18 minute read
The new farmers
from GOODWOOD | ISSUE 23
by Uncommonly
THE NEW
British agriculture is undergoing a renaissance, with a much-needed growth in diversity and an influx of new ideas. From former musicians, hairdressers (and the odd rather famous motoring journalist) to LGBTQ+ campaigners and a Kenyan-born pig farmer, this is not the usual green welly brigade. Oliver Bennett meets the new crop of farming pioneers
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FARMERS
A few years ago British farming was thought to be moribund. Sir Julian Rose of the Soil Association spoke in 2000 of a “crisis in the countryside”, noting that bankruptcies and suicides were rising. Few people were entering the industry, with many deterred by tales of despair. It was as if, to quote Stella Gibbons’s 1932 rural satire Cold Comfort Farm, there was “something nasty in the woodshed” when it came to agriculture.
But farming in the UK is undergoing a renaissance. The mood is optimistic, bolstered by three key factors: the culinary trends focused on food miles, supply chains and “farm to fork” dining; the urgent ecological mood for action against climate change, landscape conservation and regenerative farming; and the various technologies dubbed the “fourth agricultural revolution” (the third having been the 20th century’s chemical fertilisers, pesticides and monoculture).
New entrants to farming, typically driven by values rather than profit, share all kinds of motivation, from the ecological to the spiritual. They’re also introducing a significant element of diversity into the once dynastic farming fraternity.
In many ways, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE, aka “the Black Farmer”, can be credited with sowing the seeds of change. For a young Jamaican immigrant growing up in 1960s inner-city Birmingham, farming was not an obvious career option. It was only thanks to his remarkable resolve that Emmanuel-Jones succeeded in becoming one of the nation’s most celebrated farm-owners. It is telling, however, that his latest initiative, New Faces for Farming – a collaboration with Writtle University College that invites teenagers to spend a weekend learning about farm life – is still described as a “crusade to stop the drought in diversity”.
Thankfully, that drought is already showing signs of improvement. There are growing numbers of men and women from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds farming across the UK. Whether it’s former pop stars and hairdressers turned born-again farmers, LGBTQ+ campaigns by the National Farmers’ Union, a Kenyan-born pig farmer or the Cotswolds family who farm according to Islamic principles, British agriculture has been invigorated by a new wave of talented and ambitious sons and daughters of the soil.
Events like the regenerative farming show Groundswell began six years ago with a handful of guests. Today, attendees number in their thousands. Books such as Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution by Sarah Langford and A Year on Our Farm: How the Countryside Made Me by Matt Baker underpin the movement. Even, dare we say it, Jeremy Clarkson’s hit documentary Clarkson’s Farm has played its part. And helping it all along is social media. New farmers are often “digital natives”, accustomed to broadcasting their lives via smartphone, and they aren’t shy of posting Instagram pictures and blogs. Some have called them “farmfluencers”.
Of the new crop of fledgling farmers, it’s perhaps Andy Cato, one half of electronic music duo Groove Armada, who holds the most sway. In 2018 his farm in Gascony was considered one of France’s most innovative, and he became the first Briton to be made a chevalier de l’ordre national du Mérite agricole – equivalent to being knighted for services to agriculture. The National Trust subsequently awarded him a 20-year tenure at Colleymore Farm in Oxfordshire, where he’s been tasked with restoring biodiversity using his own brand of regenerative farming. Indeed, Cato’s Wildfarmed method – co-created in 2018 with former TV presenter George Lamb and Edd Lees, who left his job in the City to join the company – is now being used at more than 40 farms around the country. By 2030 these should collectively remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a 100-year-old rainforest the size of Greater London.
Cato’s epiphany occurred in 2006, when he happened to read a magazine article about industrial food production, which inspired him to buy his farm and start growing. “I put these tiny things in the potting compost and saw them sprout,” he told the FT. “Then six weeks later I was eating them. It sounds so simple but it was transformational for me. My first thought was, ‘Why is this not the first thing you learn at school?’” He now believes that new farming methods could have far-reaching benefits: “The world’s most complex problem has a simple solution: food. If we fix food, we fix the planet. It all starts with the soil.”
The last micro-agricultural moment occurred during the “Good Life” 1970s and 1980s, when self-sufficiency crossed over into the wider population, fuelled by the books of Richard Mabey and EF Schumacher. This time around, climate change, biodiversity and food security have put muddy boots on that movement, ushering it into the 21st century. And consumers can help drive the revolution by choosing to eat ethically grown produce. It’s no longer a case of “get off my land” – more a call to “come and join us”.
