Having been inspired by Rosamund Young’s latest book The Wisdom of Sheep, Julie Baber shares with us the magic of Kite’s Nest Farm, where “the kitchen is warm, the tea copious, the milk creamy”. Tucked into a valley on the scarp slope of the Cotswolds, and with nature in abundance, it’s no wonder the farm draws you in.

From my sleeping bag on the floor of the flat at Kite’s Nest, I can see straight up into a sky full of stars that seem to go on forever. A shaft of light from a bright moon cuts across the Velux window. From unseen trees an owl calls. The urge to go out into the soft dark of the early morning is strong, but I daren’t move for fear of waking others still asleep around me.

We blew in yesterday on the edge of Storm Ciaran, three women and a baby, to join those already preparing the memorial gathering for Richard Young, much loved and admired

Richard had lived here for over 40 years and had combined hands-on farming with tireless research and campaigning on such things as animal welfare, antibiotic misuse and soil health. That the suddenness of his passing avoided his having to leave the farm seems appropriate if untimely (and isn’t death always untimely for those that still have so much to do?)

Difficulty in leaving Kite’s Nest was a subject that came up often in tributes and conversations during the gathering. The farm draws you in, so that even when you do leave, (and like some mythical otherworld, that is often much later than anticipated), you can’t quite shake it off.

In her new book, The Wisdom of Sheep, Richard’s sister, Rosamund, describes their arrival. “We fell in love with the farm as soon as we saw it, tucked into a valley on the scarp slope of the Cotswolds, with the land rising from about three hundred feet above sea level to about nine hundred feet at the highest point.”

The SFT’s Executive Director, Adele Jones, reports back from her time at COP28. Adele shares her reflections on this year’s conference, considering what needs to happen once the ‘strange bubble’ of COP has popped and easy words must be followed with committed action on food and farming.

As the dust settles on COP28, I thought it would be worth sharing some reflections on a very interesting couple of weeks.

I have to say, I was sceptical before heading out, worrying that we were going to have the same conversations with many of the same people, just in somewhere sunny and a bit controversial.

Mostly that was not the case, thankfully. It was a very busy, productive and actually pretty hopeful week in Dubai for the world of food and farming. For obvious reasons, the atmosphere was a little strange and the international media never really knew whether it was coming or going in its stance on the UAE presidency, with the big conversations about phasing out versus phasing down of fossil fuels rightly dominating.

Food and farming on the agenda

However, importantly, food and farming was, finally, on the agenda. Over 160 countries signed the food systems declaration on the 4th of December, representing the first time the topic has made it into the formal COP negotiations (although since typing this, it appears these negotiations didn’t get too far before they once again stalled which is worrying – let’s hope they really are just temporarily stuck rather than stalled for good).

There were other key announcements during the week, including:

• From the 150+ non-state actors who came together around a shared agenda to transform food systems.
• Over $2.5bn worth of financial commitments to support the implementation of the Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action.
• Twenty-five leading philanthropies issued a joint call for a step-change in funding for regenerative and agroecological approaches, which currently receive just $44bn of the $250-430bn they need.
• The launch of the COP28 Declaration on Climate and Health, which again represents the first time this topic has formally been on the agenda.
• A food loss and waste roadmap detailing more than $300m in ready-to-fund investments in seven pivotal countries.
• The launch of COP28’s Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes. This is a collaborative corporate platform to put large-scale agricultural landscapes on a regenerative path ahead of COP30.

Amongst many more!

Particularly significant for us was the announcement of Regen10’s Zero Draft Outcomes-Based Framework. This framework is the result of in-depth analysis of more than 150 existing frameworks, which highlighted the Global Farm Metric (GFM) as the most holistic, outcomes-based, farm-level framework that prioritised the collection of primary data useful to the farmer. As such, the GFM has formed the basis of this zero draft framework, which will be trialled in countries all over the world in the coming year.

What made this COP different?

