 soil is the stomach of the plant. The plants don't have an internalized stomach, they have an external stomach and they spend 30% of their photosynthetic energy exuding sugary sap into the root zone, which nourishes a symbiotic community of bacteria and fungi upon which their digestion depends. It's exactly the same in the human stomach. We host a symbiotic community of bacteria upon which our digestion and our health depends. So when we look at the soil anew, we can imagine it as the collective stomach of all the plants on earth digesting and feeding and what a beautiful kind of metaphor that is and it just changes one's attitude towards the soil. Patrick Holden is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Patrick is the founding director and chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust. After studying biodynamic agriculture at Emerson College, he established a mixed community farm in Wales in 1973, producing at various times wheat for flower production, sold locally, carrots and milk from an 85-cow, a shire dairy herd, now made into a single farm cheddar-style cheese. My favorite. He was the founding chairman of British organic farmers in 1982 before joining the Soil Association where he worked for nearly 20 years and during which time the organization led the development of organic standards and the market for organic foods. His advocacy for major global transition to more sustainable food systems now entails international travel and regular broadcasts and talks at public events. He is patron of the UK Biodynamic Association and was awarded the CBE for service to organic farming in 2005. Patrick is passionate about the application of nature's principles of harmony to food and farming which is explored in the Sustainable Food Trust's latest initiative, the Harmony Project. Patrick has spoken to wonderful people all around the world at events in the United States to his Royal Highness Prince Charles as well as environmental activist George Monboy. Patrick, welcome to the show. It's an honor to have you. Well, thank you very much indeed for inviting me. I'm so glad that you found the time and that you can make it. It's beautiful to have you here. We have a lot in common, a lot of things that we've thought about and been working on a long time so we're going to have more than enough to speak about this this entire time and we'll probably get down into some rabbit holes and get into some deeper subjects and we'll just let it play out however it is because there's a lot of important topics we need to cover today to raise awareness and to move this shift. I want to start first and foremost with a question of how have you weathered this crazy time, this pandemic, Black Lives Matters, the Brexit and all the crazy things that have kind of really bubbled to the surface this year. Having been doing this for over 40 years, I imagine you've been speaking about what's coming, how we need to prepare, how we should change, maybe the future of farming and what we could do better. Has any of that given you resilience or what can you give us a little journey of what you've experienced just this year during the pandemic? Well, yes, I start with Brexit or the pandemic. Brexit was an interesting and unfortunate development in our history. I was not one of those who voted for it. In fact, funnily enough, I was in America when the vote came through. I couldn't believe it was happening. So that's been an ongoing saga, not over yet as you know. We could talk about that a little bit. It has got one or two silver linings. The only obvious silver lining I can see is that it has resulted in a restructuring of agricultural policy in England and the devolved nations, of which of course Wales, where I'm speaking to you now from the farm in Wales, is one. And some of the new proposed policy for agriculture is seriously enlightened. I would describe the Welsh draft agricultural policy scheme, which has not yet been launched as being effectively the world's first government scheme to promote regenerative agriculture. So that's something good. As far as the pandemic is concerned, it's disrupted our lives, obviously, as it has everyone else's. We, our cheese sales, which is the main product that now we sell from the farm, was going all over the world. Still is going all over the world, which is a strange thing to say when we believe in local food, but that's just one of the paradoxes of the situation we find ourselves in. Also, quite a lot to restaurants, and that all stopped, of course. And then we decided to go for the first time in our 47-year history to once a day milking because we just thought it would be easier. And this phrase we have furloughing, which means kind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer pays the wages. And we were worried about the income stopping because the cheese making stopped because we couldn't make it work. But anyway, fast forward a year or whatever it is. No, it's nine months, isn't it? Since it also went serious. And cheese sales have picked up again. We are making cheese. The demand is strong. I think the farm is fine. The farm is seriously resilient. We have been less resilient, but our spirit is resilient. And so I think we're okay. And we will come through this and build the farming system into the future. And I feel very excited about that, actually. I think that the farm, I always like to think if the food system is an organism, the farm is the cell. And we need to make the cells healthy. And if we have healthy cells, we have a healthy organism. So from the ground up, the work that we've been doing on this farm for now nearly 50 years, I think is it affirms my belief in the system that we're both believing because it's visible here. And it's exciting. And I think the future is extremely exciting, potentially, if we can get through these turbulent times and all the rest of it. And as for the Black Lives Matter developments, I mean, that is a massive conversation we could have. But I think there's no doubt about it that there's some sort of karmic, inherited anger in the, say in the African American community, but amongst Black people and people of color who have been exploited all over the world. I also think there's a kind of inherited sense of guilt that white people have. I mean, I'm not free of this. The United Kingdom is not free of this. We were a country where we exploited people all over the world. We were participants in slavery. And my own great-grandfather was part of quelling the Indian uprisings. So there's a lots of stuff there that I think is still working itself out of us, the ones who exploited and the exploited ones in different ways. And it's a very difficult thing to talk about. But I think it needs to be talked about. So if you want to go there, we can go there. But anyway, summary, things are okay. Good. That's so wonderful to hear. I do want to kind of go deeper into two little subjects that you mentioned. And I think they're cross-cutting into some respects. So people of color in the United Kingdom, there's been numbers of upwards of 200,000 immigrant workers working in food production up to some season, 600,000 is what I heard, whether that's accurate or not. But a substantial amount of immigrant workers every year, which had a strong influence also on the Brexit vote. And ties also to people of color because most of those immigrant workers