No artificial fertilizers, no pesticides and herbicides, and importantly, no manure from animals. And they have nature at the heart of everything that they do, and yet they still also manage to generate enough crop to feed 250 local families from just 15 acres of land, some of which he's categorized as grade four, which, according to official government guidance, is land with severe limitations which significantly restrict the range of crops or level of yields.
So how, how does Iain Tolhurst do it? And does the way he farms his land hold some of the answers to the thorniest questions in agriculture?
How do you farm in a nature friendly way and yet produce enough food for us all?
So to find out, I went down to Hardwick House at Whitchurch on Thames in April of 2024 to meet Iain Tolhurst, universally known as Tolly, to find out.
Now, you may have heard of Hardwick House. It's a beautiful red brick Elizabethan manor. That was the original inspiration for Kenneth Graham when he wrote Wind in the Willows. Toad Hall is described as a handsome and dignified old house of mellowed red brick with well-kept lawns reaching down to the water's edge. And that's a description that fits Hardwick to a tee. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Tolly is a member of the landed gentry. He's been renting the land at Hardwick to farm for the last 40 years, having grown up on a council estate near Bristol.
But his work as a pioneering organic farmer has taken him a long way and won him recognition from the very top because he is now in fact. Iain Tolhurst MBE.
Iain: I almost never use it. I forget about, I suppose I should do something with it occasionally.
Rob: So that happened last year, wasn't it? You met the King?
Iain: Yes, I met the king last year. I have met him before in connection with organic farming twice in fact. But it's really nice to go meet him at home.
Rob: Yeah. And you were recognised, as you say, for your work in organic farming and the stuff that you're doing here is pretty much unique, It's completely your own plan. Your own scheme of how you go about doing things. Lots of other people are interested in it, and a few other places have started to copy elements of it. But fundamentally, this is all your own creation.
Iain: The system, I think it's fair to say there's parts of it which already existed, other people develop, so I've taken some of that. This is what evolution is about, surely, you know, intellectual evolution. So I've taken some of what other people done in the past by both sides in my own dimension and brought it under a complete systems approach to food production. Looking very much at the detail of that in terms of its biological importance.
Rob: So if you could sum it up, then in 30 seconds, what is it you're actually trying to do here?
Iain: Right. I don't think I've ever had to sum it up in 30 seconds so this is going to be a challenge.
I think what we're trying to do here is we are producing food at the lowest environmental impact without trashing the planet, but also ensuring that we can maintain and increase biodiversity
Rob: You did it. There we go. It was possible.
Iain: I left a few bits out you know cause it's too comprehensive to get into 30 seconds. But um, yes, it's a quite a big story really.
Rob: Because nature is something that is absolutely at your core, isn't it? As a kid, you grew up to the Bristol direction and you loved nature right from the off as a little boy?
Iain: Yeah, I was brought up on the very edge of Bristol on the western side of Bristol, very close to open fields. So I was just a few minutes away from fields and it was quite an industrial part of Bristol. I had access to the green spaces I left and I spent a lot of time that wasn't supposed to be there though at the time I was not allowed there actually, but I did go there and that got me really interested in nature. I always played in the garden. I love the garden and loved playing with worms. And I even did a bit of growing as a young child. I had a small garden, so I've always had that kind of desire to be connected closely to nature.
Rob: So when you know and you went through various different iterations in your life before you actually started doing this, but when you started doing farming properly, you were determined to actually make sure that nature was part of that right from the off.
Iain: Yes, I don't think I was quite as conscious as that. I certainly wanted to do it and not damage nature in the process, and I think the rest has evolved from that. So my my big concern really was about bird life. So I was I suppose it was a single issue thing about the way bird life was being treated in the UK by agriculture. So it's really my concerns about bird life that got me to this point now. But now I look at the whole of biodiversity rather than just bird life, because obviously it's all interconnected.
Rob: So in terms of the system that you've got here, what is it that you're actually doing? Because you primarily vegetables, a little bit of fruit, but primarily vegetables that you're growing here and it's dozens and dozens of different varieties, all crammed into really quite a small space.
Iain: Yes. Where we are trying to produce enough vegetables to give a person or a family a decent sort of diet in terms of its range and availability throughout the whole year. So we you know, we are feeding people. That's what we do.
Rob: And it's, what, 15 acres that you're actually growing on?
Iain: Well, we had the total farm is just under 20 acres. But in that full grown space, we have about 15 acres of which we're using ten all the time for vegetable production, and that's feeding around 250 families, about 50% of their total vegetable requirements. The rest, they're buying out of season produce. Obviously, things
we didn't grow in the winter.
Rob: Okay. Are you quite proud of the fact that you're managing to genuinely produce that amount of food out of this in quite a small space?
Iain: Yeah. I've never thought about it as being primary, but I guess so. Yeah, I am. Yes, I suppose I am. Yes, we are. Not just me, my whole team. Yes, we are. We are proud of that. Yeah, definitely.
Rob: Okay. So in terms of the way that the system works, because the point of what you do is that you don't put nitrates on, you don't use pesticides, you don't use fertilisers from outside, you're kind of self-contained, and yet you're managing to get high yields out the ground and be kind to wildlife at the same time. It's sort of like an almost magical win win win situation pretty much.
Iain: Yeah. So we've excluded all forms of fertiliser, including organic ones. No chemical sprays, no chemicals at all on the farm because we can take them in the let's use chemicals, but no organic materials either, which may be alive. There are organic things you can use against certain pests. We don't use those either, and no fertilisers of any type, even organic ones. We don't import any animal manure or any organic material from other people's land. We do have a little bit of tree waste coming in from local gardens, but that's the only thing coming into the farm. The rest we produce ourselves. So we've pretty much ring fenced the farm from any external inputs apart from things like fuel of course, electricity and seeds, which you obviously need to keep the whole thing running the farm is is probably much more self-sufficient, independent, than most of the same of its type. There are few which would come higher in terms of their lack of dependence on exterior forces.
Rob: And why is it important to you to do that? I mean, is that like kind of a self-imposed rule or why did it happen accidentally? Why?
Iain: Yes, it is a self-imposed rule, and I suppose it comes to my original desire in my late youth to be self-sufficient. When I first started having family, which was I was very young. I was just 21, I had my first child, well my wife had the first child. We were very much about self-sufficiency and keeping everything within within our garden almost at that point.
Rob: So is this in the seventies we talked about sort of, you know, the good life was on the telly. You know Tom and Barbara
Iain: Yeah, we're talking about seventies, early seventies here when self-sufficiency was kind of a new thing. Well it wasn't new, but it was newly invented, if you like, TV. And there was people like John Seymour
who wrote quite a lot books on self-sufficiency. So we kind of followed that stuff for a while and I realised that self-sufficiency was actually probably incredibly selfish and completely impractical anyway. But we still I still maintain many of those kind of philosophies about maintaining the farm from within itself and not depending on the external forces. Those external inputs may not always be available. In fact, they are becoming less available, particularly things like we think about nitrogen fertiliser, which is hugely expensive.