Opening spread, from left to right: Edd Lees, Andy Cato and George Lamb, co-founders of Wildfarmed. Left: Wildfarmed aims to change the way crops are grown and food is produced by replicating natural processes. Top right: Flavian Obiero
OPENING SPREAD AND BOTTOM LEFT: MAX MIECHOWSKI
FLAVIAN OBIERO, 31, moved from
Kenya to the UK when he was 15 in the hope of becoming a vet. But after doing a week’s work experience on a pig farm in Hampshire, he discovered a new calling
Long before the filter-through effects of Brexit created staff shortages throughout the farming industry, Flavian Obiero was insisting on the need to diversify the workforce. “We’re constantly talking about diversifying businesses and biodiversity, but we don’t talk enough about diversifying the people who diversify the land,” he says. “We are now seeing more people from non-farming families joining the industry, and that’s great because different cultures bring different ideas.” He goes on to bemoan the fact that such diversification of labour skills is arriving too late for many sectors: “At the soft fruit farms, there isn’t anyone to pick the strawberries and apples, and at Christmas last year there weren’t enough people to pluck turkeys.”
Growing up in the town of Kilifi, on the coast of Kenya, Obiero was surrounded by farming in various shapes and sizes. He says that most people in Kenya have access to land – or a relative who does. “We call it subsistence farming,” he says, “similar to a smallholding, so I’ve always had access to livestock. The plan was to be a vet like my uncle, who I admired growing up.”
“People from different countries approach things differently,” Obiero adds, “so the way I would do something might be different to how a Turkish person or an English person or an American would do it. And new ideas mean people aren’t tied to the whole ‘granddad did it this way so I’ve got to do it like that’ way of thinking.”
Though many of “granddad’s” methods now seem passé, much of this country’s farmland remains in his bloodline. Having worked as a pig farmer for more than a decade – at Newlyns Farm in Hampshire and Plumpton College in East Sussex – Obiero now harbours a desire to run his own farm. But like so many non-traditional farmers, he can’t see a way to buy land. “What land is available is usually passed down from generation to generation, so it’s rarely sold on the open market,” he sighs. “And if it is, the price is now so high that only the other big farms and estates can afford it.
“Farmland costs about £10,000 an acre on average, but last week a farmer friend in Abergavenny [Wales] told me their neighbour had sold an acre and a half for £80,000 to a company planting trees for carbon credits. So that changes the market altogether. If you’re a young person trying to get into farming, and you’re competing against Microsoft, then good luck to you. What can we do if corporations are buying up land to try to offset their emissions?”
When he got into farming at the age of 19, Obiero says he was still naive and that “anything that might have been untoward – racial or otherwise – I took on the chin. I thought that was how people got accepted into a group. Now I’m older, I think perhaps there are things I should have raised at the time. But I’ve certainly not experienced anything that might have put me off farming. I’m still here, aren’t I?”
ZOË COLVILLE, 31, left her
hairdressing job in London to farm full-time in Kent with her partner, Chris Woodhead. Her Instagram account, @thechiefshepherdess, has 38,600 followers, making her a key “farmfluencer”
“A lot of people want me to have had an epiphany,” says Zoë Colville. “But it wasn’t really like that, and at first the farm was very much Chris’s thing. I was a hairdresser and Chris a plumber, but he got a virus and became bed-bound. His dad had been a farmer, and running their farm became part of Chris’s rehabilitation.”
Then Colville’s father died, and she soon came to realise that being around animals was the most cathartic way to process her loss. “The ‘nature’ aspect is important for me,” she says. The blood, sweat and tears of farming are a far cry from the glossy, filtered images we’re used to associating with social media, but Colville seems to have cleverly bridged the gap: “When I lived in London I used social media, as hairdressers do. So when I began farming and uploaded funny things the animals did, it turned out that loads of women enjoyed it. Now 80 per cent of my followers are female. They see someone who looks like them, but who does something completely different. During the pandemic my Instagram page went mental, often from people who only got an hour in the park each day.”
