Episode 134: How a Crisis Led to Change with Tim Parton

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. You know the types of conversations we have here, the types of conversations that inspire us all to do better with our soils, with our health and to be better stewards. Today I have a repeat conversation with a special guest who's been on the podcast before, Tim Parton from the uk. Tim, thank you for being here and thank you for all the work and the inspiration that you've provided to people in the past and continue to do. You're going through some significant life changes. You've had a lot of time to think about what agriculture really should be and what we should be doing better. What's going on in your life right now? What are the things you're thinking about and the things that you really want people to hear?

As you know, John, I had a life changing accident back in March. So I've been in hospital for seven months. It's been a long journey. Rehab. I'm just about to be discharged, which gave me a lot of time to read and think, as you rightly say. And yeah, I wasn't lying there doing nothing. I was busy and as I always am. But Regen Ag, as you well know, I'm so passionate about it because it all begins with the soil. But it's the food we're producing and it's getting that message out to the world that the food we're eating is making us sick. You know, the genetically modified food, the synthetics we're putting onto our soil, we've just been creating a poison, but we're putting into our bodies and that's making us ill. And you only have to look in every country you go to that is in modern agriculture, the general public are ill. Their levels of disease problems are going up and up and up and nobody sitting back and thinking, what's going on here? What's the connection? And it all comes back to our soil and the way we're farming. And as we were just talking, John, before we started to record, once that light bulb comes on for how to produce food in a regenerative way, that ball just gets brighter and brighter and brighter. There's no going back because you, it feels right, you're making more money. Everything is right about it. What is not to like?

You know, when you mentioned, Tim, a key phrase that is somewhat upsetting to many farmers, the idea that we are using GMOs and that we are using chemicals and that they are poisoning ourselves and poisoning our bodies. And there are many who kind of, there's this immediate knee Jerk reaction. There's this aversion that no way, this is not true. And because it doesn't, obviously it's not a great feeling to consider the possibility that we're doing things that are poisoning people. And so often we then seek the rationalizations and the science to support our position that we are not doing harm, that we're doing something well. And there's this quote from Charlie Munger that you have no business having an opinion. You do not have a qualified opinion until you can articulate the opposing point of view better than the opposition. And I'd like to ask the question of farmers like have you stopped to consider and ask yourself the question why is it that people disagree with you? Why is it that people believe that pesticides have a harmful effect? And where is their science? Where is their data? Have you fully explored the opposing point of view? Now here you are, a farmer having been having farmed for a lifetime and you're stating that pesticides are toxic to people, that we are poisoning ourselves. What's the basis of your opinion and perspective?

That's a very good question, John. I mean I, I've come from the dark side. If you'd have asked me. When I was back in my 20s, I was a full chemical user. I believed in them. I thought this was the modern way of farming. And then I had another life changing incident when I had a bout of anxiety, depression. My wife worked in mental health at the time. She didn't want me to go on the antidepressants. She said she was a big believer in nutrition and she wanted me to get tested. I went down to a place called the Brain Biocentre in London run by Patrick Colford, who's now become a good friend of mine because we've done a few talks together. He can always see the connection between soil and food and healthy food. And I got myself tested. I addressed the imbalance as I now do with all my crops and I got better. And that was the light bulb moment for me where I got really interested in food and how it was being produced. With research and reading, I made the realization that plants don't get sick. It's what we've done that's created the problem. It's always what we've done, what we've applied or our farming methods that have made the nutrition unavailable to the plant. We're not addressing that, we're just treating the symptom by putting the fungicide on or putting an insecticide on. It makes big pharma a lot of money. The Farmer was left with a little bit. But everywhere I go in the world, chemical farming is failing now. And it's time that people accepted that it's not a farmer's fault. We're not having to go at anybody, but we cannot continue to pollute the planet. You know, the planet's dying as well. Everything on the planet's dying in my mind. And we need now to start and farm in a way that we're not going to do that, you know. And the book, Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, it's a fantastic book that shows how genetically modified food was never certified safe. It was just bit snippets of it, of testing were taken and used rather than using all the information, which often happens these days. And we're now seeing the problems that GM have caused to human health and of course the environment. And the one that always gets me is, as you well know, because you've proved it to yourself so many times, everything they claim that they can achieve with GM food, we can achieve just by using simple nutrition. And I always use the analogy, if I put two plates of sandwiches on a table and you've got all the active ingredients, all the chemicals that have been applied to it, conventional produced flour, and then you've got our flour that's been produced just using nutrition, you know, which plate of sandwiches people are going to pick up. You know, nobody in their right mind would pick that plate of sandwiches up with a list of probably 20 active chemicals on there and want to put that into their bodies. Yet they do it unknowingly because they have no idea how their food is being produced.