You know, we save a vast amount of money by not having to use nitrogen fertiliser. We save a vast amount of money by not having to buy chemicals. We have to manage other things and there are some costs involved in that, and mostly human labour costs, which is fine. You know, we want people to be working on the land. So we have replaced some of those chemicals with some elements of human labour.
We do have machinery, we have tractors, we have quite state of the art equipment. We do have modern technology. Of course, we still are, you know, we still need to have that. But, you know, the philosophy really
is trying to maintain the farm as much as possible for itself. So fertility is very much about fertility, which is already there, locked up on the farm, in the soil, and all we need to release it is the right fungal activity and that's what we're doing.
So the fertility cycle in the field is primarily one about encouraging the right degree of fungal activity.
Rob: So really all your farming fungus and everything else is a byproduct?
Iain: Pretty much the fungi, you know, they are there in the trillions and more than trillions. You know, you couldn't possibly count them. They are the main drivers. of soil fertility and all we're doing is managing them and unlocking them and we are feeding them.
Rob: And so what's your magic ingredient on that is literally green stuff, wood chippings and and other stuff that's grown and then plowed back into the soil and then everything comes from that?
Iain: That's right. The magic ingredient is plant based. It doesn't depend on chemical fertilisers. It doesn't depend on fertility from animals, which is often coming from somewhere else on the planet. So it's very much about using plant based materials. So we're using a whole range of green manures we are using trees. We have large trees on the farm. We've introduced small trees, so we have nearly 20% of the farm is now in trees, and that's providing carbon, which is essential, of course, but also providing not just the carbon, it's providing the fungal activity which is so needed.
So we're we're replacing our soils very [inaudible] and the new the elements of many hundreds of years of bad agriculture, replacing it with the fungi, which would have been there originally when it was taken from Woodland. So we are replacing those woodland fungi. We are reintroducing woodland to agriculture to bring that essential fungal element in. Because the actual soil here, the original.
Rob: So when you moved on to this bit of land 30, 40 years ago, whenever it was, wasn't it's not great soil, is it.
Iain: No, it's very low-grade soil. In fact, some of our fields it's great for which, you know, most people would be horrified On grade four, as you can see, we know we've got some pretty good crops on that Grade four. It has also badly been raped, for want of a better word. The fertility had been mined. There’s been much of it been spotted in hay. So there's massive hay crops so many, many years during the war it got a real hammering it got it got potatoes every year, almost the duration of the war.
You know, it has had a pretty rough time. Nothing much was put back and it was in a really pretty bad state when we took it on and it took quite a few years to get that back health back. So the whole system, the farm is really based on on the importance of soil health and the way we manage that is through natural systems. And in terms of the way that that impacts the wildlife of the area.
Rob: And bear in mind, you know, that you were a bird enthusiast as a young person. You still love birds, wildlife now, and you wanted how is that actually impacting on the land around here? What kind of wildlife do you actually see?
Iain: Yeah, we see a lot. I mean, we have been monitoring this. We've had some fairly regular data collection over many years. We've seen a really increase in in bird species, fantastic increase in moth and caterpillar species. And just every species in general has increased. But we are quite a smaller size amongst a much wider farming environment. And obviously we hope that some of what we produce here will move on to other places. So the idea that farms would join up and become, you know, wildlife areas I think is very important. We need these oasis to in to make sure we have the parent material to go on into other parts of agricultural lands.
Rob: So as we wander around the farm and have a look about the place, what the what are the birds, what are the animals, what are the insects that kind of, you know, really make you smile when you see them?
Iain: Well, I think the insects are the most interesting ones, actually, because they're so diverse and so adaptable and they can put up with anything but the birds. I mean, the birds are easy to see, easy to recognise. The earthworms are a really important one for us because through the earthworm population, we can monitor soil health quite easily. We don't need to have, you know, high tech, high tech solutions to monitoring that. It's a simple process and we can see big increase in urban population.
Rob: So, you literally dig a bucket full out and count how many worms are in it?
Iain: Yeah, pretty much. We have a certain area of soil areas. It's 20 by 20 by 20 centimetres, we think out and we can count the worms. And we also are looking at different species of birds. We have seven or eight species of worms. I never realised there was so many. I, also were looking at the age of the worms. This is very important. So you can tell an awful lot about the quality and health of your soil through the earthworm population.
Rob: Okay, so how healthy is your soil, what is your your earthworm population?
Iain: Well, at its best, it varies. It varies depending on where we are in the rotation. But at its best, we're around 15 million per hectare.
Rob: That's a lot of worms.
Iain: And we tried to put a kind of a weight figure on that. It's very difficult. I haven't really come up with anything which I think is accurate, but we look at around ten tonnes of reference per hectare, right?
Rob: Okay.
Iain: And per square meter, you know, in terms of numbers, this is one 1500 earthworms per square meter.
Rob: And in terms of what the worms actually do then because you know, they're an indicator of soil health, but they actually create the soil and they're the ones that are pulling the the debris down from the ground below the soil and what they excrete is what is effectively soil. Is that right?
Iain: Absolutely. Right now, they are buried in soil. And we've we've tried to see if we can actually measure how much new. So we're building every year is possible, although it's quite complex. We do know they are building your soil. You can see it in the winter and spring. You can see new layer of soil, the millimetre or two thick on the surface. So we know it's happening. And they are doing that through plants. So, you know, we're feeding the worms who plants grow in the plants. It's even crop residues or more. So it tends to be green manures, which we grow specifically to feed the soil and to feed your friends. And those crops, obviously, those green manure crops are coming from the action of the photosynthesis of the sun and what they can extract from the soil. So we can we have a complete cycle. So we're increasing potentially increasing carbon levels through through photosynthesis and allowing your friends do that further processing.
Rob: And ultimately this you are producing decent quantities of crop which you're selling locally. So that's sort of within kind of ten miles. And so most, most of your stuff goes pretty locally, so that keeps your carbon footprint very low as well. And in terms of the way that other farmers might look at what you're doing and thinking, well, maybe they're onto something there. What is what would be like the one thing you would want another farmer to take from what you're doing and start incorporating into the way that they normally farm commercially?
Iain: It's difficult to point to one particular the same because the whole system is is about the interdependence of all the different components. It's like a computer. If you take one piece over, the whole thing fails. It's like a car. You remove the start of motor or the carburetor without function. So the difficulty is that other farmers adopting this is they have to adopt the whole system. And this is a challenging thing to do. It is possible and I do help farmers to do that. But it means you have to really go back to square one and start again. There's a financial cost in doing that, of course, in terms of, you know, you may not be able to continue cropping your farm in the same way for a period of time while you go through this transition period.
The one thing, if there was one thing, it was really to be absolutely conscious about how your actions on the farm impact on nature and how that is going to impact on the viability of your farm in the long term of being able to maintain a long term sustainable, viable food production place. It's as simple as that. If we don't look after nature, we are seriously challenged in our ability to feed ourselves. This is already showing up in many parts of the world, so it's really about getting back to nature.