And while she feels passionately about people eating seasonally and knowing where food comes from, Colville insists she’s not trying to impress anyone or impose her principles on them. “I was a vegetarian when I met Chris and could never have imagined that I’d farm animals,” she says. “But as people do eat meat, I want them to do so with respect and good welfare. I’ve been in the abattoir and I’m comfortable with the process, and while I thought [slaughtering] lambs would be tough, the second that they go to grass as sheep, they couldn’t care less about you, so there’s no sense of attachment. But I’d still say, don’t give anything a pet name that may end up in the slaughterhouse. Chris really struggles with the goats.”
Has she ever felt isolated since leaving behind her old life and moving to the country? “Our friends are always interested in visiting,” she grins. “I thought they’d just want to cuddle baby animals, but they come all year round and hang out with us. Our hours are long, so they have to fit in around our work – but they love it.”
She adds, on a final note, “Running a farm full-time with just the two of us is challenging. But now we couldn’t do anything else – or work for anyone else. Mother Nature is the only one who’s the boss of us.” thelittlefarmfridge.co.uk.
Above: former hairdresser Zoë Colville, who is now a leading “farmfluencer”. Opposite: Young Farmer Ambassador Mike Wilkins
PAUL ASTLEY
MIKE WILKINS, 27, a Young Farmer
Ambassador for the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), grew up on the family farm in Wiltshire. He is engaged to his boyfriend and manages a 3,200-acre mixed estate in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire
Coming from a farming family, Mike Wilkins believes there was never any doubt that he would go into the trade. “Why would you give up this amazing opportunity?” he asks, looking genuinely bemused. “A lot of my contemporaries experienced this, too. Some rebelled. But in my mid-teens I realised there was a lot more to agriculture than sitting in a tractor. The science behind it, the environmental impact, food security and how carbon functions within soil – all really piqued my interest.”
While many people see farming as an exclusively conservative environment, Wilkins says they would be surprised to discover how many LGBTQ+ people there are in the industry. “In the past few years we’ve had the organisation Agrespect broadcasting to queer farmers, which has been great,” he says. “I’ve met a surprisingly large network of people, which has been humbling. Since I’ve written a couple of pieces, several people have been in touch. Someone we work with told me that their daughter is getting married to her wife – I had no idea he had a gay daughter.”
He adds, however, that “there have been some negative comments. Not necessarily pointedly, but part of daily language. Within farming communities it’s still more ingrained than it is elsewhere. I have to strike a balance between calling it out or letting it go.”
Ruefully, Wilkins points out that the gay community is far from alone in its fight to be accepted into the world of farming. “Sadly, there are far fewer people of ethnic minority backgrounds working in the industry than we’d like, but I’ve been fortunate enough to speak to many of them. Talking to them about farming is fascinating, although I’ve heard some harrowing stories about discrimination. Even being female can be difficult. I’ll have meetings with female employees and suppliers where the women will be dismissed completely.”
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom, and Wilkins believes the situation is gradually improving. There remains a rural-urban divide, but the internet and social media are helping to narrow that gap. “My grandparents – sadly no longer with us – were much more isolated,” he says. “They lived in a tiny village and would never have had any interest in leaving it. Now, younger people in our industry are much more connected and have a good opportunity to engage with people. I know people through the NFU Ambassadors scheme who’ve got no farming background, but are inspired by the potential to make a difference. New smallholders are really good connectors out to wider networks, while charity and community farms are doing amazing work in raising the profile of agriculture.”
So how can the industry nurture these green shoots? “We need to grow new farmers from all life stages and backgrounds,” says Wilkins. “The money needed to get into the industry is a fundamental barrier. But outreach from the industry can help, including school campaigns. The more young and diverse people there are working in the industry, the more we can change people’s perspectives.”
Technically speaking, as second-generation farmers, Adam and Khalil Radwan aren’t exactly “new”. In the context of British agriculture, however, there’s no denying that sustainable Halal and Tayyib farming is still very much a nascent practice. “Our parents started the farm on Tayyib principles,” says Adam, “rather than focusing on Halal, which often gets reduced down to strict rules about slaughter. Tayyib interprets the welfare of animals and the impact on the environment in a holistic way.”
Indeed, Tayyib farming shares many of regenerative farming’s tenets: crop rotation, fostering biodiversity and grazing animals on nutrient-rich pastures with plenty of space. “Our farm is closely tied to our way of life,” says Khalil. “When Willowbrook started 20 years ago, there wasn’t a farm like it in the UK. I’m proud of that, but sad that few others have taken up the mantle. I suspect it’s because farming isn’t well respected in immigrant communities, as they’ve often left farming backgrounds and want their children to become doctors and lawyers.”
