Episode 139: From DJ to Full-Time Regenerative Farmer with Andy Cato

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to improving soil health and plant health and ultimately people's health. And it's important that we remind ourselves constantly of that continuity and that the ultimate purpose of agriculture is not just to grow grains or to grow fiber, but for the sustainment and the nourishment of people and of the climate and ecology generally. So I want to say thank you to all of my listeners for being here, for supporting the podcast. We've continued to grow our audience very rapidly and to my pleasant surprise, sometimes. So thank you all for being here. And a special thank you to our guest today, Andy Cato. Andy, your work and the work that you're doing at Wild Farm and your entire history and story, I suspect that you're probably a fairly popular figure in the regenerative agriculture space, not just because of your voice and what you have brought to this space, but your fairly colorful background. People enjoy talking to colorful people about colorful conversations. So tell us a bit about your story and the context of what brought you here and the scope of the things you're working on.

Yeah, well, it's great to be here. I can't quite believe that I am. Having listened to pretty much every episode since the beginning, I think, but I'll try not to be starstruck and stick to the matter in hand. So, yeah, I mean, I came at farming from a very different angle in that I was a musician, and I was one of the very fortunate few amongst musicians who got to make a living doing that. And so for a couple of decades, I had the great pleasure of touring the globe making music, DJing, essentially doing what lots of people would like to do, and I was lucky enough to have done it. So I was doing that. And I was sort of an occasional buyer of organic food, but that's where my interest in food started and stopped. There was no. I guess in every family there's farming if you go back far enough. But in the short term, there was no farming background. And on the way back from a gig one day I picked up an article. It was brilliantly written and it was about the environmental consequences of food production. And it had a line in it which said, if you don't like the system, don't depend on it. And that really inspired me to. We were living in France at the time, just because we could. We could live anywhere so long as I could get to an airport. And we had a nice big garden. And so I, at the age of about 30,5ish. Decided with the help of John Seymour's Guide to self sufficiency, a 70s classic. Over here, I don't know if it is over there. Decided to try and grow some food for the family. And you know, I made lots of very, very basic mistakes, but fundamentally seeing those seeds become plants and those plants become food on the table was miraculous to me. And I was just left with a feeling of like, why is this not the first thing that we're taught at school?

Why doesn't everyone get to experience being a part of that process?

Exactly that. And just seeing that happen opened up what can only be described as a spectacular sized rabbit hole. And I just fell in, I fell in love with this process, you know. And so the vegetable patch slowly grew and we were sitting down to meals around the family table, a lot of which came from the garden, luckily over the fence. The, my neighboring farmers were essentially entirely self sufficient, apart from the odd item of clothing. So they were a big inspiration to me. So it grew and grew and eventually, I mean, any chapter of this, you know, you can imagine was quite rich. An Englishman in France, you know, gunning for self sufficiency. There's lots of scenes there, but the, the vegetable patch became a market garden. I got a license to sell produce at the local market. Again, you know, as an Englishman abroad, that had its own tales as well. And then I took the decision that I really wanted to do this at a bigger scale and join the people who I got the center, this embryonic movement. I wanted to be part of it. And I took the absolutely mad decision to sell my publishing rights, the rights to the songs that I'd written to finance the purchase of a farm in France. It's possible over there because I'm speaking from the UK now, I should add, but French farmland is about a fifth of the price of UK farmland, which makes it accessible or more accessible. So buying land in France is cheaper because it's regulated. That means you have to go to lots of meetings in dusty town halls with, you know, people arriving in, in French white citron vans and everyone knowing each other apart from me. And so that in itself was a process. But eventually I ended up buying this 110 hectare farm. And it was a very, very humbling experience in how hard it is to be a farmer, the vast array of skills required to be a farmer, and that I didn't have them. And essentially I hadn't done so much as a soil test. I mean, it's madness looking back on it. And the soils were heavily Depleted. They'd been growing irrigated maize for several decades. It was very low organic matter, around 0.5% in places. The kind of clay that goes from concrete to impossibly sticky in about five minutes. And that's your moment of intervention. And I went in there thinking I was just going to remove the chemicals and grow cereals. And of course I was faced with the reality that those soils are much better suited to growing weeds than they were to growing crops. And it was the beginning of an incredibly difficult decade.

Ay, ay, ay. I can only imagine the difficulties in those soil conditions. But to, to add to the challenges, as if, though you hadn't signed up for challenges enough, I seem to recall also that you farmed for a while with horses, or maybe for the entire the period that you were there. Were you farming horses as well?

That came a bit later on, but basically the sort of the chronology at the farm broke down into the first a few years where it was just, as I say, very, very humbling. In fact, when I first got going there, I was topping off a stubble field. The guy who was moving out had kind of decades and decades of stuff to move. So he was there for a while and he was helping me get going as I realized that I had to become a mechanic kind of overnight and just wasn't. He set me off topping off this stubble. And it's beautiful up there. You can see on a clear day the Pyrenees from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic pretty much snow capped. And I took this photo sent to my wife saying, I can't believe you can make a living doing this. And of course the punchline was that I couldn't. But. So those first three or four years, everything went wrong and I was incapacitated with a back problem. And it was literally a nightmare. I was lucky that I could go and play records and not go bankrupt, but it was exhausting. And I got to the point of having to think I'm going to have to cut my losses here for the first time in my life, give up, essentially. And that's when I came across a book by Albert Howard and an agricultural testament. And that opened a whole new world to me. And that led to a second chapter of experimentation, including crimper rolling, multi species sowing experimentation with the bond fields method that you were talking to Frederic Larsen about the other day. And lots and lots of things. And then seeing real promise in that towards a kind of not no till organic, but reduced till organic, but then wanting to be lighter and lighter on the land. All the time. And that's what eventually led me to spend a remarkable period with a man called Ivan Lapp in Lancaster county looking at pioneer and other horse drawn farming equipment. I'd never ridden a horse in my life, but my friend and companion at the farm, Thierry, he was a, he was an expert horseman, so he's the one who made it feel feasible. But nevertheless, you know, there's quite a few chapters from finding the Persia on horses, from a breeder who was, I think, raising them for meat actually and getting them to the point of being able to hitch them up and do some work was in itself a bit of a story. But they were also some of the, some of the happiest days of my life.

When you look back on that period, what were some of the. I mean, there must have been so many. But what were some of the. What are some of the memorable moments that you mentioned reading Albert Howard's book? What are some of the memorable experiences in the field that gave you the encouragement and the inspiration that this really is possible to continue moving forward with?