We have to forget some of the science we've learned and look more at biology. And if we look at the way farmers have been treating soil up to ten years ago, it is all a science chemical based treatment. Now there is a real move. Farmers are becoming aware of that biological functions of soil. They are thinking about the biological functions, so they are thinking differently in how they're going to manage their soils. We have made a huge leap forward in consciousness about soil because up until ten years or so ago, soil was just a place to anchor a crop and you just fed it chemicals from somewhere else. That thinking is changing and we've been able to shut off from that. You know, you can take that to the complete extreme and make your farm completely self-sufficient in terms of nutrients. We don't need to be bringing in anything from outside at all once you get system rights. And in doing that, we also preserve all the natural functions of biological diversity, which we all depend on. Every single insects has a particular role to play. They are all important to us as a species. We may find what's irritating, but they have an enormous important role to play in the biological function of nature. So it's really about getting back to nature.
And we are so removed in this country, we have no history of farming in my family or yours or anybody else's at all for three or four generations or even more. In many places. The Industrial Revolution swept all. That way. And we need to reinstate that and we need to honour how important nature really is in this process.
Rob: So to see how Tolly honours nature in his process, properly, we went out for a walk through the fields in greenhouses and started in the amazing two acre walled garden.
Iain: So here we are in the walled garden of Hardwick. This has been a walled garden as far as we know, since the ground just after the Civil War and the wall was built. It's unusual because we've only got a wall on three sides, not four on the fourth side, we have a moat.
Rob: Right. Right.
Iain: So it's a very unusual garden in the sense.
Rob: That the house at the end of the walled garden here, because it's quite a big space, isn't it? It's not a small walled garden?
Iain: Two acres. So it's the size of two football pitches, if you can imagine, to Wembley's would fit in here.
And the house beyond the end of the wall here is Hardwick house and this is originally from Elizabethan times In fact it featured in the Domesday Book. The Dungeon, which is still there. Yeah. Was in Domesday Book. It hasn't changed, it's the same dungeon from a thousand years ago.
Rob: This is where Kenneth Graham wrote Wind in the Willows, right?
Iain: Well, where the inspiration for Wind the Willows came from. And he did spend several weeks here writing, starting to write Wind in the Willows. So this is actually Toad Hall. This is. Toad Hall. Right.
Rob: Okay. And Mr. Toad lived here. Ratty and Badger And Mole.
Iain: Yeh
Rob: Just because the Thames is, I don't know, half a mile that way.
Iain: 400 meters that way we can see it from where we are now. There behind us up into the woods. This is the wild woods from Wind in the Willows and where the stouts and weasels hang out. And they still do. They are still there. The stoats and the badgers. There are lot badgers here and toads. We have toads in the walled garden and we have a lot of wildlife. And that's part of what we do is looking after wildlife.
Rob: So this has got a lot of history, this place. So the walled garden itself, this is right at the heart and we'll talk a lot more about the wildlife and your kind of motivations for doing what you do in a bit. But this the walled garden here, this is kind of the heart of the operations?
Iain: Yeah, this is our hub, really. Everything emanates from here. So all plant raising is done here. Most of the input pathways is here. This very small space, two acres, 10% of our land actually takes about 75% of our labour. It's very intense.
We have strawberries here. We've got very intensive cropping and tunnels and greenhouses. So it's very, very much labour driven, very small space, very productive. It was incredibly productive during the war because all this went over to wartime production. It went from being a flower garden, which it was during the twenties and thirties to a production unit, and they used that word unit producing tomatoes and peppers only. And that was supported and paid for by the Ministry of Food. We need them again.
Rob: So what do you actually do? So if we look at these, the way that you've got to set out, we've got kind of three distinct areas just along here which are looking nine.
Iain: We've got nine plots in the garden and that each plot represents one year of a rotation. So what we're looking at here is going to be strawberries planted in a few weeks time. They will move around the gardens, they occupy a new space every year. So we have a very long rotation to break any problems of pest with disease, but also to life fertility building. We're not using any imported material. We don't return young animal manures or the fertilizers or the sprays or anything at all that perhaps conventional farming would be more dependent on.
Rob: And yet you do manage to keep up pretty decent yields.
Iain: Yeah, we have good yields given the site, which is not the best quality. So in fact this is quite low grade land it’s not horticultural land. We do get very good yields, pretty good quality of most things. So we're able to maintain that through production capacity quite comfortably without importing from outside of the farm.
Rob: And how do you actually do that and how do you keep the soil up? Because, you know, you're you're quite proud of your worms year on year.
Iain: Yeah, yeah. We brag about our worms for us are a great indicator. of soil health we know that if the worm population is happy, the soil is happy, and we've got populations around between ten and 15 million per hectare, right. Which equates to around one and one and a half thousand per square meter of land.
It's a lot of worms and we manage that through primarily through what we call plant-based agriculture. So it depends on green manures. We use plants, we grow plants specifically to put fertility back into soil, not just to put it back, but also to maintain and capture nutrients so that they’re not lost into the water causing pollutions. And we have a very wide rotation which allows us to bring these green manures in, a lot of techniques around the use of plant based green manures which are not just about fertility, but also about encouraging and increasing the biodiversity, the farm runs on biodiversity.
Basically everything we do is about biodiversity and that starts above the ground with plants and it moves into the soil through the soil microbiome and the soil which makes the gut biome look quite simple. The soil biome is hugely complex, something we're only really just starting to understand or even acknowledge in the last ten years.
Rob: So as we look across the field here, the top section, you've got a lot of greenery coming through there. What's actually growing in that top section, right?
Iain: That's a sample of one of our many green manures. In fact, there'll be two or three species of different green manures, different plants. Some have fixed nitrogen from the air, putting it back in the soil. Some are holding nutrients over winter. So not allowing them to leach out. We've had a very wet winter, potentially very disastrous for soil because you can lose a lot of nutrient from bare soil that's been covered right the way through the winter. So we're maintaining nutrient levels.
Rob: Really. There's a helicopter flying right overhead keeping an eye. It's the police keeping an eye on us. Hopefully it will disappear off.
Iain: So the green manures are not is not just about fertility building, it's about biodiversity enhancement and biodiversity improvements.
Rob: So what plants are you actually using for your your green manures?
Iain: it's a big list potentially. There are tens of thousands of potential plants we've yet to explore. In that particular case. We have we have a clover, we have a white clover, we have some trefoil, which is also a legume. These are plants which take nitrogen, but we've also got some annuals in there which will also help to track nutrients over winter.
Rob: And do you actively plant them or do you just let it get on with it? You like leave that, leave the soil alone for 5 minutes and they just pop out?
Iain: No, these in particular, we plant and we sow. So we sow these green manures specifically. We do also at times allow, as you suggested, things just to pop up. So the natural biodiversity of the site so every soil has a natural seed bank, a weeds, it's called a weed seed bank, which most growers are horrified to have. I'm very I feel very honoured to have such a thing in our land because it means that you've always got plants which will cover soil when you need it. And weeds are really good at choosing when to grow when they need to.
Yeah, so they are, they are much more intelligent than us thinking. We think we know how to grow green manures but we can let weeds do it if we fail to do it at a particular point in the rotation.
