Meet the Barrister who became a Farmer: Sarah Langford

0:00lessons that farmers have taught me about what it's like when you work with nature which is humility having to sit in your hands having to be patient trusting that nature knows better than you do letting time play out all of that stuff is what we're taught about in the city in the wellness space and I have wanted for a long time to try and bridge that gap to take the people who are looking for answers in the wellness space to some of the farmers who are really in tune with their land and say talk to each other and I think that is just starting to happen

0:38Welcome to The Slowdown, your time to redefine success and growth on your own terms with a little inspiration from others. I'm back at Brazen Studios with my next guest, Sarah Langford. I met Sarah almost eight years ago when she was a criminal and family law barrister. She then moved to the countryside with her husband and two kids to Suffolk and began running a small farm. One thing led to another and to a degree in agriculture. And now Sarah is a powerful voice in the regenerative farming movement. her book Rooted Stories of Life and Land and a Farming Revolution published in 2022 is part memoir part narrative account of a selection of farmers from around the UK and seeks to shine a light on the world of farming at a critical point in the future of the countryside I explore if a return to the land helps Sarah to slow down this episode is sponsored by Clue a period and cycle tracking app that I use personally and we'll share more about in the ad break of this episode Clue isn't just for the person on their period.

1:35It can also be used in the Clue Connect mode so that you can share information about your cycle with somebody else. Now, enjoy the episode. Hi Sarah. Hi. Welcome to The Slowdown. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for being here. Well, it's been a few years since we've had a proper catch-up and so I'm very excited that this is happening and I'm getting it and everyone else is going to hear it too. We met about seven years ago. you were a criminal and family law barrister with two small children but reading the latest press about you you've now been described more often as a farmer and a vital voice in the regenerative farming movement is that something you thought you'd be doing 10 years ago when you looked ahead at your life I've never ever looked ahead of my life and I think that's sort of kind I'm definitely a, I have lived without a five year plan ever.

2:30And that has some demerits to it. But the advantage is that when an opportunity comes, you can take it. And so it, yes, this other kind of this segue into a totally different industry or world, in fact, from the one I was in was a complete accident. uh I was a criminal and family barrister and I traveled around the country representing people who were accused of doing some very bad things for a while and it was I loved it I absolutely loved it it contained all of my three favorite things like dressing up showing off and words and and then I had babies which you can't take to court with you it turns out the judge doesn't like it and so when I was six months pregnant with my second son I got a book deal to write my first book which is called In Your Defence and that was sort of it was a narrative non-fiction it's a memoir but it sounds so sort of narcissistic to say I'm precocious to write a memoir in your 30s but that's what the um the section that sits in in the bookshop uh but it was really kind of a way of taking people from who'd never set foot in a courtroom inside this world that I'd inhabited and try to make it human and layered and nuanced but while I was writing that my husband lost his job in 2017 and we moved full-time to the Suffolk countryside and we've been going back and forward because his work was in Suffolk for the whole of our marriage and we landed basically in this cottage which was on the edge of some land that his parents had slowly bought up and they had recently bought 180 acres of arable his father had had a long-standing kind of desire to be a farmer or at least have a farm and at the age of 82 had finally realized it and and we were basically unemployed so we sort of said well we'll do it how hard can it be and then I just fell down this rabbit hole which was layered with all the kind of stuff that happens when you have a evangelical when you're evangelical about when you have an epiphany so it was much more than a change of career it was it changed everything it changed how I saw the world heard it experienced it felt about it and so I took on the management of this farm I went back to school I did a graduate diploma in agriculture at Sirencester part-time converted the farm 180 acres of arable 50 acres of pasture converted it from I'll call it conventional farming or chemical farming to organic farming but I did that at exactly the same time that this massive sea change was happening in farming in the UK because of Brexit.

