Farm With Nature

Isabelle: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy podcast, with me, Isabelle Sparrow. In this series, Do Something Bigger, we’re focusing on different ways to make a difference collaboratively in the place where you live. Every episode we’re exploring one of 25 Big Local Actions that can have a positive impact for climate or nature. We’re talking everything from renewable energy to nature conservation. So, if today’s topic doesn’t appeal to you, do come back next time as the next theme might be more relevant to you. 

Today’s episode is called Farm with Nature, and I’m delighted to introduce my special guest host, Kathryn Machin, Head of Community Engagement Campaigns at WWF UK, who’s going to be helping me explore this action further. 

Kat, I think it’s fair to say that people might be a bit surprised to hear that WWF is involved with a podcast episode about farming. Can you give us a bit of background about why this topic is important to WWF and the sorts of projects you’re working on that relate to farming and agriculture?  

Kat: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s not pandas on tractors or anything along those lines! It’s that farmers are very much at the front line of our nature and climate crisis, and that is coming through, whether that’s from extreme weather, we’re seeing more and more farmers getting flooded and their crop yields being impacted by extreme weather. But we’re also really aware that farmers have a huge amount of ability to change things and many of them are already in that space and wanting to do more. 

They hold a huge amount of our land and the hope that can come from that. And we’ve seen that actually the relationship that the public have with farmers over the last 100 years or more farmers have been heroes for us before and they are still kind of heroes for us again and when we face into some of these existential crises. 

So yeah, at the moment they’re operating in a broken food system though. So it’s really hard to be a farmer trying to do the right thing by nature, trying to put in the right policies in place for your farm when you’re facing into a climate crisis. And at WWF, we believe that there should be more support for farmers, whether that’s from the supply chains that are driving a lot of the competitive nature of the farming world, or whether that’s from government, who actually have a responsibility in helping farmers to help the rest of the UK in addressing the climate crisis. 

Isabelle: So yeah, farming is definitely very, very much part of the kind of world that you inhabit as an organisation. Are there any on the ground projects that WWF is implementing at the moment in partnership with farmers?  

Kat: So we do a lot of work to try and amplify farmers’ voices. So we believe really strongly that because everyone will be impacted by the nature and climate crises, everyone should have a say in what comes next. And that’s why we did some initiatives like the last time I was here we we’re talking about the People’s Plan for Nature, but it’s really important that we hear from farmers and hear exactly what it is that they’re already doing. Some of the challenges that they face and some of the things that they want to be able to implement. 

So a lot of our work involves partnering with farmers to understand more about what they want to see, trying to get schemes and projects off the ground that can be a bit of a testing bed for that. So we do a lot of work, whether that’s with seaweed farmers in Wales or in Norfolk. We have a fair amount of work there where we’re trying to test and learn how we can how we can farm food in a way that meets our needs for nutritional security so that we can all eat a healthy and sustainable diet. How we can do that in a way that benefits nature and doesn’t have the impact that we’re starting to see. 73% of global wildlife populations are down, and that’s largely driven by food production. So we need to know how we can farm in a way that doesn’t impact wildlife and also faces into the climate crisis so that we’re not driving carbon into the atmosphere as we do that. 

Isabelle: Carbon Copy is a UK charity inspiring more big thinking, local action for climate and nature. If you’re interested to hear more from the Carbon Copy podcast, do go back and check out previous series and do subscribe to hear new episodes as soon as they land.  

We’ve spoken to a couple of really interesting experts in the nature friendly farming space. First, we wanted to understand more from someone with literal experience in the field. Martin Lines is an arable farmer working in Cambridgeshire. He’s also the CEO of the Nature Friendly Farming Network. And here he is talking about why it was necessary to set the network up. 

Martin: So I think it goes back to my own journey on the farm, sort of we’d lost some of the nature and the biodiversity in the birds and we started putting things back in place to recover some of that and use funded schemes. And I used to meet other farmers doing similar, but we didn’t have a collective voice. Many of the conservation organisations wanted to work with and demonstrate farmers are doing good stuff. While they highlighted some of the bad things farmers are doing. So we created a voice, an organisation in 2017 that created the Nature Friendly Farming Network to bring those farming voices together, because actually working together we can achieve more, we’re a stronger voice wider across the UK, sharing and inspiring farmers, but also inspiring policymakers and organisations and hopefully public as well, who can recognise the differences within farming systems and hopefully in future and the difference in produce they can purchase from those farmers delivering nature friendly outcomes. 

