The odds were slim of me ending up in the Oxfordshire countryside alongside Jeremy Clarkson, watching his wheat harvest while cameras rolled...
At 6ft 8in tall, I have always had a vested interest in legroom, but that has been the limit of my interest in cars. Similarly, until the age of 35, I had never given much thought to where my food came from or grown any myself.
Andy Cato with Jeremy Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper in the third season of Clarkson's Farm. They sprayed the new crop with bath salts - magnesium sulphate - to help improve soil quality The best way I could think of to illustrate the Wildfarmed philosophy was to dig a hole under the nearby hedge and compare it to the soil in the field; it was dark chocolate versus milk chocolate.
It was September and the wheat would have to be in the ground quickly, in a field that for decades had been farmed with the full armoury of chemicals. Hold it up to the sun, and it’ll give you a numerical read-out which is a pretty good proxy for how healthy the plant is. Orientating the device towards the watery sunlight in search of clarity, he complained: ‘I thought farmers were supposed to drive tractors.’
As I said, I’m an unlikely farmer. As one half of electronic music duo Groove Armada, I’ve had the good fortune to make albums and perform all over the world. Fifteen years previously, late one Saturday night, I had been in my natural environment, DJ-ing on top of a Greek temple, with a mankini-clad micro-light pilot dropping confetti on the crowd.
But the years of dark clouds and endless experimentation had a silver lining. Our farm was awarded a national prize for farming innovation, and I began to encounter farmers all over the world growing abundant food while restoring soils and ecosystems. Wildfarmed was setup to support this kind of farming. Which is how I came to be involved with Jeremy’s field.
It’s a crucial nutrient for the plant to be able to photosynthesise, and all plant health depends on this ability to turn sunshine into energy. Any nutrients must be applied first thing in the morning when the tiny holes that cover plant leaves are open and able to absorb them. As the day gets hotter, these holes close.
By the time we applied the salts, it was late morning, the sun was at its zenith, and the moment to get the necessary impact from this nutrition was slipping away. Hitching the weeding machine to the back of the tractor should be the work of an instant. If you know your way around one tractor, you quickly know your way around them all. Except, I discovered, Lamborghinis.
Finally operational, we headed down to the field - where the XXL Lamborghini passed multiple times over the same spot. I looked on with a veteran local farmer, a man of few words, who said simply: ‘There won’t be much corn left.’ Yet for all our sakes, we must make sure farmers are rewarded for these aspects of food production. Because we can’t carry on as we are.
Meanwhile, British farmers are going out of business at an alarming rate; one in 20 left the dairy sector alone last year. For farmers to produce affordable food in nature-rich landscapes that can withstand the wild weather ahead, they need to be rewarded not just for their crops but how they are grown.
While these new systems might take a little time to bed in at Diddly Squat, or any other farm, there’s no doubt that regenerative farming can work on a large scale.
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