Rob: And in terms of what that then means for the crops that you're actually growing because a big a big issue is around to the pesticides, isn't it making sure that you keep off the bugs that are going to eat the crops that you want to be able to sell? Yeah. So a big part of this is making sure that you've got natural pesticides, i.e. insects and birds that are going to come in and eat the aphids and the other nasties that you don't want.
Iain: Absolutely. Yes. So we work very closely with biodiversity. We see biodiversity is the driver of the farm. In fact, what we grow is biodiversity and the byproduct of that is fruit and vegetables. So we put biodiversity really at the forefront of everything we do on the farm. That's all about protection, enhancement of biodiversity during October this whole garden on two or three occasions will be teeming with people on one occasion we will have up to 2000 people here for a day
Rob: Wow,
Iain: Squash festival, squash and pumpkin Festival. Then we have a National Organic Growers gathering, which happens in October for four days we have about three or 400 growers here eating, drinking, partying, learning, discussions, seminars. So that's another major event.
Rob: So you've been doing this for nearly 50 years now, haven't you?
Iain: Getting on that way
Rob: You're still quite enthusiastic about it.
Iain: I am. And picture this time of year when it's spring, I'm very enthusiastic. It hasn't rained for three days, so I'm getting increasingly enthusiastic. I wasn't I wasn't very enthusiastic this time last week. I yeah, I think the enthusiasm is still there. I think because we have engaged a lot of people in the farm and it's not just me on my own I can't imagine anything worse than being a farmer on your own. We are very much people orientated. We treat people the same way we treat biodiversity. They are integral part of the whole farm and and that keeps my enthusiasm, it keeps me healthy, keeps me relatively young I think. I think it's always that we want to do better next year, kind of idea that we can do a better job in the future. But I through experience and I've got a fantastic team of people who help supporters in this.
Rob: So we’re stood by the the strawberries that are coming through at the moment and the way that you've got them planted, you've got them planted in rows. They're coming up through sort of mulch.
Iain: MyPex is the only, the only plastic we use anywhere on the whole farm. We've completely removed plastic from the farm. Apart from this and the tunnels, obviously plastic is a big issue. So these are in a moment. In between the march, we have rows of woodchip and the woodchip is there to A. to try and keep the weeds down a bit but also to feed the soil, so we use wood a lot on our farm as it has its own source of wood.
So we've planted trees specifically to generate this woodchip which we use on the farm. I mean we've used around 100 between 100 and 140 tonnes of food every year and it's important to think of it as food lost. Farmers don't think of their products as food, they just think of it as a commodity. For us, it's food we are feeding people and we know pretty much how many people we can see from this land.
So that woodchip helps to maintain the carbon levels along with the green manures, which help to stop losing carbon levels. So there's two areas of carbon we're looking at. One is prevention of loss, and that's done through appropriate cultivations and tillies and the other is the regeneration or the improvement of carbon levels, which we do by growing trees and bringing that woodchip onto the farm. The farm produces most of its own carbon.
Rob: And in terms of the way that you do things differently to other people because nobody does it quite the way that you do at the moment. There are a few other people that are doing sort of similar kind of things, but you are a bit of an outlier in lots of ways. Are you? And how do you feel about that? I mean, you know, how quickly do you want other people to actually pay attention to what you do?
Iain: Well, I want to do it very quickly because I'm getting old and there is a definitely we've attracted a lot of interest over the last few years, well, ten years or more, in that we can demonstrate a level of food production which many people would have considered impossible given our very low level of inputs. We don't really bring much in from outside. So that is attracting a lot of attention. In fact, we don't use any livestock at all, is also of huge interest to people because there is a move away from livestock on farms. They're not they're not economically viable in the markets are saturated.
We know that, you know, increasingly reports are showing that livestock have a really negative effect on them, on farming systems in terms of carbon losses and terms of pollution of the planet. You know, livestock has a huge bearing on on climate change. And we we all I think most people would appreciate, although some are loathed by that the fact that we need to reduce livestock numbers quite dramatically as we did during the war and that we forgotten how we managed to do that during the war.
I'm not saying we can exclude livestock completely from the farm you know there’ll always be a place for livestock, but we have to reduce numbers because the impact is too great. All the factory farms have to go. There's no question about it, and very few people would argue against that. So it would leave some still extensively grazed livestock. But even that has to be reduced in some way because of the problems of of livestock production. So we're looking at a much lower level of livestock on farms, which means that farms are going to have to produce their own fertility because at the moment many farms are dependent on livestock for fertility. But fertility is coming from feed, which comes from somewhere else on the planet, and.
Rob: You've managed to find a way of completely circumventing that. So the Greenwood chippings that go in, that's the kind of the primary element is going into the soil to, to put stuff back in?
Iain: It's not no, I wouldn't say it's a primary It's a part of the whole system. So we have a system that no one part of that system is more important than the other. The woodchip is a relatively small amount. It's a very small amount per hectare that we can produce on the farm. So we're looking at very small amounts, but it's used in a targeted way which maximizes its use. Optimizes its benefit really. So optimizes the benefit and then the green manures maintain that we don't lose nutrients and we can build some carbon, but that's relatively short term carbon.
Rob: And you were saying that this is on a kind of a nine year rotation, these fields here. So strawberries that are in this field next to us now, won’t be here for nine years, again?
Iain: Well they’ll actually be here for two years. They're the only crop which doesn't fit so well in the rotation in the field. We have a seven year rotation. We've actually got three different rotations in the greenhouses we have a five year rotation, in the garden we have nine and in the field we have seven. So we've got three quite complex rotations.
Rob: Okay.
Iain: Each of these rotations is designed specifically and they've all been running now for 36 years. So we know it works specifically to avoid the use of bringing material into most sites other than seed. We buy, most of our seed is bought and we don't produce much of our own. It's not practical, but in terms of fertility. We are pretty much self-sufficient in terms of fertility and we are moving towards being completely self-sufficient. We have agroforestry, which you'll see later where we're producing a lot more carbon potentially, which we haven't yet started to utilise. It's still it's only eight or nine years old, but we are going to be starting next year. So we are looking at a situation in about five years time when the farm would be completely, completely self-sufficient in the fertility. There will be nothing coming in from outside at all. At the minute we are brining in a little bit of woodchip waste from the tree surgeon which is supplementing our own, but that will that will end.
And the integration of trees and we'll look at the agroforestry, the integration of the trees. It's a critical part of the whole farm system. And there's a system which could be replicated across all farms in the UK. We, everybody agrees we need more trees is how it's going to be made to work and trees become part of the whole agricultural system, not just the forest on its own. We need to bring all this back together. You know, we're looking at agriculture, we've got livestock one place, we've got horticulture somewhere else, we've got trees somewhere else. You know, the whole lot needs to be brought together as one complete unit, rather than divorced in terms of it.
Rob: And as we stood here in the middle of this walled garden, as you say, you know, an area that's been intensively used by man for at least four or 500 years.
Iain: Well actually a thousand years. There's a history of a thousand years of use here.