There’s just under three and a half thousand farmers, 9000 members of the public, and a whole range of organisations is free to join for farmers, members of the public and for organisations, because we want to bring a movement together to really drive a positive change for the future around food, farming and our environment. 

Isabelle: I really think that some of the things that Martin was saying that are very closely aligned with what you were saying is, is kind of the aim of what WWF is doing with farmers and in terms of giving them a voice, in terms of kind of pushing out messages to kind of, you know, create more of a kind of mandate for change and support around farming.  

I think one of the things I’d actually wanted to pick up was something that you said a little while back, which was about, you know, farmers can be all heroes and absolutely should be in terms of, you know, we cannot survive without food. Where does our food come from? It comes from people, the people who grow it, the farmers and the people who produce it, the farmers. 

But there is definitely a bit of a perception, I suppose, in the media that all farmers are one and the same. They kind of get tarred with the same brush, they get lumped together as a whole. And I think there might be a viewpoint that that, you know, there isn’t this kind of farming taking place, there isn’t this regenerative farming, there isn’t sustainable farming. So yeah. So what are your thoughts about that, about how that kind of perception affects people’s view on farming in agriculture? 

Kat: Yeah, I think it’s dangerous when we start to block people off in like homogenous groups. And so farmers all think one thing or farmers are all doing one exact practice. That absolutely isn’t the case. And there’s actually like a real danger of kind of this isn’t a word, but of “herofying” farmers as well because it puts undue pressure on individuals who are literally just trying to make a living and trying to feed people to then become like the climate fighters and this like big heroic figure. 

But the fact is that farmers do have a huge amount of responsibility because they are managers over a huge amount of our land. And that’s where a lot of these solutions can come from. So I think it’s important that you hear all sides of that debate. But what we’re probably not hearing enough of is those voices that are saying, look, we’ve tried this and this is the impact that we’re having. 

And I think a really good example of that is actually James Robinson, who is the co-chair of Nature Friendly Farming Network alongside Martin. And he is he has a 150 year old farm family farm that’s been in the family for generations, 20 or so years ago, they switched to organic and that was a huge, huge shift. That was the biggest change in their family farm in all of those generations that they had. 

And they only were able to do that because they got a government scheme that gave them two years worth of funding so that they could take the financial hit of the lower yields of lower grazing from that animal stock. And now they’re in a situation where 20 years later they’ve got higher yields, it’s cheaper to run their farm because they’re not spending money on fertilisers. 

There’s fewer inputs going and they’re getting more profit because the produce that comes from that farm is of high quality. So they’re selling it at higher rates and they’ve got partnerships as well, not only with big contractors that take the bulk of their milk, but with local artisan cheesemongers. So you can see how those things can all interact. 

The other thing that we’re seeing as well is that farming practices and farms can be really important for communities, whether that’s local community shops or whether that’s the ability to take children possibly from the city into farmed environments and teach them more about that farm system. And that’s exactly what James is doing over in Cumbria. So it is a lot to kind of put on farmers and we don’t want to put undue pressure on them. There’s already enough pressure as it is, but we can kind of try and raise some of those voices who have got real experience of what it’s like to switch to regenerative agriculture.  

Isabelle: Yeah, absolutely. We also spoke to Stephanie McEvoy, who runs a sustainability consultancy in Northern Ireland, and she helps companies primarily in the food, agriculture and hospitality space to reduce their carbon emissions. She comes from a family of farmers and speaks really, really passionately about the need for support of farmers. And she’s actually piloting a project called REAP, which is aiming to support farmers financially through investment from big businesses looking to improve their ESG scores. So she also talked about the challenging environment that farmers are experiencing at the moment.  