There's a lot to unpack there. Tim, you mentioned the concept and the idea that plants don't become ill, they don't become sick, but it is what we are doing, what we've continued to do. And you know, there are so many stories, but there are only a few people left who have the experience of applying pesticides for the first time. I just had a conversation recently with one of our consultants at Advancing Eco Agriculture, Jeff Claypus was here on the podcast and he described how on a smaller market garden scale, to control some weeds, he applied Roundup to his market garden for the first time. And having had very limited, next to no disease and insect problems for years before and the following year, epidemic proportions, and into the future as well, from one application before and after. And I have heard stories like that dozens of times. You know, it's. It's hard to prove, it's hard to say, oh, it was this chemical application when you have a before and after story in different growing seasons and so forth. But once you hear the story 20 times or 50 times or 100 times, you start realizing that there is a common trend here and that there's a consensus of data points that we need to stop and think and wonder what it is that we're really doing.

You know, I've seen myself, John, and the problem is once that's, once that happened, it's what a business plan that Big Pharma had got. Because then the symptoms that that crop starts throwing up, they're selling another product and another product. So that level of poisons, because I will use the word poisons because if we drank any of the fungicides or anything, they're going to make us ill. It's straight out the bottle. They are nothing else but poisons. It's a brilliant business model that they came up with either intentionally or non intentionally, but it just made the chemical companies loads and loads of money. Whereas once you start to break it back and don't do all these poisons and the soil starts to work and we can monitor the level of that nutrition in the plant and we can adapt any imbalances that we need to, to keep that plant healthy. We get healthy plants every time. And I know you'd agree with this, but every disease, every pest could be cured with nutrition. I've never found anything yet that can't. And it's just working and understanding it. That's where science and intelligence comes into this. And to me we'll be going down as a society. We've gone down the wrong road. Using science to manipulate plants to what we want them to do rather than actually working with nature and enhancing nature and enhancing what she can do. It was working perfectly well for millions of years. And then mankind comes along and we'll take it from there. We know what we're doing and look at the mess we've made made of it. But I'm not pointing the finger at anybody. The thing now is to pick up and move forward with the new information we've got because we know we can do it without. We don't have to keep putting all these poisons on everything in order to get a crop to make money. Because profits always got to come into it. No business can stand up without making a profit. But we can make a profit while enhancing the landscape and the environment we live in. And that's why I'll always be adamant, John, that farmers are the heroes of the world. Nobody else can do what we can do.

You know, there's this quote. I think it might originally be attributed to William Albrecht, and I've used it many times. We've become incredibly accurate at hitting the bullseye of the wrong target. When you think about to your point about the development of GMOs and pesticides to solve disease challenges, to solve insect challenges, those are not genetic deficiencies, not at all. They are nutritional imbalances at their foundation, nutritional and microbiome imbalances. So why not address the. Why not address the problem at the.

Root cause it's so simple. It's just obvious to me what we need to do. You know, I'm a massive believer in epigenetics, keeping your own seed. And that plant will just keep adapting to the environment it's in, and we'll just keep getting stronger and stronger and better. And to go down the route of actually genetically modifying the plant when we can just look at it and see what's going on within the soil, we're not looking at the symptoms, we're just looking at the problem and coming up with a solution rather than breaking it back to where it all started. And that's where it's all gone wrong. But there isn't the billions to be made in that, is there? That's where I see the problem is. But that's where we need to be focusing. Human beings are just so greedy, always seeking power, always seeking more money, and it's always at a cost. And that cost has been to the detriment of the planet and detriment to human health. People need to wake up. Because if people start to demand their food product produced in this way, it will change. And if farmers come together and we have, you know, we've been talking about this before we start recording again, John. Farmers together on their own, we haven't got much of a voice, but farmers coming together all globally. And it's something I talk about a lot when I'm giving a talk. And, you know, I'm also involved with another company called Green Farm Collective, where we start to sell regenerative produce, carbon and biodiversity. But people often laugh when I start saying this when I'm giving a talk, that bringing farmers together globally, but anything is possible. If we all want it, it's possible. I'm always a big believer every problem can be solved. We just need to sit down and talk about it and think about it, and we can overcome anything. And bringing farmers together globally, we've got one hell of a voice, and we've got one hell of a powerful situation to be in.

