- I see soil as a miracle.

Six inches of soil feeds 8 billion people.

- We already grow enough of all the human essential nutrients at the global level that we need to feed everyone who's alive.

- But that all came at a terrible cost.

Farming is the single biggest cause of biodiversity, collapse of water pollution and and scarcity of deforestation.

It is the second biggest cause of climate change.

So it's a miracle, but that miracle has created a - Disaster.

If we continue with the same practices, the whole thing's gonna collapse.

The solar systems are collapsing, the yields are gonna go down, the biodiversity is hemorrhaging.

- The soil is the most valuable resource on the planet and we're degrading it without even realizing - The system is.

Unbroken system is working exactly how it's meant to be.

It's a system designed to extract and build profit rather than to ensure that everyone has equal access.

It's an - Unsustainable system, so it's gonna change.

Question is how much harm is done to our health and to the environment before it changes, but literally it cannot survive.

- Regenerative agriculture to me is farming in a way that we are producing food, but also farming in harmony with nature.

- It's about finding other solutions that mean you still make money and you still have a profit as a farmer, but you're not damaging the environment and you're working with nature not against it.

- Having a regenerative agroecological system where there's massive diversity embedded in the farming system, in all this land that's around us, that is surely the solution.

- There's a growing regenerative farming movement.

It is happening more and more.

The more people see it, the more that they realize that it's something that works.

- These farms really can change the world.

- I am really, and the whistles are all very new to me.

I'm not very good at the whistles.

Everything's sheep.

Dog is new to me.

Walk on, walk on.

I've got Luna and she is getting there.

Apparently it takes four years to train a dog.

So she's two years old.

So they're basically our fertilizer machines.

We've stopped putting certain chemicals on the farm already and the sheep are now putting those natural elements on the farm instead of the chemicals, and it'll hopefully build natural biology back into the soil.

But yeah, and I also just really like sheep and when I was younger, dad said, don't come back to the farm.

There's no money in farming.

Go away, get an education.

I was a freelance sports photographer in London and then Covid hit.

So I had no way of making money and I thought, I've gotta go home really 'cause I can't pay rent.

Said there's a sheep that needs looking after.

Can you try and keep it alive?

It was a lamb.

Timmy survived and he's still on the farm today.

A huge castrated.

Male sheep.

But yeah, this is the sheep that proved to me that you can work with animals and crops in one harmonious relationship.

My future for this farm, I would like to be as environmentally friendly as possible while still making a profit.

Be as resilient as possible to global warming and work with nature, not against it.

- I'm looking forward to getting an actual hose pipe with a hose.

I'm starting a market garden to grow fruit and vegetables to help feed my local community.

Farming isn't in my family history.

I went to university not really knowing what I wanted to do, but knowing that I cared about nature and was very concerned about climate change and that I wanted to do something that had a positive impact on the world.

I noticed that there was a real lack of local food production in this area.

When I first started looking for jobs, there weren't many places doing regenerative farming.

How I wanted to do it, which is very low impact, using mostly hand tools to do it on my own means that I can actually take that time, I can give myself the time to learn and I can do it the way that I want to do it.

I am spending my own money on starting this thing.

I don't know if anyone's actually gonna buy things from me yet, or if they're going to grow.

- Let's go.

Let's go.

Put that.

Go with that.

Go with that.

- So here at Truo we've got 75 acres that the landlord owns that we actively manage.

And then we also graze 35 acres for a neighbor.

That's all permanent pasture, very hilly ground, quite steep, not suitable for growing crops.

We graze over that with a small group of belted Galloway cattle.

So native breed cattle.

Come on guys, look away.

Hey.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So every day in the winter we will move the cows onto fresh grass and then we will give them a bear of hay each day.

And that's sort of worked out as to how much they need to eat each day to keep growing and maintain their weight.

I really have a passion for cattle that grew and grew.

As I got older, I think I've become quite obsessive with it and I wanted to learn more and more.

I want to be the best I can at sort of farming cattle and managing cattle, breeding cattle.

I had never had any other doubt that I wanted to do anything else.

Over the next year.

