Advertise on podcast: The FarmED Podcast

Presenter of the FarmED Podcast, Alex Dye, caught up with journalist, educator, author and founder of Just Farmers, Anna Jones, earlier this summer, just before Cereals and Groundswell. It’s a fascinating conversation during which Anna recalls her early career working as a newspaper journalist and making the move to the BBC where she worked as a reporter for the flagship ‘Countryfile’ and Radio 4’s ‘Farming Today’ as well as a brief stint as Farming and Countryside Advisor on The Archers.  Her Nuffield Scholarship looked at the barriers to communication for farmers negotiating mainstream media. This led her to establish Just Farmers as a way to create opportunities for farmers to engage with journalists. ‘They can see that we're just normal people, too, trying to do a job in stressful circumstances like farmers. You know, we're up against deadlines, and I always say journalists are as obsessed with time as farmers are with weather. So, if you can understand the pressures that weather puts on you as a farmer, you can understand the pressures the clock puts on journalists and why they can be so impatient. So, let's try and understand each other better.’

Warming: Contains Strong Language Earlier this summer, Alex Dye spoke to one of our previous podcast guests, Sally-Ann Spence, after winning Britain’s Got Talent as part of the Hawkstone Choir. Sally was back in the Cotswolds to sing with the choir at the Cereals event and popped into our studio to give us an update. She chatted to Alex about what it’s like to become a mini local celebrity, how the Choir’s winning song made grown men/farmers cry, and plans for the future, including singing for HM King Charles and heading to a recording studio. She also thanks FarmED for ‘being part of the journey’ as a ‘top secret’ rehearsal space for the Choir in the run-up to the semi-finals.

This month Alex is talking to Katie Ward, MD of Microbz, a unique family business that’s on a mission to encourage everyone to reconnect with the power of microbes by embracing a probiotic life, not just using them in our bodies but also for our pets, in our homes and gardens, and on our farms. It all began when Katie’s dad, Jeff, returned from a trip to Europe and Australia where he’d seen a new technology that excited him: Microbial Balancing Technology. He saw a solution for the planet and started brewing jars in his kitchen. Katie talks to Alex about why microbes are the ‘foundations of health’, the amazing results from using Microbz probiotics on fields of oats where the yield increased by 50% and why we all need to ‘move away from a 1980s’ culture of using products in our home to kill 99.9% of microbes. She also explains what ‘swing voter’ microbes are. ‘There are good microbes and there are bad microbes, but there's only about 10% of microbes that are good and 10% of microbes that are bad. The rest we call swing voters. So in an ecosystem that is more pathogenic, your swing voters go to that side. So if you have food poisoning, you get it very quickly because of the swing voters. If you create an environment that has more beneficial microbes, the swing voters kind of go to that side and create an ecosystem which is balanced. Microbz are offering FarmED Podcast listeners 15% off all their products with the code: FarmEd15 www.microbz.co.uk @microbzprobiotics You can also catch Katie at this event in September https://microbz.co.uk/pages/the-microbial-revolution

In this episode of The FarmED Podcast, guest host, Lydia Smith from NIAB talks to Minette Batters, the first woman to be President of the National Farmers Union, in advance of the publication of her autobiography and farming manifesto, Harvest. The wide-ranging conversation covers everything from how to command respect as the first woman President of the NFU and juggling a high-pressure job with motherhood. Minette talks about the challenges of leading the NFU through Brexit and the pandemic, why she was so angered, on behalf of British farmers, by the trade deal with Australia, the difficult debate around glyphosate and difficult interviews with politicians! She also gets a chance to taste hemp milk and talk about the legal complexities of growing this high carbon capture crop in the UK.

This month, Alex is joined by science communicator Sally-Ann Spence who has spent many years enthusing people about the wonders of the natural world. Her boundless and passionate enthusiasm for the earth sciences has taken her from being a dung beetle expert to ecology, archaeology, paleontology and travelling to fourteen different countries last year exploring sustainable farming. She’s also a member of the fabulous Hawkstone Choir who we hosted at FarmED for rehearsals ahead of their next big day on Britain's Got Talent!