5:30The subsidies which had supported farming with a big fat check every December were going because of Brexit and the payments were now going to be only public money for public good. And I come from that world. My grandparents were Second World War farmers. My uncle took on that farm. My dad was a land agent. Most of my friends, a lot of my childhood friends growing up were all in the farming community and I found myself like back in this world on the other side of the country from where I'd grown up in Hampshire and I had two very loud voices from two very loud men my uncle who was committed to the way that he had farmed for the whole of his life with all the props that come out of a bag and my father-in-law who was chair of the climate change committee was the other way and I just thought who's right I don't know who's right and so I set off on this kind of journey to try and figure it out and came across this farming revolution that was happening in England and the rest of the UK but actually all over the world where farmers had just could not keep going as they were in the industrial food system they couldn't keep going financially but they couldn't keep going emotionally and so I just thought the stories and the people that I came across reminded me a lot of the work I did at the bar in the sense that the people that I was meeting were turned into cartoons by the public at large everyone thought they knew who these people were and that was not the reality of what I was seeing so my poor my literary agent who deeply mistrusts the countryside and avoids going there she can help it she was very she was very wedded on me writing an incredibly lucrative crime thriller series which would make a lot of sense for someone who'd been a criminal barrister and I had to say to her change of plan change of plan I have fallen head over heels with the people what it has done for me emotionally and spiritually this is so much more than growing food this is about our connection with each other in community but it's also about our connection with the planet the answer to probably most of our climate change issues come back to food come back to soil come back to the way that we grow our food you can take any of them even plastic we can come wants that but drugs medicines all the rest of it come back to soil ultimately and I had to kind of argue with her that this this revolution this farming revolution contained the answers that so many of my friends in the city were looking for in terms of their connection with themselves and with everyone else for the sense of purpose and meaning and so I wore her down basically I wore her down and she eventually said all right do it and so then I rooted and it came out um it when I first pitched it I don't think I even put the word regenerative farming in the proposal because it was just like the weirdos in the corner at farming events talking about it of which I was one and now it's basically government policy under the new sustainable farming incentive you've got companies like Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, McCain you've got people falling over themselves to claim that they are now changing to regenerative systems and it's become a movement a huge movement I've just come back from a regenerative farming festival called Groundswell which is like the Glastonbury of farming which was unhelpfully for everyone who also went to Glastonbury straight after Glastonbury but the energy of that says everything you need to know including the fact that our future king Prince William stood up and said this is no longer a niche movement this is the future of where we have to go if we've got any chance of saving ourselves and the planet we rely on.

9:44100 % well I think for the pressy that was a great like summation of all of these things and I think there are quite a few things that you said there that do form something of a thread line from from your childhood you mentioned your family you mentioned this love of writing um take me back to the beginning as it were I'm very curious on this podcast about where our initial ideas of success uh are how that's modeled for us and by whom and when well I grew up in the 1980s and that's all you need to know about all the messages that absorb about success because like we grew up watching I remember the film that was the most iconic film which was called Baby Boom and just like a working girl and basically success was walking really fast down a pavement in either London or New York wearing really high heels and massive shoulder pads and a briefcase and like bumping people out the way and going to a big skyscraper office and possibly having a sort of bedroom where you opened the blinds with a remote control that was basically success was completely wrapped up in materialism but it was also wrapped up in leave the small village or farm go to the big city make a life for yourself in some sort of corporate landscape yeah and that's very much what you aimed for i grew up in a very beautiful town called city because it's got a cathedral in it called winchester but it's very it was very parochial and I could not wait to get to London but at the same time this kind of through thread that I've seen in other people and and desperately want for my kids too I had this through thread of of the farm and we spent probably every weekend almost every weekend on the farm when my grandparents were there we lived there for six months when we moved house we spent loads of the summer there and it wasn't when I was researching Rooted I got hold of my grandpa's diaries he wrote something in five lines of diary every single day from 1939 to 2018 and in it was basically farming history but it was also it was sort of proof that we were there all the time and there was a blueprint that took place that I didn't really understand or recognize or even sort of appreciate or value until I was much older which was this blueprint of understanding or at least appreciating the natural world and being unafraid of it being feeling like I belonged in it in a way that I have since met people who think that's not for me I don't belong there and so whilst I had these messages coming from the media and film which was the only way to have your voice heard is to be in the city I also without really knowing it was absorbing this sort of blueprint of connection with the natural world that turns out just stayed there kind of latent for me to access later I I'm fascinated also by who achieves why they achieve what goes into that what well are they filling what hole are they filling I think there was a massive advantage in uh having quite hands-off parents like my parents my mum was absolutely adamant that me and my two sisters should always work so we've always had jobs I've worked since I was 16 in one form or another but she never sort of neither of my parents went to university my dad went to agriculture college my mom went to teach training college so the world that we found ourselves in was like completely alien they didn't know about UCAS forms or universities or anything like that so you're you're left to get on with it and actually I think whilst it's bumpy the ability to self-start and the ability to drive yourself and think no one's coming in to save me there's no one knocking on my door saying here's a book deal or here's your dream you've you've got to go make it for yourself that actually I think was a huge advantage and both my like my middle sister's very senior in the charitable world and my younger sister is a child psychotherapist they've all sort of really really achieved both in academia and in career-wise they've done it off their own steam and I think there's something there's something about like letting your kid find their own path but also knowing that if you want it you have to go and get it no one's going to deliver it up for you that that drive I see in some other people who've also reached it there is another thing that happened that I don't one of those moments that I'm sure didn't mean anything to the other people involved that you then are it comes back a lot I left my school and went to a sixth form college called Peter Simmons in Winchester and a little folder came with me which we were accidentally erroneously given by the teacher and it came with a letter from our previous head and the letter began we weren't supposed to read them our teacher was barely older than we were so gave them to us for accident and the letter began Sarah Langford will never be a high flyer and I thought god I'm only 16 that's quite a big thing to say what does she mean by high flyer I think she just thought I was very average and kind of never pushed myself out it was a very hot housey school so I just I did well academically but I never thought of myself as clever ever never thought of myself as clever and I think ironically when people talk particularly the Daily Mail when they talk about a barrister they will be unable to write the word barrister without high flying above it so I think there was something in doing it you're being left to find your own path as much as you're able to and also not having a weight of expectation on you because when you've got nothing to lose when no one's saying you're gonna run the world yes you're gonna really you know you're gonna run the world one day or you're going to do this or that you actually are being given freedom to fail without real consequence you're being given the chance to have a go at something because if it doesn't work no one thought it was going to work anyway and I remember that about law really significantly now I did my I did an English degree and then I did a law conversion which is hardcore cool, like it's three years of law in eight months.