I mean, there were several. The one that really springs to mind actually is when I started doing crimper rolling. So I was doing soybeans into crimper rolled rye. Amazing. To Kimpa, all vetch. And I got into that because through Albert Howard, I came across Rodale, his buddy, and then through Rodale, the Rodale Institute. And then. Is it Jeff Moller, if I remember that right?

Steve Graf?

Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. And so I come across this idea that the work that they'd been doing, and then it's a long story about how I managed to get hold of a crimperola, but it ended up being delivered by this kind of pair of Tarantino style lovers in a sports car driving it down from Germany. But that's a, a story for another day. But I got going with this crimperola and, and, you know, was still planting the covers the previous autumn into really degraded soils. And then there was this agonizing period the following spring and I really needed something to start working. I could prop myself up with the, with the music, but, you know, there's a lot of zeros on checks in farming, particularly when you're coming in with nothing. And I really, really needed this to work. I was staking a lot on this. And then there just seemed to be a totally insufficient amount of biomass and I was so close to mowing it off. And again, it was my friend Thierry who said, listen, if you do that, you've lost Another year you've got to stick it. And then over the course of two or three weeks there was an extraordinary burst of growth on both the rye and the vetch. And I just waited and everyone else had already planted their saw everyone else had planted their maize and I was waiting and waiting and then eventually went out there with the crimper and it was a bit too dry and I probably didn't set it up quite right and it wasn't quite working and I had to then do some irrigation just so it rolled better, you know, so it was going on and on. And then eventually I did it and it sort of went okay, but I wasn't particularly happy with how I'd done the operation. And then I remember going down there and seeing these little courageous rows of green poking up through the crimper old mulch. And I mean even talking about it now, I feel quite emotional about that moment. It was a, it was a huge, huge moment for me and a big turning point.

And I suppose in order to still have that emotional attachment to that moment, the crop itself eventually turned out to be okay as well.

Well, it did. And that was the first time when I begin to begin to welcome growers onto the farm to do some field walks and stuff like that, you know, when the, maybe the, you know, the Englishman wasn't completely mad after all, you know. And I started to work a little bit with the, the local agroforestry association. And so that was, it was a turning point in so many ways. And this is a long time ago, but I remember that on each of the fields or the areas I did some organic, conventional organic comparisons if you like. So inter row hoeing and all of that. And it gets hot down there, you know, so the, the moisture retention thanks to the mulch was not inconsequential. And I seem to remember that the, I mean it wasn't like a brilliant harvest, but I remember doing the comparison and it was something like my margin on the, the maze into the crimperole vetch was somewhere around 790something a hectare. And if I was honest about irrigation passes and the cost of that, the, on the conventional organic area it was, it was minus 100 and something, you know. So this was a really, it was a breakthrough in so many ways.

When, as your operation evolved in France, what was your pathway to market and how did you begin thinking differently? What was the inspiration for thinking differently about facilitating market access?

I suppose it was a combination of two things. I mean, one is that what evolved over Time was a different approach to growing wheat. So I got interested in the idea of pasture cropping. And there was two phases to that. One was using grazing and the second one was developing an absolutely lethal prototype into Roamowa, which definitely wouldn't pass any health and safety checks. But as that system began to develop, I was just really struck by the fact that, you know, here we had these and there was a whole varietal question down there because there's a tradition of the Pays am Boulanger, the sort of farmer baker, you know, sort of on farm baking from your homegrown produce essentially. And a lot of them were using these older wheat populations. And so there's a lot of height there, which gave you the opportunity to do some more experimental work with regard to the understories and so on. And you know, it was by no means perfect, but a system evolved which was working or working in the context of having sort of grass fed beef as a backup plan for when it doesn't work. And so you see, you know, these beautiful wheat plants growing in nature, rich ecosystems, and then it's all just sort of going on the same pile as everything else. And I thought, this is crazy, you know, and I need to try and add value to this. And as I say, the Pays and Boulanger tradition was, was there to inspire me. So my first plan was to set up a mill and sell flour because I'd never baked bread in my life and I had enough going on without adding that to the list and. But the flour sales didn't go that well. There was one, one baker in Toulouse who was really supportive, but by and large there was a lot of attachment to sort of high gluten baguette flour. And mine didn't really fit into that. So. But by this time I'd invested in a mill, like I was a long way down the road again. And so I decided to try and learn how to make bread. A process which my son labeled lakes and mountains after what usually welcomed us when we opened the oven door. These kind of like dripping pancakes with mountainous ridges around the edges. Actually it was a guy called Parmentier who's famous for his potatoes, but he also wrote a book about baking in the 18th century because he was so furious about the state of bread in France. And he gave me some great tips in there. Anyway, I'm getting distracted. But we ended up making bread. And again the shop said, well, we've got bread suppliers. But I said, yeah, this is a bit different, and started giving it to families who were not celiac, but had digestive issues with bread, stopped eating bread. Cause it wasn't agreeing with them and it was very well received. And from that it was a kind of word of mouth thing. And eventually we ended up with quite a lot of demand. So I got some proper bakers to come who really knew what they were doing. And then we started supplying bread for schools and eventually end up with a farm shop. And the phoenix had sort of risen from the ashes to a degree. But I suppose that was the moment when you see this is not an affluent part of France, but when you see local people using their food choices for different reasons. You know, either because they like the taste or because of how they feel or for their health, or because they want to support that kind of farm landscape, whatever it might be. People have agency and it's a lovely collaboration.

When you describe an English farmer farming in France and being accepted by the local culture, that's. That is an image that raises kind of a quizzical expression on people's face, particularly on mine. But then when you think about an Englishman baking bread and being sponsored and supported by the French community, that raises. Perhaps that's an interesting juxtaposition that's going on there. What did that all look like?

