The Future of Food: Can Regenerative Farming Save Our Soil? (Andy Cato)

0:08Hello, it's Oli Dugmore here. Welcome to Radical, the 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 Statesman. But this week, I'll be standing in for Amol while he's up in Scotland filming something called The Traitors. Today I'm joined by Andy Cato, farmer, innovator and one half of Groove 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.

0:38He's also had a bit of a radical change in his own life as well. Andy walked away from the music industry and sold the rights to his back catalogue to 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 maximising output and scale, regenerative farming centres on restoring ecosystems and building long-term resilience to the problems of the 21st century, the changing climate, and conflicts around the world impacting the flow of the fertilisers and chemicals needed for mainstream farming methods.

1:10In 2019, Andy founded Wild Farmed, a company which wants to help farmers transition to regenerative systems while staying profitable. Quick 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 &A episode that comes out on a Monday. Now let's dig in shall we?

1:34Andy 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 the problem that we face in our food system, we're going to talk about solutions, challenges, all of that but I wondered if before we start you can 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 canaries in the coal mine of the food system i grew up in barnsley when the coal mines were just about still open and um and so when canaries in the coal mine 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 the cocoa price which has gone up massively over the past few years same thing with coffee and essentially these are all symptoms of wild weather hitting degraded ecosystems and by degraded 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.

2:48And 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 food system just zooming out to realise that there has been this kind of miraculous process, particularly since World War II, 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.

3:39None 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? Well, 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's 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 in 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 micronutrients that are present or absent in the 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 micronutrients in tiny, tiny doses.

5:02But what that means that you're doing is stewarding those plants to health proactively rather than reactively responding to disease with pesticides. The same with us, you know, in the human context, it will be having a really micronutritionally 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 with this kind of technology yeah so there are 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 or even just an uncultivated meadow nature's default setting is incredible abundance and resilience there's a great stories of when when the europeans arrived in what we now call california and they went into this uh 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 as a wilderness but it wasn't a wilderness at all it had been tended 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 of harnessing this nature's tendency towards abundance tell me more regenerative practices yeah what are you doing that's different to other farmers the next farm over in Gascony you know tell me the difference yeah so um so we talked a little bit about um introducing livestock on on the land and and if they graze properly that can be a really significant boost to soil biology and get it bring life back to the to the land when it comes to growing crops if you look at any natural system the 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 bare um 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 it's nice and easy you know but instead of doing that as soon as the harvest the crop has gone you would plant what's 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 diversity I want to talk about that in more detail as our conversation progresses.

8:14But 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. But you did do something else before that, didn't you? I mean, for people who don't know, Andy is one half of Groove Armada, incredibly successful toward the world. I mean, just tell me about that 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 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 era my cousin set up the diy sound system clues in the name like do it yourself you know and so there was uh there was something that really um 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 uh from the moment that i saw seeds become plants and plants become food on the table it's this miraculous process the whole idea that soil is the only thing that can turn death into life later when i'll get to when i had a farm in france and we used to have these school kids would come around and we gather around a fallen tree and 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 that I'd written which is a musician's pension to finance this farm and try and do it on a 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 what you 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 um and i guess most of us don't in our urban existence but uh when the tree falls and i'm and i'm not a um i'm not a biologist 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 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.

11:15But 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 new life. and just standing back to consider that and that we have this very, very thin layer of topsoil in which this happens and the fact that without that there is nothing is quite a change in 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.

11:58And I just really want to sort of zero in on that for listeners that you'd achieved that right. It's entirely possible. I don't know the specifics, but off those royalties, like you said, it's a pension. You could probably put your feet up and you might never have to play a gig again. And instead you said, no, no, I'm actually going to sell the rights and I'm going to buy a farm. I'm going from nightclubs to farms. You know, that is, can you just explain that process for us? Because I think it's an 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 factors in that one was just pure fascination i did just love it and uh and uh and part of it i think was and i noticed this when people come and came to visit and um you know helped a little bit in the veg patch or helped on the farm despite all of our urban cocoon this there is a fundamental pull of the of the land which is this is still in us i think i i really started to uh observe and really admire the kind of quiet independence of our farming neighbors although that independence will become a bit more nuanced as i understood a little bit more about how the chemical farming system worked um like for example one time i was um came back from a gig in ibiza where we're dj-ing for a high roller on on his yacht and it was just interesting the conversation how the 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 uh my neighbor 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 10 miles around his house than he had time to see in his lifetime so I had these 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 and where it's used 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 were faced and when you've realized that we can do it and the only barrier is choosing to do it or in my case what we set about was trying to prove that it was possible to do it at scale you can't really walk away from that do you think michelle was happier than the high roller i mean it's it's manual labor right it's like it'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 uh you know uh anyone who 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 so infinitely far that it's inconceivable that your back will make it.