16:30And I was traveling, I was volunteering in Bali when I got it. And it was in the days of dial up internet. And I was in an internet cafe in this monsoon outside, logging in to get my law results. And I went down to the bottom, thinking that that's where it'd be. And my name wasn't there. And there was this very thick sentence in bold going, if your name isn't on the list, then you failed. And I was like, well that was a massive waste of an at-west loan you know but of course you went up and up the list and then I realized there was a search you could search your name and it was at the top and it was a real moment in kind of right okay okay you know I've I've done it but I think there's freedom in thinking what's to lose let's have a go at it it's so interesting how different people would see that in different ways because if I got a report card that said that I would go I'm going to be determined for the next 20 years of my life to prove this person wrong I think there is that and I think a lot of people including my last guest have the same mentality of I now have a chip on my shoulder and I'm going to elect to be a barrister precisely because it comes with the prestige and the high flyer in brackets next to it um in order to prove to other people that that you can do it so it's interesting that you saw it as a as a space of freedom I think there is that I definitely think there is that I was like I don't I did not like the feeling of being written off so early and so easily but I also quite liked the ability to have no to just put yourself forward for something whilst thinking if this doesn't work and if I get this wrong it's okay and I thought you know that's the same with writing actually a book deal the timing and all the rest of it there's so much luck involved but I found a diary that I wrote the other day about my first book and it basically said I'm embarrassed to put this out into the world I cannot believe I've taken money for it it's so badly written I don't know like who's gonna read this I just I just want it to go out there and I will hide under the duvet and then it will all disappear and then we'll read it and it became a Sunday Times bestseller and was option for TV and it's been read by like bought by 80 ,000 people or whatever it is like it's been objectively it's a success and that again was a real sort of lesson self-talk I think uh I think that I do I think that I believed it I believed that it wasn't a very good book I write stuff and obviously it's like it doesn't see the light of day but um I write things and my impulse is to compare it to the best fiction and non-fiction right you're comparing it to Pulitzer Prize winning Nobel Prize winning people where you're going oh well it's not quite Tolstoy so what's the point and then you realize in the smaller share in the smaller sharing that I do where I'm like I do a LinkedIn post or an Instagram post or something and the message that I get back from people that are like I feel I feel heard I feel seen I feel acknowledged I feel like you've said that in a way I understand it you've visually portrayed it to me in a way that I get then you realize like actually it doesn't have to be the most incredible prose ever for so many people to feel like it's important yeah you're right and now you know when I read it again and sometimes often actually that's why you're able to keep writing you go into a sort of flow state and you do read back and you think yeah okay that's quite good I like that sentence like that's that's I can see objectively that it is I'm happy with it now and the same with Rooted in a way like um I shortlisted for Writing Prize and I was like okay I can see that there are there are part there are lots of parts in it that I'm objectively very happy with but you're totally right when I was thinking about success for me the ability to give voice to people who feel like they haven't been heard to be the bridge in between the person who has no voice and the wider world the ability for someone to read you your words and go that is it and that's why I read You know, I think we all look to art, whether that's music, visual art, writing, to have our life experience interpreted through another medium so that we feel connected and so that we feel like we're part of a sort of universal project.