We have such a powerful voice that the pharma companies, as you're referring to them, have deliberately and intentionally adopted that voice or co opted that voice to be their own. And I think this is a piece that, it's a curious piece. It's almost a bit like Stockholm syndrome, you know, in the podcast interview with Vern Peterson here on this podcast, some time ago, Vern made a point. I forget the exact name of the index, but it was something like Consumer Trust Index. It was a scale of the degree of trust that the public has in different professions. And farmers ranked close to the top of the list on public trust. They ranked right up there with clergy and agribusiness ranked close to the bottom of the list with pharmaceutical companies and petrochemicals, et cetera. And so what has happened is the chemical companies have they're smart. They didn't get to be the size they are by being stupid. And so they have farmer outreach and farmer training, farmer support. They train farmers on how to communicate effectively. And here in North America, and to a degree in the Western world generally, we have this mantra of needing to feed the world. We need to feed the world. And this mantra, feeding the world, came directly out of the pharmaceutical company's playbook, and it is being parroted by farmers. And farmers are, in many cases are the champions of using GMOs and of using pesticides. And they say we require these compounds in order to feed the world, in order to produce enough food. Of course, anyone who looks at the math and looks at the numbers knows that that isn't true. We don't have a production problem today. We have a distribution problem. But I find it interesting. The point that you're making is that, yes, farmers do have an incredible amount of power and influence. Many of them historically have been lobbying for the exact things that they're spending large amounts of money on and that they're being captured by the pharmaceutical industry by. I don't know if it's useful to ask the question, how did we get here? But it is a question of considering what we know today. Why are farmers resistant to the idea of reducing pesticide use? They still feel dependent on them and they feel dependent. And there is a degree of resistance to change in spite of knowing that we are applying a lot of toxins. Why is this and what needs to shift?

