Diane Bohna explains the grazing system

Bringing back native grasses

A 45-minute drive to the east of Bohna’s ranchland lies the Sierra Foothill Conservancy (SFC). “Grazing is essential for re-establishing native grasses,” says rangeland manager Billy Freeman. Perennial native grasses have long and deep roots, often going 20-30 feet deep. Most pastures in the valley are re-sown regularly with annual Mediterranean grasses which make for much better feed because of their high sugar content. But their roots grow to just two or three feet and, like other non-native annuals, they are green and palatable earlier and compete heavily with the long rooted native varieties. In order to re-establish native grasses, Freeman has to time very precisely when and for how long the cattle are allowed to graze: non-native species will be rich in sugar and palatable earlier than the native species and therefore will be grazed harder. That leaves them little or no chance to develop seeds and mature. Because the annual grasses are so tasty, native species get grazed lightly which exposes the growth nodes, and once the cattle have been moved these grasses will be able to develop seed heads. Over time, native species recover and soil fertility increases. “We are seeing a lot of changes,” says Freeman. The level of biodiversity and water infiltration has increased. The bank of the creek was eroded, and the cattle rounded off the sharp edge so the vegetation has come back on the bank – there are cottonwoods and willows once again. And the thick layers of dead grass, which prevented fresh growth, have gone, and the grazing has restarted decomposition. Ninety acres of riparian pastures have been re-established next to creeks, by having them grazed once or twice a year for four to six days only.

“Grazing is essential for re-establishing native grasses,” says ranchland manager Billy Freeman

“Land needs cattle more than we need meat”

The SFC is a non-profit research facility, but can anyone make a living from ranching? Joe Morris, a cattle rancher in San Juan Bautista, says yes, it’s possible. For him, too, holistic management is key: “Attend to the needs of the whole – livestock, plants and soil microbes,” says Morris, and most of all, observe! He points out the huge variety of cool and warm season grasses on a pasture close to his house. He says, he was extremely surprised when he learnt in a workshop run by ecologist and soil scientist, Christine Jones, that grasses only make up about 10% of the species in grassland – the rest are forbs, broad leaves, shrubs and lots of flowers.

The ranch gets on average just 16 inches of rain, most of it from October to April. The grasses start to dry up by April, and even though it hadn’t rained in six months, there were vernal pools with rushes and, nearby, patches of wet soil underneath green salt grasses.

The ranchland on the San Andreas Fault

Unlike Billy Freeman, Morris does not use grazing to establish particular varieties, rather using perennials in general, which were in short supply when he took on the ranch. He has been finishing cattle since the late 90s. He buys animals aged 15-20 months directly from ranchers or at auction and finishes them at 24 to 30 months. This gives him the flexibility he needs for grass management and to react to factors such as weather events. The second enterprise is an Angus and Hereford cow/calf herd. To raise and finish all animals on the ranch wouldn’t be feasible because such a system is complicated and inflexible, and the market does not always reward it, says Morris. Lastly, he grazes cattle for other ranchers.

Morris markets the meat of his animals directly. Customers order ¼ or ½ an animal online, which means they will receive a mix of meats. Between June and November he delivers orders to 60 people at five different pick-up locations on each trip. The schedule is tight, customers have 15 minutes for pick up. The meat isn’t cheap, but Morris has a customer base of around 400 people who are willing to pay not just for high quality meat from grass-fed animals, but also for the land stewardship and ecoservices provided.

For [Joe Morris] holistic management is key: “Attend to the needs of the whole – livestock, plants and soil microbes,” says Morris, and most of all, observe!

More than meat

Ranchers should be paid for the ecosystem services their animals deliver, says Rob Rutherford. Before his retirement, he was a professor in the Animal Science department at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Raising sheep has been a life-long passion, as is playing golf. When his local golf club had to retire nine holes due to lack of water, and thistles took over, Rutherford brought in his sheep. It did not take long until 90% of Italian thistle was gone because “the sheep have changed the biology,” he says. Marketing the meat and playing as much golf as he wants for free suits Rutherford well. But to him, using sheep and cattle as ‘land managers’ is much more than a quirky idea: “We don’t know what ecosystem services are worth,” says Rutherford, “the Reagan Library was protected by grazed areas around the building, which acted as a firebreak and saved the library from burning down in 2019.”