21:27and I think writing all art at its best casts that net out and says you're not alone this is this is how I felt and you felt that too with my subjects which were in the first book the law and the people who were caught up in it and in the second book food and farming and the people who were caught up in it I wanted to be able to have the ace card of saying this is all real these are real people I haven't embellished I've met them and with both books I wanted the people to have to be inverted commas like normal I spoke to loads of sort of people who had massive platforms who were really uh leading the way and a lot of this and I didn't want to put any of them in my book I wanted to put people that I had come across who were just quietly getting on with it because there were and I wanted to be able to say look they're doing it without any fanfare they can make it work and so to sort of give a platform if not a voice I always feel really uncomfortable sort of saying I'm giving a voice to them because they have a voice yeah but at least a platform to reach through through my ability to write um to be able to tell a story because let's be honest that's what you do in front of a jury you know it turns out to be amazing training standing in front of a jury and being able to tell your client's story in a way that allowed these strangers to walk in their shoes for a bit I think that's sort of my job to take people who've never been into these people's lives and go let me take you by the hand take you on their journey show you what they feel and think and their challenges and why that they're multi-dimensional people like we all are and with that comes a bit of kind of compassion empathy and understanding and hopefully a bit of like what can i do how can i help how are we going to how are we going to pull together on this mission totally you mentioned obviously university becoming a barrister in the period where you were working as a barrister doing all of these things and having your first child and then your second you know I feel like that was also the era of women can have it all um lean in this kind of thing so was there a sense of overwhelm burnout did any of that like what was the kind of like work environment actually like I did my last trial eight and a half months pregnant so I decided through talking to lots of other barristers that for multiple different reasons but mostly financial there was no reason there was no point me going back to the bar whilst my kids were so little and so I didn't balance being a barrister with having tiny children because I couldn't because I spoke to enough people who said unless you have this this and this in place forget it uh but I did I suppose so the writing happened around the children and it is you're you're totally right the era of being able to have it all which of course is absolute fantasy and whilst there are analogies to kind of food and farming in this but whilst we do not kind of financially reward in a capitalist system which is what we're in the unpaid and unseen work that women do it will always be there it will always be that way around that imbalance i mean there is a moment that most of my friends and I have had where you're on your hands and knees sweeping up peas at midnight going I have a law degree like how am I in the 1950s how did this work uh and you know that gender pay gap is still real the inequality of sort of parental leave is still real um if not in in theory then in practice the social stigma around men taking off long periods for paternity leave and i think there is a sort of there is a the way i relate that to food and farming is that it is natural systems that we all rely on without us even knowing it for the air we breathe for the water that we drink all the rest of it that has never been had a column on the spreadsheet either so I don't know that um I respond to it because I also all women who have got small children and tried to balance that within a career a lot of a lot of women who grew up in my generation do then see the inequity of it when you're when you're faced with it and I can't like there's no sort of easy answer out of that really I think there's lots of countries who struggle with it as well I don't think that anyone's found a perfect system even though there are plenty of countries that have tried hard to make it more equal so you feel that um you weren't able to go back into being a barrister while your children were little that didn't feel like a realistic thing to be a court-based barrister it's really unstable you often don't know what you're doing the next day a trial will come in and you will have to get yourself to bristol for 8 a.m to maybe do a trial that may come in to a list or may not come into a list the crown prosecution service may turn up without the cctv that they have lost or something like that in which case the whole thing gets pitched off till next week there are just myriad uncertainties which mean that while it's just you to worry about that's fine and actually quite flexible and you can do other work around you can do sort of paper-based work around it but if you're paying for round-the-clock child care which means that you're probably going to break even anyway and you don't really know when you're going to see your baby it made no sense it made no sense financially and it made no sense psychologically to have two little people who I brought into the world who I was paying someone else to look after and I was not doing anything other than keeping my kind of career motoring.

28:32But what happened was circumstance took over. So I met my literary agent when I was pregnant with my second son and there's only two years between them. So then the writing kind of came into my life. It's not easy, but you can fit around nap times and you can fit around it it's not and you can do it from anywhere and I can tell you there is nothing like writing a book or writing anything with two small children to show you that you cannot be precious about your creativity you cannot say to yourself I need to have this particular desk and that particular quiet and that pen like you do it on the bus or in a cafe or in a playpen like you do it wherever you can do it yeah and and are you still using your law in any way I know we were discussing before that you'd like to again bridge some of these gaps what I think has been one of the kind of unexpected and really interesting parts about the journey that rooted the book rooted has taken me on is it's taken me back into a sort of political and legal space and I mean that in the sense of using the law to protect nature so it's a bit like regenerative farming when I first started hearing about it everyone thought it was everyone that I spoke to thought it was kooky and fringe and never going to be made mainstream and about four or five years ago the I started hearing words like ecocide and legal personhood for rivers and mountains and forests.