are coming from other places that there's a lot of different cultures and races and colors involved. Well, in our case, of course, most of the economic migrants were from Eastern Europe. So they weren't or aren't people of color. But it is a very interesting thing that how could we hope, and of course, it's exactly the same in the United States, we've kind of denigrated the social and economic status of people who work on the land and produce food to a kind of underclass. And in America, of course, it's the Hispanic population, but in the United Kingdom, it's Eastern Europeans who still have a good work ethic and are actually interestingly enough, much fitter and healthier than we are. And it's terrible, really, it seems to me that we've created this divide between those of us that eat the food and some kind of economic underclass who produce it. That has to change. And I think it needs to change. And I think it needs to change, frankly, for the mental and health and physical health of the people who have been doing the exploitation, because it's good to work on the land. It's good to use one's body to produce food. So I think we have to change a lot, including our own attitude towards visible work on the land. I totally agree. And where I wanted to maybe go a little bit deeper and see what just since you're on the ground and you work with tons of farmers in the United Kingdom, but also around the world. If you saw during this time, mainly the organic regenerative farmers that you work with, or maybe even you had insights into others, was it such a thing that because now, because of the pandemic and this lockdown and the Brexit, that those immigrant workers weren't there anymore, that a lot of the farms, whether it was smaller or bigger farms, didn't have enough hands or laborers to harvest the food. And I was receiving stories and some friends of mine were actually saying, yeah, we're having to till the food back into the ground because we don't have enough people to harvest and disseminate the food and not enough takers. Were you experiencing that as well? Or did you know others that this was occurring and happening? Well, we weren't experiencing it because the people that work on this farm are mostly local people. When we used to grow carrots, which we did on some scale, we did have some Eastern European workers who came here. But I think that in relation to the main areas where these workers come from Eastern Europe, which is really the Eastern counties now, to pick vegetables and fruit, there was a shortage, but some people still came over. And some people actually live in the UK. I mean, they moved over and they live in these kind of strange work camps, which have been established by some of the big growers. I think, yes, there's been some plowing in the crops. And yes, the farmers in the Eastern counties tried to employ British people and found they were useless, which is interesting. There's no good work ethic amongst young people of our country, which is kind of telling, isn't it? It's hard work. I mean, you and I have both experienced it no matter whether it's animal husbandry or animal agriculture or actual organic farming. It's hard work. It's early hours. And there's a trick. There's a trade to it. So there's ways to do it efficiently and quickly. And to do that, a lot of us are missing those skills today. Yeah, that's so true. I went to Immokalee in Florida at the suggestion of Eric Schloss, who wrote Fast Food Nation. And I saw the workers in Immokalee and it's humbling. You know, I mean, they're out of the fields all day doing, you know, 10, 12-hour days and they can work fast. And I've got enough carrot picking experience and carrot weeding experience under my belt to know about what that feels like. And it's not just bad. Actually, it's meaningful physical work with a real result. And we ought to give it a higher status, both economically and culturally, because it's actually part of the development, in my view, of a harmonious human being to work physically with our bodies. You see that as a, that ties into some other things that you're working with, the Harmony Project and the Sustainable Food Trust. Do you see that as a direct tie-in to the true cost? Or do you see that more as fair wage, fair trade type of a thing? Or because that's a big aspect of the growers, the harvesters, the producers of the food to process it in cheese and to get it ready to go to market. Do you see that as a part of the true cost? Or is that a separate line item, so to say? No, I think it's absolutely connected. You may know that we produced a report called The Hidden Costs of UK Food, which was first published in 2017, but we refreshed it last year. And the headline of the report is, for every pound that we spend could be a euro or a dollar we spend on food in the supermarket. There's another hidden pound split roughly 50-50 between damage to the environment, depletion of natural capital pollution, that kind of stuff, destruction of biodiversity, and damage to public health. And that extra pound doesn't appear on the price of the food. So the real price of the food is double what we're paying for it at least. And of course, you're right that part of that hidden cost is the cultural, human externalities which are improperly valued or not valued at all. So we're not just destroying environmental capital. We're not just polluting and causing climate change. We're not just damaging public wealth. We're damaging cultural health. And the period of industrial agriculture has been a kind of mining operation, an extractive industry where we've removed people from the land. And that should be monetized. We should recognize, I mean, Bandana Shiba, I heard her say the other day in a meeting that it's worth trillions of dollars, the destruction of the small holder capital, which was represented by the skills of the people, the people themselves, their livelihood and all that goes with that. We haven't put a value on any of that. So we've got terrible food systems in a kind of race to the bottom, where there's huge scale, hardly any people on the land, exploitation of its fertility through chemicals and everything else. And now surely we've reached the bottom with hardly any soil fertility left. And a lot of this is about uncosted externalities of a negative nature, but also unvalued positive externalities. So in order to put things right, we need to make the polluter pay. We need to redirect the subsidies. And we need to put a proper value on all those aspects of food production system that I've just mentioned. We can do that. And I think there's an appetite to do that now. And if we did do it, things would change dramatically. And they must, because otherwise we're going to have an unlivable planet and an ecological catastrophe because of the destruction of biodiversity. I totally agree. And there's that big factor also. The human capital is just not valued at all of what people do. And there's this great saying from Carolyn Steele, might have came up with it, or in a conversation of ours, is when you keep in food, you cheapen life. And there is really a value in this, not only the total environmental cost of food and the natural capital that we need to make sure that is accounted for and included in that process, but also that when we, like in 2008, when we had the big financial issues around the world, where we turned