Yeah, I mean, the truth is that. I mean, this has been a universal experience for me that I think that within the farming community, however we might agree or disagree about, in quotes, the right way to do things, there is an enormous sense of solidarity. I've been lucky enough to always experience that anyway, you know, despite doing things in a wildly different way to most of my neighbors for most of the time. And similarly, you know, I think when you're driving down the road in a tractor, most people will pull over, you know, there's an understanding still that an important thing is happening here and people will try and get out of the way. So. And also, I think, you know, we had kids in school, I was farming. There's not been English people down there. There's certainly no English people mad enough to try farming down there. So I think there was a kind of, you know, grudging respect for just getting involved, you know, trying and just trying to do something and make a positive impact. Even though, you know, along the way far more things went wrong than went right. But it was, it was, it was full of fantastic and very memorable moments that more than offset the dark days. And there were some really, really dark days which left an indelible impression. And one memorable one was when I was farming down there's very different to what I've experienced over here since, in that it's. A lot of the farm buildings are still used for their original purpose. It's very manual. There's a lot of just making things work, just doing it, you know, and including a lot of flat bottom silos, the last two or three tons of which is shovels. And so I was shoveling out one of these silos and I got a very insistent call from a great supporter of mine, a part of the sort of local farming and political community who had helped me an awful lot. He said, listen, I need you to get a loaf of bread into town. And I said, listen, really, it's not the time, I'm busy. And he was absolutely insistent but couldn't say why. And eventually I climbed out the silo, absolutely covered in all the things you can imagine, and drove this loaf into town. And I was greeted by a guy with sunglasses and, and, and a machine gun. And I was let through the gates and found myself delivering a, a loaf of bread to the French president. And if you'd said that, if you'd said that as a potential scene when I was standing in a DJ booth in Ibiza in the, in the early 2000s, I wouldn't have believed you.

Yeah. So many questions come from this conversation, but I wanted to talk a bit about your experiments with the Bonneville's method and with pasture based wheat. But before we go there, you mentioned that you had this attraction to the local population who might have had some digestive distress from wheat. And this was in an area where there is a culture of local wheat production and local baking. So how was your wheat different? What was different from what people were growing in the area already?

Well, I'll say that, you know, there was, there was a culture of, of local baking, but the vast majority of people are, I don't know the percentages, but the vast majority of people are getting their, their baguettes from, you know, very traditionally made baguettes. So there's definitely a bread culture in the idea of going, getting the bread while it's warm and it's fresh. And there's a lovely social aspect to that. The connect the social connections that come from that. But in terms of how it's made and what it's made from, you know, it's a slightly different story. And I think, you know, with local food it's quite important to sort of pull apart the social aspects and the nutritional aspects, you know, and they're two very different things. And so, you know, there Were a number of these pays and boulangers dotted around the countryside. Generally speaking, they would take their bread to a particular market on a particular day of the week. But as a percentage of overall bread purchase is very, very small. And so I think what was working for people from the wheat grown at my farm would probably have worked from the wheat grown and made by any of these pays of meulanger because we were all doing very similar things. Long fermentations, low input farming systems.

Got it.

Thinking about the wheat production practices and the growing systems, what did you eventually find to work and did not work for you? You spoke about your experimentation with the bonfills method and companion planting, planting into pasture based systems, which are all ideas that I'm very intrigued by because I do think we need to, we need to figure out how to grow small grains differently in a way that is more ecologically friendly than we. Than we commonly do.

Yeah, well, I started it's actually we had, we had some school children at the farm on a very rainy day. And I was telling a story about how wheat had been discovered growing in the parches of the Fertile Crescent. And then as I was saying that I was sort of thinking, hang on a minute. And then somewhere I'd think I'd seen a Colin Zeiss mention which is sort of half struck a chord. And from that I thought, well, we've got these tall wheats, I'll just try drilling them into tightly grazed pastures in the autumn and see if they can stay ahead. And what happened there was it looked great in the autumn because the, the wheat came out the ground like the clappers. The pasture had been tightly grazed and you know, to the beyond what I normally would have done. And you had these lovely rows and it seemed to be that the battle was won. And then spring came around and it was a very, very different story. And so that didn't work. And then what changed that was introducing grazing. This was with cattle because that's what I had as close as possible to grow stage 31. So in that scenario what we started to find was that grazing it tight up to that point with these taller varieties, the wheat would often stay ahead. And you had to be a little bit like you were discussing the other day about the alfalfa. You know, you had to be careful at harvest time. And this is when techniques like swathing become useful and just depended on the moisture between, you know, between spring and harvesting. But it worked sort of often enough to be interesting, particularly in the context of a farm bakery where you Know, you're using all the wheat yourself. You can just plant a bit more, you can have margin, you can graze it off with the cows if it goes wrong and so on. But then it's when I was thinking, oh, it'd be great to be able to just control this, to sort of take the risk out of harvest, that I was thinking about the mower idea. And there was a guy who was working at the local agroforestry association with whom I discussed this a lot. Little did I know, of course, that a few thousand miles away, Woody Van Alcor was having exactly the same idea. And I'm sure innumerable other people having the same idea too. But the MOA system, again, is all very primitive. I was using a little 1960s Ford Dexter tractor. This was long before the idea of GPS systems was even on my. On my radar. I was using really wide road spacings because I was driving manually, because that's the equipment that I had. So I was on 75 centimeter centers. So basically maze centers. But what was fascinating there was that if you got it right, once the mowing was done, the capacity for. For the wheat plants to fill the spaces and use up all the available light was quite remarkable. So that felt like a really, really promising avenue, and that's why I pursued that one. And then we narrowed row widths and got GPS involved over the years and so on. And the Bonfields one, I'd read the story, and it's an amazing. Like a film script, isn't it? Because he tragically died with a lot of money in his rucksack at a railway station. I mean, it's all very, very mysterious, but it's a fascinating story. So I just did what he did just in on a garden level. So I was talking about handfuls of plants, but I was getting between between sort of 90 and 110 tillers. I mean, these plants become monsters, absolute monsters. And so then I thought, I need to be able to do this on a field scale. So my initial attempt was to block off the holes on a maize drill to find a way, literally using Sellotape, but to find a way of putting wheat seeds, you know, every 40 centimeters in every direction. But that just didn't really work because I was doing that in July and there were all kinds of moisture issues and you don't need many losses there for the whole system to break down. And so then I tried. There's a lot of tobacco production down there. So people were transplanting soil blocks of plants. I thought well, if I can get 11 and a half tons a hectare with no impulse, this is worth the manual labor. I'll do that.

Right.

And so I did several thousand wheat plants in soil blocks and transplanted them, but I never really got to the bottom of why. But it just didn't like being transplanted, just didn't, didn't thrive. But this is an avenue. Knowing what I know now, I think that robotics has a, an interesting role to play here, potentially. So when I get back from kind of trying to spending my time up the food system, trying to persuade people to do stuff, this is a project that I really want to go deep on.

Yeah, well, I'm having parallel conversations with a robotics company about exactly this. So we need to stay connected on that topic. So when you mentioned the wheat plants developing into absolute monsters, 90 to 110tillers each, what time of year were you planting those and compared to typical common planting times in the region?