30:17And everyone thought it was kooky. How can you possibly criminalise the willful destruction of nature? That's impossible. And in fast forward five years, it is being timetabled in Scotland, in France. there are countries who have already granted legal personhood to rivers and forests and streams like in New Zealand and Canada there's a new book out called Barrister for the Earth which I'd really recommend which shows how the law can protect the natural world from from us and it's a wild idea but then when you look at you go into some of the kind of legal history women could only have bank accounts in their own name in 1975 in the UK and there are plenty of examples where the common consensus has been well obviously we can't grant that person that social class women legal rights of course that's mad and we now think the other way so I think that when we're talking about breaking all our planetary boundaries how fast we need to act about this and what the law actually is basically our parent that says no you're not allowed to do that because it's too dangerous for everybody i think this we're on the precipice of this really exciting time of re-establishing our sort of democratic contract with the law and being able to use it to hopefully save ourselves in time.

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33:16but people for that reason might not want to aim to be farmers as their job title and so I'm wondering um how do you personally feel about being identified as a farmer and what do you think we can do for the farmer identity at large to kind of redo some PR on it yeah I love that question um it really needs a rebrand right yeah i i think that a whole generation of farmers was infantilized by chemicals ecological knowledge like knowing what a ladybird larvae looks like so that you can see it and know it's going to eat all the aphids that are going to eat your beans or knowing about natural cycles was once commonplace and was eradicated and in a whole generation who had sold a bag of pesticides and artificial fertilizer by a salesman it made it not a very inspiring job and lots of my childhood friends would watch their dads and it was usually their dads get on a tractor every day and think no way am I doing that one of the most kind of hopeful and inspiring things i've seen about the agenda farming movement is that those kids who once said i want nothing to do with this life it is hard and it is boring and you have no control or creativity that they're coming back because the way of farming with with nature rather than against it is intellectual and creative you have to be a botanist and an ecologist you have to understand how crops work together and it is much harder and it's much more nuanced but it gives it back its dignity and autonomy and so the idea of a farmer having to be uh intellectual and creative and clever is starting to be known in the farming community so when you go to these shows you will see it it hasn't necessarily translated out to the wider world because you still obviously will get your sort of picture book with your fake farm in it that you show your kids farms that absolutely don't exist with ducks and a ruddy cheeked farmer's wife and um red barn red barn with a kind of pet pig in it but you feed all your scraps to you know that doesn't exist anymore not really but I wonder if what I have thought for a long time is that some of the philosophical lessons that farmers have taught me about what it's like when you work with nature which is humility having to sit in your hands having to be patient trusting that nature knows better than you do letting time play out all of that stuff is what we're taught about in the city in sort of the wellness space being in the moment being connected realizing that you are way way smaller than you may have thought and i have wanted for a long time to try and bridge that gap to take the people who are looking for answers in the wellness space to some of the farmers who are really in tune with their land and say talk to each other and I think that is just starting to happen I wrote a piece for the financial times the other day about estates going into wellness and we now have loads of good science on it loads of um hard science by which i mean what happens in our brains when what happens in our brains when we walk on an old forest floor and the spores that are sent up go into our brain and go into the same part that releases serotonin you know what happens when we look at something green and so the ability for those who manage land to open that land up whether that's by the NHS giving out prescriptions green prescribing it's called giving prescriptions for access to nature rather than pills amazing statistics in terms of success rates behind all the pilots they've done or whether it's opening up to to people who want to relearn some of the skills that have been lost foraging uh whittling being able to do stuff with your hands you know i i can sort of smell it coming i can see it coming i can see this thirst amongst those in the city and that hopefully will be the beginning of getting rid of this old cartoon of the farmer and starting to elevate the people who grow our food as the most important people the high flyers that they should be the high flyers i mean they are the only ones able to give us what we need we can't exist without food but nor can we exist without clean air we're not going to be able to exist unless we uh reduce carbon emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions the soil

