Regenerative and Holistic Farming - why the new blog.

I have always been close to nature and farming. I spent my childhood on my Grandparents farm, my teenage years on mixed dairy farms, studied horticulture at University and my working life in fresh produce. You could say it's in my blood.

Without farmers and growers, there would be few other occupations, as we all need to eat. Food is essential for our wellbeing, our survival and so is the way we look after our soils and our environment.

And yet in many ways how we produce our food and the system it operates in, could be doing more harm than good. If we look back in history the fall of many civilisations has been because they lost the ability to feed themselves. Currently, from an environmental perspective we have climate change, rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity and the degradation of soils. From a farming perspective, farmers are struggling to make a living, they are seeing more extreme growing seasons and a higher incidence of pests and diseases. From a human perspective we have rising malnutrition, hunger, obesity, and an increasing number of people with dietary related illnesses.

My view is that all these things are connected and that in general our current farming methods and food system are failing.

My interest in Holistic and regenerative farming has been sparked by questions I have asked over the years, when observing the farming around me.

Questions like:

• why land that has manure spread on it yield better than fields not treated in dry years?

• why an organic carrot crop suffered less disease than a conventional one?

• why we are seeing the increase in crop diseases such as fusarium that 15 / 20 years ago were not a problem in the UK on some crops?

Alongside this, I have through taking and delivering leadership development programmes, learnt about chaos theory, about the writings of Clare Graves, Margaret Wheatley and the teaching of Roy Leighton.

All this, plus reading such books as 'Wilding' by Isabella Tree, 'Dirt to Soil' by Gabe Brown, 'Silent Spring' by Rachel Carson and 'Holistic Management' by Allan Savory ignited my interest into learning more about what can a sustainable food system really look like, what are the opportunities and the challenges that it brings and how do we change.

I will endeavour to share about in writings going forward, interesting books and articles that I come across in my research, questions that arise and my thoughts.