A key differentiating factor between this COP and others in the past, was the fact that government, NGO and private sector conversations were all much more joined up. This was aided by the way things were laid out, which this year meant that the blue zone (state actors) and green zone (non-state actors) were located right next to each other, rather than completely separate, which allowed for a significant amount of cross fertilisation of conversations and ideas.

Linked to this, my next observation was that whilst there’s still a long way to go, the private sector has really stepped up. As many of you know, we have been involved in the Sustainable Markets Initiative for a while now, working with many of the world’s largest food companies and financial institutions on the future of sustainable agriculture. More recently, these discussions have focused on financing the agricultural transition (watch our session on this theme here), underpinned by common, robust and transparent measurement. See the SMI report outlining the draft financial model that launched this week.

The big question for me though, is how we make progress fast on financing the urgently needed agriculture transition, whilst operating within the constraints of a global economic system which is dishonest and unjust. In the words of Helmy Abouleish of SEKEM during one of the Future Economy Forum events, “we must…use the system to beat the system” and start to reward farmers for the positive impacts they are delivering, whist at the same time working to embed the principles of true cost accounting within government and business circles to ensure we value our environmental and social assets appropriately. There is, of course, an ongoing argument about what should and shouldn’t be monetised (cultural / indigenous knowledge for example), but as stated during the session by Hunter Lovins from the Future Economy Forum, at the moment, not valuing these things means that in the eyes of decision makers, they will continue to have a value of zero.

Thankfully, there are people already on this journey to ‘beating the system’. In my COP reflections blog last year, I talked about SEKEM and how they are finding ways to provide financial incentives to farmers delivering carbon benefits. Since then, SEKEM have not only cemented this with the Egyptian Government – who are now one of the first countries in the world to include carbon credits for organic and biodynamic farmers in their balance sheet –  but are also exploring the option of rewarding farmers for nature and social benefits to drive a truly holistic farming transition. We will be piloting the GFM with SEKEM next year.

Another amazing case study is the Community Managed Natural Farming project in India, led by Vijay Kumar in Andhra Pradesh, which is working to transition the lives of smallholder farmers (with an emphasis on women) through peer-to-peer learning and the re-direction of government subsidies. In the last seven years they have onboarded 6 million farmers over 8 million acres impacting over 50 million people – helping them transition to regenerative farming techniques.

Finally, in Australia the Farming for the Future project is working with a network of farmers to drive a transition to production systems which deliver for nature, climate and health, whilst also being more profitable. This process involves building robust evidence to demonstrate the relationship between enhanced natural capital and farm profitability for core production.

The train really has now left the station on food and farming, and the real work starts now to keep new and emerging projects on track. Despite many of the optimistic conversations I have had over the last two weeks, I did also hear some of the old rhetoric creeping in on things like ‘all livestock is bad’ and ‘embracing tech is the only solution’. Ultimately, the answer to fixing food and farming involves many solutions, many different people and the ability to learn from examples of where things are working in the real world, using these to catalyse and inspire change elsewhere.

Where next?

COP is strange bubble, but I leave encouraged by the practical nature of conversations about next steps. Looking ahead to COP29, which, after some intense political jostling, has been confirmed as being hosted by Azerbaijan, my sense is that it is likely to be slightly smaller, with less of the fanfare and more focused on the negotiations, which I think could be a good thing.

The big build up now is to COP30 in Brazil. By then, we have to have some of the solutions we have been discussing, including financing agriculture in a different way and the phase-in of true cost accounting in the real world – both of which depend upon the adoption of a common framework for measuring impact.

COP30 must be about showcasing, learning from and working out how to scale the things we are already doing, rather than rhetoric and commitments in words. After all, by then, we will be at the end of 2025, with just four harvests left to go until we hit – or miss – those aspirational 2030 targets.

Pollinators play an essential role in our food system, with an estimated three quarters of crops depending on them. Yet, due in part to the impacts of intensive farming practices, their numbers are in decline. Here, beekeeper and Chair of the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association, Jo Widdicombe, looks at the issue of genetic diversity and why it is critical to safeguarding the future of one of our key crop pollinators – the honey bee.