38:37regenerating our soils is the easiest and most effective way of absorbing carbon holding onto water so villages don't flood of creating fungal networks that we can then use to well I mean like that's a whole other subject but the only people who are going to be able to do this are land managers so they are going to be the ones who save us it's interesting because my father used to always say and think about and kind of shake his head at the way that society has gotten itself into a structure where the most important people are people sat in offices moving around fictional money that doesn't even really exist and the people who are providing us with food we don't care about at all um and that always played in my mind is this like insane paradox of the capitalist system and and I see it too what you're saying about um this this interest in return to the land I mean I think there's a great Alfred Wainwright quote about you know people wanting to head back to the mountains um but more recently than that obviously a guest on this podcast is Hector Hughes who is a company called Unplugged which is cabins in the woods and there's about 50 of them across the UK I've stayed in one for people to do detox retreats but he just introduced i think it was last week the opportunity to actually start to work with some of the local farms and do experiences and one of them is milking wow and people are like signing up to milk cows and i'm like wow so great that like we've come all the way around i i we had a family farm growing up in serbia which was like a really miles away from the kind of cotswolds experience that you might think of as farming and um to milk the cow in the morning was such a chore that you had to do so this idea of like the kind of hilarity of people now coming back to want to do that as urban people as a city experiences is quite entertaining to me um but you mentioned cycles and seasons and more connection to nature bringing us in more connection with our own body and I was wondering how aware are you of your own cycle over the course of a month?

40:47I mean it's something that we're just not really taught about ever it's when you think back on lessons at school or even from your mum the idea of being in tune with your body so that you can predict your menstrual cycle or predict your mood or I mean we have been kind of cauterized from it one of the game-changing things about learning about the natural world has been that has been the idea that I mean you can call it intuition or you can call it being in touch with the mind-body connection whatever it is but being able to tune in to yourself to not live entirely in your head has been one of the big things that I think I've been able to do um there's nothing like giving birth where you're ignored by every doctor and you go I know what's happening to my body like the baby's about to come out take me seriously whatever it is to give you confidence in your own body but I'm much better now at knowing my menstrual cycle knowing how it affects me knowing how my body is impacting my mood much better now than I think I was in my 20s but I do think that that has been kind of kick-started by leaving the city and being in the natural world and watching cycles unfold and recognizing that pattern in my own life.