15:00Anyone who's done that stuff, when you look at those sepia 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 think there's a flip side to the hard labour 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 you know if you if you can do something from a sofa i'll not have to get off the sofa that's success well my experience was that so long as it's part of a plan which you think is important i'm not saying like 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 that feels coherent then hard physical labour is an amazing thing.

15:43The sheer pleasure of sitting down and having a piece of bread when you've really gone for it for five or six hours, 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 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 array of skills that it requires, how hard it is to grow food on degraded soils whilst trying to restore them and make some money. It was very humbling and now makes for some good stories.

16:29And I was lucky because I could still go away at the weekend and prop myself up playing records. So I had that financial buffer. It was tiring because I was going to bed at 5 a.m. on the weekends and getting up at 5 a.m. in the week. Literally from sort of like space, Ibiza, back to your farm. Yeah, I mean, the most bizarre juxtapositions. My life has been one of the most surreal juxtapositions from going from the space terrace to a kind of Gascon farming equipment fair to, as we'll touch on later maybe, but DJing at the Greg's annual conference. I mean, my life is weird. That's quite fun stuff, isn't it?

17:05but uh you know when it all um looked like it had failed and i was considering having to sell ups for three years and i was completely invaded by weeds uh 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 30 years later it'll be a forest and there's an amazing succession that happens to do that but of course in low fertility fields the same logic applies so they're brilliantly suited to growing dock leaves thistles bindweed and um and i battled and battled and battled and failed and um there were some really lonely dark days there you're making big decisions you get one chance a year to 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 farms, how we would do that and how a farming community would be first and foremost.

18:08When you say dark, I mean, talk to me about that. We're just talking about financially, emotionally. What does that mean? Yeah, I mean, all of those things. I was completely exhausted. I was standing in the middle of, you know, the kind of 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, why on earth are you putting yourself through this? What are you trying to prove and to whom? And a sense of just having taken, the year that we bought the farm, there was this freak record harvest harvest after which um 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 was like can i even sell this now you know so it was just a uh 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 you'll ever get to play them for someone and then you churning away in that field.

19:29Tell 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 hadn't managed to pull it off. So tell me about pulling it off then. What does it mean? Let's drill into it. What are you doing that's different? What is this regenerative farming?

20:00How does it work? Well, from the Nadir just described when I was on the point of giving up, the reason why I didn't was this really freakish encounter with a book from, what would it be, 100 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 shouldn't mention because she never gets mentioned, but it was very much him and his wife who did this. It was a joint project.

20:37She was a botanist in her own right. And they wrote this book called An Agricultural Testament, which essentially the still message of it would be that nature works through a process of diversity of 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 put a crop 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 20-year vegetarian was a challenge in its own right taking my first cow to abattoir was a moment of deep introspection but on the other hand it's then how do you grow crops in a way which is making things better rather than making them worse.

21:44Take me to the abattoir. With you there, 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 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, loved, and abattoirs are not nice places. They're definitely not. Tell me about it. yeah well I became convinced from from the Albert Howard book that um 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 uh 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 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-up 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 ii farming system and the mountains of cheap grains that accumulated as a result of its, ostensibly, its success, which has created a whole livestock industry and feedlot beef and all the issues in the River Wye and all of this grain, half of our grain harvests going into animals, and that remains to me something which needs to be addressed.

23:23And so I think when we talk about the phrases, it's not the cow, it's the how, this is a very specific use of livestock as part of a grazing program properly managed to bring fertility back. But I was persuaded of that. I became even more persuaded of that when I saw it in action. But then a herd that's living a natural life with a bull that comes and goes gets bigger, which I wanted it to because I needed a job to be done on the land. And the point came when I had to take a cow to an abattoir. and you know where I was living in in rural France it's quite sort of 50s Britain it's quite old school farming all the all the barns are still used for their original purpose it's all a lot smaller and so I borrowed a horse box and drove the cow to an abattoir 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 you have to take it the night before I'd left it as late as possible to to try and reduce stress and there was one person left there, a lady, and she just said, oh, take it round the back and drop it off.