Together with others, he is lobbying Cal Fire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) to change the regulations and officially recognize grazing as a fire-fighting tool. Costs for fire insurance have increased dramatically, so much so that it’s become unaffordable for many homeowners, some properties can’t be insured at all. In view of the recent fires that ravaged parts of Los Angeles, premiums will likely increase further. “If homeowners were to get a rebate if their houses were surrounded by a fire break, they would likely be happy to pay a rancher to bring in animals to maintain it.”

Solar farms need livestock too

For 11 years, Katie Brown, one of Rutherford’s former students, worked on establishing a “sheep ecoservice schedule” for what at the time was the world’s largest solar farm project. Once the panels were erected, the area was seeded with a perennial and annual seed mix, containing grass and forb species that naturally occur in the area such as foothill needle grass, pine blue grass and goldfields. The grasses established so well that the team realised they’d need to move in sheep immediately. Today, the grass under the solar panels is grazed by 3,000 to 6,000 sheep, at about 60 sheep per acre.

Dakota Glueck, rancher and cattle coordinator at TomKat, tends to the cattle

The panels create a unique microclimate that changes the plant species composition, says Brown. Because they provide shade, evaporation, transpiration and ambient temperature are reduced. That leads to increased biodiversity, and native perennials from dormant seed banks start to flourish and the total biomass production goes up, which means the number of grazing animals can be increased.

Brown believes that ‘solar farm ranching’ or ‘agrivoltaics’ can work financially – ranchers get paid for the grazing services, and their sheep provide wool and meat for local markets. The cost of grazing a solar site is typically cheaper for the solar farm.

As for the San Joaquin Valley, Brown believes that fallowed land there can be restored to a native mix of perennial and annual vegetation. For any such project grazing is essential – sheep can even graze salt grasses – and holistic management is the tool. 

Creating a market

From creating firebreaks to solar farm ranching and golf course management, sheep and cattle can provide a whole host of ecoservices, as well as providing us with food.

Kathy Webster is the Food Advocacy Manager at TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation in Pescadero. She sees her role as a maker of connections. Holistic management benefits the environment, increasing biodiversity and soil health. But ranching is also a business and needs to be profitable. One way to achieve this is to encourage more people to eat grass-fed beef.

For Webster, getting beef into schools, universities and hospitals is key. In 2018, TomKat Ranch started the ‘Beef2Institution’ initiative and hosted ranchers like Joe Morris as well as university, hospital and school food procurement managers to discuss how to get meat from local, grass-fed animals into institutions. Most institutional kitchens source everything from companies such as US Foods or Sysco. And some schools can’t buy raw meat because they either don’t have access to a full kitchen or are not set up to receive raw beef product. The ‘Beef2Institution’ initiative was able to create cooked products, like cooked beef crumble and patties, which schools can use.

Webster also began working with Santana Diaz, a trained chef and Director of Culinary Operations & Innovation at UC Davis Medical Center. Their goal is to get more local, grass-fed beef into all UC campuses and five affiliated hospitals, and Diaz has been coming up with ideas for meals that are tasty but use cheaper cuts of meat.

A unique sales pitch

Sound data on the nutritional value of grass-fed beef, and research done on the benefits of holistic grazing for soil quality and biodiversity, have helped Webster to come up with unique arguments about why buying grass-fed beef from ranchers at a fair price through public procurement ticks all the boxes. Hospitals and other institutions have sustainability and climate goals. Webster does not focus on the low emissions of locally produced, grass-fed meat nor does she attempt to compete on price. Her argument is: buy grass-fed meat for a fair price as a means to reach the sustainability goals of your organization or institution. With the research done at TomKat Ranch, she has the data to show that beef produced in a holistic grazing system increases biodiversity and soil health, helps to mitigate drought conditions and flooding, creates wildlife habitat and, as a healthy, nutrient dense food, actually gives chefs and the people they cater for a lot of bang for their buck.