So I was planting those in July, so a little bit later than Bonfield's, because I was about slightly guessing here, but I'll guess about, you know, 600 miles south of him. So I was planting a little bit later, mid July. And, well, I suppose a conventional farmer down there will probably plant mid October. And traditional organic stale seedbed operations would mean that you might drill early November, something like that.

Earlier, you were speaking about grazing the wheat with the cattle at growth stage 31. For those who are still learning about and thinking about managing small grains in this way. What is unique about growth stage 31? What happens when you graze earlier or later than that?

Well, I mean, later than that, you need to be careful that the, what becomes the ear isn't at a level that can be bitten off. And, and so it's essentially getting as close to that as you can. So as close to stem elongation as possible without in any way endangering or forcing the plants to make a new year, because that comes at a huge cost.

And the reason for doing that as late as possible is to. And that having that intensive grazing is to clip back the pastures, clip back the other plants as aggressively as possible, because the wheat will grow back more robustly than the pasture grasses. Is that the case?

That was the case sometimes. And that was the case in the context of taller wheat varieties. There seemed to be, more often than not, a situation where the combination of height in the variety and the fact that it was annual rather than perennial meant that from that moment onwards, it would just get ahead and stay ahead. Of course, the period of vulnerability comes later on when the wheat then start to senesce and if you've got loads of moisture and the understory is catching up. So you need to think about the plants that would be optimum to make up the understory in that case.

So more recently your professional work and life has gone in a bit of a different direction perhaps. But has this work with grazing and pasture based wheat production systems or in perennials, has any of this been brought forward? Any of the farm growers that you're working with today doing some of this.

Work, what are you seeing that people.

Are doing that is working well, I guess is my question.

Yeah. So I think what came out of this is the first and foremost. What came out of it was the field to plate community. And that has formed the whole basis of wild farms. So in other words, here we have local people using their food choices as a force for good, whether personal, environmental, whatever it is that they're interested in and how, you know, we don't have much ecological road left, so how do we make that choice available to people on the high street? And so that field to plate community at the French farm was the. Trying to do that at scale has formed everything that we were trying to do since in terms of how we do it. When I met my wild farm co founders Ed and George, we decided that we would have to do this in England, in the uk, because in terms of building a movement for change, just in terms of who we know, this is where we had a chance of putting enough people together to try and get something going. So when I came over to the UK and started, I was very wedded to this idea of intero mower. I'd invested most of the family silver in it, a lot of late nights in DJ booths to pay for all these prototypes and I just. Because when it works, it's brilliant, it's the most satisfying system. And I was very wedded to that as an idea. And I had another very humbling experience when I started doing that in grass based pastures again. Looked good in the autumn, looked terrible in the spring and there were some mitigating circumstances around weather and the history of those fields and so on and so forth. But that came at the same time as thanks to you, I came across Christine Jones and this whole notion of plant diverse in it. And I remember standing in this field with the wheat going quite rapidly backwards in these grass based pastures. Just this terrible moment of realization that the reason why I'd seen such positive potential in the fields in France was. And I'd assumed it was all down to plants being perennial. And I mean, it seems obvious now, but it wasn't then. And I now realize that it was all about really the plants being diverse. And so as this shifted the whole focus to plant diversity combined with the wildfire mission to make what had been happening in France feasible at scale, or at least to take positive steps to move in that direction at scale, despite all of the hours spent with the mower. And some of our farmers have decided to build them and push on with that, which is great. But in terms of sort of landscape change at scale, how can we bring these practices to bear? Well, the best thing seemed to be a combination of COVID crops and by crops, so companion planting, essentially, because you don't need any new kit, you can just get on do it. So from that point, we started building the wildfarm community around that fundamental practice.

We've been talking about your journey, discoveries and things along the way, but we haven't really spoken about wild farmland. Tell us a bit about the scope of the work that you are doing today. What is the scope of your work at Wild Farmed?

Wow, where do we start? That one? Well, I suppose the headlines are that we're working with about 110 farmers and we working with around 500 customers. And they go all the way from micro bakeries to food processors to supermarkets to football clubs. And so really the wild farm community has become a very, very diverse community that we're trying to bring together as a force for a collaborative change. And in terms of how that actually works, farmers grow for us, following the wild farm standards. We found quite early on that if you were asking people to pay a little bit more for something, once you get beyond kind of friends and family, you have to say exactly what it is that they're paying for. So we drew up these farming standards a few years ago now, and farmers grow to those standards and we take the grain off them and turn that into various products. And initially that was into flour. So we were providing an ingredient. And again initially to micro bakeries, Michelin starred restaurants, tastemakers trying to build a thing of what my co founder George refers to as concentric circles just moving outwards. There's no point knocking on the door of an outer circle till the inner circle is already doing it. So slowly building up the kind of the retail end of it that way, and within that, just trying to create a more holistic version of value across the whole supply chain.

So these farming guidelines, or I forget the term that you Use. But the process that you've outlined, can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like? What does it look like to produce grain for Wild Farm? What are the requirements?

Yeah, so we drew these up. As I say, because if you're asking people to pay a little bit more, people want to know what they're paying for, which is fair enough. And the word regenerative is being applied so many different things that we felt the need to be precise. Not that everyone has to do the same thing, but everyone has to be clear. And so the practices as defined originally were plant diversity at all times. So either a companion crop with your cereal or a cover crop ahead of a spring cereal. Originally the business was organic and we've since moved towards some nitrogen use. So that began at 80 kilos for winter wheat, that's now at 120. Because that's been changed. We had this kind of community review process, but in split doses of 40 kilos, helping our farmers to get going with SAP testing. No surprise where the inspiration for that came from. And then no applications of pesticides to the growing crop. And when we defined those processes, essentially what we were trying to do with the processes was guarantee certain outcomes. So, you know, minimizing water pollution, pesticide free grain, nature rich farming. And what's really exciting now is that we've spent so much time and energy measuring those outcomes that we're getting close to a world where we can define outcomes rather than practices, which is the key.

I was just about to ask you that question about measuring outcomes. So what are the. I know that these understand from what you just said that these definitions, these defined outcomes are still in development. But what are you arriving at? What are you beginning to coalesce around? What are the outcomes that seem to make sense?