Stephanie: These people, at least in my part of the world in Northern Ireland, manage 70% of this country, 70% of a really tiny space. But that’s, the rest of us only occupy 30%. So they maybe make up 2 to 5% of the population and they’re managing 70% of a country. Why are we not given these people more time, attention, budget, resource, support, like space in the conversation that some of them are doing it really, really well and some of them are doing a really bad job. 

But instead we seem to and it’s seen in so many ways, conversations have become more and more black and white and people are less in the nuance, they’re less and the kind of in between. So they’re not really, they don’t want to hear that while one farmer can be fantastic that another farmer can be awful. So we tend to hear stories in the press about this very isolated part of the population, about how awful they are, and they’re so reckless and you know, how much pollution they were doing. And they did this and they did this. And all the context of the reason why corners are being cut and farmers have a much higher rate of health and safety issues than any other industry is because they’re being pushed on price is because we don’t recognise the value of that part of our economy. 

Kat: So what Stephanie has just kind of described, that is an issue that we have to really carefully face into. We’ve got a situation where cost of living has never been higher, but our food prices are still relatively low comparative to the rest of Europe. And those low food prices have driven farmers to try and compete almost down to the bottom for the lowest possible price. 

And it really risks things like quality and environmental standards. And one of the things that WWF is doing is working alongside the NFU. So that’s the National Farmers Union and the RSPCA to kind of call for core environmental standards to be put into UK domestic law. And that means that imports that come into the country will also have to meet those standards and are not going to be undercut by some of those lower quality standards of food that could come in and potentially appeal a lot more to consumers because they’re at lower prices. 

Now, I want to be really clear that what WWF is not calling for is for our food prices to suddenly shoot up. I mean, I’m definitely feeling that in my weekly shop and I’m sure everybody else is too. But we are calling for more responsibility within the supply chains themselves because they’re taking huge amounts of profit and it is driving really difficult living standards for people just generally, but also creating a really difficult condition for farmers to operate in. 

And again, it goes back to that broken food system. Now, supply chain is one area that you can kind of try to influence and try to get better practices in. But government also have a responsibility as well to look at this system, recognise it is broken and do something about it.  

Isabelle: Yeah, absolutely. And obviously this you know, this podcast is very much about how we can encourage more action, whether that’s, you know, with the people that you live with or the people that you work with, but that the action can also take the form of lobbying, calling for change. Speaking to your local MP, speaking to your council or speaking to, you know, people in positions of power because, you know, it has to come from all sides. 

Kat: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what Stephanie is talking about as well is about, again, to that point, these are individuals that are responsible for a huge amount of land, especially in Northern Ireland, where it’s even more emphasised, but have such little say in how we get there. And I think that that really needs to change as well. 

Isabelle: So speaking about action, there are different ways of taking action on this issue. We asked Martin to tell us more about the sorts of actions the members of the Nature Friendly Farming Network are taking. 

Martin: So depends on your farming system, where you are in the UK. But they’re maybe putting in flower strips, putting in seed mixes, supplementary feeding, cover crops, less intensive inputs. So reducing non-organic fertilisers and pesticides, moving to a more whole farm approach where they’re reducing pollution by runoffs and soil loss, by having habitats and grass margins focusing on soil health. 

And if you’re a livestock farmer, many of the actions may be resting in your grass for longer. Having more diverse grass swards and herbal lays rather than high input rye grasses that take a lot of fertiliser. And being careful of the amount of animals they have, and the amount of manure they produce within their landscape to reduce pollution into watercourses. So there’s a whole range of different actions that different farmers can take. 

Isabelle: So all of that is quite interesting and potentially some of it a little bit technical, I don’t necessarily know about the ins and outs of different kinds of grasses, and I think it’s probably safe to assume that most people listening to this are not farmers. So I also asked Martin to tell us more about what the general public can do to take action for this. 

Martin: I think the first thing, sign up and be a member, because that gives us the numbers and the clout to push to governments and others say move more of your funding support to this sort of farming practices. If you can buy locally and seasonally, wherever possible, if you can connect to a local producer that’s doing good stuff, look out on various websites that highlights locally produced food at a high environmental level that can be posted or sent to you. 

And also if you are talking, can you go and visit farms if you have the opportunity and sort of highlight the good stuff that’s going on, but also talk to MPs, your council, people who are in charge of procurement of supply chains to say, could you purchase procurement in the supply chain from farmers doing nature friendly things on their farm? 