Photos courtesy of M. Kunz.

Patrick Holden delivers a talk at our Beacon Farms launch event in July 2024

Although the Beacon Farms idea then went into hibernation, it wasn’t abandoned, not least because of my conviction that my ‘seeing is believing’ experience when I was just five years old (which inspired me to go into farming), could be replicated on a much wider scale.

Back then, my mother, encouraged by a local retired clergyman, took me into a cow shed on a small dairy farm near Epping Upland in Essex and planted a seed which has remained with me ever since. I remember loving the atmosphere and the smell of the cow byre and thinking – I’d like to milk cows!

Interestingly, there is another impression that has remained with me since that day. The clergyman, a retired bishop, invited us to tea, and asked me to say grace. This was not a request to which I was able to respond, since this was not a tradition in our family. My parents, despite or perhaps because of their Anglican upbringings had reacted against this particular aspect of their childhood parenting influences, but the sense of embarrassment I felt is still with me to this day!

I mention this only because the fact that the inspiration from the farm visit was juxtaposed by another very different and lasting impression (of shame), emphasises the point that early impressions of very different natures can often stay with you throughout life.

My dairy experience was later reinforced by other farm visits, influences which collectively planted a seed that eventually germinated and fused with others, so much so that by the age of 22, I’d moved to our farm in West Wales and was milking a herd of Ayrshire cows!

Our soft launch of the Beacon Farms Network has so far received an amazingly positive response, with a growing number of farms having signed up from across the UK and Ireland. Our entry criteria for Beacon Farms is that they will combine the following three features:

• Practising or moving towards biologically-based, sustainable farming
• An interest in informing and hopefully inspiring visitors about the story behind their food
• Facilities for hosting visits and events

The range of opportunities for farms to host visits is very extensive, as we have experienced on our own farm over the last couple of years.

Becky Holden leads a farm walk at our Beacon Farms launch event

I have had in the back of my mind for some time the idea that we could play our part in improving public understanding of how food is produced in a sustainable way. I am also concerned by the reality that most people, even those in rural areas but especially those living in cities, have very few opportunities to visit a farm, yet they are intimately connected with their food three times a day. If you go into a supermarket with the aim of finding out where your food was produced, its degree of sustainability or localness, you will likely leave disappointed. To counter this growing gulf in understanding, it’s clear that there is an opportunity to host many different farm gatherings.

On our farm we have hosted 40 visits over the last two years, ranging from schools, including pupils and teachers from primary, secondary and tertiary education; health professionals (a one-day gathering of NHS procurement executives); cookery training; weekend events including the Wales Permaculture Association and the Specialist Cheesemakers Association; several team days including the Welsh Government’s Health and Well-being of Future Generations team and the Agricultural Policy team; Young Farmers clubs; and farmer discussion groups.

Cumulatively, we have learnt a lot about what works and what doesn’t work when hosting visits, all of which we would love to share with members of the Beacon Farms Network, many of whom also have their own valuable experiences to share.

Regarding facilities, ours includes a converted threshing barn, with a church like atmosphere – albeit without a history of worship, although you might say that the seasonal threshing of oats over more than a century has left an atmosphere which is not unrelated to prayer!

We’ve put in underfloor heating, a wood burning stove, an adjacent eating area, a large kitchen with a beautiful ash table made from wood from the farm, an annex, plus toilet and shower facilities which collectively can easily cater for large gatherings.

“… most people, even those in rural areas but especially those living in cities, have very few opportunities to visit a farm, yet they are intimately connected with their food three times a day. If you go into a supermarket with the aim of finding out where your food was produced, its degree of sustainability or localness, you will likely leave disappointed. To counter this growing gulf in understanding, it’s clear that there is an opportunity to host many different farm gatherings.”

This meeting stage has now been augmented by sleeping accommodation comprising what will soon be nine bedrooms, two in nearby eco-cabins with catering facilities and bedrooms above the threshing barn kitchen area and the adjacent stable house, simple but all lined with ash and larch panelling, mostly sourced from our farm and planked up on our sawmill.