Award-winning architect, Tim Tasker, who designed the FarmED Conference Barn and Cafe, has recently been working on a new building at Honeydale Farm which is constructed of hempcrete, a hugely versatile, breathable and sustainable building material that captures carbon.  Tim has been working with UK Hempcrete and the Centre for High Carbon Capture Cropping and on this episode of the FarmED Podcast, Tim talks to Alex about why he is so excited about the opportunities of hempcrete. He discusses what makes a healthy building and how hemp could potentially revolutionise the construction industry, offering opportunities for farmers and creating sustainable, affordable building materials with could also make self-builds easier.  Tim also talks about his vision for the future -  why we need more beauty in house building and his ‘big aim’ to encourage a ‘network of small businesses’ around the country that could supply localised construction as ‘an alternative to commercial construction techniques.’ Links: https://www.ttarchitects.co.uk/ https://www.ukhempcrete.com/ https://www.carboncapturecropping.com/

Co-founder of FarmED, Ian Wilkinson has been on sabbatical to Australia and New Zealand. In this episode of The FarmED Podcast he talks to Alex about his original journey from agricultural college to seed merchant, as owner of Cotswold Seeds, and then the decision to buy Honeydale Farm with his wife, Celene, and fulfill a dream of being a farmer. Ian and Celene founded FarmED as a regenerative demonstration and place for debate, discussion and inspiration and Ian talks to Alex about his inspiring experiences in Australia and New Zealand - covering everything from kiwis to kangaroos, cattle to cover crops, agroforestry and logging, and the observations he made about the differences and similarities in farming in New Zealand compared to the UK. ‘New Zealand and Australia are made up of people that have often been there for two or three generations from Europe, a huge number of European families in New Zealand, and a lot of those are farming families,’ comments Ian. ‘The importance of agriculture is valued in society more than I would suggest it is currently in the UK.’ Listen to The FarmED Podcast wherever you prefer to listen to your podcasts. Please give us a rating, like or follow.

In this month’s episode of The FarmED Podcast, co-founder of Wildfarmed, Andy Cato, talks to co-founder of FarmED, Ian Wilkinson. Andy famously found fame as part of Groove Armada and then sold his music publishing rights to buy a farm in France, before going on to establish Wildfarmed and starring on Clarkson’s Farm.  Andy talks to Ian about his inspiration, the tough lessons he learned in France, and why he is so passionate about growing regenerative wheat to make flour and bread for the supermarkets. Hear about everything from how he measured nature uplift, ‘such a key indicator of ecosystem recovery,’ by bribing neighbours with pain au chocolats, his views on the use of glyphosate and how he set up Wildfarmed because actions bring about change, and  ‘how can you act in a world of anonymous food?’ His message is ultimately hopeful. ‘I think that based on incoming messages, the idea of agency and purpose and hope, particularly amongst young people, really, really does resonate. And there's this sort of sensation that people are on a kind of slow motion train crash that they can't do anything about, and that there is a way to act through their food choices, is definitely a thing that I think has huge potential. It's not easy to communicate it, but where we have landed it, the response to that has been amazing.’ Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on FarmED’s YouTube channel. Please subscribe, like and leave us a review. They really do help.  Links  https://wildfarmed.com/

Our guest this month is cattle farmer, ecologist, Nuffield scholar and trainer Rob Havard, who will be running a course on Holistic Planned Grazing at FarmED on 11th March.  After working for various wildlife trusts and conservation organisations, Rob returned to his family’s farm and now he and his wife, Lizzie, run Phepson Angus, a 100% grass-fed suckler herd of Pedigree Aberdeen Angus across 1,200 acres of diverse pasture in Worcestershire and Shropshire.  Rob talks to Alex Dye about his passion for combining productivity with ecological gain. ’I do think we can get to industry standard suckler cow stocking rates with probably at least a third if not quarter of the costs and  at that point an ecological cattle system becomes more profitable than a conventional system,’ he says.  Rob describes his eureka moment and how holistic management provides a ‘framework’ for farming. He explains why he was so inspired by the bison on the Great Plains in America and how he convinced his farmer father to embrace farming more regeneratively. Rob also talks about travelling to Argentina and Uruguay as part of the research for his Nuffield Scholarship and closer to home, discussed the delights of involving his whole family in spotting the orchids on his farm, which have increased as a result of their farming systems.  Listen wherever you usually get your podcasts or watch on the FarmED YouTube channel. Please subscribe, like and leave us a review. They really help to get the word out.  Links https://www.phepsonangus.com/ https://www.farm-ed.co.uk/events/220/holistic-planned-grazing-with-rob-havard

For many people for many years, Adam Henson, presenter of the BBC’s flagship programme, Countryfile, has been the face and voice of British farming so it was a delight to welcome him to The FarmED Podcast studio to record our Christmas Special.  As well as talking about Christmas at the Cotswold Farm Park, founded by Adam’s father over forty years ago, Adam talks to presenter, Alex Dye, about his career both in the field and in front of the camera. He discusses the changes he’s witnessed in agriculture and why he does not describe his own farm as regenerative.  Adam talks about everything from measuring carbon footprints and exciting innovations in technology to challenges facing farming in terms of mental health and why he is hopeful for the future but as a tenant farmer, ‘cannot live on hope.’  Having visited farms and agricultural businesses all over the country with the BBC, Adam has some fascinating anecdotes and views on how education should engage young people in farming - perhaps by borrowing from the British Army’s advertising campaigns. He is passionate about the importance of communicating farming stories.