So we have a real joined up approach, but also the recycling produce. We are bringing in compost from people’s green bin waste to make really good fertile comp soil. But please separate your glass and your plastics out of those recycled materials so we can have better quality compost and not contaminate our land and let us make a better circular economy in all of what we can do as citizens, as public, and then as us, as farmers, land managers and the joining it all up. 

Isabelle: Yeah, this this part of what Martin was talking about I found really shocking. It was it was a sort of random part that he added into this conversation. But apparently there’s a real problem with people not taking plastic and not taking glass out of their compost their, their green bin. But it’s not green everywhere. But, you know, the food waste is what we always call it. 

Leaving plastic and leaving glass in there and it ending up in the compost! And if you think about the impact that that could have and the issues that we were seeing all over the media about microplastics in water systems, all of that will be influenced by people not thinking carefully. And I think that maybe, you know, we have such an assumption that when you throw stuff in the bin, it doesn’t matter which bin throw it in, it’s going to get sorted.  So there’s no way that what you’re doing could possibly have an impact on something like a farm, like the agriculture, like the food system. But actually, I think there are you know, there are real risks and real impacts there. 

Kat: Yeah, definitely. I mean, just personally, like a big green flag for me is correctly sort your recycling. I go wild for that. I love it because it’s this old adage, right? There’s no such thing as away, you can’t throw things away. It ends up somewhere and it’s really difficult, like cognitively when you don’t see where it goes. So you do just put it in a bin and then every Wednesday or ever day or bin collection is it disappears, but it has to go somewhere. 

And this like, sometimes in the environment movement there are and there’s this false fight between individual action and systems change. But actually there is a lot of research that shows when you’re taking more pro-environmental behaviours and if that is the bare minimum of not putting glass in your composting bin, you are more likely to want to do more environmental behaviours like you might be more likely to even get to the point of voting for policy or writing for a party that has greener policies. 

And we need to have both of those hand in hand. And you can really see it like schoolkids really get it. They do so many litter picks, they do all of those things. But when it comes to where you are at home because you can’t see where it goes, you have no idea what is actually the implication of it. 

So I’m constantly having to dive into my bins to try and stop my housemates from putting the wrong bits in the wrong places. I’m honestly a delight to live with. I promise. 

Isabelle: As a charity, we’re all about sharing solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss and supporting people in places around the UK to enact change in their communities and with the people around them. So I talked to Steph about how important it is for her business that farmers are able to share with and learn from each other. 

Stephanie: Like the average age of a farmer is 58. If you’ve been doing something for 45 years of your life, are you going to want to listen to someone coming in and just saying, you know, that way you’re doing it now, that’s no good, that’s rubbish. That’s what’s ruining the place. Do it my way. Again, it is a kind of it’s hard for some people to hear that. 

They might listen with, you know, curiosity and intent, and be like, that’s very good. But they don’t want to feel like an idiot at 58 years old, having 45 years experience in a field. Literally, they don’t necessarily want to be told. And that’s why one part of what REAP will offer in the next 18 months is an educational resource for peer to peer learning. 

So, no point me going in and talking about it, there’s no point in you or anyone else or even a scientific academic who’s an expert in soil microbiology, because at the end of the day, people learn from their peers, they learn, especially in this industry. And it’s then this is one of the resources that’s massively missing. It’s an issue for my my clients, my agri-food clients. They don’t provide the resources for their supply chain to become more sustainable. 

Kat: I love that so much. And one of the reasons I love it is because when we ran the citizens assembly a couple of years ago, we asked people what they wanted to see and how they wanted to see action to get out of the broken food system that we’ve got. One of the number one things that they said they wanted to see was support for farmers to learn from one another and to hear from one another and to have that peer support. 

So I’m so happy to hear it is happening. And that is really, really heartening and I think it makes so much sense as a human way of moving forward. We talk about farming policy often in these like really abstract, quite technical ways, but actually having farmers sit and talk to each other with all the same barriers and challenges, despite the fact they might have really local context and specific things that they’re trying to work against or with the fact that they can talk to each other and find that support for one another is really great. I love that. 