food into a commodity. And so we have people who are used to investments and commodities, who have no idea about farming or how to produce food, cheapening food. And just let's produce it as quick and fast as possible. It doesn't make matter what goes into it or how many chemicals. And it's really cheapened food, which is then in turn cheapened life, our health, and many other ripple effects that carry over to us all. You touched upon it nicely, and that's where I really wanted to go, is the sustainable food for us is really producing super reports. And it's done, you know, not only the 2017 report for the United Kingdom, the hidden costs of food, which have now been updated, but other reports that you've worked on, and you're probably continuing to move forward with those, there are some key pillars in there of things that you, in this food system, the food web, you kind of touch upon that axle, absolutely need to change or be improved upon. Can you go through and kind of give us an update and tell us what those are and explain those a little bit better, what your mission and vision is with the sustainable food trust? Well, you know, we're not tackling everything. We're a very small organization with a big mission, but there are only about a dozen of us working with the organization, which was founded in 2010, 2011. We're working internationally, and we are particularly active, obviously in the UK where I'm based, but also in America, we have a 501c3, so we have some wonderful supporters and donors in the US. One of the things we did very early on was we held a series of meetings, one in Georgetown University in Washington, where Prince Charles spoke. And we also had a meeting, a big conference in San Francisco, the true cost of American food, where we were looking at these externalities and this discipline of true cost accounting. I think we were kind of one of the midwives of nursing that approach to looking at the real cost of food and bringing it into the world to the point where now I think it's widely accepted that uncosted negative externalities are a major distorting effect on the whole food system of the world. Until we put that right, we can't really drive change in the way that we need to, because the apparent cheapness, which we know is a delusion of food in the shops, is still having a huge grip on people because they believe, unfortunately, wrongly that the price is an indication of value when in fact the opposite is the case. So we need to put that right. But arising from that, we got involved with tea, baggy food, horrible acronym, Pavansukh Dev, an Indian man who was involved with the natural capital community and who was one of the sort of architects of the whole thing, the whole framework of putting a value on nature. But we realized that there was no common framework for measuring because in order to monetize to value, you have to first measure. But there was no common framework for measuring the impact of different farming systems on the outcome of the farming practice. So I'm speaking here about, let's just take this farm, we're farming here, we're having an effect on the soil, the water, the biodiversity, the nutrient cycling, the emissions, the energy and resources, the livestock health and the crop health of the plants and animals we grow on the farm. And of course, as we've already discussed, the social and cultural impacts. But all the academics who are kind of measuring those things and putting a monetary value on them, we're using a different framework. And exactly the same thing is true with farms. So for instance here, we have five different audits every year. We have soil association, which is our organic audit. And of course, I will use to work for the soil association. And I was one of the architects of the organic standards. But we also have other audits, we have red tractor. And then some farmers have leaf. And then some farmers have animal welfare audits. And then there's the government, in the case of America, the Farm Bill, but in our case, the Welsh government, who want us to provide data every year in order to judge whether we can be eligible for various environmental schemes and indeed the organic farming scheme. Now all these audits are using different measurements, different frameworks, they all cost quite a lot of money. And they tie lost time up in bureaucracy. And we convened a meeting of farmers and land managers about five years ago to discuss all this. We said, this is crazy. We're the farmers, we're having all these audits. None of them given me or any of the other farmers good information about whether we were more sustainable than last year. So for instance, I get two inspections from the soil association each year, I'm telling this against myself because I designed the damn thing. Do I know whether my soil organic matters better than last year? No, I don't. Do I know whether the biodiversity is increased? No, I don't. Do I know any of those things I just mentioned? Basically, no. I just know that I haven't cheated because the soil association inspector checked. And that really isn't good enough because now we need, if we're going to address climate change and irreversible biodiversity loss, we need to be able to measure the impact of every farm in the world. And we need to measure the impact against a common framework. And that is what we've been working on over the last five years with this group of farmers and land managers of huge diversity. And some of them are large intensive arable farms, some of them are stock farms, some of them are small organic farms. We found that there's an amazing atmosphere of trust between us all because we all want to measure our impacts. And we've come up with this framework, which we think should be the basis of a new form of communication between all farmers all over the world, regardless of what kind of farming they do or their scale. Because it can apply. I mean, if you think about it, you could be a small holder farmer in Zimbabwe or India or anywhere. What do you want to know? You want to know the impact of your farming practice on the soil, on the biodiversity, on the nutrient cycling, on the energy and resources, the things I just said. And if we can have a common way of measuring that, this would be amazing. Because if you go back to the COP 21, where the French minister, Stefan LaFolle, came up with this wonderful idea of four per thousand. And this was catre pour mill. And this was the idea behind this was that every farmer in the world should build their soil organic matter. Well, if we were measuring that using a common framework, then we could have a COP 26, which we have to be hosting in Glasgow. And our hapless Prime Minister Boris Johnson, maybe who knows, could announce that we want to join with the rest of the world in developing a harmonized framework for measuring our impact on our soil. Then we could make farming part of addressing climate change. That's just one example. So we have, as you can tell, I'm quite excited about this. Because I think that actually you could overlay this new way of measuring our sustainability impacts over all the existing certification schemes, including organic. And I personally think we talked about this briefly before we started chatting. But I think the organic certification scheme is too binary. You know, the inspector comes here, you are or you are not, but it is