24:26And I went round the back and there was all these metal fences, modular metal fences, and there was some lambs and there was some pigs and there was a massive white cow, the local breed, Blondacky 10, 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 transport human emotions onto animals. But I jiggled it around, got into the front of the queue. And there was a couple of hours left before nightfall and I stood there 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.

25:14but 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 neighboring farms which were cereals only organic or not you know i would send kids down on the farm visits that came much later when the phoenix had risen from the ashes and say that anyone who can find a worm over the hedge there freed run on the pan de chocolat and i knew they wouldn't find one and even when you broadened 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've stuck stuck 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?

26:16I think the answer to almost every problem we face is equilibrium and balance and one of the problems about what we're trying to build with wild farm now is standing up for nuance in a world of slogans it's not easy.

26:38I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Andy Cato. 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. Now, back to Andy.

26:59What's the response been from the farming community? You're trying to get these ideas out there. What do people who run farms day to day, what do they think of what you're espousing? well i mean i don't think a generalization would be would be valid there but um no no nuance on this please but um you know we're working with an awful lot of farmers and an awful lot of farmers all around the world um are working with these kind of ideas and i think that the flip side of it is that i i spend quite a lot of time in conferences now doing talks and stuff and 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 caveat if it's properly applied are true 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 they're price takers for their chemical inputs and they're price takers for the commodities and 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 most and hoping for the best.

28:32And so I think that the opportunity that we've got from these practices to make farming aspirational again, to give farmers their agency back, to make it profitable, because most farmers 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. But that needs to be a coordinated programme of empowerment and training and community and a sense of collective purpose. I think that's probably where the challenge and the pushback comes, right? Because yes, there are these inputs, but the counter is that the way that we currently farm, the study in 2015 puts it about three and a half billion people are fed in this way.

29:12A 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 you know how do you how do you square that equation how does the the output of the quantity that we need to feed the population that we have how do you how do you square that circle can you square that circle yeah you can um and i think it's important to look that question in the eye because um there's various bits of it first of all is is yield i think has to be seen as yield over time so how much can we actually reliably produce for an infinite period and so it might be um that by throwing the kind of kitchen sink at a system you can get a little bit more for another decade another 20 years or whatever but without um 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 on how we define yield and base it on what can we reliably produce on this plot of land forever.

30:19And so over that period of time, that initial period where those yields might be lower, who's footing that bill? Is it the farmers themselves? Is it the consumer? Well, the finances, it will come back to the finance, but in terms of the can we feed the world thing, you know, so what we're also seeing already is that under climatic duress, these systems can often out yield conventional systems so clark's farm for example last year another year of wild weather it was a dry spring i think it was 132 years or something like that and um and he was using uh technology sort of drones and autonomous tractors on uh most of the farm and the wild farm fields were going into three year three of trying to build up this soil resilience essentially just get more holes in the soil so it 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 just on a pure output level it's not as simple as 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 soil resilience back 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 there's all kinds of bits and pieces around the edges where if you need to make a 15 change of of grain use then it's not you know you don't have to make many radical shifts for that to to be realistic just to take Clarkson's farm 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 tots up what he's made and lo and behold every year he appears to make a loss.

32:08And then 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 eke 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? Yeah. 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 II. We've now realised there's these unforeseen consequences.

32:47As 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 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 harder. But in terms of finance, the basis of a truly regenerative system is just remaking the economics to reflect reality.

33:23So if a farmer's soils is holding more water, for example, then obviously the farmer will benefit from that over time in terms of their drought resilience, but it's also a massive benefit to insurance companies who are trying to mitigate flood risk. It's also a massive benefit to water companies who need to improve their catchment without building really expensive reservoirs that are going to take 15 years to build. 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.

33:59So as a concrete example of that, wild farmed growers who are in the right catchment are being paid by seven of the UK water companies now per hectare fee because it's cheaper for them to avoid water pollution at source than getting out afterwards. And then we can do the same for nature on food producing land because it's a long legacy where you can't get paid for nature if you're producing food or 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, all contribute.