Well, there are some that are easier than others. So for example, let's start with easy ones, that is water quality, for example. So we've been working with in the uk, I don't know if you have the same over there, but we have a system of private water boards. So the whole country is a patchwork of different private companies looking after water supply. And so the farming team have worked absolutely tirelessly with them to measure the fact that a wild farm grower is not going to be contributing nitrate pollution, for example. And so that's relatively straightforward and excitingly is actually from this year because those outcomes have now been measured and repeated is becoming like real payments to farmers. So this idea of holistic, holistic view of yield, if you like, or a Holistic view of production being kind of food quality, nature quality, water quality, not just how many tonnes, as a way to kind of making food from these systems affordable and reducing farmer risk. You know, we're starting to take steps down that road. So water quality is quite an easy one if we stay off sequestration for a minute. But carbon emissions intensity is quite straightforward. You know, nitrogen use, yield out and then we dedicate a lot of time to nature. Because a real focus of the wild farm community is that nature and food have been seen as mutually exclusive and we're trying to stop that being the case. And so measuring nature outcomes has been driven by our partnership with Bristol University. So what we're doing there is doing comparative measures. So in fact, across all of these outcomes, you know, comparative measures I think is really important. So for example, we, we are monitoring biodiversity in a wild farm field, in the nearest conventional field, and then again, all in this sort of interest of trying to generate value. There are certain landscapes here, unfortunately, all non productive, but it's a real mission of mine to change that. But this is all the sort of nature and food shadow, but non productive landscapes for which you can get paid, you can get government payments for nature, essentially, but not if you're producing food. So by comparing the nature outcomes in these food producing field to those, we're just always trying to build this case about how nature and food can be symbiotic and need to be.

Yeah, and need to be. That's, I think, a spot on point, is this idea that the best way to regenerate landscapes is to remove people and to remove human stewardship from the landscape is an idea that I think needs to die. And so I'm completely with you on that one.

There is an assumption, you know, going back hundreds of years, I think, whereby, you know, there's a feeling that we have to remove humans from landscapes in order for those landscapes to. To thrive. And I think that the sooner we can, we can overturn that, the quicker we can get back to a point of the kind of symbiotic relationship we need with the natural world in order to build a livable future.

I want to go back to your quality outcomes. I have a couple of ideas or thoughts that come to mind. One of them is you've listed water quality and not having any nitrate pollution as being one very important outcome. And your nitrogen management practices have shifted where you are now at 120 kilos per hectare of nitrogen application that is very different from where you started from. How did you arrive at the need for those levels of nitrogen. And how have you been able to determine. I'm sure you're measuring that you're not producing groundwater quality, but it's interesting to me that you're not impacting groundwater quality. It's interesting to me that you've split that application into three pieces. You know, we have this phenomena across the American Midwest, which seems to me to be the height of lunacy, of applying 100% of next year's crop nitrogen requirement in the fall before the crop is planted. This is specifically on corn. And I look at that system and I just. I cannot. I can't figure. I can't. I know, like, I understand it intellectually. I know that the incentives are there for dealers. They have the. That time of year, they have the available equipment and time and employee time to go out and spread it. But from an agronomic perspective, it seems to me to be one of the most stupidest things that we could possibly. Anyway, how did you arrive at that nitrogen use and those split applications, and what have the benefits been that you've observed from that process?

Well, the original level reflects the fact that we're coming in from an organic starting point, and therefore, you know, personally speaking, you know, came from a place of great skepticism around nitrogen, full stop. And this is one of the many examples of just trying to avoid dogma and meet the world as it is and learn from people who are doing a great job. And so the first step was becoming persuaded that limited amounts of nitrogen to ensure adequate biomass and therefore sunlight capture, can actually just be a really positive force, not just for farmer outcomes, without which we've got nothing to talk about anyway, but actually just in the spirit of sunlight capture as the driver of all of this, and the first, where we drew the line of 80 and two split doses of 40, it was a best guess. It was a best guess based on nitrogen efficiency curves, on what we thought would work and what we found last winter. We've had three years of extraordinary weather in the UK and we are just farming in a completely different water cycle. And it's making what was already a hard transition really, really difficult. Which I think brings us back to the community piece. Maybe we can come back to that in a second. But the reality of that was that across the board, mining wheat in the UK is down over a third, I think, and for our growers, using a little nitrogen to go quite a long way. Our sort of mantra of nutrition based on need, well, we just couldn't meet the need in some cases. You know, so we just had to. You can't just close your eyes and hope that doesn't happen again. You have to. So we came together as a community and like, okay, how much do we think we were short and why? And so we decided that for, not for spring cereals, but for winter cereals, the option of this third dose of 40 would be the only sensible way forward. So then we went back to the water companies and said, what do you think about this? And consensus was that with all the available data this shouldn't pose a problem. And so again, we'll measure it and then we'll go again.

I found it interesting when you were describing all of the. You described three different measured outcomes that you're measuring. None of them included the quality of the wheat being produced. How do you see that evolving over time?

Well, we are doing that. It's just that we haven't done enough of it to make claims about that. So one of the baseline guarantees that the wheat is pesticide free. So that's a guarantee that we give to our customers. And we test that both at the farms, we test that in the store, we test that on the way to the mill, we test the flour. So the pesticide free guarantee is a really important one. But we want to go beyond absence of bad things to the presence of good things, you know, so we've been doing small tests of polyphenols, for example, and found anything. Again, this is all relative. So we'll test a wild farm field relative to the nearest conventional field sample that we can get. And we find differences, you know, between 14 and 100% in places. And I'm not actually the leading the work on this, but we've just teamed up and I'm fearing I'm getting this wrong even as I'm saying it, but I think it might be called audacious and it might be the University of Utah.

Two different people. But edacious is Eric Smith and Stefan Van Fleet at the University of Utah. Yeah. And you collaborating with both of them, but yeah, two separate organizations. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So we've teamed up with them to look at the wider nutritional piece, not just in the wheat, but also importantly for us is seeing how that translates all the way through to the finished goods.

So when you look at the scope of the work and the progress that you've made so far, what is, what is your long term vision? What is the impact that you desire to make with wild farmed over the course of the next decade?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean I think that the. I think there's two very distinct pieces to it. One is on a farming level, what we're trying to do is provide the agronomy support, build a holistic level of financial support so that farmers can engage in really meaningful behavioral change from a kind of, you know, so many farmers have been forced into a mindset of suppression and control of nature is the only way to survive. And how can we help people to a place of sort of nurture and collaboration, you know, and we see that joining this community, that sort of mindset shift ripples across, you know, all sorts of other practices on the farm, which is great. So that's what we're there for. I think the biggest impact in terms of system change is the idea of traceable supply chains. And time and time again, I think we come back to this as being a really key to unlock the kind of change that we all want to see. Because otherwise, you know, you can say to people, yeah, your food choice is your greatest point of agency for your health or for the climate or for nature or whatever. But unless they can then go down the road to their local shop and a price they can afford, buy food from farmers who are doing something about that, then it's meaningless.