like that really, is it? You know, this is a stairway to heaven. We need to get better every year. Everyone needs to be in now. It's not just about an elite market for rich people. It's about an existential crisis. We all need to be in. And we need to have a sustainability assessment framework, which is inclusive, not exclusive end of round. Yeah, I'm totally in line with you and I agree. I mentioned in our discussion earlier, I feel that the bar is too low, but you said it so eloquently, it's too binary. It's very similar to the sustainable development goals or to other GRI reporting. Basically, what most of us are doing, what most people are doing is they're waiting till the end of the year and they're seeing how their year's activities fit into the reporting and then they're reporting on it. Wouldn't it be better if we reported based upon actions and improvements in our soil health, in our farming and where we've continually progressing and, you know, trying to keep up with our exponentially growing world based on actions and performance and improvements instead of saying, okay, I've got to do my reporting or I've got to get this report now. Let's see how I measured up with the standard or that. And that's how a lot of us are doing it or how it was done in the past. What if we set little goals or performances, positive actions that we can take and do on our farms, that at the end of the year, we're reporting positively that there has been a progress from last year or improvement made, you know, and that's really the direction we need to go. So I'm in alignment with you. Well, I mean, the tragedy of all this is we don't even have any baseline data. So, you know, if you were to, I've been here 47 years, if you were to say to me, have you kept accurate records of biodiversity and soil during that time? No, I haven't, I'm embarrassed to say, but if we were required to do that using a common framework, then this would be fantastic, because then I can pride myself, for instance, on improving my soil organic matter, maybe even building soil, because I think that's what we've got to do. It's not just about the organic matter content, it's about the total amount of soil. If we can measure those two things and have baseline data for all farms, then we would know whether the changes in practice, the regenerative systems that we need to introduce are having the desired result at the moment, we don't know. So I think to your point about rewarding practice, we probably, in the beginning, do need to reward better practices. So we are having this conversation with the Welsh Government, we're saying, well, how can you reward a regenerative farming system? And the answer that we're suggesting, or we're having a discussion about, is that, first of all, you require farmers, if they're going to get their single farm payment, which we have in Europe, you know, the area payment, BPS, we call it the UK, but it's basically the same as in Germany, for instance, you get a payment really just at the moment, it's like a social security payment. If you don't break the law, you get the money. But if this money was conditional upon adopting farming practices, which did no harm, and part of the condition of the receipt of those subsidies was an annual sustainability audit, so we start to capture this data, then you would become either paid for stewarding what you already have, or maybe you could be paid for increasing the soil organic matter or something like that. This would be wonderful, because then farming can come into the discussion about climate change and irreversible biodiversity loss, because as Vanda Nashiva said in a talk I heard her give a year ago, the world used to be covered with rainforest, it's not anymore, it's covered with farms, because we've destroyed the rainforest. So really farms are in the front line against addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. We have to farm in harmony with nature, otherwise we're not going to have an inhabitable planet. I totally agree. We used to, you know, well probably the right word is not we used to. The minute we started farming and agricultural practices, especially intensive and since the industrial revolution, we've had the biggest impact on our environment. Tilling and moving rocks and cutting down trees is just releasing carbon in the atmosphere. A lot of nitrogen and chemicals and issues around farming and this intensive way of doing it has had a big impact on our environment and our climate. The United Nations FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2015, said we have 60 harvests left with traditional industrial agriculture and this year 2020 it's been updated it's 45 harvests left with industrial agriculture methods, intensive farming and we need to make a shift. We're eating our finite resources, we're having a major impact on our environment. We don't understand true cost, total environmental cost as percentage of EBITDA if you're looking at it from a business aspect and we need some substantial changes. Now you, the sustainable food trust is not only educating and doing the reports and working with policy and governments to try to do this, but you mentioned it yourself, you're doing things with farmers from all around the world, you've spoken in San Francisco and in the United States and done some different events. During this and I've got to tickle on it a little bit with a pandemic, we've been domesticated by agriculture so agriculture is outside but we're locked up in our homes and kind of staying put not traveling so much. During the pandemic we're on this lockdown but things that are global citizens are food environment, wind, air, water and species that cross nations and borders but we're on this lockdown and brings me to this question how do you feel about this view of global citizenry or that we're all crew members on this spaceship earth that we cannot really truly be divided by nations, borders, divisions of humanity especially when we lock and I don't want to pick on the United Kingdom at all. When we lock down a country in some regards through a Brexit, through a pandemic lockdown but yet the amount of food produced outside of the UK and other countries is still pretty substantial probably four times the size of the United Kingdom so that whole lockdown procedure or not allowing certain things is just for me unfathomable because we're all sharing the same arable land, we're sharing food across the world and so what are your thoughts on that as far as global citizenry or this kind of different global view of the world? Well I think it has, the pandemic has what's one of the side effects of the lockdown to remind us all of our common humanity, I mean we're all, it's the great leveler isn't it, disease but it also has such an enormous force I was just looking, we have a wonderful clear day outside and there was one of these rare occasions where it said on the weather forecast this morning on BBC Radio 4, West Wales is going to have the best weather and so it is, it's beautiful clear sky out there and I was just looking normally first thing in the morning at dawn we see all the airplane trails of the flights coming in from America and there's hardly any, it's incredible, I mean it's just changed everything and weirdly enough life on the farm hasn't changed nearly so much, I mean it's as if nature is blissfully ignorant of all this