What is amazing to experience is the profound effect that visiting a working farm has on individuals. In our case, visitors are able to witness the processes of milking, cheesemaking and, this year, carrot growing, as well as the general daily and seasonal activities that characterise all farms everywhere.

Taken together, this facility, in our case largely financed by my dad’s legacy, plus additional borrowing, has created a wonderful stage for a whole range of meetings.

There are of course many other farm education networks out there, some promoting conventional farming practice, but all trying their best to improve people’s understanding of the story behind their food. We do not want to compete with any of the other initiatives in this field but rather complement them by sharing insights and resources.

Our aim is for the network to be mycelial and built on trust and transparency, to eventually stimulate a larger movement enabling hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people to have a direct experience of food and farming, which hopefully will influence them for the rest of their lives.

As part of the newly launched Beacon Farms Network, the Sustainable Food Trust is also working in partnership with The Harmony Project, an educational initiative which supports farms in hosting school visits for young people aged between 5 and 14 years old. Through this partnership, we will develop and share a range of curriculum-linked resources and templates to help participating farms communicate their stories, whilst also supporting them to connect with local schools. 

If you are interested in finding out more about the SFT’s Beacon Farms Network, please get in touch with our Head of Projects, Bonnie Welch, via email: bonnie@sustainablefoodtrust.org.

David in Castilla y León

I emptied a bag of mixed raw fleece that I had used to pack around a gift of cider in my suitcase, across the back of the mistreated bus. It caused a great deal of interest from David and Antonio, who were particularly impressed by the softness of the Shetland and Portland wool. David caught a shearling ewe for me to inspect and I was surprised by the short length of the staple and relative coarseness of the fleece – soft but not as soft as some of the breeds I handle at home on a regular basis. Many wool producers in the UK have merino prejudice, which is unsurprising, given the way it dominates the world market and is held up as incomparable by many involved in the international wool trade, including some key figures in British Wool.

David explained how the merino has been bred-up into a bigger sheep in New Zealand and Australia, with the wool staple there double the length of that in Spain. Spanish wool cannot compete, and Spanish shepherds receive the same pittance per kilo that we receive in Britain from the external trade. I asked about internal markets for wool and was told there were none. To make matters worse, Andalucía is a blue tongue restriction zone and as, according to Antonio, all the fleece in Spain is sold via Andalucía, they have been unable to sell anything for four years.

Spanish merinos grazing

We talked about shearing. They shear in April and do it themselves to avoid having to pay the Eastern European shearing gangs to remove what should be a valuable crop but has become another cost in an already struggling industry. The ‘wool is worthless’ mantra is clearly not unique to Britain.

I spent much of this summer in the UK, at home in the West Country, working with a shearer and talking to customers about their fleece. Most intended to burn it, unable to see any alternative given the cost of transporting it to the British Wool collection points – on top of the cost of paying us for the shearing. Now I find myself in central Spain, repeating the same argument (with the help of Beth as an interpreter) that I had been making all summer to anyone who would listen. How insane is it to throw away this versatile natural fibre that the sheep of both Britain and Spain were developed for and choose instead to make our clothing and other fabrics from oil – a finite resource that, through our misuse, is poisoning our water, land and air?

The argument wasn’t lost on David and Antonio as the exchange of questions turned to meat and subsidies. To put it simply, Spanish shepherds cannot make a living from sheep as meat alone and depend heavily on subsidies. Antonio asked at what age I send sheep to the abattoir and when I told them it was usually around 18 months, they both seemed surprised. For my part, I was so surprised at the age they send theirs that I had to question the interpreter. “Did they really say 20 days?” I even held my hands out to the approximate size of a 20-day old lamb to check, but no, I had not misunderstood.

I explained how I believed that shepherding could only be sustainable, self-financing and profitable if wool was restored as an integral part of the product as a whole, and that this could only happen with the significant development of internal markets. I told them how my shearing partner and I were attempting to build a business around not just shearing the sheep, but marketing and processing the fleece, adding value for both us and our customers. We all agreed that this was a hard task but that it was really the only way forward for both our countries.

