Dear Reader,
The night before we recorded this episode, Andy Cato played a DJ set in Ibiza. The next morning he was at Juntos Farm with me, talking about soil. Most people know him as one half of Groove Armada. Fewer know that he sold the rights to his songs to buy a farm in France, skipped the soil test, and spent the next few years losing ground to the weeds. What he eventually understood was that it makes little difference whether you fight nature with chemicals or with machines. Either way, you’re at war with it.
That lesson shaped everything he has built since. Andy argues that farming does far more than produce food. It determines whether we have clean water, living soil, thriving insects and a landscape that can weather a changing climate, yet none of it appears on a farmer’s balance sheet. So rather than debating which rules farmers should follow, Wildfarmed measures what actually happens in their fields: the bees, the water, the soil, the quality of the grain and the wellbeing of the farmers themselves. Some water companies now pay those farmers directly, for the simple reason that preventing pollution is cheaper than cleaning it up.
I also put to him the question I’m asked most often at Juntos: can regenerative farming really feed a growing population? His answer is to measure yield in decades rather than seasons. He points out that over the past five years, climate instability has already cost the UK roughly a year’s worth of bread from conventional wheat fields. And he draws a lesson from growing up in Yorkshire during the miners’ strikes: you don’t dismantle an old system until a new one is ready to take its place. It’s a more patient view of change than this movement usually allows for, and I think it’s the right one.
He’s candid about the cost. He has been criticised for not being purist enough, and says that scaling Wildfarmed turned him from someone who slept well into someone who doesn’t. It’s a reminder that building the alternative is slower and messier than arguing for it.
You can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch the full conversation below. If you know someone who doubts that regenerative farming can scale, send it their way. And if you have a minute, a review really helps.
With love,
Finn