I think there's a few answers to that question, John. I think one, it's our education system where people are still educated in that way, because quite often pharmaceutical companies are sponsoring our universities and, and getting right in there with a young mind that that is the way to farm. I'm sure it's the same as over there in the States as it is here when you're in the growing season. Farming magazines are just full of scare stories that it's going to be the worst disease year ever. It's going to be the worst pest year ever. If you don't put that fungicide on or if you don't spray those pests, you will not have a crop, you'll be bankrupt and your family's going to be turned out. And you know that. So easy to work on fear and scare people. And I know when I first started on the regen journey, I just cut myself off for more magazines because it didn't do my mind any good because it was testing my resilience to farm in a different way. And the last thing I needed was to read articles where it was going to be a bad year for xyz. So I cut myself off from that, which was quite isolating. But it was the best thing I did and just trusted myself. And I think human beings are a little bit like sheep. They don't like standing out from the flock and going in a different direction because they'll be ridiculed for it. And I know I was ridiculed an awful lot when I first started. Everybody told me we'd go bankrupt. Everybody said we'd have more grass weeds and we'd be able to cope with. Everybody said I was mad and it wasn't going to work. And as the years go by, they keep looking over the edge and my crops look good. I never had a yield deficit. It was always a yield improvement improvement. And people start to change, but I'm going a bit off track there. But it all comes back to being controlled and being controlled with magazines and fear. And I think if we had a magazine filled full of the work we can do with nutrition, overcoming disease problems and pest problems, people may start to trust it. But we've got generations now that have been embedded in the chemical system. And you might get what the middle generation that starts to come on side or the younger generation, but the older generation is still fighting it. And I see this time and time again when I'm out consulting on farm where you'll have a farmer in their mid-40s that hasn't been given the range yet and they know they want to change, but they get 10 acre or 20 acres to play with or 100 acres. They're not allowed Anything to like the whole reign of the farm. And quite often the dad will come up to me as I've given the talk and says, come on, you know all this isn't true. You've got to get back to chemicals and it's just embedded into them that you've got to go back into tillage and chemicals to farm. And the only way is just to keep visually showing people, I think, and showing them what can be achieved. And sharing is a better way of life. You know that when you're I'm walking fields now, you can't help but smile when the bird life and the insect life is all buzzing the way the whole ecosystem is working. Whereas if I go onto conventional farms to judge crops, as I quite often get asked to do, the farm will be deadly silent. There won't be anything birdsong there won't be the insects buzzing. It's just deadly quiet. Which is quite, for me, quite daunting and quite horrifying. When I've been on my farm and everything is buzzing and everything's alive and it's just a pleasure to be there. It's a gift. And it's a gift to know you can't help that feel good factor of doing that. You'll know you're farming in the heartbeat of Mother Nature, what you're doing is right, but you'll know your bank balance is better off as well. So you can't help but smile because it all comes back, you know, we've got to be making money. But if you can make money and be doing something right, it feels good. And I know I'm producing food which says, I go back to the Green Farm Collective. We're just now starting to sell certified regen produce that will have a premium to it. But I don't want that premium to be too big, that everyday person can't afford it. It's no good producing something that's just for the upper middle classes. We've got to have a right that everybody on the planet can afford nutritional food. And that scare story of, oh, we've got to feed the world, we've got to feed the world. I mean, whoever came up with it, brilliant propaganda, I take my hat off to them. It was a brilliant, quick and easy catchphrase and I've heard it used so many times. But you look at the obesity in our society now. People don't respect food anymore. Their bodies are searching for nutrients that are within their food. If we get this high nutrient rich food, and I use the word rich because I know people use dents quite often and I was giving a talk to a lot of food people at the ethnic council down in London and they said, Tim, we can't use this dense word. Dense is black. It's too dark. If we need to sell it, we need to come up with something lighter. Which is why I now use the word nutrient rich. Because it is lighter, it's alive, it's vibrant, it's bright. And that's what our food is. It's not black and dense, it's buzzing with energy. And we need to respect food and enjoy it. Food shouldn't be, but it should be full in our bodies, full of energy and vibrance that we don't get ill then because we're the same as the plants. We're not designed to be ill, we should be getting ill. If our nutrient balance is right within our bodies, we won't get ill. I'm convinced of it. It's just having that body working at its full element. And I treat all my crops as if they're my athletes. I want to feed little and often if it needs it, but I want that sort of abide everything if I can. But with our maritime climate, it doesn't always happen. But that's where the SAP testing comes in. We monitor that crop right the way through the growing season and we know we can get full potential and get that nutrient rich crop to the table where it belongs. And that's what farming should be all about. We should be celebrating what we're doing and we should be holding our heads high of what we're providing for people because food is everything. It should be shared, enjoyed, but it shouldn't be out of reach. I can't emphasize enough. Farmers need to make money, but at the same time, everybody should be able to afford the product that they produce, not just the upper middle class.

So, Tim, I want to get into farming a little bit as well. But I want to come back to our conversation around the power that farmers have. You know, it's easy to be discouraged today if you are a farmer. Many farmers are not doing so well financially and they look around, they don't see that they have a lot of options, a lot of resources to the work that they're doing. And it's easy to feel very disempowered. So, and here we are describing the tremendous power and influence that farmers actually have. How do you harness that? How do you embrace that? How do you leverage it? How do you step into that power?