Rob: So, you know, this is there's nothing natural about it. And yet, by the same token, we are surrounded by birdsong is just greenery bursting out everywhere. It's bumblebees buzzing past. We've got loads of dandelions and things. You've got lots of strips of other planting around to let all sorts of other things go on.
Iain: They are there. It's a lovely spot. It is. I mean, you mentioned the strips I mean, this is this is not by accident. This is actually designed to be here and you know it’s about creation, biodiversity. Let's a look in in the greenhouse here.
Rob: We've come into a we've come into the greenhouse we have a couple and their young baby or toddler helping out. Yeah it's just this is very very family friendly the way. you’re doing it here. Yeh it’s very
domestic bliss really.
Iain: Yes it's the way my children were brought up. This is Sparrow he's our lead grower and his partner and their little baby Willow who's now walking around with a very large hoe and keeping in the row and not standing on the plants you see, which is quite a remarkable achievement for three year old.
Rob: Sparrow is the head grower at Tolhurst Organics. He's been working with and learning from Tolly for three years now and he's fully committed to the project.
Sparrow: Well, it's it's a lifestyle. I really am passionate about doing something good for the planet and I feel like feeding people healthy food is is a noble cause whilst also trying to do it in a sustainable and healthy practice for the planet, but also because the lifestyle and the work outdoors and yeah, the healthy food that you get from it. So one of the perks of being a grower is that you get to eat organic foods all the time and you can feed your children organic food.
Rob: Yeah. So you've got your other half and your toddler son helping out here as well. This really is a it's a whole lifestyle as far as you're concerned.
Sparrow: Yeah, Well, that's the beauty of, of, of living and working on the farm is that and I'm never far away from the family. So when we have our break time trip and I can see my family at lunchtime, I can see them, I don't have to commute from work. So and I see them in the morning and the evening and, and sometimes they come down to work and and he looks at the tractors and harvesting and helping out. So.
Rob: And what are you actually physically doing in here today?
Sparrow: I'm preparing a seed bed to drill some salad rocket and then I'm going to be drilling some cabbages and kale as a basically for peg plants trying to bare root transplants which will be left to grow in here. And then we will dig them out and transplant them into the field to later.
Rob: And what kind of reactions do you get from people? Because I know all this stuff is mostly sold locally. When you have conversations with people, what do they say to you?
Sparrow: Yeah. Well, you don't really converse with many people when you're in the field. It's part of the job is quite solitary and but we do get together and have gatherings, so we have the organic growers, which is a festival that I run with friends the fire and we get, you know, 400 growers together and hang out and talk about the things that we want to talk about. It's a bit nerdy but it's also quite fun as well. And, and, and then, yeah, I do get to meet the customers sometimes when I do the delivery rounds and that's quite nice to see who’s eating the vegetables, you know.
Rob: And what. So what do they think about, you know, what you're doing and why you're doing it? Do people buy into that or are they just wanting to get fruit and veg?
Sparrow: Yeah, they buy into it. A lot of them say that they'd love to this, but then the reality is it's not as romantic always like that. People are not always kind of cut out to be doing it all the time. It's nice growing your own a little bit.
Rob: Yeah, but it's physically hard labour, isn't it?
Sparrow: Yes, it can be. Which is why I think we've moved much more at field scale, because then the hard labour is done mostly with the tractor, but still when we plant out 20,000 leeks in a day in the morning, we have to get everybody on board the potatoes, for example. They're very easy to put in the ground but getting them out. And now 25 kilo sacks and hundreds of them is quite demanding. But then we we get help on those days. So we make kind of community day where we can get lots of people involved. And and that's a nice way to involve the community. It's come and join us for the harvest because this is what you would do traditionally, you know.
Rob: And in terms of how you feel about your life, are you happy with the choices that you've made?
Sparrow: Yeah. I mean, like I say, I get to live in a beautiful place and with my family nearby, we eat very healthy and it's healthy lifestyle work choice. So yeah, yeah, definitely. It's a good thing. It's hard, but nothing worthwhile is doesn't require a little effort.
Iain: This is one of our original greenhouses from the 1960s. In fact, it was a second hand greenhouses for me that came here. So it's pretty much passes sell by type, but we've managed to keep it going. The rest of our production is in tunnels. We have quite extensive tunnel areas We have 20,000 square foot protected cropping all together and we have a separate rotation here. What we're looking at here, we've got lettuces.
These were planted just two weeks ago. They're coming on. They'll be ready in about three weeks. We're just clearing crops now, so we've been cropping this all winter long. Spring onions a bit thin. It didn't, they didn't do so well, but we're still harvesting them more lettuce down there. The channels have sort of three crops a year, so the tunnels make a huge difference to what we can produce over the season. It gives us a long continuity of of leafy green material right through the winter, which we wouldn't have if we were doing it outside.
Rob: And in terms of the volume of stuff that you produce, how, how, how many people can you feed with? How how big an area are we talking about here?
Iain: Okay, so we've got the whole farm, if you include everything is nearly 20 acres. That includes buildings and pathways and rows. In terms of actual cultivated land, we have about 13 or 14 acres of which we are cropping ten acres at any one time. So there's always 40% in the green manure crop not growing actual vegetables. So it's growing the green manure and that's fertility building and improving of biodiversity. This is an integral part of the whole system. So we need that 40% set aside. We cannot crop continually without bringing in from outside, which we don't want to do. So we're. Probably. So an intensive farm would look at that and go,
Rob: Well, you've got nearly half your land, not in food production at the moment.
Iain: Yeah, well 35%, to be perfectly honest. Exactly 36 and a half percent I think. But yes. So we, we acknowledge that. So a third of our land is not producing at any one time, but we need to do that in order to maintain the high yields we're getting from the rest of it and to maintain the freedom from pests, diseases and lack of facilities. And so the balance over time is that you're not putting any inputs in. So you've lost the mass. There's a big cost saving there in Doing that there is a big cost saving, you know, such a massive carbon footprint saving as well, which is often something which is not recognised on farms. So we are, you know, we're not squandering on carbon on this farm.
We can produce fruit at very, very low level of carbon.
Rob: And how many people can you actually feed on this this patch. of land, this 15 acres. From the whole farm?
Iain: It's around. Depends how you look at it. But we're feeding around 350 families, about 50% in their vegetable crops a year. You have 50% topping up in the winter. We don't produce tomatoes all year round. So that's topping up stuff which is for us is out of season. We could be producing 100% of all their vegetables if they didn't want to have tomatoes at Christmas or strawberries all year round or green peas all year round or French beans in November. You know, there's a limitation to what we can do because of the climatic limitations, obviously. But if people want to go back to where they were during the war and just the provenance and local produce, there's no reason why we couldn't feed everybody all their vegetable requirements.
Rob: Yeah, and this is the thing, isn't it? This is literally a much more natural way
of doing the whole things, are you? So you don't eat meat yourself?
Iain: I am a vegetarian well vegan-ish. I wouldn't claim to be 100% vegan, but I'm vegan-ish, I try very hard. Yes. I've been vegetarian for most of my life since my early twenties. I started on a dairy farm for four years and it finished me.
Rob: That put you off did it?