Exactly.

And so, you know, so I think just getting this question widespread, like who grew your food and how, and trying to make this a high street possibility and a question in the minds of procurement people at food businesses large and small, I think that's a really important step because I don't know if you've had the same thing. I guess not. But there's a really interesting statistics around eggs over here. Nothing to do with us, but free range eggs in the UK now. And you can quibble about how free range, free range eggs are, but that's a whole other story that I don't know enough about. I don't want to get into. But 75% of eggs sold in UK supermarkets are free range, despite often being up to twice as expensive now. And what we're finding is We've got over 100,000 people engaged on social media, most of whom are under 40. When you provide people with a sense of purpose and a sense of empowerment, there's a real hunger for it. There's a real hunger for it, and I think that's a hugely positive force that just needs to be unleashed. But without traceable supply lines, essentially creating digitally what Wendell Berry talks about, you know, a direct link to your producer is the only real way to build an ecologically sound food system, but we can do that now through digital networks, at least to a degree. We can make things a lot better.

Yeah. Much more easier than we've been able to even 10 years ago, even five years ago. Yeah. So your example of free range eggs and them having such a significant segment of the market in spite of being twice the price brings me to. It's actually the very next question that I had written down that I wanted to ask you about was how are you compensating growers for producing wheat with these, for producing grains with these quality standards? And how are you thinking about the price to the grower relative to consumer cost? You just mentioned that you want to keep things affordable. What do those dynamics look like? How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, well, where we began thinking about that is essentially that we as wild farmed would pay growers a nature premium, I suppose we could call it that. So we just paid growers more and we still do, but the long term.

Goal Is to roughly 10% more or 50% more.

Well, it's gone down. So initially it was when we were in organic business, it was a bigger premium than it is now. But essentially what we want to create a situation where these different aspects of production, so the nature aspect, so you know, on our Bristol samples we're seeing up to 100% increase in biodiversity in wild farm fields compared to a conventional field, for example. So if you can get nature payments on the spreadsheet, you can get water payments on the spreadsheet, reductions in carbon emissions intensity, even if we stay off the thorny issue of sequestration, then that's the way that I see of doing two things, which is one is reducing farmer risk and the second one is making sure that the grain price doesn't have to move to such a stand that food from these nature rich systems becomes unaffordable. In the meantime, we've learned a lot about the food system and this is my other co founders, Ed's area of expertise. But suffice to say that you can move the price of flour in a lot of wheat based products, a pizza for example, or a croissant, without making a massive difference to the price of the product. Because a lot of the price is the other stuff or the rent or the wages or the heating or whatever. And so that does open up a lot of flexibility. And we also just have to face head on the strange imbalances that we've ended up with. And this is not an option for everybody because there's an awful lot of poverty in the uk but for a significant number of people, if you live in London, you're talking about £7 for a pint of beer, up to £4 for a coffee and £1 40 for a loaf of bread. Now that's just not a fair reflection of the world. So that's a conversation that we have to have too.

Yeah, you're absolutely right that that is a cultural misalignment of values. This conversation about pricing and developing pricing model and structure that works well for customers and compensates them well, as well as keeping food affordable for consumers, I think is such an important conversation, particularly around the staples, animal proteins, meat, milk, eggs, and for staples such as wheat and bread like these. These are the, the staples that are at the foundation of not just diets generally, but I think particularly of healthy diets. And I'm of the persuasion or of the perspective that it's important to pay our farmers well and that when we pay producers well, the whole economy thrives and flourishes. At the same time, we have to recognize that we have a lot of people who are struggling financially and we need to support them as well. How do we reconcile those two?

Yeah, I mean this is the million dollar question in all senses, isn't it? And I think it's. Well, the solution that we're trying to make a reality is this holistic nature of production. So for example, we've been working with, we have a thing called the sfi, the Sustainable Farming Initiative in the uk and that's a sort of post Brexit set of environmentally focused. I don't like the word subsidies, but let's go with that for now, but I'll explain why in a second. But a lot of that is really good, but the shadow of nature versus food hangs over it. So there's still this idea that if we want more nature, it's based on the idea that we take land out of production. And so we're having lots of conversations with government about that, trying to get that sorted out and they are listening to that. We have another all day session recently about that. So they've already updated one of the options open to farmers which recognizes the wild farm practices. So for those growers who have got that option plus happen to be living in the catchments for one of the water boards who are now recognizing that it's actually cheaper for them to pay wildfire growers per hectare rates than it is to get the pollution out of the water afterwards. You can be in a situation there before we even get to nature, where, you know, that's around 500 pounds per hectare before you planted a seed.

Wow.

You know, so I think that actually the key is recognizing the value, that agroecological farming methods provoke parties, a whole. This is real, actual value. That's why I say that I don't like the idea of a. A subsidy because the myriad examples of it actually just being the best return on investment that government could choose to spend money on, you know. So I think that this holistic version of value for farmers is how in my mind, we marry good food from nature rich landscapes with affordability.

Now this is an intriguing conversation because to the best of my awareness, you have advanced much further in this conversation from a perspective of rewarding ecosystem services than anywhere else in the world that I'm aware of. And there's many areas that I'm not aware of. But when I think about the possibilities of being rewarded for producing better groundwater quality in Australia or North America, I'm not aware that the compensation models for rewarding good agroecological practices exist at the scale or with the monetary reward board level that you were describing.

Well, I don't know. And it's still piecemeal here because we've got myriad water boards and we're not working with all of them yet. But now we've got the principle. The hope with all of this is that, and not just for us, for anyone pursuing these kind of farming systems, the key, I think is establishing the principle. And similarly with government money. I was having a discussion with them last week that because of the shadow of nature versus food, once again, there was a wild farm grower who was following our protocols. And so it's been tested and confirmed by various water boards to have no nitrate leaching. But when he was producing food, aside from a government perspective, he couldn't get any money for that. And yet now he's being offered 1700 pounds a hectare to take the land out of production to protect against nitrate leaching.

Right.

So we just got to close some of these loopholes and get rid of this nature versus food dichotomy. And I can really see a way to combining good farmer outcomes with reduced risk. At the end of the day, I've yet to meet a farmer who doesn't want to grow food in nature rich landscapes, if that was an option that they were paid fairly for.

Andy, you have such a rich story and we've touched on a few aspects of it, but I'm sure that there are many that we haven't. What are some of the important topics that you'd love to bring forward forward that we've missed touching on so far.