 Isabelle: I got the sense from Martin that the need for awareness, for sharing the practices that work and the campaigns that can make a difference is really the Nature Friendly Farming Network’s reason for existence. I asked him what people could do to learn more and to collaborate.  

Martin: One again, join the network you’ll get regular news that gives you information. Have a look on our website. There’s a whole load of resources and information and where you can get food from and look at our social media channels because we are constantly sharing what other people are doing. The network is about sharing what others are doing to give people the ideas. 

So where could you get local food from? What labels to look out for? What to ask your parish council, local government, your schools in that procurement and supply chain? How are they managing their landscape on your behalf? You’re paying contributions to tax into landscape management within the Council so we can all do something and ask a lot of questions. So there’s a lot of resource in our network and we share a lot of resource throughout the year. 

Kat: If you’re interested in learning more. WWF have loads of reports and you can really deep dive into finding out more about regenerative agriculture. So just Google, ‘WWF, regenerative agriculture’ (and good luck spelling it) and you’ll find lots of resources there. We have a great report called Land of Plenty that dives deeply into some of these issues that we’ve been talking about. 

We’ve got some more reports coming down in the spring. And if you want to take any of those actions, alongside joining the Nature Friendly Farming network, you can also head to the WWF campaign hub, and you can find lots of activities and actions to take there. 

Isabelle: The links to all of the things that Kat just mentioned and loads of other information about our guests and this action are in the show notes. We’re going to finish as usual by sharing some of the most important things we’ve learned from this episode. 

Kat: I’ve definitely learned that the compost that I put into my bin eventually ends up on farms. I don’t think I knew that. So that’s new for me and I already knew to not put glass in it. But I’m really hoping more people will not do that now. 

Isabelle: I’ve learned that peer to peer learning is really vital and something that we should be encouraging and supporting more of. It makes total sense that farmers would want to learn from people who have experience in the field (I’m using that pun again), and rather than from people who are just, you know, telling them what to do from a desk somewhere. So I think that that’s definitely something to support.  

One thing that might be a good idea is, you know, we’re all quite disconnected, I think a lot of us, from the way that food is produced, the way that farming works. So I think something that Martin said it said would be that you could actually go and physically visit a farm. You can see how they work. You know, if there’s a farm shop, you can go and ask if it’s possible to go out into the field with them and have a look at what they’re doing. And yeah, just be interested like show, show support by actually asking and being curious about how it all works. 

Kat: Yeah, definitely. Like lots of farms will have those community days and we heard a little bit about farmers that are already doing that work, which is great. And WWF, we also have got lots of resources to help encourage you to make the most sustainable choices that you can. And so Eat for Change is a campaign that we ran over a number of years and there’s recipe cards with that and some videos that you can watch for how to have a nature friendly meal. 

Isabelle: Absolutely. And I guess the final thing to reiterate is it is free to join the Nature Friendly Farming Network. And you don’t have to be a farmer to join. So I would encourage everybody to go look at doing that and show your support for sustainable farming in that way. 

Kat: It’s really great to hear from Martin and also from Stephanie. And just to find out that these things are happening and we like, at WWF, we’re really privileged, that we already work quite closely with the Nature Friendly Farming Network and it’s brilliant. The more voices that we can bring to the table. Pun intended, I’m afraid. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to come back in a couple of weeks.  

Isabelle: Thanks so much Kat. Yes, Kat’s going to be back and to talk about Creating Space for Nature in a few episodes time. Please don’t like make me work out exactly how many, but at some point in the spring we’ll be talking about that with Kat. So thanks so much Kat, it has been an absolute pleasure to present this episode with you. 

Many thanks as well to our guests today. Martin Lines from the Nature Friendly Farming Network and Stephanie McEvoy from ESG Made Easy and REAP. This episode of Do Something Bigger from the Carbon Copy Podcast was written and presented by me, Isabelle Sparrow. My co-host was Kathryn Machin, Head of Community Engagement Campaigns at WWF UK. It was produced and edited by Bradley Ingham. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do share it with everyone you know. It really does help. Until next time. Goodbye.