Speciality Food Feb/March 2024

specialityfoodmagazine.com 33 there should be, William truly says he believes this way of working is the future. “People like Wildfarmed are creating a framework,” he adds. “What’s happening is a tighter definition of regenerative farming is emerging.” But it needs to happen at a faster pace. “What organic people like Helen Browning say, is it took 40 years before organic farming had a formal definition and standards. A lot of debate took place – but that was 40 years of casting around!” William sees regenerative as a way of involving more and more farmers in a movement that drives the industry to collectively work better. “The other thing I like about it, is that regenerative refers to the soil, and that’s the bit it’s all about. If we can get everybody focused on having living, functioning, vital, fertile soil, that’s great.” Britain, he continues, has some tremendous soil and a decent amount of rainfall – everything we need to make a start...to grow our own fantastic produce. And without intervention now to continually nurture and improve it, we could find ourselves in hot water. “I’m pretty certain in 10 years the average consumer will be able to tell the difference in quality. That if you go into a supermarket and see a bag of carrots, you’ll be able to scan them and see one bag contains no nutrients, and a bag grown differently is more expensive but, considering what you’re buying, you’re getting way more for your money.” As an analogy, William points out we’re comfortable, for example, asking why one car is worthmore than another. “But we think a carrot is a carrot. They are clearly not.” For all the good going on, as farmers start to move to regenerative methods, William does think a benchmark or standard is required, largely to stamp out spurious practices, such as those who claim to be regenerative by abandoning ploughing for direct drilling...while still spraying and adding fungicides to the soil. “What we know is healthy soil has fungal pathways that make nutrients available to the plants and that ensure food is nutrient dense, which it isn’t at the moment. We’re eating veg that looks like the veg our grandparents ate but has a fraction of the nutrients. If we’re putting fungicides on the soil we’re going in the wrong direction.” Feeding the nation Of considerable concern, especially as farmers leave the industry, driven out largely by the low pricing strategies and unreliability of supermarkets, is food security. Something else William says needs addressing now. “We should be reading Henry Dimbleby’s report (National Food Strategy) again and again and again in government.” Britain needs, he adds, more production of green vegetables and pulses, but these vital crops are largely being ignored in favour of wheat and biofuel. “It’s controversial, but we do grow too much wheat. And it’s modern wheat, which quite a large section of the country is intolerant to. That’s bonkers considering how reliant our ancestors were on it for their diets. “We don’t look at the great nutritional value of wheat from the 18th and 19th centuries,” William says, revealing he is growing heritage grains on his farm, looking at its attributes compared to modern wheat. The travesty is, he continues, that farmers were told to maximise their yields, yet they don’t get paid a great deal per tonne. “Those tonnes involve fossil fuel, fungicides and insecticides, and 8% goes to bioethanol. A huge amount also goes to animals that haven’t evolved to eat wheat!” There has to be a balance, William says, of feeding people, while fostering wildlife and soil, which has become as important to farming as research into the gut microbiome has been to understanding human health. Being ‘off balance’ is what has been going so badly wrong in our food system. “If you look back in history, land was used to build churches, or houses, or to grow vegetables. Everything else on the maps was marked as ‘waste’. But those spaces were full of wildlife and carbon and potential flood water. It turns out that it’s not waste. It provides an important function, it’s now that regulators are saying how important land is nationally. There’s a need regarding retaining that land in a state that produces abundant biodiversity as much as food.” William is a fan of rewilding and says seeing it in action is rewarding, and encouraging. “It’s fantastic for creating jobs, and there’s amazing science showing you can restore biodiversity, even at a garden scale. We’ve been doing agroforestry for 10 years on our farm to improve the quality of crops and soil. And it was announced recently we will be paid for agroforestry, which is marvellous.” There’s more work to be done As he’s already stated, William thinks measures to support regenerative farming and to understand exactly what it means, are coming down the line too slowly. However, when they do land, they are making a positive impact. We must continue, he says, to give farmers alternatives that are sustainable for both the planet, and their bottom line. “It will mean, for many of us, producing food is an alternative. We can do it or not do it,” whichmight prove controversial. “We can say we’re going to rewild a whole piece of land because it’s good for carbon sequestration, or we can produce some food as well, and that’s what we chose to do here, leaving space for nature, while growing lots of food. “We’re no longer under the straightjacket of the Common Agricultural Policy,” William adds. “Let’s have consistent strategy now, and encourage farmers to produce high quality food when they want to, and for as long as they can afford to. “Farmers do amazing work and have to put up with awful things, like terrible weather. They have got used to farming in a certain way because they were told to farm that way. Now they’re being told once again to do it differently....but there is some amazing stuff going on.” His advice? “Go and see farmers who are doing the right thing.” There are always things that can be done tomake sure that every year that goes by we produce in an environmentally sensitive way