speaking is a monoculture you know it is one type of plant over great distances and there might be some other bits in the hedgerows but it's not necessarily what you would view as a sort of thriving natural environment i mean talk to me about how your ideas intersect with biodiversity yeah well i'm very passionate about

14:29Andy Cato:um the fact that we we have to combine nature with food producing fields for for all sorts of reasons some of them are agricultural related in that there's you know pretty well established evidence that increasing the diversity of habitat in the field helps the resilience of that field against diseases but also you know wildlife is mobile and so the idea that we can just have these islands of rewilded restoration and nothing in between is just not going to work so I think there's this huge opportunity to combine the need for wildlife's mobility to if we really want to restore our ecosystems with rewarding farmers who are putting nature in their fields and just to be clear this is not complicated so for example uh you know we've done a lot of work with um using the evidence of the uk center of ecology and hydrology a bit of a mouthful but they've they've got data on all kinds of things and one of them is the average range of insects so between about 80 and 120 meters and so um in a lot of wild farm fields what our growers do is put down a a pollinator strip a flower strip so that the uh there isn't a wheat plant that's more than 100 meters from the nearest flower and so therefore you get pretty good coverage across the whole field now if you do that it depends a little bit on the shape of the field but you're talking around four percent of the field being taken out to cover the whole thing and so as a as a as a percentage reduction in cropped area versus the value that's being produced there, which is our measurements with Bristol University show this doubling of insect biomass, that if we can create a value system which pays farmers for that and its value relative to how much people are getting paid for nature, as the question was saying, in the rewilded systems, then there's going to be a net financial gain to farmers even before you get in to the benefits to disease resistance and so on from the abundance of insects within the field.

16:36Oli Dugmore:To just drill down into rewilding specifically, which is what the question is about, I feel like very often we think about the kind of mega species. There are people who get very excited about the idea that there might be wild wolves in Britain and that actually gives you a really concrete example of where there might be a tension between rewilding and agriculture because if you're a sheep farmer, you're probably less keen on a pack of wolves roaming the Yorkshire Dales or whatever it is you choose. but you don't see there, other than that example, which is obviously quite stark, how much is there a tension between the ideas of rewilding versus agriculture?

17:10Oli Dugmore:Is it a false dichotomy to say that the two are in conflict with one another?

17:14Andy Cato:Well, I don't think necessarily the people doing it are in conflict with each other, but I do think there is this ongoing conflict which goes back for centuries about nature versus food. I mean, you could say that when the first national park was created in the late 1800s, the premise of that national park is that for nature to thrive we need people to get out of the way and uh i think we just got to flip that on its head and really start owning the potential that we have to be stewards of complexity and we need to be stewards of complexity and um you know we don't understand how a lot of soil life works but we don't you know the shark or the hawk that these things are designed to work nature's designed to work and so we don't need to wait till we can understand every last detail of soil life because we probably never will but we know the conditions in which it thrives we can monitor them now we can and we can respond so this idea of of stewardship of placing ourselves back at the heart of nature again rather than saying that if we want to give nature half a chance we've got to get out of the way i think that's a really important psychological shift that we need to make

18:18Oli Dugmore:where where does that lack of understanding come from i mean would you talk a little bit about chemistry versus biology in the food system well i mean in in terms of farming it's you know it's

18:31Andy Cato:quite an interesting tale in that you know for soil to be healthy it needs to be covered in plants and it needs to be disturbed as little as possible and so by the time we get into the 19th century a lot of european soils have been plowed and left bare for a very long time and they're and they're tired and so for a while there was this unbelievable export of in terms of quantity of guano i think it's peru from peru back to uk millions and millions of tons of it i mean chiseling that stuff off the rocks must go down in history as one of the worst jobs of all time but anyway but this idea of like shipping in fertility from from from elsewhere was was going and then when an alternative to that was being looked for and it's interesting because a couple of hundred years before there in the 1660s i think he was called robert hook had had observed fungi and his mate in Holland had observed bacteria under microscopes and they'd written about it.

19:27Andy Cato:One of the theories as to why that sort of was a dead end was because they were both brilliant at making microscope lenders and neither of them left any instructions. So who knows what would have happened if they did. But in the mid-19th century, chemistry and physics were the dominant sciences and there was a certain amount of inevitability, I suppose, in ending up with a chemical understanding of soil. So scientists, amongst the most famous of which was probably Liebig, burning plants and then looking at the ashes and seeing the nutrients that they were made of. And they came to the conclusion that it was all predominantly nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.

20:03Andy Cato:So it's the same MPK that you see on the side of fertilizer bags, you know, 200 years later. And of course, when that became possible, thanks to Haber and Bosch, the best boy by name that never was, who invented artificial nitrogen. and there was an exponential increase in production and then with that, the sort of force feeding of crops and the diminution of soil biology came disease and so we repurposed chemical weapons as pesticides to keep the plants alive and it was miraculous on lots of levels but it had all these unforeseen consequences and Rachel Carson in the 60s famously walked out into silent fields, wrote Silent Spring and started the environmental movement from there.

20:43Andy Cato:But we've ended up with this chemistry-focused system, and one of the great opportunities for AI and its analysis of complex systems is this ability to steward, even if we don't fully understand it, but to steward biology in a way that we've not been able to do before.

21:01Oli Dugmore:Finally, we've had this question from Roger. It seems that regenerative agriculture would be very appropriate for subsistence farmers in the tropics and subtropics. they have highly degraded land and lack income and social integration to what extent do you think can regenerative agriculture be scaled up in these situations and what are the prime constraints thanks bye so how could regenerative farming be used around the world Andy well you know I don't

21:32Andy Cato:have any specific knowledge of the farming systems that's been talked about there but what is clear is that the the principles of regenerative farming are universal and what we're trying to do is mimic natural systems and keep soil covered with a diversity of plants for as much of the time as we possibly can and i think that applies in in any context and um and i suppose the the constraints to that will be there's the knowledge and empowerment part of that there's creating an economic environment which values the societal benefits of doing that in a way which is sufficient to overcome what might be perceived as an easier option for this particular harvest so we need to value it and you know some farmers are operating within the constraints of of supply chain or seed and fertilizer contracts which are inhibiting their ability to act so um uh you know To return to where we were on the main episode, the overwhelming story here is that this is possible in every context.

22:41Andy Cato:We're seeing farmers all over the world making this happen. We're seeing the results that flow from doing it this way. And I just hope that our attempts to build an economic model and a supply chain and a farmer community model that can deliver it at scale can continue to build.

22:59Oli Dugmore:Andy, thank you so much for answering the questions thank you for your time, I really appreciate it absolute pleasure thank you listeners for all of your questions as well there will be another episode of Radical coming your way very soon but for now, bye bye

23:41Oli Dugmore:I'll see you next time. by a true story of murder and scandal. And from the world of Jane Austen, the other Bennett sister, only on BritBox. Start your free trial at BritBox.com. This episode sponsored by Ridwell. Doing the right thing shouldn't be so hard, but when it comes to recycling, it often is. Ridwell makes it simple to recycle more from anywhere. With Ridwell, you can recycle plastic bags, snack wrappers, pill bottles, bottle caps, and other items your curbside bin doesn't take. And unlike most recycling programs, Ridwell carefully tracks where your items go and reports back on what actually gets recycled.