“How insane is it to throw away this versatile natural fibre that the sheep of both Britain and Spain were developed for and choose instead to make our clothing and other fabrics from oil – a finite resource that, through our misuse, is poisoning our water, land and air?”

The way forward and the way back – sheep were never really meant to be penned inside small paddocks of intensively farmed grass, unless it was for short periods to manure arable land. In Britain, most of the commons were lost to the Enclosures Act. With that came the loss of a centuries old tradition of moving sheep continuously across open downland and the seasonal movement of flocks between valley, moor and mountain. Here in Spain, the transhumance has continued into living memory and is still carried out by a few shepherds determined to maintain their deep-rooted cultural practices.

David pointed to a swathe of open grassland below the tree line on the nearby mountains. That, he explained, is the cañada – the drove road for the transhumance of the sheep to their over-wintering ground in Extremadura. It is a journey of 340 kilometres. Because the sheep have moved slowly across these long, wide droves, every spring and autumn for hundreds of years, a unique biodiverse habitat has been maintained by the brief bi-annual grazing and trampling. The sheep self-medicate on the abundant herbs along the way, and the shepherds have learnt through generations of transhumant families the value of those herbs to humans too. The grazing grounds in both Castilla y León and Extremadura get a long rest from sheep, again maintaining biodiversity, and significantly, reducing parasites and the need for chemical inputs.

“Here in Spain, the transhumance has continued into living memory and is still carried out by a few shepherds determined to maintain their deep-rooted cultural practices.”

I wanted to know if the wolves follow the flocks or wait for their return but there is too much to discuss, so that will be a question for next time. According to the International Wolf Center, “Incomplete statistics reveal that Spanish wolves kill some 10,000 head of livestock annually.”

All too soon, our meeting was over. David and Antonio had to get back to work and Beth and I had to go and find the family members that we abandoned in Pedraza. All of us agreed that the conversation needs to be ongoing, or as Antonio put it, “It would be very interesting to exchange ideas about the proper use of wool and responsible animal husbandry.”

A few days after my return to Britain, I had a message from Beth to say that Antonio had been in touch. He had spoken to a friend who still carries out the transhumance in their region. The friend would like to meet us and invites us to join him on at least part of his journey next year. I guess it’s time I learnt to speak Spanish!

If you’re interested in finding out more about sheep and transhumance in Spain, you can read Merino (Churras and Merinas), History, Culture, Landscape.

Featured images courtesy of Julie Baber.

Bronwen takes notes during a selection visit to Montgomery’s Cheese, one of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s cheesemakers who produce Montgomery’s Cheddar

SFT: What are the key motivations of the customers who buy your cheeses? It is clearly taste and provenance but are there other drivers?

BP: I would say that each customer brings their own set of values and interests to the transaction. One of the skills of the monger in the shop is to be able to identify what’s driving somebody to be interested in our cheese, even if they might not necessarily be able to articulate it themselves. Taste is one of the big things in our shops and we encourage our wholesale customers to set up systems where people can taste the cheese they are going to buy – before they actually buy it. It means that they are going to go home with the cheese that they like the best, but it also means that they’re making their buying decisions holistically, not just by the price, not just by the label. Really, it’s about what’s delighting them. We don’t apply different margins to different cheeses in our shop, so, hopefully, people – even if they like the more expensive cheese – can buy a small piece if their budget is limited. I think that’s really critical.

“Each customer brings their own set of values and interests to the transaction. One of the skills of the monger in the shop is to be able to identify what’s driving somebody to be interested in our cheese, even if they might not necessarily be able to articulate it themselves.”

A counter full of cheese at the Neal’s Yard Dairy shop in Bermondsey, London. The selection of cheese changes week to week; on display in this photo, from left to right, is Harbourne Blue, Pevensey Blue and Ragstone

SFT: You have recently undertaken a pilot with the SFT’s Global Farm Metric. What motivated you to do this?