In the last 50 years, we have seen a decline in many insect populations including some bumble bee and solitary bee species. In 1992, the varroa mite was found to have reached Britain and the number of honey bee colonies and beekeepers declined rapidly. After a campaign by British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) and others, highlighting the plight of the honey bee, the number of beekeepers and colonies started to rise again. Some have suggested that the increase in honey bee numbers has impacted on other insect species causing a decline through competition, but insect numbers were declining long before honey bee populations started to rise again.

The issue of available forage is an important one for beekeeping, as well as for other pollinating insects, but it is an issue that beekeepers have very little influence over. Intensive farming techniques, the use of chemicals, the loss of habitats and the resulting reduced availability of forage, all impact on insect populations. These are all issues that sustainable agriculture, together with good management of ‘wild spaces’, may be able to address, but beekeepers also need to play their part in developing more sustainable practices.

What do we mean by sustainable beekeeping?

Beekeeping is often described as a partnership between the bee and the beekeeper, and both need to benefit if the system is to be sustainable. Beekeepers have a strong interest in keeping their bees alive and healthy, so will use techniques that they believe will safeguard their stock. As with many enterprises, though, there can be a conflict between short-term economics and long-term sustainability, and what happens in practice may not be beneficial in the long run.

Apart from the local environment and available forage, the most important aspect of a sustainable system is maintaining the qualities of the bees themselves. Just like any other livestock, the characteristics or behaviour of the bees can be assessed, and the good traits selected. We can rear offspring from the healthiest colonies, for example, or from those which are calm, rather than aggressive. Others will choose to breed from their most productive colonies. By rearing offspring from those that perform well under local conditions, we can develop a population that is ‘locally adapted’, rather than the common practice of buying in queens that are genetically programmed to thrive in different environmental and climatic conditions.

The use of hybridisation in the honey bee

In the course of the honey bee’s evolution, about 28 subspecies have developed in Europe, Africa and the Near and Middle East. These are the result of the bees responding to particular environmental and climatic conditions in relative geographic isolation. In the last few hundred years, honey bees have been introduced to most parts of the world. In Northern Europe, including the British Isles, the original subspecies was the dark European honey bee, Apis mellifera mellifera.

In 1859, Britain received its first recorded imports of another subspecies, Apis mellifera ligustica, from Italy. We have continued to import and hybridise the subspecies ever since. In recent years, the level of recorded imports of queens has been in excess of 20,000 per annum including imports of ‘breeder queens’ from which many offspring can be reared.

Hybridisation is a technique which is widely used in animal and plant husbandry. The crossing of different breeds or varieties to produce the benefits of hybrid vigour, can be repeated at will. The hybridisation of honey bee subspecies was a technique pioneered by Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey. He experimented with crossing different subspecies and the resulting offspring were known as Buckfast Bees. The same technique is still in use today, particularly in Denmark, to produce the Danish Buckfast which is exported around the world.

The problems of hybridisation in honey bees

In the first few weeks of her life, a queen honey bee will fly out from the hive, perhaps two or three times, and mate with numerous drones. This mating, commonly with 10 to 15 drones, will last her a lifetime of egg-laying, around two to three years and sometimes longer. It is a system that helps to maintain genetic diversity in the bee population and reduces the likelihood of inbreeding becoming a problem.

To produce a hybrid strain of bees, such as the Buckfast, isolated mating stations are used or the instrumental insemination of queens. This is to ensure that the queens mate with the selected breed of drones. The offspring of these bees have hybrid vigour and can produce good results. The problem arises in future generations as these colonies produce new queens which mate with numerous drones from the surrounding area. Local bee populations quickly become a random mix of different breeds.

These colonies can have issues of aggressive behaviour, but the biggest problem is that queens reared from these colonies do not breed true. If, for example, one finds an exceptionally good colony and rears some queens from it, the offspring are likely to be extremely variable and not display a close similarity to the parent colony. This makes selection and improvement of bees very difficult and encourages beekeepers to buy further imports in a bid to get a better bee.

