comes, you don't really ever have to think about the end consumer. It's a massive shift to say, okay, maybe we should think about where we're going to sell this before we grow it. But it's also crazy. No business


makes something without thinking about who's going to buy it apart from farming. And that's because it's been subsidised by the government for so long. It is a big shift, trying to work out who's going to buy it before you grow it. But one of the things that has helped, again, has been connectivity. The internet's changed the ability to do that hugely, but I think I can see a point where farmers who share land borders get together to do landscape-scale kind of change. That also gives them quite a lot of power because they can then enter into bigger agreements for larger numbers. It's a bit like an old-school cooperative.


Although many of the regenerative farmers in your book are men, you also encounter a lot of hostility from conventional farming professionals – do you think more women will come into regenerative farming? I think that women will be the key to how regenerative farming progresses. And that is because, at is most elemental, it is hard not to see the toxic masculinity within conventional farming, which can be literally as basic as ‘I’ve got bigger, stiffer stalks of wheat than you. My tractor is bigger than your tractor.’ And what regenerative farming has that conventional farming lacks is collaboration, whether you're equipment sharing or whether you're sharing advice, because you're the only people doing it nearby. But it also requires failure and admissions of failure. I remember talking to Helen


Browning (CEO of the Soil Association), and she said, 'It's funny, when I went


into conventional farming [in the 1980s], I was the only woman in every single room. And then when I found organic farming, I walked into the room and it was like, Oh, this is where the women are.' And that's why I think women are going to be the key to regenerative farming, because whether it's gender or socialisation, they are more used to compromise and less afraid of saying, let's look at how the natural system works. Why use a product to kill it when we can work out what insect might eat it – that way of thinking. Women are less afraid of the stigma of saying it, as opposed to men who quite like thrusting names of all the chemicals that you get.


How can consumers support regenerative farming? For now, organic is the easiest way because it is certified. And if you buy something that's organic, it is guaranteed to be grown without synthetic chemicals and nitrogen. The animal welfare standards are significantly higher than the legal ones. It's the only way of knowing unless you buy it directly from the farm. But I do think that social media


has provided a kind of gateway to the public, to some of the more progressive farmers' ventures like Wildfarmed, started by Andy Cato, for example. They're very good on their social media and at saying, 'Look, I'm going to do a video about how this has grown.' There are loads of farmers actually who are doing that, who are using social media to regain their autonomy.


Where does regenerative farming sit in terms of rewilding? Is rewilding the right ambition, overall? Wilding is really important, and I absolutely accept there are some animals, creatures, birds, insects, bacteria and fungi that cannot live


21


in farmed areas and need those wild spaces. But I also think that in the UK, we have had a farmed landscape for a lot longer than many other countries, and we have plenty of species which have adapted to it. They can coexist and have done up until really the Green Revolution. And so I think that while wilding is important in areas of unproductive land, we must still be able to grow our food. Otherwise, rewilding means we are just outsourcing our climate problem. So rewilding quality land here just means shunting our problem onto somebody else. We should not feel good about the fact that we are restoring systems here if we're depleting them elsewhere.


You were a barrister before you became a farmer. Did that help when it came to writing Rooted? I didn't think about this at the time. But standing up in court for ten years doing jury speeches was really good preparation. You have to win people over. And I am still and always have been interested in the voices of people that we don't get to hear who often are critically important to our lives, and we never meet them or hear from them or understand how they kind of underpin everything. That's always been, and I think will continue to be, what I want to write about because those people's stories are always fascinating.


See p.27 for our review of Rooted.


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