It's hard, especially in the uk We've just had a horrible farming year, very wet crops failed for a lot of people. But I'm not being big eddied when I say, you know my water infiltration rates, I can do an inch every 30 odd seconds. And when we get these 2 inches of rain in over a 48 hour period, all my water's just gone straight into the soil. It's held there. I haven't got flooding on the top where as I look at my neighbors who are still in a conventional system ponding all across the field, that crop's going to fail and it just proves what we're doing is right. So what I'm building up to there John, is that a lot of it is visual. Farmers, I think, learn an awful lot by visually seeing what's happening and showing them what's happening. And I always, when I, when I'm giving a talk I'll always say, well just start with a small acreage. There's so many people over here now that are doing it and they're making it work. Talk to people that are successful, you know, and start your journey that way. But start and do a proportion of the farm and prove it to yourself that it's going to work on your farm because you can't be silly and just go headlong into it and then if you haven't got the knowledge you probably will fail and you'll lose a lot of money and that's not good, that's not good for mental health, it's not good for your actual well being financially. So you've got to be cautious. But doing your research. I did an awful lot of research for years before I started on the journey. So I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve and I knew exactly where I was going and I never had a yield drop, I never had problems and I'm not being big headed in that I'd spent hours and hours and hours reading and learning so I knew what I wanted from the situation and I did have to go headlong into it and I'm a manager, it's not my farm. So I've got the pressure of reporting to my boss at the time and so I'd got to make it work. And I think that was even more pressure on me than if it was my own farm because I didn't only have to answer to myself, I had to answer to somebody else. But I knew we'd got to get carbon back into the soil, we'd got to get that soil working, we, we couldn't keep throwing all this Abundant nitrogen on the fields. Knowing we're only using 50% of it, we can't keep polluting all our waterways. So I was aware of all the environmental impact, but I'd got to keep showing a profit because otherwise I'd have lost my job. So that in turn, it all comes back to education and talking to people. And that's what I always love about the regenerative farming community. Everybody's always keen to help one another. It's normally just people's egos that gets in the way that they don't want to ask for help. And the ones that I've seen always fail with it are the ones, you know, Our government was giving a lot of grants to buy direct drills, and people were buying the drill, and then they were going out trying to farm conventionally using a direct drill, and they fell flat on their face. They had four yields, and then there was a lot of drills back on the market. Education is everything, and it's inspiring. By last year, I averaged a farm walk every other week. So I've done my bit of getting the message out there. And I'll keep shouting because this is the only way we're going to move forward as a world society to create the environment, the planet, food that we want. Everybody, wherever I go, we all want the same things. We all want to be healthy, we all want our families to succeed, and we want to do the best for our families. And by farming in this way, we're doing that journey. But it's showing people visually, one, how depleted their soils are normally. And everywhere I go, soils are in such a bad state, you know, they're normally terribly short of calcium. They're holding together, the aggregation's gone, they're compacted, they're quite often anaerobic, and they're just not working anymore because we've stopped them working. We've just burned all the life out of it. And once you can show them that and then show what can be achieved, you can inspire them on the journey. But you've got to go at their pace. One thing I've also learned, I can go in there and get somebody moving really fast, and then they get really scared and they go back miles to where we started from, and then it's a few years before they come again. So you've got to go at their pace that they can cope with mentally, because mental health's a big, big thing, you know, and you've got to respect that. You don't want somebody that's not going to sleep at night. You've got to go at their pace. But it's. That first step is the most important step because then you're on the road. And I might have waffled on a little bit there, John, but it's all back to working together and getting things moving.

Tim, you mentioned the concept of going at people's pace and being their coach that's right beside them and meeting them where they are, working with them. This is such an important piece and it also speaks to. I'll use you as an example. You were a pioneer in this space and you have an incredible success story. You, in terms of disease and insect resistance, your yield, your yield, performance, your weeds, like your, your farm is a showcase for what regenerative agriculture really can be. It's an inspiration and a vision for the future. And at the same time, it is so far removed from many people's reality that there doesn't appear to be a bridge for them. There doesn't appear to be a bridge from where they are to where you are. How do you address that?

Oh, and this one comes up a lot, especially when I'm giving talks. It comes up a lot because people think, oh, I'm never going to get to where you are. When I started, I was in a, you know, my soils were in a poor state. They weren't terrible, but they weren't good. You know, my infiltration rates years back with about eight minutes to do an inch of water. It's just how it's come on. What I always advise people to do when you're starting off, take a sample of soil, put it in a jam jar and put it on the shelf somewhere and then come back and look at it in five years time and see the difference in the color, the texture of your soil, see how it's changed. Prove it to yourself what you're doing is right. And it's not a competition. That's the other thing. It's not a competition. We're all in this together. And you know, I've made mistakes. I didn't get everything right, but I obviously learn a lot more when things go wrong than when they're going right all the while. So if I'm not making a few mistakes, I'm not bloody pushy hard enough. I've got to push harder because some things have got to go wrong and I didn't have any major ones, but I've had little things go over the years. But it's understanding where you want to go. And it's like using the analogy of swimming across a river and you know, you get halfway across and you're starting to get tired and you start to look back at that bank where you came from because it looks inviting and it's comfortable and it's safe. Don't look back. Keep remembering why you started on that journey to get to the other side of the river and keep going and you'll have the strength to get through. Because once you get to the other side, the grass is a lot greener and a lot lusher and you're going to enjoy life a lot more. And you'll look back. That journey, the journey of getting to the other side is what life's all about. Life is a journey and it's experience in the ups and downs and it's not always all going to go right. But you tell me when conventional farming's always gone right. It hasn't. We've had disasters. When it goes wrong in conventional farming, it's normally the weather or chemical didn't work or something, there's always an excuse. But the minute it goes wrong in region agriculture, this system doesn't work. Well that's just not true. It does work. It works all around the world.