Is there an alternative, more sustainable system?

Although beekeeping can be a solitary occupation, bees interact and are affected by other colonies in the area. If someone brings in a queen from the Mediterranean, for example, those genes will soon be in many colonies in the area. The drones that colony produces mate with new queens from local colonies. So, whilst some beekeepers avoid the use of imports, they can still be affected by the issue of random hybridisation, through the mating of their queens with neighbouring drones, possibly up to a six-mile radius.

The way forward is to start thinking about selection and improvement within our local populations, as a whole, instead of thinking that we are beekeeping in isolation and that the random introduction of new queens is the answer. Maintaining genetic diversity within our local populations is very important, but importing genes suited to different climates and environments is not the answer. There is plenty of genetic diversity here already. We should remember that the subspecies are genetically diverse within themselves which is how they have survived over the millennia.

How do we progress from the current position?

Currently, we have a great mixture of bees in this country descended from many different subspecies, and we are continually adding to this through further imports. If we want to refine our population, we should stop importing bees and allow natural selection to go to work. Gradually genes unsuited to bees in this country would drop out through the loss of certain colonies.

Natural selection helps to produce a bee that is a good survivor, but, just as in livestock farming, we are also looking for qualities that the beekeeper wants, such as a docile nature, good productivity, and so on. We can build on what nature selects by assessing colonies for the qualities that we want. We can then choose to select which colonies to rear further queens from. It is a system based on natural and artificial selection (by the beekeeper).

Drones produced by our newly reared queens are produced from unfertilised eggs and are, therefore, direct offspring of our original selected queens. Gradually, the quality of the whole local population can be improved. It is a system that has been shown to produce a locally adapted bee and to improve quality whilst maintaining genetic diversity. This is in contrast to the current system of importing bees to address the constant decline in quality and continuing the vicious circle.

The National Bee Improvement Programme (NatBIP)

The National Bee Improvement Programme has been launched by The Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association (BIBBA) in order to place our beekeeping on a sustainable footing where quality can be maintained or improved. Qualification for participation is very simple; the beekeeper merely agrees to avoid the use of imported, or the offspring of recently imported, stock.

It is felt that this is the first step to putting our beekeeping back on track and allowing us to build on nature’s survivors, combining this with what is good for the beekeeper. Although it is described as a national programme, it is built up by local beekeepers working with local bees. Just as the shift to landrace crops and native livestock breeds underpins a more resilient and regenerative farming sector, so prioritising locally adapted bees is essential to securing a stable and sustainable future for beekeeping.

For more information on the National Bee Improvement Programme, including details of how to take part, please visit the BIBBA website.

Featured image available here under the Creative Commons license.

 

 

 

The Global Farm Metric (GFM) was started by the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) in 2016. Its roots lie in the SFT’s work on true cost accounting which is all about assessing the real costs and benefits of different food production systems and supporting farmers to adopt more sustainable practices. After rigorous development of the GFM framework, it is now being tested on farms around the world to ensure that it is useful for farmers everywhere. Here, the GFM trials team share some of their latest news, including the launch of a five-year trials programme with hundreds of farmers in the US state of Kentucky.

The Global Farm Metric (GFM) team is excited to share the news that our partners in the US, the Organic Association of Kentucky (OAK), have signed a contract with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to trial the GFM with up to 110 farmers per year for five years. The ambition is that the ‘farm sustainability assessment tool’, based on the GFM and developed by OAK in collaboration with the SFT, will help to reward farmers for adopting more sustainable farming practices.

Brooke Gentile, Executive Director of OAK says, “We have an incredible opportunity to deliver significant technical assistance and incentive payments to enrolled farmers to get soil health and conservation practices implemented. We also have the space to think collaboratively and creatively about unique and lasting market development opportunities for climate-verified products.”