Alex talks to cook, writer and veg grower, Kathy Slack about her book, Rough Patch, and how growing vegetables helped her recover from burnout.  Kathy had a high flying career in advertising before she suffered a physical and mental collapse that left her ‘distraught, crippled by depression and grief and panic’.  She explains how her mother coaxed her out of the house into the garden and she ‘would sit on the raised beds with my cup of tea and just watch the soil and the weeds and the bugs and the life there…and something about being close to the soil started to heal me.’  Then she just sowed a couple of seeds and watched them grow. She  describes to Alex the ‘sense of awe and promise and wonder’ of seeing ‘a tiny little seed turn into a radish in like three weeks’ and talks about how growing veg can be more empowering than growing flowers, giving a sense of the agency, of actually growing food to feed yourself.  Her book includes recipes and Kathy also runs cookery classes, so she talks to Alex about how she plans her growing! Kathy describes working in the kitchen garden at Daylesford and writing food columns for lifestyle magazines and she offers advice for anyone who knows nothing about horticulture but wants to get going with growing some veg.  ‘I realised that I could mostly ignore the manuals and just experiment and now I'm a very messy gardener, not particularly proficient but I really embrace that messy ramshackle way of growing. There are so few places in life where it's okay to be a complete failure at something and you go well that's okay I'll just it again,’ Kathy says. She advises against jumping straight onto an allotment. ‘Start with radishes or lettuces or something that if it goes wrong, you can just sow it again. Then maybe if you've got pots and a warm balcony, maybe progress to tomatoes the next year. ‘So start small and get hooked on that joy of going, here I am picking a tomato that I've grown myself.’ Links: https://www.kathyslack.com/

This episode of The FarmED Podcast is recorded on location, at Baddaford, Guy Singh-Watson’s farm in Devon. Guy, founder of Riverford, has been dubbed ‘the most brutally honest farmer in Britain.’ Here, Guy talks to Alex about how he finds regenerative agriculture a ‘difficult subject, because I absolutely welcome the sort of broad church approach that has drawn in farmers who, for whatever reason, felt antagonised by organic’ admitting that ‘we got it wrong somehow. We did alienate a lot of conventional farmers, the farmers who really we should have been getting on board.’  But it’s the ploughing vs glyphosate argument that he wants to see more openly discussed. He explains why he hates the term ‘food poverty’ and why his mission has always been to produce food ‘that's accessible and affordable by all,’ whilst also being fair to producers and the increasing challenges of that.  He also talks about his wrangles with the supermarkets, why he is anti-commodity, why we should all eat less meat and how his hopes for the future, for  ‘size and specialisation’ replaced by the mixed farming model.

Something a little different for this episode of The FarmED Podcast, which covers computer systems and farming systems and a little agricultural history too. You’ll discover why farmers grow grass as well as what AI and beekeeping have in common. Alex is joined by Paul Totterdell, who started his career studying IT and is now Director of FarmED’s sister company, Cotswold Seeds, which supplies 20,000 UK farmers with diverse seed mixtures that are good for soil health, animal health and the health of the planet.  Around 75% of UK's land is farmed agriculturally, Paul explains,  and a huge proportion of that is grassland. ‘All the grass that you see out there in the fields when you're driving past, that hasn't just grown there by itself. We've had to plant that. A lot of people don't realise that grass needs to be planted.’ Paul tells us how the agricultural upheavals after the end of the Second World War created a reliance on fertiliser and high yielding ryegrass. Shallow-rooted, the plants struggle in the drought conditions we’ve seen this summer.  ‘Cotswold Seeds have been looking for many, many years at different novel plants that we can plant alongside the ryegrasses and sometimes without any ryegrass whatsoever,’ Paul explains.  He goes on to talk about a new scientific research project which Cotswold Seeds and FarmED are both involved in, known as CHCx3, which is looking at how plants can capture carbon from the atmosphere and mitigate climate change.  Paul also talks about how all of this relates to bees. Paul’s apiary was the very first project to be introduced at FarmED, long before the other livestock and crops arrived.  Watch on YouTube and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please do give us a like or a follow and leave a review.  Links:  Cotswold Seeds  https://www.cotswoldseeds.com/ CHCx3 https://www.carboncapturecropping.com/