BP: This goes back to the last question about the diversity of farming systems that are being used by the suppliers of our cheeses. We were acutely aware that we’re not farmers and we don’t have the capacity to make minute judgements about the environmental impacts of different farming systems, even though we visit the suppliers that we buy cheese from all the time.

We don’t have all of the data in front of us and we don’t have the eye to necessarily see what’s important and separate it from what’s just visually apparent. We thought it would be really interesting for the people who are farmhouse cheese makers and are making the milk as well as the cheese, to participate in the Global Farm Metric (GFM) trial, for a number of different reasons.

First, to get a better sense of the diversity of the farming systems and how they measure up next to one another, [but also] so that we could help people to understand what the opportunities and risks within their own systems are, encouraging their own path towards progress in whatever form it takes. Clearly there are customers who are interested in this, and, if we had the data to back it up, it would be great to do some experiments, perhaps putting filters on our ecommerce platform on the website. So, if people wanted to buy cheese that comes from a high biodiversity system, you hit the filter and 10 cheeses come up that have actually demonstrated that they are excelling in this area. There are some exciting opportunities around that, but first we need the data to get started.

SFT: How many of your cheese makers are participants in the GFM trials?

BP: We invited all 25 of the farmhouse cheese makers that we work with and about 20 of them signed up. We’re right in the middle of the trial now, so obviously it’s a big ask to get people to spend 4-6 hours completing forms online when they are busy running a farm. It’s hard to carve out extra time when you’re exhausted at the end of a long day. It will be really fascinating to see how many of our cheese makers complete the process and the feedback that they give to the GFM team – I think one of the outputs of this is to actually help the GFM team make their metric better and easier to use and more relevant, and to make sure that the information is actually good for farmers. It’s a two-way process.

Another one of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s cheesemakers, Curlew Dairy in Yorkshire, where Ben and Sam Spence make Yoredale Wensleydale

SFT: The best cheese making represents a combination of the quality of the raw milk and the art and science of the cheese maker. What would you say is the right balance of these two features for the best artisan cheeses?

BP: Such an interesting question – is it the milk or is it the making? Is it the nature or the nurture? They’re both really important. Right now, we have a collection of cheeses where the farming is really excellent and maybe the cheese making leaves something to be desired; and on the other hand, we have a collection of cheeses where maybe the farming is a little bit more intensive and a little more conventional but the cheese making is superlative. It’s been really amazing to me how you can, in general, with some exceptions, really taste the quality of the raw milk in the finished cheese, even when the cheese making isn’t great.

On the flip side, there’s a lot to be said that with amazing cheese making you can actually bring a lot of quality, character and interest to very boring milk. Really, what we’re aiming for is to help both of those parties to discover the missing half. I can’t point to very many places where they’ve got everything.

“Is it the milk or is it the making? Is it the nature or the nurture? They’re both really important.”

SFT: Have you had any feedback about the interest of your customers in knowing more about the story behind their cheese?

BP: This is one of the reasons that we’re so interested in participating in the Global Farm Metric trial. We’re going to have some data from the trials, and we can then test a hypothesis. I couldn’t tell you with any certainty what the most important factors are to our customers – it may be that there are different groups of customers who would rank them completely differently from one another. By making that information more readily accessible, either on our website or on the labels in our shops or by being able to train our team to talk about them more fluently, we’re going to find out a lot more and we’re going to be better at hooking up the right customer with the right cheese for them.

Check back in a year or two when we’ve completed the trial and put some of the stuff to the test and we’ll see if we can identify what the main drivers are for people who care about the provenance of their cheese. If there’s good data that shows people are making buying decisions according to the provenance of the cheeses, that’s a much more powerful agent for change.

Photos courtesy of Neal’s Yard Dairy.

SEKEM’s sustainable farms in Egypt

Water is such a critical issue across the globe and SEKEM has been so successful in terms of managing water systems sustainably – do you think what has been learned from SEKEM can be disseminated more widely, especially in arid climates?  And more broadly, what do you see as the future of water on our planet?  How do we manage it in a way that is fair?