The GFM research team have worked closely with OAK over the past 18 months to adapt the assessment for US farming systems, which OAK piloted with a handful of farmers earlier this year. We are now taking it to scale and connecting with others in the food system.

 

In the continuing annals of the Brexit catastrophe is a, perhaps unexpectedly, knotty issue around seeds that is impacting smaller scale agroecological seed producers and growers. Pre-Brexit, some 80% of UK seed was imported, most from the EU, the biggest seed producer in the world. But, in the rush of separation between the EU and UK seed lists, a wide array of open-pollinated varietals, especially local and ‘heritage’ seed, was missed in the transition – and that’s affected what’s available. This has hit box schemes hardest. One grower recently bemoaned the availability of open-pollinated red pepper seeds after having to purchase F1 hybrid seeds (at £5 for five seeds) – he couldn’t get the open-pollinated varietal that was more suited to the locale and land on which he farmed (and which cost £1 a packet instead of £5).

In July 2022, a new wave of paperwork arrived specifically directed at organic producers. The costs involved are significant and, consequently, it has had a considerable impact upon seed producers. Marianne Landzettel, who wrote about this issue for the Sustainable Food Trust a year ago, predicted that “things will get worse”, and indeed this has proved true. For organic and agroecological growers on the ground, getting diverse seed on import has become much more difficult, largely because of the introduction of seed testing by the Animal and Plant Health Agency. The testing is expensive for seed producers, and it requires a large amount of seed to be tested. So, again, smaller-scale producers are significantly affected.

One of the key problems lies in the fact that there are few seed producers in the UK and it’s not always easy growing in the British climate, even with localised varietals. Further, there is a dearth of organic seed – the Gaia Foundation point out that only “3% of all the seed available to grow on the UK market” is organic. Recognising this, Gaia, working with the Soil Association, Landworkers’ Alliance and Seed Cooperative, has set-up the ‘UK and Ireland Seed Sovereignty Programme’, which aims to support small-scale growers by creating “a resilient agroecological seed system with regional diversity at its heart”.

Katie Hastings, who works on the Seed Sovereignty Programme, says the programme started out of a recognition that there was a real lack of seed saving skills in the UK. It is becoming increasingly important that seeds be adapted to the climatic conditions of where food is being grown. “When a farmer buys F1 seed, they cannot save their own seeds from that crop for the following year, meaning that there is not a chance to build regional resilience in their seeds.” Now five years into the Programme, Katie comments that they are seeing an increase in seed being produced on farms in the UK and Ireland which will build more resilience into what’s being grown. “This obviously means that, as a country, we are more resilient to changes in laws around importing seeds.”

Producer, Kate McEvoy, of Real Seeds, has commented that there is also very little knowledge about how much seed is being produced overall in the UK, which then also makes it difficult to assess whether this is something of concern. There needs to be some concerted study of the sector to assess its standing.

Kate has asserted that, “a sustainable seed system is the foundation of a sustainable farming future that can feed us without exploiting or damaging the land.” That is a critical starting point in the transition to sustainable farming that is becoming imperative. Government has recently concluded a ‘Call for Ideas’ that will feed into the development of a  ‘Plant Variety and Seeds Strategy’; there is hope that the ideas to come out of that consultation will open wider conversations with Defra which might address strengthening UK seed sovereignty, encouraging seed saving more widely in edible horticulture, and ensuring that open-pollinated seed and local varietals suited to the UK climate are prioritised.

Food waste in the UK and across the globe is a continuing issue and one that must be addressed more completely as we move forward into this new century. Food waste, in its broadest manifestation, encompasses everything that is lost in the process of food production, from the food in the field and on the land, to what is lost in harvest and in the packhouse, then moving off the land and into its transport and to its markets, until it is bought and then not eaten. The global statistic for food waste (as a whole) is around 30%, almost a third of our food.