stuff that's going on with humanity, human come lately and the farm, the life of the farm just continues but I think it is a great teacher, everything's a teacher and the pandemic is showing us lots of things, our common humanity as I've said and also this nonsense about borders, I mean it's a shame about Brexit, it's happened, we have to face that you know when it rains the piglets are wet as my teacher once said but even Boris's father Stanley Johnson who I interviewed on a podcast which is on our website, he is a great European, a great proponent of the European project so it's a bit ironic that his own son, he used to be an MEP and his own son is just you know who knows why he did it but anyway here we are, you had Trump and we've got Boris and whatever and we just have to work with what is but I think it's clear that we're all united by our humanity on planet earth and we need to work together to make it a habitable place for those that follow us and farming is one of the most important ways we can change things and indeed if we're just citizens we all eat and our eat, the act of eating is powerful as Wendell Berry reminds us. So this coming year was actually the launch of the United Nations Food Systems Summit it was because of the pandemic was kind of done all online and next year they're supposed to do that not only in Glasgow but there are some pre-events about the the UN sustainable food press I wanted to know if you're taking part in that as well so those discussions and dialogues on more global level on how we look at food and farming and things because that's so important but over the years we've seen more and more this bubbling to the surface that the biggest drawdown factor to get back into the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries is food is an agriculture it's really not I don't like to use the word silver bullet but it's the biggest drawdown effect that we can kind of get this rebalancing on our planet and and we've touched upon it a couple of times that it's really the way they calculate the earth overshoot day is based on a replicable global hectare that provides you with enough water food air shelter security to live a vibrant long life but per person we're using an overshoot of that replicable land this year august 22nd I believe was earth overshoot day and the global hectare for 2020 is 1.6 global hectares and we're using 2.89 or 98 global hectares per person so it's on a resource overshoot and a deficit but it's all calculated through this global hectare or acre you know I'm sure there's a way to calculate it in acres as well that provide us with the basic needs of humanity so so that we can live within the planetary boundaries which goes back to the basics farming food how we get our resources and that shift on an international basis is really not only bubbling to the surface but it's beginning to occur as long as I've been with the UN and different international organizations I see the topic come up more and more because people are realizing that's the biggest way like Paul Hawkins said in the drawdown to have the biggest impact and effect to get us back into a balance so for the future of humanity and I really see everything that the sustainable food trust does speaks about tries to work on although a small organization is trying to get us into this other awareness and trying to get us policies and processes to move us there and so for that I thank you but there are also some some controversial things I guess some some ways where you say I've heard you in the past speak with him whether it's environmentalist George Montboy or or vegans or whatever how some of that knowledge or understanding of of how food is produced about farming about where we get our food from if it was understood better if if we understood how it worked and the difference between industrial agriculture and sustainable farming or regenerative practices that we would have another view or could maybe even make the shift faster instead of fighting against each other because really we're aligned and so I would like to hear more of your comments or thoughts on on these things because that's also a hurdle that we need to tackle to get everybody on the same page to reach this critical mass for even better momentum because both tribes so to say are very powerful in another self but we're we're not going in different directions we're actually kind of aligned and I think that's what people are missing I agree and just to touch on a couple of the points you made the beginning of what you just said we're hoping to be the COP26 and the UN food summit next year and to contribute probably particularly in relation to trying to get an alignment on measuring farm sustainability because we think that holds a key to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss so we'll see how we get on with that you mentioned Paul Hawken and the drawdown project I'm a fan of Paul's I think he's a good man I think it's been said that if we took regenerative farming practices to scale we might be able to sequester maybe a hundred parts per million of CO2 back into the soil which is the world's second largest carbon sink only after the oceans but it's probably the one way where in relatively short time we can really draw down significant amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere but to your main point I think that there is a lot of confusion around everybody agrees with the general discussion that I'm sure I think most people do that we we need to change we need to change our farming and our food systems but I do believe there's quite a lot of confusion around amongst the general public but even amongst people who are particularly interested in these issues about what kind of farming systems should replace the ones we've got at the moment what those farming systems would produce and therefore what we should eat because my point or our point is that surely we should eat in proportion to what the farming systems which are regenerative which we need to replace the ones we've got at the moment produce because in a way it's very simple and the way this is the way I see farming we farmers it's more or large the farmers of the world we're stewards of the small parcel of natural and human capital over which we have temporary influence and what we need to do is to steward that land and produce as much food as we can which is consistent with maintaining and preferably building that natural and human capital that's actually the task of all farmers throughout the world and particularly now we've cut down most of the rainforest it needs to be a biodiversity reserve a soil carbon reserve a place of harmony and beauty but at the same time we still need to produce food now there have been a series of reports that have come out in the last few years I'm going to focus on the eat lancet report not because it's the only one but because it had a massive influence because you know the lancet and the medical community endorsed it and you know Gundhild Stoleden who's a friend of mine and a you know very influential person and there's the eat forum they were all backing this and of course Johann Robstrom who is a I'm a fan of Johann's and his wonderful work on planetary boundaries but I have to say that I think that the headlines of the eat lancet report caused have caused a great deal of confusion amongst the the eating public