At Trato we've got three aims.

Number one is to produce utterly tasty nutrient rich beef.

Secondly, we are gonna do this as ethically as possible.

So we're only gonna feed our cows grass, hay and hedges.

They're gonna be kept outside all year round.

And on their last final day we will give them a respectable trip to the abattoir.

And thirdly, we are gonna regenerate the soils on this farm.

- We grow birds', I peas, we grow wheat, we also grow quinoa, which is a crop I saw on Countryfile.

- Quinoa.

- Quinoa.

If you're from down south, - No if you're from the world - Os seed drape.

And we've got a new crop here called meadow foam and it's for the cosmetic industry.

And we we're growing it for the first time.

- So I wasn't gonna come into farming at all because I looked at the conventional system where we were doing and it didn't inspire me.

Like I, I'm definitely environmentalist at heart, you know, I love our planet and I wanna keep it.

And there was nothing that, no offense dad, there was nothing that dad was doing that was inspiring.

Dad had gone regen sort of secretly, right?

You hadn't really shouted about - It.

Well I, like I said, it was a journey and yeah, and you dunno if it's going to work, but you, I've read the books probably the the best books for Gabe Brown Dirt Soil.

Yeah.

And, and that, that's the sort of turning point for a lot of people once they read that book and realize it's Gabe spin in it 30, 40 years and it works for him, why not try it?

If we look here and we we dig a hole, it's not gonna be very pretty.

We haven't met any obstructions with the spade, but there's no worms and it's just sand.

So what we've done here is, is take some of the degraded soil down to the arable field and some of the soil down to the hedge bottom.

So this has not been cultivated in decades, it's how it should be.

It's not very good soil, it's sandy soil.

But on the other hand it's got root living roots, some worms, loads of worms.

- This is our aim and this is where we're currently at.

So that's how far we've got to go to get our organic matter to this and not this.

- Today we are planting apple and pear trees.

We're doing a strip going all the way down the field.

It's the start of an agri forestry trial.

So the hope for this agri forestry strip is that we'll be able to harvest the fruit from the trees to sell and also that the roots will help improve soil structure and biology, increasing the resilience of the farm, especially with water retention.

These are kind of the first times that I've dug holes in this plot and being able to see the worms is just so satisfying.

Knowing that there's biological activity going on in the soil is really good to see.

- I was looking for a market gardener.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know much as we do wheat and barley and oats and beans and peas, you know, they're a little bit boring.

I mean I'm sure I can make them more exciting but ultimately the variety is sort of part of the deal.

You need the variety to sort of get that, you know, get people interested.

So, and I'd know nothing about grown fruit and veg, so I thought I'd find someone who did.

- I'm very lucky here because Tom has been transitioning to regenerative farming.

He hasn't killed this plot in a few years.

He's also cut out the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

So hopefully the land is also already starting to recover.

I feel really positive about the future.

I think the short term future, I feel incredibly overwhelmed.

Although I've been farming for several years, I've always been working for someone else and they've been making the decisions and I wanted to make the decisions.

But now that I'm making them, I've realized that it's quite hard job - Sometimes thinking, have we taken too much on, that's one thing that's certainly a bit of a struggle is have we got time to manage this as well as our other lives, but then also keep a social life 'cause that's quite important to the two of us and we don't want this farm to take away from that.

- So all these holes on the surface, the activity of the dung beetles, which are really important for a sustainable farming system and they're breaking down the, the dung really quickly, releasing those nutrients, getting with the smell, reducing the greenhouse gases coming off of that muck as well.

Yeah.

Also they carry around these little mites which parasitize the larvae of the flies, which are nuisance a house.

So if you have a good don beta population, they're almost at the bottom of this - Sort of, yeah sort of - Food web.

They're really unsung heroes and you need livestock in a landscape to actually support these, these dung beetles.

We are building a community of farmers to look at opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And Ben is part of this farm net zero project and that's how I first got to know Ben.

- The style of grazing we are using, the mob grazing is all about high impact grazing for short periods where they are on a small area of the field for one day and then we move them on again and then they don't return to graze that field for another 60 to 90 days.