What is most overlooked in this process is farm loss and waste. This takes many forms dependent on farm size and what their operation is. Suffice it to say, however, that most farmers don’t know the scale of their loss and waste, and that can have a big impact. It’s estimated that 3.3 million tonnes is lost or wasted on farms every year, releasing 10% of overall agricultural emissions and contributing a quarter of food loss and waste overall. The irony of all this, is that farmers don’t seem to really understand what’s at stake for them – the significant financial value that they may be losing.

Getting on top of farm waste

Ben Hartman’s book The Lean Farm gives thoughtful consideration to why waste happens on farms, and it is truly myriad. He details 10 kinds of on-farm waste, from overproduction – which he identifies as ‘the most odious’ because these unsold goods waste both investment and product – to waste that comes from transport, overprocessing, inventory, waiting and motion and all the way to ‘overburdening’ and ‘unused talent’ which both reflect on the waste of good labour. The expansive way that Hartman tackles waste on the farm is holistic; he recognises the interrelatedness of different kinds of waste and this helps him to see a bigger picture. Having an understanding of how waste is generated within a farm’s system, is critical to curbing it.

Measuring farm waste can help farmers become more aware of how much they are wasting. The World Wildlife Fund, UK has recently published its ‘roadmap’ to reducing farm waste, across the spectrum of UK farms. It aims to make a sea change in the number of farmers working to reduce their food loss and waste on farm, which will ultimately both reduce emissions and increase profitability. The WWF maps an inverted table of farm waste, which starts with ‘prevention’ at the top – the ideal starting point for eliminating waste – and moving through ‘reuse’, ‘recycl[ing]’ and ‘recovery’ (in relation to energy) to end with ‘disposal’, the worst outcome for farm waste. Ideally, waste should work through this pyramid, moving as much as possible into surplus and as little as possible into disposal. If we can reorient thinking around minimising waste to increase profitability and sustainability, we will make significant progress in reducing our waste issue overall.

The Sustainable Food Trust in its work with the Global Farm Metric, has contributed some of the thinking around how to involve farmers more deeply in managing farm loss, waste and surplus. The Global Farm Metric defines on-farm sustainability and enables farmers to measure their whole-farm impacts in a consistent way, with categories including soil, water, productivity and resources. It is designed to align existing assessments through a common framework for sustainability. This establishes a baseline of farm-level data that can be used to monitor progress towards sustainability goals at a local, national and international scale.

Waste is also, arguably, aided by scale. It’s easier to manage waste if you are small than if you are big, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you waste less – waste is not always proportional to size and scale. Whatever the size of your farm, having a plan or set of protocols to identify and manage waste and loss is vital. And the thing to always remember here, is that minimising waste will always, ultimately, help support a farm’s bottom line.

As an example – what works and what doesn’t?

My husband and I run a small organic mixed farm that is mainly focused on horticulture. We have a box scheme that fluctuates in size throughout the year (in summer, many of our customers have produce from their gardens and drop out for three or four months), but we also do a weekly market year-round which is at its height over the summer holidays, so it balances out pretty well. And we’ve set up a system through the week that works well for us. Our market is on a Monday, so we pick on the Sunday, and when market finishes, anything that isn’t sold comes back and goes into our veg boxes on the Tuesday. Also on the Tuesday is the pick for Wednesday and Thursday boxes and by Friday, all the boxes for the week are out the door. Any food hanging about by the end of the week, comes into the house, and because we have both family and volunteers living with us, there very little left. So, that works great for us.

What doesn’t work as well is our cancellation policy – we currently allow our customers to cancel boxes with two-days notice and while, in principle, we should be able to take the customer off the list prior to picking and packing, our relay on this isn’t the best. This is because we are really busy on the farm and we have a small crew and are generally, overstretched. We’re not as efficient as perhaps we could be, and efficiency really requires focus. To remedy this, we’ve extended our cancellation policy to request a week’s notice on box cancellations. The problem here is that customers like to be able to cancel on quite short notice, so there’s been some resistance to the longer notice period. We’ve explained the logic of the shift and how it is focused on cutting our waste, but it’s not a perfect world. We’re hoping as time goes on a bit, they’ll settle in.