which is all of us because they came out with this kind of notional diet they need they said first of all we need to eat less meat well that's definitely true and we need to move towards a plant based diet well that probably was always true and it's still true but I think they tended to throw the the sustainably managed grass-fed ruminant baby out with the bath water of all the livestock products that we need to stop eating namely the feedlot beef the industrial hog production the industrial chicken production the mega dairy stuff we need to stop eating all those products of course we do because they are not consistent with regenerative and sustainable farming practices however and I'm speaking now not just about the United Kingdom but I think about most farms in the world in various different by various different means sustainably managed livestock in my opinion are a fairly central component of truly regenerative farming systems and by telling everyone especially young people who you know all going vegan thinking it's the right thing to do it's a kind of protest mode I mean I was I was a hippie back in the 60s and I was protesting and I think the modern protest is to go vegan and you can understand why people would want to go vegan but they see all this horrible industrialized off-production but they need to have a sophisticated understanding and like the prayer to know the difference between the animals which are part of the solution and those which are part of the problem and let me give you an example in the United Kingdom as a great friend of mine who's got a big arable farm a tillage farm in the eastern counties and he's called Hilton Murray Phillips and and he was in an all arable industrial system and he it was on his conscience because he knew was doing bad so he converted it to a mixed farm where the fertility building was through grass and legumes and 50 percent of his farm has gone into grass but he's found it very very difficult to to stay economically viable with that system because all over the United Kingdom and actually all over the world people are thinking well we certainly don't want to eat red meat anymore and red meat includes pork of course which probably we need to cut down on our eating of pork because it's fed in industrial ways mostly but red meat especially is seen by people as being lamb and beef and it's become un-PC to buy lamb and beef but if it's grass fed or mainly grass fed then actually by eating lamb and beef from those systems of regenerative farming you are not only helping the farmers you're critical to their economic survival now I think that the eat lancet report did not do a very good job of differentiating between those two kinds of livestock production and I think a lot of damage has been done and a lot of confusion has been caused so one of the pieces of work that the sustainable food trust has been focusing on is to try to differentiate and get it into the public mind because in the end informed public opinion citizens of planet earth need to get all this stuff it might be complex but they have to get it because otherwise we won't bring about the changes that are needed. I couldn't have said it nicer so that that was beautiful thank you thank you there's definitely a lot of cross cutting areas that we need to raise this awareness and make sure that they it's not them and us that we realize that we're all thinking in the same direction our intentions are good and we want we want to want to move forward in the right direction there are a couple other things that came out this year during the pandemic that I wanted to know what your thoughts and feelings and and if you'd seen them one was kiss the ground we did film yeah a fabulous film about soil health and farming and regenerative practices but also the roald dale institute does so many fabulous things around regenerative agriculture and has done some long-term studies and the reason I bring it up with your thoughts there's a lot of farmers especially in Eastern Europe also Croatia Malta and different places that are still doing in a chemically intensive industrial agriculture and extremely hard to talk to them about organics or regenerative practices and making that switch and they're like even you bring it up they're like there's no way that's going to work it's going to be profitable we can make it yes yes and the shot is that it's not wrong the problem is unless we they sit the eaters of planet earth support the kind of food production outputs of those regenerative farming systems then I would say there's hundreds of thousands of farmers all over the world say in the Corn Belt or in Eastern Europe and say the great plains of Romania where there's all this wonderful soil and further east again and in the eastern counties of England they're looking at what it would mean to adopt regenerative practices as advocated in kiss the ground and they're saying come on you know if I introduce a big livestock enterprise on my farm to eat the grass from the fertility building at the base of the rotation I don't have any income from the corn or the grain that I would have grown on that land I've just got the grass if I turn that into meat or milk as we are doing here the market doesn't want that or it certainly won't pay enough to make it a viable operation so they're not wrong these farmers they're saying well I can't do this it's not going to pay well enough so we really need to think about these issues and make sure that we realign the government policy the polluter pays principle the redirection of subsidies as we've already discussed but also what we eat so that we can support the shift towards regenerative farming I thought kiss the ground was a brilliant film if you haven't watched it it's on netflix just watch it I also there's another another film just come out called sacred cow if you come across that that's just about to be launched I think that's I'm on that and just briefly and I think these films are great because they're explaining some of these issues to a wider public and unless we get the public on board these things are not going to change are there are there any advice or tips or help that you could give to farmers currently doing industrial practices who kind of are feeling that they should transition but are holding to the old system or holding to industrial system some advice to transition or some help ways to get them thinking or looking at it different or tips that they could would make a transition better or even to get them to think about moving in that direction I think you know I feel like quoting Bob Dylan here you know the old road is rapidly aging get out on the new one if you want to lend a hand because the times they are changing I think the times are changing I think that you know David Attenborough wonderful communicator he is reminding everyone now that we were the last chance to loon and farming is currently part of the problem it could become part of the solution and I to those intensive farmers I'd say have faith start making the change try introducing a crop rotation which includes fertility building without chemical fertilizers and pesticides or at least part of your farm to get the hang of it because I think the market and policy change will come to support those new actions I believe there will be an emergent market for carbon you know I think the investment community are coming