You know, there's a book on the bookshelf here just above me by Henry Elliot, Robert Henry Elliot. It's called the Clifton Park System of Laying Land down to Grass. And I was looking at that again the other day and it talked about how UK farmers are besieged by a flood of imported grain which is forcing them to use more and more fertilizer. There's no state support for agroecological or soil health focused farming practices. Varieties are inappropriate. You know, it will be laughable were it not for the fact that that's from 1898 and the fact that we're such a long way down a very well signposted road. And yet something I think has exponentially changed in the past very few years. Because when I think back to, you know, some of these other books here, just sat down reading things like Fukuoka or Albert Howe, we've already mentioned Frank Newman, Turner, Faulkner, all these people. And I picture myself in the French farmhouse just working my way through this stuff. And compare that to Groundswell, which for non UK listeners is the Regen Get Together, founded by the inspirational Cherry family. That's quite literally changed the landscape over here. Yeah, the 8,000 people across two days and the hunger for information. I mean, you saw it, the kind of beetle mania when they greeted your arrival. But I think the solidarity that comes out of those events is just such an important thing. You know, those dark days on the farm in France really left their mark on me. And the wild farm community of growers is without question the thing of which I'm most proud. And people are really loving being a part of that. You know, the get togethers, the open days, the resources, the celebrations, the collective learning of it all, eating what you've grown back to, traceable supply chains again. But this has emerged to be something, you know, really important for our farmers. A lot of people don't get to do that and it really changes your reflections on how you want to go about doing things. So all of this, I think, is why, you know, more than 90% of people who join stay with us, and why new growers want to join all the time.

I'd love to ask you about consumer demand. I'm sure you've probably heard my thoughts on consumer demand driving change. And for listeners who are not aware of this, I've spoken about this in several occasions, but I've been of the opinion that there have been very few cases, in fact, I haven't been able to Identify any where positive consumer demand created significant change. There's been incremental change and slight improvements. But you actually just provided an anecdotal story of free range eggs being 70% of the supply chain, which is, as you said, we could have a discussion about what free range, what actually qualifies as free range. But are you observing that consumer demand can actually facilitate and drive change in the supply chain? And if so, why hasn't that happened more broadly yet?

I would say in terms of significant changes in supply line supply chain is too early for us to say. I don't know. But I know that the level on which we're engaging with consumers and procurement people within food businesses suggests that there's almost in our scale at least unlimited demand, subject to getting the pricing mechanisms right. And I guess if that hasn't happened before to a degree, and maybe the free range eggs example points is an indicator why this might be in the absence of traceability and supply lines. How can it really? Because if you're in the supermarket, you can't know who grew your food and how they grew it. You can't have consumer empowerment.

You've given me so much to think about. I don't even have a follow up question.

Andy.

This puts a whole different perspective or this puts a deeper emphasis than the one that I've considered in the past on the need for traceability. Because what you're describing is that the old model, the model that is espoused by Wendell Berry and the Joel Salatins of the world, is to have a direct relationship with your grower. But given the wide disparities in geographical distances between most producers and most consumers, that's not logistically population possible. But the point that you're making is that we can create an element of that trust digitally with traceability and with a connection to the grower. And that when authenticity is translated through that medium, you can facilitate those types of relationships that justify and that warrant paying for products paying a premium for healthy and well grown products through the supply chain.

I think so. I mean that's our experience and as I say, we're a small business operating in a very well established section on the super market aisle. But our experience so far is that there's a lot of mild out there.

How does the price for your products on the supermarket shelf compare with what is right beside it, with its competition?

Well, it depends on there's a lot of different things right beside it. And it will go from, you know, a sort of 1 pound 40 loaf to a 5 pound sourdough, you know, and we're somewhere in the middle of all that. So yeah, so there's a whole range of, of options there. And it's, you know, let's be clear, this is at the moment that the price point is such we are still paying our growers the better part of the nature premium. And so the reality is that this is not an option for everybody, but equally in the world of the, of the seven pound pint, the four pound coffee, it is an option for lots of people. And I think the key is to, is to give people the choice.

In the spirit of thinking about how we can rethink supply chains and how we can facilitate market access, how we can collaborate effectively with people, we should engage in a different, in a similar process and reimagining our growing systems. I'm so intrigued by the work that Frederic Larsen is doing and the work that Colin Seiss is doing. I'm very inspired by this idea of companion planting and I hear these stories that were 50, 60, 70 years old about how they identified a specific species such as cornflower that had a beneficial effect on wheat at 100 plants per acre population. There's so much, I feel like there is so much there that we need to learn about. I perceive that we have a lot of imagination blocks in thinking about how we might grow plants. What are the things that you're inspired by?

Well, similar and I think it's partly how we grow it, it's partly the system and the infrastructure afterwards, you know, so we've had to do an awful lot of work to make growing wheat, beans or barley and pea an option for our growers because most people don't have grain separation equipment anymore. We've got a sort of post harvest infrastructure based around monocultures. So that in itself is to do that efficiently and not to, for that cost, not to become absolutely prohibitive in such a tight margin market. That's, that's a lot of, that's a lot of work in itself. And yeah, you know, I think it's always just trying to. I'm just struck by the urgency of it. You know, I used to give a statistic that said in my lifetime we've lost 70% of all wildlife. Then someone recently put that in human terms and they said if you imagine that as a human population, it's equivalent to losing everyone in Africa, Europe, north and South America, China and Australasia. And so that just keeps going round and round my head, you know, the urgency of it and therefore just the importance of Avoiding dogma. So in the question, as we talked about before, I've invested everything in interroom or idea. I think the interim o rid is fantastic and Woody Van Arkel and others are doing great work pushing that forward, as are some of our growers. But then if plant diversity and optimizing sunlight capture has such immense potential to be the main driver of system change, and we can do that with a bicrop or a poly crop that can be planted using existing seed drill, then we just got to get on do that, because we can't wait to build the worlds with the mowers, right? And so with the wheat, beans or with the barley and pea. Because I was set up to do things in strips because of my mower system. For a while I was planting them in strips. You know, is it better you could do two different depths? In the end, it turned out that just putting in seed drill and compromising the depths and mixing it all together just gave a better outcome. So, okay, then I might have all these split tanks and strip systems, but it's just better. So let's just keep moving forward, try and keep it simple, and then try to work out the optimum seed rates and so on to be able to manage that in an effective way. And what happens in wet seasons compared to dry seasons. But we're making real progress with this. But I think that the. The world is changing so fast, we have to avoid dogma moving forwards and just work on best practice. So when I was listening to Frederik Larsen the other day, you know, once again, the thousands of hours I've spent on pulleys and PTO speeds and everything else on interimos. And Frederick's doing what he calls the chemical mowing. So just knocking the alfalfa back with the broadleaf herbicide. And from my starting point as an organic grower, I would never have countenanced that. And yet the more we measure outcomes, we know that in biologically active systems, this is being broken down. We're not finding it in the soil, we're not finding it in the grain. So however hard that is, we just gotta look at the evidence. And particularly as such, as the wild swings in rainfall, mechanical interventions in the field are becoming really difficult because it's just too damned away. You can't do it. So, yeah, I think just trying to always work with best practice and find the best way forward.