Iain: Yes. I mean, I'm not suggesting everybody has to be vegan. I think certainly people need to be reducing the amount of meat they eat by a huge factor because meat is very expensive in terms of planetary expense and in terms of ecological expense in terms of biodiversity expense and the expense of the animals and the people who are growing these animals as well.
Rob: Because, you know, you're in you mid seventies, as you said, you look in pretty decent order. To me, it's clearly not been a lifestyle that's done you any harm
Iain: Young seventies. No hasn’t done me any harm. It has meant a lot of hard work over many years, of course, but I'm lucky enough I can still work, you know. So yes, it suited me. May not suit everybody, but it certainly suits me.
And if you look down here, we've got some flowers flowering calendula we allow these to grow. This is very much about looking after biodiversity. We've got chicory here which is going to flower. So this is about encouraging insects. So even in the tunnels and greenhouses, we have, you know, elements of nature. There's little wild corners here and there. We should be allowed to grow because it's really important for insects. We have zero pest problems. Our biggest pest problem actually is birds. Pigeons.
Rob: Oh Right ok.
Iain: Yeah, that's cause nobody eats them any longer. If they were getting slaughtered like they did during the war, they wouldn't be a problem.
Rob: Right okay, what do you do about the pigeons then or is that just something that you put up with?
Iain: Well, now we have to cover crops and it can, if we don't cover them quickly, as soon as we plant them, they can be gone in a night, literally. So we have to cover temporarily, just for a few weeks until they grow. When crops are going really fast, they grow faster then pigeons can eat them. So yeah, we take the covers off at that point, but up until then we have to cover years ago we would have had someone out there with a rattle all day long to keep them away. We obviously don't have labour to do that, you know. So crop covers are really important to us.
Rob: In a neighbouring greenhouse. I then met Maria, who's been working on the farm for just over a year, and when I met her, she was working in the middle of a sea of tens of thousands of tiny baby plants.
Maria: At the moment I'm pricking out celery, which was sown about two and a half weeks ago, maybe three, and they're about sort of an inch tall. and behind us, we've got some lettuce, we've got thousands of kalettes and brussel sprouts to break out as well.
Rob: And why are you why have you chosen to do this? You have all the careers of all the jobs,
all the lifestyles you could have had. Why have you chosen to do this?
Maria: Well it's certainly not to make money. It's well, I believe in healthy food systems. I think that's what led me here in the first place. And Tolly is on this awful slash great clay soil, which everyone says that you can't grow vegetables on. And it's really nice to see it working so sort of beautifully, in line with nature, in line with sort of social practices in farming, which is.
Rob: Is clearly important to you though?
Maria: Yeah, No, absolutely. It's really important. I came from a farming background.
Rob: Okay.
Maria: But that's a sort of cereal farming operation over in Cambridgeshire, which is conventional agriculture in terms of well, conventional the the sprayed version of agriculture.
Rob: So that's really interesting. So you grew up in a in a kind of like conventional all hi inputs or high yield kind of environment?
Maria: Yeah.
Rob: And obviously you kind of felt a need to get away from that.
Maria: And it wasn't so much getting away from it was going towards that, but in a way that I sort of felt. comfortable. Yeah, I felt great with because I mean, I don't mean to sort of step on any toes, but there was nothing inspiring about the world of farming that I came from, whereas this really is it's got so many facets to it. It's not an easy job. It's so sort of intellectually intense all the time, but it just makes for a really fascinating career.
Rob: Which is the most important bit to you then, which is the bit that, you know, makes you feel good about yourself kind of thing? Is it is it the actual quality of the crop you're producing or is it the nature elements of it? Is it you know, when you see larks in the sky? What's the moment where you think, this is the right thing to be doing?
Maria: And I think that's really hard. If it was just nature, then I probably wouldn't be in a farming job. You know, you can take on all sorts of roles in conservation. I think it's the sort of bringing together of all of it. It's food, it's nature, it's sort of it's a lifestyle as well. I mean, it's a really lovely job to be outside or in a greenhouse. I mean, I'm sheltering from the wind at the moment. It's a really windy day. really glad to be indoors. But no, it's it's just really good for the soul.
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. So what do you folks make of it, then? They supportive?
Maria: Surprisingly, no. They they find it hard to get around the idea of food as being a low input system, low input, low output. I mean Tolly is this great sort of counter balance to that because it is a really high system. It's labour intensive. Yeah. I mean, there's four people working on this farm for 20 acres, whereas as four people working on that farm for 2000 acres. But it's a different type of food and it's a food.
And so they're kind of interested in, you know, you go back and have a chat with them and say, look,
you can do it different ways. And some of those ideas starting to filter through.
Rob: Yeah.
Maria: I mean, increasingly they've been more perceptive than I imagine that they've been because the "o" word, the organic word wasn't something that we could have mentioned before. You know, it's it's I think they're quite interested in the system and especially the sort of fertiliser break that they're hooked on because it's expensive. It is expensive. and that this year, last year has made it really important to think about. And they do think about inputs a lot, but they're hooked on it. It's a sort of addictive system. It's really hard to break free from that just by sort of cutting it all out altogether. That's not how it works. You know, you have to focus on your soil health, the crops that you grow, the way that you grow them, the timings, the things that you grow in between the crops because the bare soil also another problem. So it takes a huge mindset shift, especially for my dad, who's a sort of older generation of farmer who isn't used to this.
Rob: Would you, would you like to take on a big farm yourself one day, take on an arable concern and bring some of these principles into doing it? Is that kind of like an ultimate pipe dream?
Maria: It could be, I suppose, on a stage where I haven't quite set my heart on something. Yeah, I want to work in food systems and I wouldn't be here if I wasn't. I'm yeah, now I'm really passionate about that. If I could get an arable farming landscape that is amenable to these ideas and yeah, absolutely. But it's so much about the community as well and there's so much support within horticulture and vegetables and I'm yet to discover that in the arable world.
Rob: Okay, that's really interesting. Maria, thanks so much. Great talking to you.
Maria: Thank you.
Rob: I'll let you carry on sorting your radishes out.
So we've just come out of the we're walking alongside the outside of the the main greenhouse here, and we've got a very handsome crop of nettles, nettles and grasses and all sorts of bits and pieces on the outside. So this, this is not accidental?
Iain: Well, it was accidental. It was here when we came but we've also managed to find a really good excuse for keeping and maintaining it, which we do. So it's a really important habitat for insects because nettles come up very early. You can see we're here in mid-April, already a foot high, and because they're very early, they attract a particular type of aphid which only lives on nettles. And that aphid attracts predators, which live on the aphids, and that predators will then move into our tunnels and greenhouses to parasitise any particular problems that go on in there. So this is a really important part of our whole habitat management. It's very much a biodiversity feature and we manage it in some way.
We don't we don't mow it. We do cut it once or twice a year. We leave all that debris on the ground and what we have here we have a hollow stem and hollow stems a really good for things to live into. So any hollow stem, there is something in there look, any hollow stem is a little winter hotel for a little chrysalis or a pupae which is in most cases a predatory insect which would live on pests. So managing this habitat this specific way is really important.