Pam Marrone made this point in, in my interview with her that if, if pesticides were held to the same performance standards in order to be registered that biologicals are, many of them wouldn't, wouldn't succeed in being registered. And you know, there is, if you look at it from a macro perspective, it's been a while since I went back and looked at this data. I tend to focus in my talks on what to do, what the positive actions are. But if, if you look at the macro data in the United States, I think the first data point is like 1963 or something in there. Early 1960s pesticides were just beginning to be much more widely used and the US lost 7% of its total crop in a five year average. Five year average was 7% average annual loss. Insect pests flash forward to the late 1990s, maybe early 2000s and pesticide use has increased by a couple orders of magnitude at this point. Insecticide use specifically and the average, the running five year average crop loss to insect pests was 13%. So we actually increased loss to insect pests from 7% to 13% with dramatically increase insecticide use. That's, that doesn't seem to be a great argument for the effectiveness of insecticides, does it?

Not at all. I'd love to see the data on how many of the insects, pollinators that have been lost along the way on that journey, because you'll be well aware that the rats have gone through the roof and we've lost a lot of our pollinators. Without pollinators, what are we going to eat? We need our pollinators. It's just ridiculous, the damage that neonicotoids have done. And they keep getting. They did ban them over here, but now and again they still let them use them on sugar beet. We've proved many times that just by you getting the silicon levels up in the sugar beet, it kills the problem. It's people just don't look at using nutrition. They just go for that chemical all the while. But don't look at the side effects of it, the problem it causes. You know, the neonics, it's in our water, it's in our trees. It's just, we don't know how long it's going to be around for what we, you know, we're just poisoning things without even looking at the consequences. And that's the work Jonathan Longred did. It's just fantastic. With the near nix to prove, please prove how dangerous they are. And why would we want to do that to our beautiful planet? We should be always leaving. It's one thing I love about the Amish religion, John, to have to leave the soil in better condition than what you found it as a farmer. That should be every farmer's priority. It should be. The soil on the farm should be in a lot better condition when you pass it on. And it's just everybody should be like that.

I actually think that many people believe they are doing that or desire to like. I think it's common desire for farmers to do that, but that's associated often with a degree of putting their head in the sand and ignoring the consequences of pesticides and fertilizers, et cetera, and being told that they're being told that they're appropriate, that this is the way.

I totally agree. And you know as well as I do, you know, somebody will listen to this and then their chemical salesman or fertilizer salesman will come around and they'll start mocking us and say, no, no, that doesn't work. You've got to be doing this. But you look how much carbon, you've burnt out your soil, see how your soil's depleted. You know, everybody should be testing their levels of organic matter and carbon levels and seeing what their soils are working at. And you look all around the world, all soils are depleted of carbon. Now the soils aren't functioning. We've got more Desertification than ever. The planet's dying. And the sooner we wake up to the fact and try start to reverse it, the better, because we're on a ticking time bomb. In my mind, you know, the following of Regen Ag, it's growing. You know, it's grown so much in the last 15 years since when I started. We still need to get a lot more, you know, we can't stop. We've got to keep driving force. And it's getting governments on board. But unfortunately a lot of governments are still supplemented by the big pharma and pharmaceutical companies.

Supplemented. That's an interesting choice of word.