34:33And 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, talk to me how it's interplay with food security. Does it make the food security of the UK stronger, weaker? Tell me. I think there's two bits to that. 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 after Ukraine, we talk about energy security or energy sovereignty, rather. And after the NATO shenanigans that are going on, we're talking about defence sovereignty.

35:12And we're not very loudly talking about food sovereignty 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 soil covered with plants, harvest sunshine, fill the soil with holes again, restore nature and the resilience of ecosystems we depend on and 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 the last five years have shown. It also means that inputs are used more efficiently. So, I mean, everyone's got an interest in that from the farmer because of the cost.

35:55But 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 II, 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 who can grow your food. And so in terms of building this collaboration for change, that makes it very difficult.

36:37The second thing is it makes it very difficult for this sharing of value around the food system from all the people who have a vested interest in farmers restoring ecosystems whilst growing food, the people we talked about, insurers 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. I mean, it's set out to do that, but we just had to do that to make 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.

37:29I feel like going from growing 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 settlement that we live in as a society. Some of 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 conflate value or we conflate price and importance quite often, don't we?

38:08and 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 it on actually I guess I moved from if you don't like the system don't depend on it to if you don't like the system change it and what we 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 all that expertise to operate around different economic incentives but changing the economic incentives 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 soil the 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 we're having at the moment around nature with with other people and we can do this Can you tell me more about how you think about value?

39:37I mean, personally, what do you value in your life? What does it mean to you? I mean, certainly the last 17 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 go, we'll come back to value. So it's sitting 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 a thousand bass sounds in 10 minutes until you find one that you like, or obviously the Google search, all the things I'm familiar with. And it really knocked me for six, even though it's blindingly obvious, that when you go into food production, every experiment takes a year.

40:20And then you think, okay, well, every experiment takes a year, and so now if I'm lucky, I've got 20 more goats, maybe, as a sort of physically capable adult. that really brings in things into focus and and just notions of time and which of course is linked to in therefore importance there's um there's a brilliant thing from aldo leopold who was uh um i'm gonna 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 is 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 he goes all the way back through to sort of the pioneers of the american west and all the various adventures in between and he talks about how there are chips of wood falling out from the saw onto the onto the forest floor and he says that the um the woodsman calls it sawdust and the historian calls it archives but there's lots of examples of this sort of sense of perspective and i think from the sense of perspective come 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 farmed 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 that it goes all the way back to the farmers or the amazing messages of from a lot of young people we get at 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 trite to say that that really is is just gold dust but but it is you know and um and this sort of being in the middle of this collective effort has become the thing that's most special to me agency you mentioned it earlier you mentioned again and how it connects to to value so how does agency interplay with regenerative farming well i think there's um from a farming perspective the agency comes from there's and i guess this is a parallel that goes across a lot of society isn't it that's one of the consequences of of a chemical based system has been handing over a degree of control as a farmer to specialists so I would with my neighbor Michel 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 area of maize 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 were miles inland 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 absolutely miraculous and so um michelle my neighbor you know sort of lived through all of that but then it was a strange contrast where he would he he's the master of everything from you know the intricacies of a tractor engine to where the mushrooms grow in his local woods and knows every inch of everything but on the other hand then you'd see the 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 in quite a smart car and sort of sign the chip of paper and michelle would just do it and so there's this bit that on the one hand he had agency because he was looking after all his machines and he was going out ploughing and doing all the rest of it but on the other hand a lot of the stewardship had been sort of had handed over uh and so i think um 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 top-down approaches so that's the farming perspective i think and it's just very very exciting to be 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 the kind of factory they didn't want to be part of i'm assuming that that it's within that then that you find hope and inspiration because you know the picture can be quite bleak in fact you know 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 2050 you're looking at probably about 10 billion people necessary increase to food production maybe 60 70 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 i'm the framing that you have i actually think is quite a positive one absolutely it's a positive one i think if the um you know if the if the last 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 if 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 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 yeah why is it not happening because the job that needs to be done i think is twofold and it's completing this um turnaround of economic incentives and we're working very very hard on that so that you know the water payments we talked about uh we're close to doing the same thing for valuing nature in 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 you know the biodiversity net gain 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 insect biomass you can quadruple b populations on food producing fields and it's bonkers that farmers go and get paid 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 the farmers that we work for we need we need that to expand across all farming networks so that farmers really feel empowered to have a new way forward you know these are 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 the economic incentives.