So it's getting this long rest period.

All the plants can rest and recover.

So they can set seed, they can flower, you know, some increasing habitat for pollinators and insects.

So the root system will massively expand during that rest period and improve the soil structure through that better rooting action that improves water infiltration.

So all these sort of benefits from the high impact mob upgrades that we get improves our productivity.

- We push this into the soil and what you have is you have the profile of the soil.

This is just one to show you what it's like.

So the deeper soil and then obviously the sort of top soil.

We can look at the deep soil that's moving into the sub soil, which is paler because there's less organic matter.

Soil organic matter is dead or decaying plant in animal matter, which contains a high level of carbon within it.

And then in this sort of top six inches of soil is the real exciting part, which is sort of locking up that carbon and you can see how you are offsetting any emissions from your animals by the carbon you're stored in the soil and with your management as well.

- So they're a really important tool to adding organic matter into our soil.

- It's all about the soil, isn't it really?

- Yeah, definitely.

I know - An estimate of the carbon stored in the soils in the UK is about 10 billion tons of carbon.

That's equivalent to about 80 years of greenhouse gas emissions from the uk.

Soils are absolutely phenomenal in the amount of carbon they can store.

- I'm only able to work on the farm part-time because the farm can't afford to pay me full-time.

But really this farm only supports two people and at the moment there's three of us - And then just fall.

It is a very strange world to be in and especially because I work in cafes to kind of sustain myself, especially over the winter.

People will happily spend seven pounds on a coffee and a cake, but they are horrified if their bag of salad is two pounds.

- We have come to believe that money is more important than soil and money is made by industry, by manufactured goods.

So we are prepared to pay lots of money for cars, computers, houses, airplanes, everything else, but food must be cheap.

That idea I think has to change.

- The most challenging part of our first year here at Trato has definitely been this full winter.

The short days.

So just an absolute killer.

So we were having conversations about supplying an online butchery.

We needed cattle to hit these certain weights at these certain times.

We weighed them and weight gains had dropped off a cliff.

A lot of them had lost weight.

And I was kind of like, okay, I'm not a very good farmer.

Well maybe they should be in a shed.

So then you start questioning things, whereas actually the guy that owns this online butchery and he was like, everyone's cattle doing what you're doing loses weight at the moment or they're doing really well if they're maintaining weight spring, summer in autumn.

We are seeing growth rates that are comparable to any sort of other system 'cause they, I'm also outside all year round.

They're not in a shed where they could suffer from pneumonia.

We are seeing a huge reduction in in antibiotic usage as well.

So we're hardly to use anything here.

So it's really good.

- What we've discovered since we started direct drilling is that we're not disturbing the soil and we've got a slow buildup of organic matter.

This is something I think other farmers need to quantify their level of organic matter, whether it's going up or down and if it's going down, what are they going to do about it?

And what we are trying to do is point a direction and prove that it's financially viable so that we can all build our organic matter levels - Better for the soil, better for the ground, better for the land.

We've seen less flooding, less compaction within our soil.

We're also more drought resilient because of the, you know, what we're planting and how we're drilling it.

So using this drill with a no-till drill, we're just a bit more future-proof really.

- Compaction is when soil is the, the structure is being destroyed.

You can think of a, a beautiful soil that looks like chocolate cake crumbs or you can think of a soil like a big lump of concrete.

And so what's happening is those chocolate cake crumbs are becoming compacted and losing the structure and the air is being squeezed out of the soils.

So if you imagine compacted soil is like soil that's being suffocated and if you haven't got the oxygen in the soil, the roots can't work.

The whole complex web of life within the soil is being suffocated and the water has difficulty percolating, which makes crops much more vulnerable to drought as well as greater risk of flooding rural communities.

- If it was me, I'd change everything tomorrow.

Like I'd implement so many plans, I'd bring cows on, I'd get sheep on different parts of the farm they'd never been on, but I can't do that 'cause I've got a, I've got a dad who is my boss.

So I will have to think carefully and calculatedly about what I am able to do without giving dad a heart attack.