‘We are a rainforest people, who live in a rainforest nation,’ says conservationist and writer, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, speaking to Alex Dye on The FarmED Podcast and explaining why these ancient forests are so vital for combating climate change as well as for our own wellbeing.  In his bestselling memoir,  ‘OurThe Oaken Bones,’ Merlin talks about how, while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan,  his armoured vehicle was hit by a landmine that momentarily blinded and deafened him, leaving him with PTSD. His wife Lizzie suffered several miscarriages and his father was hospitalised with Covid.  ‘I felt so extremely lucky and privileged to have the farm at home and to be able to go and hide and retreat and heal within what we knew as the old oak woodland at Cabilla,’ Merlin explains.  It was thanks to Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforest of Britain and David Attenborough who talked about rainforests in his Wild Isles series, that led to the discovery that the forest at Cabilla was much older than they’d originally realised, part of the Atlantic temperate rainforest, mythologised in stories and legends, which would once have cloaked much of Britain. When Merlin and Lizzie moved back to Cabilla seven years ago they wondered: ‘How do we make a living from this land? How do we restore the land as well? Agricultural consultants advised them to cut down the trees but instead they planted another 100,000, tripling the rainforest area, and brought back beavers.  ‘The whole point is that it turns into a lower-yield conservation-grazing agroforestry scheme,’ Merlin tells Alex. ‘Atlantic temperate rainforests are a pinnacle habitat in the UK for a number of different ecosystem services. For example, they are one of our most effective carbon sequesterers. So at a time of climate crisis when we need habitats that absorb and sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere, nothing does that more effectively terrestrially in terms of what we can protect and restore than Atlantic temperate rainforests.’ Merlin and Lizzie have created a wellness retreat at Cabilla, so that others, including veterans and NHS staff suffering from burnout, can benefit from the psychological and physiological restorative properties of the rainforest.  They have also established The Thousand Year Trust. The Trust is so named because it aims to pull people out of short-term thinking, ‘You see a lot of articles at the moment saying things like, can we reverse climate change by 2030? We absolutely can't. But could we reverse it by 3020? Well, yes, we could. We can set the conditions and it will be something that the next 20 generations will work on and then we'll get back to a place of climate health. And I think that the ability to think in multi-generational timeframes is really important.’  Hear how The Thousand Year Trust is also crowdfunding to build Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research field station, a place where scientists from across the world, can study these extraordinary habitats.  Discover More: Cabilla Cornwall: https://www.cabillacornwall.com/ Thousand Year Trust: https://thousandyeartrust.org/

This month on The FarmED Podcast, Alex Dye talks to acclaimed author and producer/presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, Dan Saladino. Dan explains how his childhood in the citrus and olive groves of Sicily led to his ‘passion for telling stories of food and flavours’ and just why these ‘wonderful stories’ are ‘the richest subject for any journalist’, a lens through which to look at ‘politics, power, science and culture.’  It was The Arc of Taste, a slow food project to save the world’s most endangered foods, that inspired Dan’s celebrated book, Eating to Extinction, and Dan recalls some of his ‘favourite food memories’ created while researching the book. These include time spent with the Hadza people in Tanzania, Africa’s last hunter gatherers whose extraordinary relationship with the honeybird demonstrates the perfect 'collaboration between humans and animals’. He talks about why the drink made from endangered Perry Pears, is ‘the champagne of England.’ Regenerative farming and its focus on increasing biodiversity and thereby increasing resilience, is crucial to our future and the future of food security in an age of conflict and inequality, Dan believes. ‘We’ve enjoyed huge productivity but it’s been at the cost of resilience,’ he says. Our ‘dependence on cultivated plants’ and ‘a few species of food, in an increasingly unstable and fragile world’, makes us dangerously vulnerable to climate change, diseases, and upheavals in world trade. He talks about how ‘shocks to the system’, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and food price inflation have already had huge social and political impacts. Looking to the future, water shortages could be catastrophic for food production. The answer is to build resilience into our food systems.   Ultimately hopeful, Dan explains why we should all ‘seek out and explore the diversity of foods in our own locality,’ and ‘think like the Hadza’. He also reveals to Alex his favourite take-away dish! Find The FarmED Podcast wherever you usually listen to your podcasts. Do please subscribe, like and leave a review.  Follow on @thefarmedpodcast Links Read more about Dan Saladino and his work:  https://www.dansaladino.com/ Read about the Arc of Taste:  https://www.slowfood.com/biodiversity-programs/ark-of-taste/