42:29Do you use any kind of supportive tracking mechanism i use clue um an app to help me like track my cycle but but i'm a massive massive kind of tech and nature fan and i write about it and rooted i think tech this is why it's different from ye olde worlde organic farming which let's be honest just used to be called farming but the difference is we can measure stuff now and uh our ability to sort of understand our own cycles is going to be is really tech is so helpful with it there's a thing that's um kind of a bubbling conversation that i'm really interested in at the moment around cycle syncing so syncing the phases of your cycle with your work right um so you could be more creative in one part of your cycle more liable to not want to be shiny and in front of camera and one part of your cycle maybe more interested in writing another part like productivity books gaslight women because they're so often written by men and this idea of like wake up at 5am and have your best ideas and then do xyz with your day is not realistic for for a lot of women and so I'm wondering if you have found any like routine that you've noticed as you've spent more time on the farm and in nature that you've picked up um that you find you know during this part of the month I'm much better at this versus this or even writing like are there any times of the month with your writing that you feel that you've noticed more or less creativity I have noticed that uh there will absolutely be periods of your cycle where your negativity your own self-negativity can kind of stop you leaning into a particular part and of course and usually it is cycle related and then you realize that a few days later and I think that has been a big part of getting older is being I'm being much more in tune with your body is saying my thoughts are clouds they will pass and this doesn't define me and this doesn't define my work this is influenced by other hormones in my body that are being released and tomorrow I'll feel differently and so forgiving yourself a bit rather than beating yourself up and you know it's what you teach your kids right you know your feeling is real in the moment you're feeling it but it won't be there forever it's not great it's not fixed and so when you're talking about creativity it's great like release and giving yourself permission to move through it move through that feeling and not realize that it defines your work i think for a lot of people the assumption is that becoming a farmer and a writer feels like slowing down from a fast-paced city life and being a barrister but it could also just mean a completely new intensity of something that you've you have to learn um how do you feel like the pace has shifted from city barrister life to farmer writer activist life and if both are still feeling fast-paced is there a pace that you're able to work towards or a goal that you have of how the speed at which you'd prefer to live your life i think it is a slowing down um and i think that the the misconception is that slowing down means less productive and it doesn't one of the extraordinary lessons psychological lessons about having to learn to farm without chemicals is the length of the experiment so we are so used to trying something new and getting the results like immediately whatever that is in farming you plant the seed in what october november december we used to plant in december for various reasons you won't know whether that experiment has worked until next august and you can factor in some wild weather on top of that as well and there is nothing as humbling as having to sit on your hands and wait it out to make you slow and stop and notice and not try and control everything to to force you to stop micromanaging and controlling stuff and just let it be and I think one of the I had a life-changing conversation with one of my favourite farmers called Ginge and we were standing in front of a field of mine of barley and it was quite an early organic one so obviously basically farming with chemicals is like creating heroin addicts and when you stop overnight you have some consequences to that because you go cold turkey so we were looking at a farm of fields of barley and I said god ginger's a total disaster I mean like look at all the wild oats and he said isn't that funny all I can see is barley and as soon as he said it it was like I'd put a different pair of lenses on he was totally right I was focusing on the things I didn't want to be there and that meant that that was all I could see so the whole idea of like slowing down and really noticing and stopping and having to think all right that hasn't gone to plan what do I do now or do I do nothing and just let it play out I mean that is that is slowing down but I still think you reach an end result which is the same if not much better than if you had just put your foot to the floor and created and carried on working and pushed growing up in a city where there's so many options available to you there is this sense of well if it didn't work fix it and fix it quickly and uh if you failed like try again immediately and you know the sooner you bounce back the the better um and find the solution you know I was very much brought up like a hustler like fix the thing find ways like make it work and so when that's your default setting of I can fix this therefore I should be in control of this it's very difficult to let go of that that feeling for sure I think we all have that I think our generation have that I think that that's the lesson that we've been sold and I use that word deliberately because the people are telling us that say you can fix this if you buy this the ability to go maybe I can't fix it and you know what maybe I shouldn't because maybe it's going to tell me something and that is and that's an analogy that I think is so valuable that farming has taught me that has a lesson for everybody when you are farming organically or regeneratively you look at what is above the ground to tell you what's below it so you look at a bunch of docks or other pioneer plants usually most farmers go we've got to spray that off can't have that there because they'll reseed and they'll take over or they're taking up space what you do if you're farming organically or regeneratively you go why is that there that means that there is compaction in the soil because those pioneer plants have got really deep tap roots and so nature's put that there to break the soil up and aerate it so it's anaerobic it's not able to grow that is doing a job and what I need to do is let it do its job and it's a bit like you can pick a myriad examples slugs pests so many times so many times we had a problem on the farm and my contractor Richard who's been farming with chemicals for the whole of his life would panic and go I need to stop this happening two years time it just wouldn't be there the weed just would not be there the pests the aphids just would not be there because a natural balance had played out and I think that's the big the big lie that we've been told is we can buy stuff to fix it immediately and of course what you do is just create another problem you fix the thing you're trying to fix and you set off another ripple and it's a sort of uncomfortable truth that there is no silver bullet to any of this stuff it's going to be a tapestry of answers and a tapestry of solutions all working together and it's the same in our lives if we have something whether it's a back pain or writer's block or something just trying to fix that one thing does not really fix the thing which is behind it was western medicine in a sentence i think yeah um in the micro of your day-to-day if you have to deal with a problem or stress or something do you have two or three tips that you've learned in your lifetime of of ways to slow down in your day-to-day that have helped you breathing i know it sounds mad it sounds mad and i remember years ago someone was talking about breathing i was like obviously just breathe turns out we don't the the ability and it's funny I don't know if you have this or other people listeners have this but when you are in a natural environment it's funny how your breath slows down if you're in a forest or you're standing on the top of a hillside if you make a conscious effort to notice your breath you'll be breathing more deeply and I don't know the reason behind that but the ability to sort of breathe in for three and out for five is extraordinarily effective and I think the the way even when I'm in the city which my kids are at school in um in Brixton and uh you know that's not going to change anytime soon so but even in the city you can find a pocket you can find a pocket of the natural world and I think the a way that I'm able to slow down in a micro level is to pay real attention to something so I will I did it this morning like I watched a bee on the lavender in the garden and I just took a cup of coffee outside for I don't know how long it was I don't time it but to really like zone in on the micro detail of something which has the consequence of making you feel quite insignificant and small because there's just like all of this life playing on around you completely irrelevant you are completely irrelevant to its purpose and journey and path and I think like honing in on that on that micro natural world whether it's looking at the sky and noticing that there are still swifts here and they'll leave soon so we should watch them while we can that thing that sort of micro gesture is really grounding i find it really grounding and i think we can do it pretty much anywhere we do not have to be in a bucolic farming setting to do that and what is your current working definition of success now that you've you know moved um from one career to another and had all of these experiences and our definitions of success might change over time um what does it feel like it is to you presently it's a really hard question I think it's a really hard question and I do think it's changed a bit but I mean I if I'm feeling like really grand and pompous I would say that what that my definition of success is being able to leave the world better than you found it in some capacity that can be small it doesn't have to be stopping plastic waste or fast fashion or something like that if I'm feeling like less grandiose I think that it would be being able to