- She's becoming to be more challenging with her knowledge and should we do this, should we do that?

And we're getting some meaningful conversations now.

Who knows what's gonna happen to her three years time?

We might completely disagree - At the moment I am probably doing farm related things for about 14 hours of the day, but that is the nature of starting a business.

I'm not paying myself this year.

I think we need to acknowledge that farming is a skill.

I definitely do not want to be in a position where I can't pay people to work at the farm.

So I need to work out how to do that.

- What we need for new entrants to be able to do what they need to do.

We need the proper training and demonstration and advice.

We need the land, affordable land and we need finance so they can actually get on with it and have the adequate resources and they need access to markets as well.

How to access those markets.

That's critical to get us to where we need to go with new entrant and regenerative farming.

- This is a, a liquid nitrogen that many farmers apply to boost the yield of their crops and we've reduced our application by 30% last year and I don't think there was any significant decrease in yield this year.

I I paid 263 pounds a ton, which is quite a keen price.

But other farmers now we've got a shortage.

There's rumor it's gone up to over 900 pound a ton and that makes you think twice about the application rate, doesn't it?

Most farmers will use herbicides to kill weeds, the fungicide to control fungus diseases, insecticide control insects.

We've certainly stopped insecticides.

We are reducing our fungicides by doing different region techniques, but it's not an easy way to bumpy ride.

It's about building confidence and what works in one year and what, how you can refine it in the next and eventually we'll get there.

- The worms are, I don't really like using human terms, but they're the engineers of the soil.

So they do a lot of the work of moving nutrients around and breaking up the soil as well.

So they eat plant matter and then turn that into soil.

They are the farmers really the soil biology, all those creatures within the soil, the fungi, the bacteria, all the invertebrates, the worms are all working, providing a phenomenal service to make our soils alive and to make them work to reduce flooding, to store carbon and to detoxify and provide a whole range of other services.

But they need food and their food comes from plant material and it can be part digested through dung or it can be plant roots or it can be in the form of compost and mules.

So they just need to be fed all the time.

If you don't feed that biology, it starts dying.

The diversity starts decreasing and you start losing those services that the soils are achieving.

For us, it is all about feeding the soil.

That's how we grow healthy plants.

Rather than spraying them, we're actually adding things to the soil.

That means that the soil builds its fertility and unlocks the things that are already in it.

- In our regenerative journey, we're trying to find break crops that will make us money.

Meadow foam is one of our break crops.

It's basically called a break crop because it gives it a break from the conventional wheat that we would grow.

Bringing in crops like this because it increases our diversity of what we're growing should bring different bugs and insects and animals onto the farm.

And this will be our first time harvesting it.

We've never, we've never grown it before, we've never harvested before.

We want to be able to drive through our farm and we want to have so many bugs at our windscreen that we have to clean it.

That is our end goal.

- So farming at the moment isn't diverse and look across the countryside, look at the main crops that we're growing.

Winter wheat for example, is one of our biggest crops.

There's 5 million acres of it.

It's a huge crop, huge crop worldwide.

Rice, wheat, soy and maize or corn in North America are the four big crops that our whole population, world population has doubled on the strength of those four crops.

And yet there are hundreds of crops that we could grow but choose not to.

If we were to explore growing those crops, we would rebuild soils, we'd have diverse crop rotations, we would have better gut microbiomes, we would deliver so many benefits to public health.

But of course there are barriers to that.

We've got a supermarket system that generates something like 95% of the food that you and I eat.

- I think we're disconnected from it all.

We live in a world where a lot of our food comes packaged and we buy it from the Tescos of our world and for most people they have no clue of how that food is produced, who produces that food and how it got to the supermarket.

The disconnection with nature, because we're living in cities, we're living in concrete jungles and you know, green space is literally a patch of grass and a non-native tree - That steer there is gaining one and a half kilos a day.

We're starting to prove that you don't need to feed cereals and grains concentrates to hit these weight targets.

We can do it on what's growing beneath our feet for free.

We're not using any fertilizer using the rain, the soil and the sun.

We do stop every now and then and think, wow this is yeah super special.