And we've got flowers in here, we've got dead nettles, we've got red nettles, we've got some grasses, we've got a whole range of different things. And it changes depending on the time of year. So there's always something flowering and the flowers are really important. Any flower is good for predatory insects.
Rob: Because this is one of those things in in conventional farming. They bash this flat as soon as look at it. It's spray it around instantly.
Iain: I'll see if I can find.
Rob: See that you've genuinely got farmers hands as it's nettle, you just put your hand straight in and pluck it out. You're not bothered at all.
Iain: Trying to find the aphids, but they're absent. Oh there's one. There's an aphid. And because that’s there, that encourages the predators to come in and there's something else in there. On a warm day
Rob: Do they not sting you, the nettles?
Iain: A bit. I'm not exactly immune to it it's good to keep [inaudible] hidden away apparently is it.
Rob: Yeah. Okay.
Iain: Bit of nettle flatulation
Rob: Okay.
Iain: So yeah, it's a, there's a whole lot of stuff going on. You got new flowers down here, and we've got some perfect little Pimpernels in there. So it's a really important habitat. And you can see there's things flying around, there's different insects there on a warmer day. It's rather cold, windy day. On the warmer day, this would be alive with flying insects, all of which live on pests. And that's what we do. We create the right habitat for those insects to thrive.
Rob: And so because it's literally next to the greenhouse, you open up the flaps, open up the windows, and then everything just goes in there.
Iain: Yeah, as soon as they run out of pest here they go looking somewhere else and consequently We have no pest problems at all in that respect. In the tunnels of greenhouses.
Rob: Amazing.
Iain: Let's go and look at the propagation here. You can see. Hang on. So this part of the field here is in a resting phase. It's in clover and other species mixed together, that's to build fertility. It won't be cropped now until next year has a whole year of rest. And it actually started the green manure started two years ago under crops. So it's actually been there for quite a long time. We've been cropping it and green manuring it here at the same time. It gets mowed every every couple of months.
And here we are, our tunnels. We have four bays of tunnel here. We've been working now for over 30 years and we've got a whole selection of crops in here. We're looking at leek plants. We've got about 25,000 leek plants in here, 12 rows. They're going to be taken down to the field in a few weeks time, planted in the field. And that will give us our leeks right throughout the winter. We've got rocket over there, which we still harvesting the on there.
We've had carrots drilled which we're just coming up. And then to the far side, we've got spinach, We've got some gaps there because we had a pheasant came in and clear out one day we have to deal with wildlife of all sorts.
We've got rocket, we're harvesting this area here. We're looking at it's going to be tomatoes. All that would be planted with tomatoes this time next week that would be full of tomatoes. And we're going to go and look at those plants in a minute. So all of that Bay, this is an area it's 130 meters long. And. Ten meters wide. This will be full of tomatoes, will be about 900 tomato plants in here, and that will produce around it varies from year to year. But certainly between one and 2000 kilograms of tomatoes, it's one of our heaviest crops from greenhouses, that is. Tomatoes. And not that.
Rob: That's a proper money spinner for you.
Iain: As far as our business goes, I wouldn't say as a money spinner, it's certainly makes some money,
but I wouldn’t call it a “spinner” no, there are no money spinners in my food growing. It's all relative. Yes, it's
it's still quite a worthwhile crop where some crops may make, you no money at all tomatoes will make us something. So it's very important. It's important crop.
We're looking at a woodchip compost on the ground here is some of our woodchip which is now being composted, is applied to the soil we do apply woodchip to our greenhouse areas once every four or five years. We put a small amount in and then we got the spinach over there which you can see is looking an absolute picture of health. It's beautiful green, big, large, turgid leaves, beautiful flavour, fantastic flavour that goes out, gets picked twice week, goes direct to customer. So our customer usually gets food which is usually picked within well with the green crops within 12 hours or less than 12 hours. So so we've come up along side one of the other poly channels that your planting peppers and all sorts of things in.
Rob: We've got a plant here that I'm not sure I quite recognised with lots and lots of yellow flowers on it, standing on a meter tall or something like that. What would we go here?
Iain: Yeah, this is Woad. This is used traditionally for dyeing.
Rob: Woad?
Iain: Yes, woad, W-O-A-D
Rob: The ancient Britons used to paint themselves with woad didn't they?
Iain: They did indeed. This is it. So this is Woad. It's a very ancient plant. It's been grown for a thousand years in this country. This one's going to be used for dying. It's to help fix a dye I think, in the wool. Or. I think it's a fixative I think, I'm not an expert on this, we just let our neighbour come and grow a bit of this is beautiful plant and you can smell it has a wonderful smell today.
Rob: It's quite a strong smell, looking magnificent. So and also these type of flowers, which you can see very wide and floriferous type flowers are really useful for attracting insects like insects love this. So, you know, we encourage.
Rob: So I’m picking up the theme all the way through here. Everything is around having as much insect life going on around the stuff you're actually planting so that you have this cycle of predatory insect insects that will go and eat this stuff that you don't want eating it.
Iain: Everything is interconnected, everything right from the soil and microbes. And so there's millions of things going on. So, right the way through the plants into the crops, it's all part of the whole system. So we have a systems approach to management of pest diseases and fertility building over here.
We've got some of our propagation. So we've stepped into another a plastic greenhouse.
Rob: It's properly warm in here isn't it.
Iain: About 30 degrees in here at the moment. That's probably a bit too warm actually behind this. We got to a whole lot of shallot plants and trees, there's about three and a half thousand plants here. In fact, there's more because there's two or three and every tray is about 8000 shallots growing here in trays. They're going to get planted next week in the garden.
Rob: You’ve got a colossal number of different lines going on at any given moment, haven't you? We're just seeing, you know, shallots, leeks, spinach. Radish, radish. here How many different crops are you actually growing?
Iain: We're growing around in terms of vegetable types. It's over 100 different vegetables.
Rob: Okay.
Iain: And we've cut we've cut back a bit in the last few years because hit got a bit manic
Rob: I was going to say it's a hell of a lot to manage.
Iain: And of those hundred vegetables, many of them will be grown two or three times. We're doing about 300 sowings a year. So pretty much every day we sow crop. It's not every day because in the summer you might sow ten, one day in the winter we don't do much. sowing at all. So it's all year round and it's very intensive in terms of raising plants and seeding what we're looking at here is radish they’re sown direct and they're just about ready. We're going to start picking these this week. I think we're going to do them tomorrow. Actually, if you have a look around here, you can see your radish.
Rob: Look at that. Absolutely perfect.
Iain: Yeah, right. Yeah you want a radish?.
Rob: Yeh I’ll have a go.
Iain: And the soil is good for you.
Rob: The soil is good for you? Right. Okay.
Iain: Absolutely Bacteria and fungi, which the gut needs.
Rob: Okay.
Iain: Because much of the gut biome is very much similar to soil biome.
Rob: Now, I'm I don't normally go for radish either, but these are okay. But that's. Lovely.
Iain: Yeah.
Rob: There's a really sweet, mild flavour to it.