“In terms of sustainable water management systems, we need more action, we need more change. It needs the expansion of concepts like agroforestry, and also really up-to-date technologies to reduce water use. In a country like Egypt that only has 50% of the water it needs to survive, even the 20% that we save if we switched to biodynamic agriculture is not enough. We need many, many more researchers and projects, looking at biodiversity, agroforestry and technological innovations. I’m very happy to tell you that we have a lot of research going on.

I could tell you that even with only 50% of the water, we could feed the whole population – but it would need collaborative research and initiatives. But I’m very optimistic that with a bit more wisdom, we can live a meaningful life with the systems available on mother earth. Some of it is going on already at SEKEM and at the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development. We are happy to share our research regarding sustainable water management.”

You’ve been hugely committed to sustainable development – what is needed to drive it forward faster?

“Sustainable development from our understanding is holistic development. A development where political development, economic development, cultural development and ecological development go hand in hand. We feel that this kind of basic development will approach us out of the future, whether we wish to or not, or we want to or not, it’s coming. And it will either come out of our enlightenment, so we understand why we choose the light, or out of crisis. What we can do today is opt for enlightenment, opt for contributing to sustainable development, opt for innovating and engaging with sustainable development. It is the development of the future, there is no other option, there is no plan B or alternative to it, and hence, it’s very important that we engage and work with it sustainably. We want to make sure that it provides all goods and services in a competitive way – it doesn’t harm nature, it helps society and supports societal development and ultimately contributes to the unfolding potential of each individual human being. I don’t think that there’s any alternative, it’s just the degree of engagement and emotional interaction of a person to another person which will differ, but in the end, it is something which I believe will come because mother earth will not leave us to destroy nature or abuse the natural kingdom.”

SEKEM’s sustainable farms in Egypt

How do we prepare ourselves for the impact of climate change on agriculture? It’s already clearly visible across the globe – how do we turn the tide?

“In Egypt, we have 7 million acres managed by 7 million small-holder farmers, with each one of them having approximately an acre or less, and obviously climate change with the temperature rise and humidity is already affecting us, changing the varieties that we grow. And on the other side, today, Egypt’s 7 million farmers are contributing to climate change in the same way as all other farmers, in the UK and across the world, just by emitting three to four tonnes of CO₂ every year. The whole of the agricultural sector contributes nearly 30% of all emissions. But our organic and biodynamic farmers can prove that there’s an alternative, they can sequester carbon in their soils, sequester carbon in their trees, they fight the emission of methane by their system of waste management, turning wastage into compost into black gold for farmers. In the end, they contribute to carbon sequestration in the soil, at five, six, seven tonnes an acre – at least – a year. When you put this together and evaluate it, it’s a real ecosystem service and farmers could do a fantastic job if you honour that work and pay them for this service by issuing carbon credits, which would allow them to simply grow biodynamic crops and sell them at the conventional price and still have a much better income to survive on. And at the same time, it would improve biodiversity and reduce water consumption in Egyptian agriculture. All this together shows us that there are alternatives and that by engaging in organic and biodynamic farming, we can turn around this huge challenge.”

SEKEM’s sustainable farms in Egypt

Tell us about the Economy of Love? It’s such a vivid idea; how does it work?

“The inspiration for the Economy of Love comes from my late father. At the very beginning, when we started 47 years ago in the desert to set-up SEKEM farm, it was very clear that biodynamic agriculture, which is the method that we applied, was fantastic. It really supports the stability of soil in the Sahara and generates a real contribution to systems change. It also feeds a different management of the supply chain, a different management of the economic system – it has transparency, and everyone gets a fair part of the value. We ultimately aim for a fair and just price for the consumer. And at the same time, we ask all the time, can this farmer develop himself and his family? Can this farmer develop his abilities and contribute to his village? The Economy of Love tries to include social, cultural, economic and ecological criteria, bringing in many more dimensions. Only those farmers who enter this Economy of Love, in the end can apply for carbon credits, which will enable them to sell their biodynamic products in the market at the same price as conventional products which makes it much easier.”

All photos courtesy of Samuel Knaus.