- We don't have a cucumber one, do we?

Oh yeah, nice.

Someone sent me an Instagram message saying that they were the best cucumber she'd had in years.

So that was very nice.

This is our fourth market here.

All of the long-term organic vegetable growers that I have talked to have said don't do it today.

Feels quite not disappointing but the market is so empty.

There are very few traders here that's quite worrying in terms of what our business is going to be like today.

But it might just be that this isn't, this one isn't the one in the meantime it's gonna be a bit of a struggle.

I think I have experienced quite long periods of depression and problems with my mental health when there's so much information and so much doom in the world having something that I can hold onto that is life giving.

It's what I need to be able to exist.

- So we've got, we've got damage here from either the stem weevil or the flea beetle and you can see it's gone right to the core of the, the root and the stem at the bottom.

As I said, this is probably the first time it's, it's happened to me on this sort of scales.

You can see that one moving about though.

And I think that's the, the weevil.

I think it's, it is the difference between a profit and loss and, and and the saving Grace May well be that the price of os seed rates high this year because of the Ukraine disaster.

But in a normal year when rakes priced quite a lot lower, I'd probably quite lose money on this.

And because I've chosen not to put insecticides on, I might partially be at fault.

But that's life isn't it?

You're gonna be a risk taker sometimes - It is a bit crappy when like we harvested our meadow foam and we hardly got any meadow foam and we've definitely lost a bit of money on that and we've definitely lost million on our quinoa this year.

So we're not gonna grow that anymore.

But we gave it a go.

We had a look.

Hopefully we'll make money this year.

You don't really know them until you've, you've harvested it and then you've sold it.

This is our yield now.

It's quite bad for rape.

Like ideally with rape you wanna, you would, you would be hitting about five here that would be like really good.

But we are hitting about two, which two and threes and fours, which is not great.

- We are at the end of August, start of September we had over a month and a half without any noticeable rain.

I think we maybe got half a mill in all that time.

There are big cracks in the ground and it's very hard underneath.

Basically it just all dried up all the way down.

And that was why all of our new seedlings just really struggled because we would've had to water so much just to rehydrate the soil.

It's also not surprising to me.

We know and we have known for a long time that our climate is becoming more unstable and uncertain and temperatures have been rising.

I am now planning on finishing my sails at the end of November because I just won't have the produce to sell it on into the winter and I'll pick up another job over the winter for this year.

I felt really terrible by the middle of August just because I could feel how dry everything was and cracked and, and it made me feel like a bad land custodian.

Like I just, my confidence was go like I was losing confidence.

I was losing confidence in what we were selling.

I felt like we were doing a bad job.

- So we've had like the driest July I think on record for many parts of the UK and you can still see how dry it is here.

A lot of the old grasses are burning up last spring in May of 2021.

I over-seed the farm here with herbal leaves.

So these varieties of the herbal lay are providing their worth now in this extremely dry weather we're having.

They're so resilient as you can see here.

We've got chicory, the red clovers here, the bit slightly bigger leaves.

We've got plantain here as well.

So there, there you go.

You can see already that that's a good six inches down into the soil and like breaking off the tip as well.

So when modern rye grass is there only rooting this, this has got another four inches on that.

This root is going deep down into the soil profile.

It's helping to break up any compaction that might be in this area here.

And then this deep root is feeding, you know it's pumping carbon and sugars deep down into the soil all the way down there and feeding a larger area of those soil microbes.

And then that's also bringing minerals back up and into the leaves for the cows to eat.

And then next door where my neighbors are continually grazing their pasture.

There's a lot of bare soil, there's a lot of yellowy dead grass 'cause it's just burnt off in the, in the extreme heat and the drought.

- This is the breadwinner crop.

Wheat is a crop that keeps us going as farmers look, look at our yield, how good's that but that, that is the kind of yield we're looking for.

Like we're averaging 10 and we're getting like elevens and twelves with us reducing nitrogen every year.

And we've been region now for like eight years.

You know, it's doable, it's possible and and this number is the reason why a lot of people won't go regen.

And we are regen and this is the yield we're getting so there is no excuse really.