Yeah. And that's the problem. It all comes down to greed. Again, it's all greed. And that's where every inhabitant of the planet has got to stand up and wake up to what's going on because we can't keep doing it. It's a passion of mine, as I know it is of yours, but it just annoys me when people just want to keep treating the symptom rather than looking at the cause of the problem. Why are we getting more Fusarium? We never used to get Fusarium. Why are we getting more disease in our crops? Because, you know, when I came into farming fungicides, you might do one, maybe two a year, but I stopped using them. I was up to about five a year. The one year it was a wet year. Now I wouldn't even consider it. It's just not there. Because once you get that plant functioning and you've got your soil working, that plant's not going to get. Get ill. It's. Why would it.

So, Tim, following up on a kind of a blend of a couple of points that have come up you mentioned in the political environment and the social environment that we now live in, where pesticide applications and intensive fertilizer applications are considered to be the norm, they are even called conventional agriculture, as. Because that has become the popular convention, even though it's very contemporary. And in the environment where the policymakers and the administrative sides of government are often being supplemented by pharmaceutical funding. I love that phrase. How in that type of environment, when we have a small group of people that are, let's just say they're 1% of the farming population who know there is a different way and a better way, a way that is better for everyone, how do we. I want to come back to the question that I asked a little bit ago. How do farmers embrace their power? How do farmers embrace their influence to significantly shift the needle at a macro scale When I asked you that question earlier, you answered it in terms of gaining experience and making progress in our personal life and personal practice on our farming operations. And that is a fundamental prerequisite. But then helping to shift the global conversation, the macro conversation. How do we step into and embrace our power in that context?

For me, coming together as farmers, we have got the power and we have got the voice. And then by having the voice, we can start to educate. The end consumer is always the one with the most power. Because if they demand their food produced in this way, to me, whenever I've explained how I farm and what I do to a total layperson, for one of a better word than that, is just an end consumer. They want to buy that food. Where can I buy that food? And unfortunately we haven't. You know, with this farms where we can buy grass fed beef and lamb, that's fantastic. Buying it off the farm and talking to that producer, that's how we should be buying all our food, is buying it direct. And we now need to get to the same position with our bread and everything else and our vegetables. It needs to make that connection. Because people have got so far removed from where their food comes from, they just think they go to the store and they buy food and it needs that connection back with the farmer. And by educating on, you know, on packaging and actually getting the message out there, you know, I always think all of our farming unions let us down, but most of them are conventional farmers, for want of a better word. And we, by coming together, we should have the money to put it in there. How we can educate, but how we can be rewarded for what we're doing. So that money we invest in educating the general public will come back to us because people will want the food that we're producing. And that's to me how we, by coming together, we have that power. And that's what it's all about. And farmers working together and talking, we shouldn't be fighting with our neighbors, we should be working as one and helping each other and moving the whole system forward. So we're producing the food that we want to produce, but selling it as we're making money and not just being left with a tiny piece of the cake, what that agrochemical company thinks we're worth for all the effort and work we put in, when we're taking all the risk, we should be rewarded for the nutritious food that we're producing. And we need that connection with the consumer to do that. In my opinion, I might again be a Bit waffly there, but that's the point I'm trying to get across is making that connection with the end user because once they know how we can produce food and how it's going to be better for them and it's nutrient rich, they want to buy it. But until we can educate them, because again, there's so much propaganda out there saying that GM foods are safe and that they're not going to hurt them, people aren't bothered. They just listen to a bit of media and they carry on. But we need some firm facts and visual effects of programs because I'm a big believer. Most people learn visually better than anything else. And once they see people come here to my farm and they see the wildlife and you know, I have bird ringing groups, I have an entomologist come on, none of them have ever seen bird numbers and insect numbers like it. And they all say, why don't all farmers do this? We wouldn't have any problems if all farmers farmed like you. And if I can do it, anybody can do it. It's not that I'm special, it's just that I'm passionate. But most farmers are and they want to get out there, but they just need the knowledge and we need to make that connection back with the end user because they have the buying power and they're the ones that will change everything, in my opinion.

So, Tim, as you think about your journey and the successes that you've had, and you're now in the process of going through some life changes as a result of your accident, what does the future look like for you? Where, where do you see yourself channeling your energy and focusing your energy going forward?