Iain: Yeah. We grow for that reason because some of them are pretty pretty vile actually.
Rob: It's lovely. And we've got and then. With the bit that I'm not eating.
Iain: Just chuck it back.
Rob: Chuck it back on the ground.
Iain: And nature will deal with it. I mean, we sell the whole thing with the leaf, obviously. So this is a really quick crop. These were only sown three weeks ago. We've got vines overhead and they're there to really shade the greenhouse. It gets too hot in here. So we've put those in really as a shading mechanism.
Rob: Are they eating grapes?
Iain: Yes, they’re edible grapes. We had our first crop last year.
Rob: Absolutely fantastic. Wonderful.
Iain: And then beyond here, we've got more trays, celeriac. There's about three and a half thousand celeriac there. And they’ll be going into the fields as well. So most of this is going to be planted out within a week or two. In fact, we have a very busy few weeks coming up. We're behind because of the wet weather.
Rob: And this is a crucial thing to understand, isn't it? The fact that all the stuff you're doing here, nature's at the heart of it, Biodiversity is at the heart of it. But this is a really complicated commercial business that you couldn't you can't do this just as a charitable thing. If it doesn't work, if it doesn't make money, it doesn’t happened at all. It has to is it has to make enough to cover its costs.
Iain: Of course, you know, we're not we're not charity. We don't get any support for anywhere. We have no we have no government support in terms of loans or top ups at all. We will be getting something in this year for the first time ever, which is welcome. But it's enough to pay the wages for two and a half weeks. So it's not a huge contribution but we are quite grateful to get that this is a bit of money, but this business has to stand on its own two feet. We have to be commercially viable, which we are just about. But it's difficult. Yeah, becoming more difficult in the last ten years.
Rob: As we travelled back to Tolly's house, we passed the veg store, effectively the farm shop, and I met a lady called Julie Weedon, who was buying some produce and asked her why she makes the effort to come and buy fruit and veg from here rather than from a supermarket.
Julie: I just love the organic vegetables and knowing where they're grown and it's not many miles. So potatoes here are better than something coming by airplane. It's a whole lot of reasons. And so you're, you know, fairly local.
Rob: Very local yeh. So what do you make of what Iain's doing
here?
Julie: it's brilliant. I mean, I've been coming here for years, so ever since it opened and when it was really good was lockdown because you know,
Rob: They they kept going.
Julie: They kept going. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rob: So why is it, what are the bits about it that you particularly like then? Because you have to make
a little bit of an effort to come and do this rather than just go the supermarket.
Julie: Yes, I well, I like the people that work here and just it's just got a good vibe and.
Rob: And it's this isn't like the environmental side of it.
Julie: Yeah. Yeah. And I really like the fact that it's organic and has always been organic and it's not pretend organic because you see things in the supermarket and you know, it says organic and it's 20 times the price. And you sometimes wonder, but I don't want to. No, no, you can see the field. You see the field.
Rob: And it's and it's lovely.
Julie: Yeah, it's really good.
Rob: And the other side of it is the fact that because of the way they farm it, there's lots of wildlife around the place. Is that important to you at all?
Julie: yeah. well, I love where we live here. We're very lucky and there's lots of wildlife and, and the fact that it is all organic around here is great. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really good thing.
Rob: Okay.
Julie: And so what are you making? What have you bought today? Well, I've bought white potatoes and I've bought some rhubarb. And so. A a bit of rhubarb crumble. Exactly.
Rob: Given the fact that, you know, you've been running the farm for 50 odd years now and that you've got a lot of experience and a lot of quite a high viewpoint, if you like, on how things have changed over time. Are you currently more or less optimistic about the direction we're headed in than we were maybe ten years ago?
Iain: In some ways, I am I am optimistic. If you're a farmer, you have to be you have to be optimistic in other ways. I am pessimistic about the future now. I have seen the degradation of the environment, particularly in this country. We have the least biological species in this country, just about anywhere in the world, and it's because of the way that farming has progressed and post-industrial revolution. There are still plenty of people who think this is still the only way to go forward.
They're not really thinking about food production long term. So I am worried about some of these trends. The big the really difficult part about all this and the bit that really most people don't want to talk about. The elephant in the room is the financial implications of doing this. And to grow food properly, it's going to cost more than it does now. And there's no there's no easy way around that. We have to accept that food production is a national service, it is a public good. It needs to be done. It's going to have to be supported by governments. At some level it is. It has been supported, but often supporting the wrong type of agriculture is produced. You know, the massive mountains of food that nobody could use and is now still producing environmental damage on a huge scale. That has to change. We have to divert that money, which I don't think is ever going to be more than it is now. But we have to divert that into a way which is better spent in terms of looking after the biological factors. of soil but still producing food. And I think our farm offers some of the possible solutions to doing that.
The other big elephant in the room is the predominance of livestock in our agriculture systems, which has increased enormously since the war. It's gone up dramatically. All the major investigations reports into global food security have come down with the same mantra, and that is we have to reduce livestock numbers. There is no question very few people now can argue against that. It's become much more difficult. So we do it set and we realise that production of livestock will have to fall. You have to come down to a level which is sustainable in the long term. At the moment, so much food is being fed to livestock.
If we look at UK as an example, over 65% of all the cereals we see grown going direct to livestock and we lose a huge value of that food. We lose a massive value of potential, that food that's going to have to change. Livestock are no longer can they consume vast amounts of cereal. They're going to go to feeding people and much of the land would be released and that would still be livestock but a smaller scale.
They wouldn't be they wouldn't be any factory farmed. It would be outdoor livestock only. It would be a much reduced level to what they eat now which would release a huge amount of land which could be given back to nature. So it could be, you know, could be repurposed for that for nature's needs, which we need to do in order to save the environmental planet.
Rob: Well Iain, it's been an absolute pleasure to get the opportunity to have a wander around the farm and look at what you do here. It is a unique place. It's a lovely place to be. You're quite an inspiring, chap. It's well, as you know, you get hundreds of people come here every year to actually learn what you're doing and to see what you're doing and why you're doing it. Keep going because you are pushing in the right direction. Stuff is starting to happen.
Iain: Yeah, we're working to cultivate the next generation, of course, as well as to take on from there some I mean, part of my work is about helping young people. We have volunteers who come to learn on a farm for three months and they go off and you met Maria. They all fantastic examples. Someone's going to go on and do what we've started. So we are trying to look after the next generation, which are going to be absolutely dependent on we really are I won't be around to see what may be the worst of the damage, but I won't be around to see what I hope is going to be a big repair job afterwards. which I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. But it may not be in my lifetime, but there's a start of that process now. I think we've got to crack on and get on with it, haven't we?
Rob: Iain Tolhurst MBE. Thank you very much.
Iain: My pleasure.
Rob: Well, what a privilege to meet such a remarkable character. He's a real pioneer who's already had a huge influence on thousands of people. If you want to find out more about the farm, the website is Tolhurst Organic Dot Co Dot UK.
Well That's it from this bumper episode, It's been a Wild Rover Media production for Kent Wildlife Trust.
I'm Rob Smith. And until next time you go wild in the country.