So we are in the grain store and this is 200 tons of regen wheat knowing that this has used half the amount of chemicals and every year we're reducing our chemical inputs.

It just makes me feel wholesome in a way that I can't even describe the full amount of happiness that farming in environmentally friendly way working with the land Dad started red and farming not for him, he did it for me.

Like he did it for the future generations to come and that was the most selfless act he could have done on this farm.

And I'm now carrying on that tradition and we're getting greener and greener every year for generations to come.

And this is a region crop and this can only become more region in the future.

- These are bee treat and I love harvesting them.

They're one of my favorite things to harvest.

I feel like I say this about everything though, so you can just tell that I love my job when you pull it out the ground you can just smell the earth.

Oh it's just such a happy smell.

This is the market selling technique of abundance.

You stack them high and then they sell.

I think my niche might be novelty.

That's a way I think I can get people in and interested and involved and hopefully then they'll try them to try the crops and realize that they just taste so much better than things from the supermarket.

It feels like the realization of all my dreams.

I think like I really care about this because I grew it perfect.

There we go.

- We are walking through this group of cattle now they're really calm and relaxed.

No one's running away from us.

They're super chilled.

They're not, they're not threatened by us being in here.

What that will translate into at the end of the day is a better eating quality of the beef because they're not stressed when I handle them.

They're not full of adrenaline here in the middle is the one that's going to the appetite tomorrow.

Yeah, this is his last night having the right amount of respect for him.

You know, I'd rather take him in the morning to the abattoir.

So he spends his last night with these, with his fellow herd members rather than being alone in the abattoir as such or pinned up in a different pen.

It's all familiar ground for him.

No that's it.

What's up there?

Bring this, we good mate, come on now.

- Good.

- So one of the major criticism of livestock farming is it's adding to and contributing to the climate change.

But what's amazing about your carbon footprint is that with all your landscape features, the hedge raise, the woodland is actually you are capturing, you are storing more greenhouse gases in your emitting, - Right?

That's brilliant news isn't it?

It's - Absolutely amazing.

So this is the common balance of your farm.

So here we have your emissions, these are the offsets.

So offsets is all the parts of your farm that are taking greenhouse gases out the atmosphere.

- Yeah.

- And the black is the your carbon balance.

So what is happening is this figure is negative, which means you are removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than you're actually emitting.

- It's awesome, isn't it?

I mean there's such a great marketing tool for us now to be able to say we are ma, we are managing our hedges in this way and, and they're sequestering more carbon than our cows are emitting.

So the hedges are, are amazing anyway.

- Yeah - And the woods are pretty good, but the soil has absolutely smashed it.

That is such a, a huge figure that we really should be pushing farmers to be adopting more of these practices to push this - Here in this shed.

We've got soft wheat which will be made for bread and cakes and things like that and it's being sold in a village down the road in Selby.

But normally we don't really know where it's going.

We just kind of sell it when the price is right and then yet it's off our farm.

It's gone at the moment.

You kind of have like conventional farming, regenerative farming and organic farming.

So you know, conventional is sold at a certain price, organic is sold at premium and we are in the middle trying to get the same yield as conventional but trying to use less chemicals.

We are choosing to be regenerative with no premium like organic because me and dad wanna say that we've done everything we can for the environment on this farm.

Like this is our patch of land that we can control.

We want to do everything physically possible in our control to be as environmentally friendly as possible.

Every year we are doing better than the previous year.

I'm excited to see this farm in like 10 years time 'cause I think it'll be a completely different farm than, you know, the farm that I grew up with.

- These are my kind of overall kind of glance on my finances from last year.

I put in 12,000 pounds of my own money.

So of the 13,000 pounds that I made, I actually had about 4,500 leftover at the end of the year.

But I didn't pay myself for that.

Yeah.

And I was living with massive support from my family.

I only have this one life and the world is in pain and it's suffering and I want to use my time here to help heal it.

And growing food is the way that feels like it makes the most sense - On this table in front of us.

We've got all the beef that's come from one of our belted galleries that we've sent off just before Christmas.