There is a lot that we do really well on the farm in terms of waste. We are religious about our composting as it’s such an important component of our fertility building, and we’re good with using our surplus – the pigs we raised for our own kitchen were fed on the grade-out potatoes and spent veg, which they loved. But, the next step is to have a much better grasp on where we are losing or wasting veg in our system and getting a better understanding of how to measure its impact and ultimately reduce it.

A new generation of young farmers, growers and landworkers are coming into agriculture, motivated by a need to do something meaningful in the face of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. None, however, come from a farming background. Here, they talk about the issues that they face as new entrants and the choices they’ve made and why.

Finn Halsall

Finn Halsall is 23 and has been working in Cornwall for the past 4 years. He aims to help tackle the key problems of our world and to try and make the planet a better place. For him, this means focusing on the climate crisis and social injustice through growing food in an ecological way. Since graduating in Conservation Biology and Ecology, he’s been working at two growing projects – as a trainee and now grower at Goonown Growers , and at a community field called ‘Love Land’, which is a branch of Falmouth Food Co-op, where he’s leading on the creation of a new commercial growing project.

Tell me about yourself – how did you get interested in growing? Do you come from a farming background or is this new territory?

I work at a market garden and also a community growing project – I’m part-time on both. I got into growing about four or five years ago, when I was in Nepal. I was really inspired by the self-sufficiency that I saw over there, where local people were so resilient and growing a lot of their own food in rural areas. I was hooked and came back from travelling and made a huge garden at home and started reading loads of books and watching videos, and it escalated from there.

After travelling, I went to university to study conservation biology, and I still thought that I’d just garden and grow my own food on a large home garden scale and work in wildlife conservation as a career. But shortly after starting uni, I decided that what I actually wanted was to have a career in growing, and after completing my course, I took my first job in farming.

Did you at any point do any kind of formal training?

No, not like qualifications – just lots of time spent volunteering and visiting places, and it was great to have experienced so many different projects first hand. I’m yet to discover a formal qualification that really fits into what I’m interested in. Especially because conventional agriculture colleges and courses barely touch on organic.

You work on two different projects as an employee – how did you find the work?

Yes, at the market garden I’m an employee; I started out with a paid traineeship scheme. And at the community garden, I’m also an employee. There, I’m leading the growing project and I manage the actual vegetables, so it’s a lot of responsibility. Fortunately, this year, my salary has been funded externally, but going into next year, we’re going to try and make it sustain itself financially, which is a big deal. It’s definitely a great step on from voluntary roles to getting paid to work on farms.

Is your long-term goal to own and farm your own land, or are you happy working for and with others?

Definitely the dream is to own my own land, largely because I would like to also have a bit of land to live on. But helping on someone else’s project or getting involved in an existing project isn’t out of the question – it just requires finding the right project. I’d love to be involved in a project from the start – whether that’s on my own or with other people.

What are the main issues you face as a young grower?

There are obviously key issues in getting started: access to land, the financing that you need. Many of those setting up their own projects come from privileged backgrounds, owning their own property or having financial help from family. There are definitely a lot of barriers getting into farming. I’m lucky to work on a farm which pays me a wage, and to also be involved in a community project which has access to funding. If I was to set something up on my own, I’d need a huge amount of money and access to land, which is ever increasing in price and harder to find.

I’d like to live on the land I work, but there are all kind of rules and regulations and planning issues and policies regarding that. The One Planet Development policy in Wales is a step in the right direction.

In terms of support for the work you do, are there things that you feel young people need to go forward in farming and growing?

I don’t know how anyone can make young people feel attracted to farming. I think there needs to be more education – I learnt how important farming is and that it’s a meaningful way to take action on the various injustices in the world. It needs to be talked about more and encouraged from top down and in schools. Volunteering offers great opportunities for young people to learn, but how do we get more young people to volunteer? More training opportunities would be great – the Kickstart scheme, which was government funded training, was brilliant and a lot of farms took advantage of it. It allowed young people to be paid for their work.