behind this I think banks are changing I mean just to give you a couple of examples we had a meeting with most of the UK supermarkets last week and they're all interested in adopting this new harmonized framework for measuring sustainability and labeling think about that that's all the UK supermarkets expressing interest in this change we are also in discussions with one of the major UK banks who are going to trial this farm sustainability assessment because they don't want to loan money to farms who are degenerating their soil this is this is big stuff so I think farmers who are thinking about it and worrying about the economics of it I think start now is the answer because I think things are going to change I agree I definitely felt the change over the years and I come from six generations organic farmers in Germany and I've really seen substantial changes over the years and it's just getting better we need to do more positives and have more wins more actionable things like we discussed instead of just doing the bare minimum or reporting which could be very tedious and boring let's let's try to to make that progress that to include those actions to improve our land and our soils we could get into probably numerous different things on this on the importance of soil health biodiversity the biome of of our soils and how that ties to the biome of our body our good gut health and the microbes that are vital in that a kiss the ground is one that really touches well upon that so I don't know if we need to rehash that but just one handful of healthy good soil really has more microbes than there are human beings on planet earth just one handful and well I think a rather nice turn of phrase is soil is the stomach of the plant the plants don't have an internalized stomach they have a an external stomach and they spend 30 percent of their photosynthetic energy exuding sugary sap into the root zone which nourishes a symbiotic community of bacteria and fungi upon which their digestion depends it's exactly the same in the human stomach we we host a symbiotic community of bacteria upon which our digestion and our health depends so when we look at the soil anew we can imagine it as the collective stomach of all the plants on earth digesting and feeding and what a beautiful kind of metaphor that is and it just changes one's attitude towards the soil absolutely I love that how you I'm glad you you you said that because that's the exact way we need to hear it I have my hardest question for you today is the burning question wtf and it's not the swear word what we've all been pulling our hair out and yelling this year it's what's the future well I think we have to be optimistic I believe there are certain moments in human history where changes of consciousness happen I believe that I was part of that one of those shifts in the 60s end of the 60s it was an amazing time and there was this kind you couldn't really say where it came from because you could analyze it you could say well the baby boomers after the Second World War they all had it so good and they could think it a freeway but it was it that was part of it but it was the music it was something was happening here this is another quote from Bob Dylan and you don't know what it is a ballad of a thin man a highway 61 revisited something is happening now we don't quite know what it is but we know there's a consciousness shift going on so things that would have been inconceivable a few years ago are becoming more possible now and I do believe that it's important to see this through I think we have to ask ourselves each of us every day what is the higher purpose of my existence on this fragile planet what am I serving with my life what what higher cause should I be serving there's something important about maintaining this thin film of organic life which surrounds the planet and making more beautiful and harmonious and the late environmental campaigner Doug Tompkins had that kind of a view who I would have the great privilege to know and he said if something isn't beautiful it probably won't function properly so we need to enhance the beauty of the earth we need to serve our inner search what however that manifests whether it manifested a faith or some sort of spiritual search I think this higher purpose of humanity and the collectiveness of our striving to make the earth habitable for our children this is a spiritual dimension to things but I think we need to sit in front of that every day maybe we should sit in sit in front of it and be mindful and meditate and just feel the experience of our interconnectedness with nature and I think if we do that we will be inspired to undertake right action in our day job and you know in our work in the world because I think the two are connected and I do feel optimistic because I believe that many people are thinking this way right now I have three last questions for you and they're kind of self selfless or selfish questions for my listeners they're take the ways that they could use or apply in their life to help them on the shift or to to see the planet definitely things that you've experienced if there was one message you could depart to my listeners a sustainable takeaway that has truly has the power to change her life what would it be your message well I've got it's got to be a food message because food's my subject and I was to quote Wendell Berry again eating is an agricultural act he said he is right was right he's right we have power to improve our health and to reverse the decline in biodiversity and build soil health and carbon every day when we eat food so because we're the cell in the food system which is global cellular health is where we start microcosm macrocosm so we have the capacity to understand everything and change everything with our own lives and we can start with what we eat so when you next buy food make sure you know the story behind it make sure it comes from a regenerative and sustainable system preferably not too far from where we live but that's possible and if you just do those simple things and eat the food which comes from regenerative farming systems ideally from farmers you know then you will be part of the change I love that we both saw each other I don't know if you remember in 2017 I believe it was that or 2017 the eat form in Stockholm and there was a gentleman there Ron Finley as well he always says growing your own food is like printing your own money and that's a more modern way of putting what you said but it's it's so true there's so much power resilience so much security and changing that if people really knew that that we've given our stewardship to grow and produce food over to others we don't even know where it comes from and it's it's their job and that stewardship was misplaced to give it to them because some of them are doing it just as cheap as possible which is cheapening life and and affecting our human health in many different ways my next question is what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey as a farmer and you probably want to mention as well that that along with with your farm in Wales you've also had other full-time jobs you've been doing other things so it's like you've got a couple passing jobs that you're working at the same time and it's hard work what have you experienced in this journey that you would have loved to know from the start well I'm not sure I