Before starting Willowbrook, Lutfi Radwan worked as an academic at the University of Oxford, Ruby as a psychologist, reflexologist and teacher. The farm was a manifestation of their desire for a spiritual connection with the earth. “With the Islamic factor, some don’t think beyond tabloid headlines,” says Khalil. “But Oxfordshire is very educated and environmentally aware, and every week we sell at East Oxford Farmers’ and Community Market, which is full of people who make direct connections. Online sales are excellent, and people come to us because we’re Halal as well as natural and chemical-free. The Cotswolds is a good area to be in for us. There are lots of farmers in the area producing good-quality organic produce, in full awareness of climate change, environment and animal welfare.”
“We want to be able to market to general consumers,” says Adam, “but we’re small, we don’t have an economy of scale, and the product is priced accordingly, so people who are committed to these issues or know about us buy from us.” He adds that while business is good, that they’ve made the decision not to grow purely to keep up with demand, but to hark back to their parents’ founding principles when they embarked on the project, “both in terms of animal welfare and leaving space for nature. That’s crucial.”
The Radwans are acutely aware of under-representation in farming and encourage people from diverse backgrounds to visit their farm in the hope of nurturing interest. It’s also a chance to show off the quality of their produce. “Our next step is open days,” says Adam. “If someone doesn’t want you to visit their farm, no matter how many nice words on their marketing, I wouldn’t trust them. When you see farming in reality, without wildlife being destroyed or rivers polluted, you realise that this isn’t just theoretical.” willowbrookfarm.co.uk.
ADAM AND KHALIL RADWAN, 32 AND 29,
help to run Willowbrook Farm, a 50-acre plot near Oxford that was founded in 2002 according to Islamic principles by their parents, Lutfi and Ruby Radwan
Above: brothers Khalil, left, and Adam Radwan of Willowbrook Farm. Right: Sandra Baer, left, and Lynn Cassells at Lynbreck Croft
BELOW: SANDRA ANGERS-BLONDIN
LYNN CASSELLS, 43, from Northern
Ireland, and SANDRA BAER, 38, from Switzerland, have farmed at Lynbreck Croft in the Scottish Highlands since 2016. They have appeared on BBC2’s This Farming Life
Lynn Cassells never meant to be a farmer, and nor did Sandra Baer, but, having met while working as apprentice rangers for the National Trust, they decided to embark on their agricultural adventure together. “We had a dream to live closer to the land,” says Cassells, “so we bought our place in the Cairngorms with a loan and started farming from scratch. It’s a 150-acre mix of trees and grass. If you were to look at it, you’d say we’d never make a living. One farmer said he would have called us ‘certifiable’. But we saw huge potential in its diversity of habitats, including pasture, and only wanted to produce food with regenerative impact. We finally went full-time in 2020.”
Like so many new-generation farmers, their approach is underpinned by a strong ethos: “We uphold a number of values. The first comes from the belief that food represents health – mental, physical, social, ecological and financial. That’s why we were motivated to change our lives. We believe the most productive, efficient and financially beneficial way of producing food is to work with natural processes. Then there are social elements – we really value sharing the food we produce with our local community. It’s our contribution to social wellbeing.”
Cassells accepts that the natural approach can increase costs: “I embrace the word ‘premium’. The prices we charge for our food are as close as we can get to what it actually costs. Many acknowledge that food prices in supermarkets don’t reflect what it costs to produce. Because we have a direct sales model, we can look at what the market is saying. If it doesn’t make a profit then we don’t do it – because it’s not working somehow. Everything has to be run profitably.”
She adds, “Since Ukraine there’s been a global discussion about food security. We produce about 95 per cent of our vegetables and our priority is to educate our neighbours to grow their own. Our goal is to be mutually beneficial, collaborative and co-operative.”
Although the pair acknowledge that women farmers are still in the minority, they emphasise that they have been welcomed with nothing but enthusiasm by the community. One local farmer referred to them as “hearty lasses”, which they took as the highest compliment. “We’ve learned a lot from farming and costing models from 100 years ago. That’s the beauty of farming. It comes in all different shapes and sizes. Get it right and it’s good for us – and our customers.” Our Wild Farming Life: Adventures on a Scottish Highland Croft (Chelsea Green Publishing); lynbreckcroft.co.uk.