I should be challenging it, challenging it as much as possible into educating and helping people. I have my own website, Timbarton Farming.com where I try to help people on their journey. I still want to do as many talks. I'm hoping to get back on farm and do as much as I still can practically. But I still want to shout the message and do the work with Green Farm Collective that we can get the message out there to the consumer and get our bread and our vegetable everything produced region out there. And that's what I really want to put my energy into, is having that voice to educate people, be it farmers or be it consumers, because people care about what they eat and that is growing. You know, I've been in hospital and I went for an operation one day and I wasn't totally knocked out, I was just muscle relaxants. I didn't feel the pain. And all the people around there were talking about soil and the operation went very smoothly because I was talking about soil the whole from the time they picked me up, from the ward to the time they took me back, I was educating and talking about soil. They still come and see me now and they're doing bits in their garden and they've got their compost going. I'm well known throughout the hospital being the soil man. And people come and talk about their gardening problems and pest problems. So everybody's interested, I find, once you start to engage them, but it's just getting that time to engage them in the first place. And everywhere I go, I do a lot of talks to local villages and people like that. It's always the same response. Where can we buy this food? Why isn't it in the supermarkets? And by enough of us shouting and pushing it, people will demand it and that's when we can really. That's where I see my future going is educating, helping farmers and getting the message out there, John, as much as I can, because it's so important, you know, and if I can leave this planet and I've made a little bit of difference, then my existence has been really worthwhile because it's. It's such a precious commodity. The planet is. We've only got one. There is no Planet B. We've got to work with what we've got, but we've got to stop and restore and heal the damage that we've done to it. Because, you know, I'm not pointing a finger at anybody. You. I can see our farmers were led to use excessive nitrogen. You know, you can see. Imagine the yield response to that they got from doing it. He's like, whoa, look at this. But we now know we're burning too much carbon, we're polluting all our waters. We can't keep having all these oxygen dead zones in all our oceans. And a lot of our oxygen comes from marine photosynthesis. We can't keep throwing all this phosphorus on and it's just leached away. We've got to learn to work with plants and release just the right amount of phosphorus for that plant to use. And the same with nitrogen, you know, the soil wouldn't be full of nitrogen, it would just accumulate enough to get the right yield. And that's what the rise of AGI cycle is all about, is working in balance. And that's where, you know, you wouldn't have these great big dump loads thrown on soil causing all this imbalance within plant and within the biome of the soil and then washing it and leaching it all away just doesn't happen in nature.

You know, Tim, just occurs to me that there's a, there's a part of our conversation, an important part of this general conversation topic that we haven't touched on and that is personal health. Maybe we did touch on it, you mentioned it briefly in a bit of your own health journey. But as farmers we're so focusing on helping and supporting other growers to improve their soil health, to build soil carbon, to grow disease and insect resistant crops. But it occurs to me that there are many farmers who are on this journey who aren't perhaps giving enough consideration to their own health and to the health of their family, both. Not just in terms of the quality of the food they eat, that's a very important, important piece, but also the products that they have in their house, the household cleaners that they use, etc, like we are exposed to a lot of toxins and it's been interesting to observe. I would go so far as to suggest that there are many farmers today who are taking better care of their soils than they're taking care of their families and their bodies.

I would agree with you there, John. I mean, mental health is a real big one of mine and I, I think because farmers are so isolated, mental health always needs talking about. And I think especially male farmers, they're always so reluctant to admit they've got a problem. They'll only admit they've got a problem when they're really down on their uppers and they're really struggling. And again, that should be talked about as openly as if you've broken your leg. It shouldn't be a stigma to it. Everybody suffers with mental health, it's just on different levels. It's whether people admit it or not, we all suffer with mental health, it's just different levels. And most of that can be addressed in my opinion. I'm not a doctor, but in my opinion it's just the same as the plant and most of it is addressed by nutrition and keeping yourself balanced. But going back to cleaning products, I mean the amount of phosphorus and a lot of cleaning products that are just flushed down the drain, we can't keep doing that. There's plenty of natural products that we can use, but again it's. The cleaning side has been abused just like agriculture has in my mind, as in lots of quick fix products that do a job and make the user happy with the result they get. But they're not being told the damage that they're doing by using these products. And that's where we need to be very aware in all our purchasing choices. It's not just the food, it's all the cleaning products are a big pollutant and overlooked an awful lot in my mind.

Well, it's not just that the cleaning products are a significant pollutant, although that is the case, but they also affect our health directly, negatively, in a very pronounced way, and most of us are not aware of those factors.

Totally agree, John. People don't take the precautions they.