think what I think I did know this at the start in some intuitive way but I think I can affirm that if you have a deep intuitive desire to do something new and maybe slightly disruptive it's definitely right to do it you know I mean what we did that when we were a community of six people who got back to the land here in 1973 from London because I grew up in London I mean it was a mad thing to do you know I mean there was no sense in it everybody would have said well you certainly shouldn't do that but we did it anyway I'm so glad we did because I've learned so much and I think that every day brings a new opportunity to learn you know we're reduced and we're also frail that's the thing that strikes me uh human frailty you know our emotional roller coaster which goes on a daily cycle and you know times we feel kind of as if we're invincible and other times we feel absolutely devastated and dark and that's the truth isn't it about being a human being we have to stay with these we have to be in front of these things bear them and learn from them and I think there's so much possibility of doing good work not by feeling a victim of difficulty because it is lawful that the world is going to be difficult at times the thing that perhaps I should mention in connection with all this is a book written by Prince Charles about more than 10 years ago now called Harmony a new way of looking at our world and I know the prince and I once said to him why did you write this book and he said I wrote it entirely from my intuition and uh his the harmony book is basically saying that throughout human history and eternity everything is governed and informed by geometric mathematical laws which express themselves in all things everywhere whether it's the movement of planetary bodies around stars and suns whether it's the Fibonacci sequence expressing itself in the growth of plants or in the structure of the human ear the geometry and the maths of things how the ancient civilizations understood this and put those principles into the design of the great gothic cathedrals whether you're talking about music the music of Bach all these laws and principles are expressed in us and all around us and we forgot them and to rediscover or to look at farming through the lens of harmony is my current revelation I've been farming as best I've known how in a regenerative way organic way for many years now but I'm suddenly realizing that this little ecosystem that I'm managing is also informed by these fundamental laws and principles but I didn't see it and I think this is a this is a revelation for me and I'm excited by that because I feel it can inform better action and by the way just to say it's not just about harmony there's also discord and disruption as we know as we see in the world and somehow we need to embrace the discord and disruptive tendencies which manifest everywhere in cycles and in wars and all the rest of it as part of this striving towards making the world more harmonious it's not it is about there are bad things that happen but somehow they're part of a bigger understanding of the world so that's what I feel is most important for us all really I don't think I'm describing something which is particular to some sort of you know religion or faith or anything I think these are more universal laws I'm speaking about it's more interconnection with our world with our biome with life and I you've already answered my last question but I what what you said so nicely ties to something else I wanted to see if you heard about it or what your thoughts or feelings were and that is Lynn Margolis which was Carl Sagan's first wife as a famous scientist that she's no longer alive but she really termed this calling this term of a symbiotic earth or symbiosis and this way of realizing that we're in cooperation and collaboration with everything else on our world not other species but the microorganisms in our soil that we are part of this earth and that we're really intertwined and the harmony project which you just explained and based upon Prince Charles book the harmony of a new way of looking at our world and the vision and your aims as that project for me are just in alignment I'm a big fan of Lynn Margolis and the symbiotic earth and and and how she discovered the the micro risa and the connectedness of our of our soils and microorganisms in our earth and and if we realize it no matter what we crawled out of the primordial soup of this planet we are part of this earth and those microorganisms in our bodies we have more in common with our planet than we deal with us as humans that the human genes and cells are not as much in our bodies and connect us as much as the microbial genes and cells in our bodies connect us with our planet and other species and with oak tree or with ruminant on our planet and so it's really nice to see the way you guys have presented this project how your harmony practitioners and the interconnection this of life and the dynamic balance that we have to really play this dance or this this nice life here with with our planet that's all the the questions I have if there's anything you did not get to say I would love to hear it now or if you have any questions for me personally but it's been a sheer pleasure Patrick I really thank you. Well just to say on the harmony project there's a man called Richard Dunn who's a was a head teacher at a primary school elementary school who read the book the prince's book and decided he wanted to change the way in which he taught his children without losing his very high educational status and he is now heading up our harmony education work so it's really powerful because he's written a manual for a teacher of an elementary school as how you can embed this new approach to teaching week by week month by month without compromising you know the educational attainment to the children all that's available on our website you can go to the harmony bit of our website follow us on sus food trust or instagram if you want to know more about my farm here half odd cheese h a f o d cheese is our instagram or you can visit our holden farm dairy website it's a wealth of information on the sustainable food trust but thank you very much for this so wonderful conversation I've really enjoyed speaking with you thank you so much Patrick and I will definitely put in the show notes all your links all your websites I would encourage people to go read the book I've go to go to the website to download some of the reports they're all free and I guarantee you not only from our discussion but from the wisdoms that you can find there the plethora of resources you you will have a different look at the view of food and life and I thank you for this mission you've been on for many years now and all you've brought to our world and I'm so glad that we're working together one last thing that my listeners probably don't know is unless they've been to my website menu B as I've got a book coming out the end of this year menu B people and planet food saving solutions and you're going to give us a nice contribution to that book as well and so I hope we can get some of the things we talked about today and so many other wonderful projects into the book as well so that everybody can really shift this paradigm and get us in the right direction of living in harmony with our planet thank you so much Patrick it's been a pleasure thank you