The beauty of the system that Frederic was describing is that it's imminently scalable. It's scalable to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of acres very quickly. And I think the point that you brought up is the one point you brought up about toxicity. In our final harvest, we care both about the presence of quality and the absence of toxicity. And I really appreciated your non dogmatic approach to nitrogen applications. If it is necessary to apply an herbicide in a certain growing system, if we can measure and quantify that the active ingredients and the potential toxins in that herbicide are not in the product that we are harvesting, and they no longer remain in the ecosystem that they're rapidly being degraded, then to me that's a win. And that's really what we should be measuring is what, what is the final outcome? Because with our integrity grown verification, we've taken the perspective and then this. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done with that verification as it evolves over time. But even with the challenges around glyphosate, I want to take the stance, and we are taking the stance that we don't care about glyphosate application. We care about glyphosate levels in the final harvest. So that means if you are in a cropping system where you feel the need to apply glyphosate or to apply any other pesticide, is it showing up in the harvest? And if the answer is no, and if it's not showing up in the ecosystem, then that's the outcome that we all want.

Exactly. I think we have to. That's why the outcomes just change everything in terms of value, in terms of practices. You know, when we drew up the Wild Farm standards, it was to try and generate certain outcomes. And this is going to be a whole new chapter when the outcomes themselves become the focus.

Thank you. Andy, a couple of thoughts. Are you familiar with the company Greenfield Robotics?

I'm not, no.

I think you would enjoy looking them up. I'm happy to connect you as well. But Clint Brower and his team are here from there in Nebraska, Kansas area and they have these miniature track robots that are doing weed control on a 30 inch corn row, for example. They're going through mechanical with. So they're basically mowing between roe. And they are, they're pretty awesome machines. They have about three or four years of experience and a couple million acres of experience underneath their belt at this point. And quite impressive.

Wow. Okay. That's proud. Brilliant.

Yeah.

Is that the people you're thinking about with regard to sort of Bonfields type stuff?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So these, these miniature robots also are. They're developing planting capacities and foliar spraying capacity as well, as well as herbicide spraying capacity, if you want to do that. So they have a very versatile miniature robot.

Wow. Okay, that sounds awesome.

Greenfield Robotics. The other piece that I wanted to mention is an Australian, slash Canadian. Williams is his last name. Is it John Martin or is it Martin Williams? Need to maybe look that up. But he is. I've heard about him, I've reached out to him and I want to have him here on the podcast as well. But his magical device is a high speed, no energy infield grain separator where he has developed this technology that it looks like a stainless steel cylinder that grain gets augered into off the combine and it flows out the bottom in three or four different directions. And completely there's almost perfect separation based on the dynamics of seed flow and how it flows through the column. So I think that might be a particular interest for you.

Definitely. What was that guy's name? Did you say?

I think it's John Martin Williams.

Find him. I'm sure there can't be many who are going to respond to in combine grain separation. Google's.

Well, it's not in combine, it's post combine, but it's infused. It's designed to be an in field solution.

Yeah, yeah, great. That sounds pretty fantastic. I'm speaking to Kish next week about trying to get these trials up and running, which would be great. So hopefully we can get that over the line.

Yeah, we'd love to get that over the line and begin working. Okay, so I'll make sure I get the right name. I'll try to send you a link, even if I can track it down.

Okay. Fantastic and brilliant. I think in all of these things, you know, what we've really learned is you've just got to, we have to meet the world as it is. And when we started Wild Farmed, our idea was to basically do for flower what coffee shops did for coffee. The idea that it would be freshly ground on every street corner. And I have to give a shout out to a pair of London restaurateurs who were brilliant restaurateurs, very successful restaurants, and came to the farm in France and saw what we were trying to do and decided instead to launch a bakery mill. And we work tremendously hard on trying to make that real. And then, you know, it's just a very complicated thing to do, from the grain deliveries to keeping the mill running. And actually realize that within the food industry there's so much incredible expertise, so many incredible people, and actually it's all about just working with those people and collaborating with all our expertise to build a new kind of system rather than trying to replace it. I think, you know, this, given the urgency of the situation, that collaboration for change is really important.

There are so many great people that have visions for how the system could be different. And, you know, I think it's one of the limitations that I see very frequently historically. I think many growers, many farmers and producers have to some degree felt, taken advantage of and felt that it was them versus the world and not fully appreciated the depth and the degree of collaborators and the opportunities that are out there for people who have a vision for what could be different and how the food system could be different. So your idea of a street bakery and a mill, you know, we already have an analog for that. It's called a brewery and a pub, where we have, we have all these artisanal breweries that are becoming very popular, becoming all the rage. And why could that same concept not work for all types of other products as well?

Yeah, well, I'm going to have to leave you to lead on that one because we kind of got our hands full over here doing what we're doing.

Yeah, well, wonderful. Well, Andy, thank you. Thank you for being willing to be here and to share your experiences on wisdom. I really appreciate everything that you are doing, the work that you're bringing forward and may you continue to have exceptional success.

Well, thank you. I mean, it's. Thanks for all your work and inspiring people, including me, to sort of make these choices. And I think, you know, we've seen enough across our field to play community now to know that, you know, in 20 years time we could have fields full of resilient crops despite wild changes in in weather because of infiltration rate improvements and so on. We could have farmers rewarded not just for the tons of food produced, but for its quality. We could have food and farming attracting the best minds because it's cool and because it's aspirational and hospital waiting list coming down because food's medicine. And we could have annual reports of species recovery because our farmland is nature rich and basically it's just whether we choose to do it. So thanks for all the work you do in persuading people to make that choice.

That's an awesome ending note, Andy. Thank you. It's basically just because we choose to do it so we can all make the choice individually in our lives. So thank you.

Pleasure. Thanks.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible, and since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess, we test, we analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening, and we look.

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