54:53communicate and touch the lives of people who feel like you are living outward rather than inward so you are able to notice and hear and take people with you give people the benefit of the doubt without judgment and bring them along so that they feel part of something I think that is probably a good definition of success reaching outwards to people I love that and what advice would you give to somebody say in their early 20s looking to be more connected to nature do the right thing for the food supply chain that's looking to try and make a small change or a big change I think there's this fantasy that fallacy rather that I'm just one person I can't do anything there are loads of things we can't control political things that we can't control one thing we can control is our food choices and they really do matter it is probably our biggest source of agency where we put our money when we buy food I am incredibly alive to food budgets but when we're paying more particularly in london like we're paying more for a takeaway coffee than we are for a loaf of bread we're paying more for a pint than we are for a chicken we're paying more for bottled water than we are for milk like and there are enough people who will spend four pounds fifty on a takeaway coffee but will not spend four pound fifty on a loaf of bread so those choices are really empowering and they really matter and so taking the efforts to find out the provenance of where we put our money when we're buying food is probably the closest kind of democratic act we can do we've got no power about loads of stuff but that we do have power about and we can complain about the supermarkets we can complain about the fact that five food companies create a fantasy of choice when really they own anything but supermarkets sell what we buy yeah I always love the saying of like you vote with your wallet totally do and you make you make that decision you can be a conscious consumer you've mentioned it a few times before but I just want to kind of for my own sake put it into one question which is you've obviously had lots of learnings from farming that I think are really relevant to people who live in urban areas and live in cities what let's say three things would you love for people to take away from the work that you do that currently live in cities like I do the first thing I'd like people to understand is I suppose an echo of what I just said that we have agency with our food choices it has never been easier to find out how your food is grown through social media and websites the second thing is to put your money where your mouth is if you care about this stuff if you care about clean air clean water if you care about people being paid properly for the work they do if you care about nature restoration if you care about any of those subjects you can support farmers that are doing this because they're selling it online you can buy your meat or your fish or your vegetables or whatever from a delivery box that is that is doing that and the third thing I suppose is that in a world where we are told a lot about how everything is doomed that this is a real solution it's not being peddled by someone with something to sell but it works I've seen it and the science backs it all up our ability to address lots of the issues we're dealing with genuinely lies under our feet and we are ignoring it we are to coin a phrase treating it like dirt and it is instead it is magical it is extraordinary and it's also out there for everyone to to learn about so i think for those in the city there will be a pocket of soil near you somewhere and one of the most life-changing things i think i've seen happen where i've seen people burst into tears do this and I've seen kids respond to it incredibly instinctively, is to go to somewhere, even if it's in the city, and put your hands in the soil and feel it and notice it and then smell it.

59:31And it sounds quite out there. Until you know how our brains are hardwired to respond to it, why in part we can smell that smell after it rains, because of the petrachor smell, we're all linked to it. So to begin sort of igniting that curiosity about stuff we have just completely sort of whitewashed out, there is a Mary Oliver poem which has a line called, attention is the beginning of devotion. And that's really it. Pay attention to it and you will fall in love with it and you will become devoted to it. And it will change everything about how you see the world. she also says um she had a convivial relationship with nature which i like she wrote a lot of her poems walking in nature and her famous poem wild geese was her literally looking at some geese and practicing a poetry technique of using periods at the end of sentences and seeing how that might work itself out i mean um that is you know what we all will what we all think all the time you know what is it you will do with your one wild and precious life I mean what else is there yeah it's so true um well I mean I have so many follow-up questions but I feel like that was such a nice place to leave it so I wanted to ask my final question which I ask everybody which is if I had to watch one film or read one book or look at one piece of art that would help me understand you better what might it be and why well as someone who's written two memoirs there's quite an easy answer to that my book rooted uses the prism of me to take you into the world that I found myself in but the reason I think maybe people have responded it to the way they have is because I go into it knowing nothing and I go on that journey as well so in terms of understanding like why I'm so evangelical about it now how it's changed my life that book describes that in real time how I moved from a place that I think lots of us are in from in the city to to as close to an epiphany as I can get without a church yeah it's true um well thank you so much for your time thank you for having me thank you thank you for tuning in this episode was hosted and created by me Tiana Tambridge it was produced by Whitney Rosenthal with sound and video produced and recorded at Brazen Studios.

1:02:10Cover art and design by Natalia Ruhe and the sponsor for this whole season is Clue. Please subscribe to The Slowdown to be notified of upcoming episodes, tell a friend and leave a review because it really helps a podcast like this get out there into the world. And remember, we're all heading to the same destination and there is no prize for getting there early, so we might as well slow down.