So yeah, pretty awesome to see it here in front of us and actually realize how much you get back from one animal.

- The story we're trying to tell at Trudo is just how this beef got to this table.

I think it's really, really important to kind of be super transparent with our customers because I know a lot of people, well most of us go to the supermarket and we just see products on the shelves and have no idea how they got there.

- So the story of the scale that's here in front of us is that it's produced over 200 packs of beef, that's over 800 meals for people.

And so it produces amazing nutrient-dense food as at the same time it's been enhancing nature on our farm at Trato for its entire life.

So that finishes off.

Do you want, have you got an ice pack in there?

That looks good, doesn't it?

- Okay, - Let's go.

Let's go and deliver.

People will compliment us on the mints and the extra flavor and like, or depth for flavor and quality that'll add to a basic meal like a lasagna or a chili.

They, they really say it goes to the next level and, and they can't believe they've never had mints like it.

We've seen what our cows are eating on the farm, you know, we're seeing the different species of the plants are eating in the fields, the hedge rows.

We know that they're getting that super diet that is fed nothing but sunlight and rainwater and, and that is translating into a beautiful product that tastes amazing and, and you can't compare it when it's natural like that.

It really beats anything else that's been fed in a conventional system.

- So this is everything we've grown last year.

So this is wheat grass, all seed rape, peas, metaform, and quinoa.

And they're in order of profits.

So we lost money on these two.

We had a profit of two pounds on the peas and then we gained money on these three.

Each field basically had a different crop in it.

So most farmers in the UK would probably have a rotation of grape and wheat and maybe one more, maybe sugar beet in this area.

Whereas we're trying to expand our rotation to help our soils and increase our soil health.

We've changed this slightly so in the future we're not gonna grow these two anymore.

We're gonna grow all of this, but we're gonna add oats in as well.

So a different crop.

But I'm glad we've tried them.

I've drilled all of these crops in the ground on our farm.

I've seen them grow and I've harvested them.

So I've literally seen the whole life cycle of these crops and it's exciting to know that I grew that and I've, I've been part of the lifecycle of the food cycle optimal.

- We've been continually measuring our soil for carbon.

We've measured principally in organic matter.

We've identified that our soil was down at 2% or below in 2012.

We're now averaging about 3.6%.

I dunno when I'm gonna stop.

I, I'd like to carry on till six plus.

And every time we build organic matter within soil, we're pulling carbon dioxide outta the atmosphere to reduce the global warming effect, - The way to bring respect for the soil.

Again, we have to bring the education of soil and education of nature in our schools and in our universities.

All those who eat must participate in growing food.

- One of the solutions is giving young people the opportunity to see food growing and to taste the fresh nutrient rich food.

And I found this can really transform their relationship to both eating food and also to the natural world.

And we need more people on the land and maybe this is one way to do it.

- Come on dad.

Yeah, - Great to see, isn't it?

- They look happy, don't they?

- They come, yeah.

I mean it feels like it's where they're supposed to be, isn't it?

Yeah, they're excited.

Yeah.

'cause when it's absolutely horrific weather, like lots of rain or you've got these intense heat periods, you bring 'em in here, it's going to No, this is your, this is your track resistance, isn't it?

Yeah.

- Said it's like a spa day for them.

They're having - A massage and a lovely new treat.

- It is.

It's up to us, I think to provide a high quality need, but for very happy animals.

- Yeah, a lot, many cattle are able to smash through some woodland and they always wanted to show their strength, didn't they?

Yeah, they always like trying to test themselves.

They look a lot bigger.

Yeah.

So consumers have a choice.

They really have the power.

They can decide to buy cheap meat from industrial farms or they can find farmers like myself that are producing meat in this way that really value animal welfare and the environment that we we're farming in.

And if enough consumers make those choices, we can change the food system.

- Come on then.

Come on then.

I think that using our senses is a forgotten art.

The obsession with immediate profit raises our connection with our ecosystem.

And without those connections, our presence on the land becomes exceedingly rare in four years of agricultural studies, not once did any professor ever tell me, let alone teach me how to observe.

And without that skill, we cannot farm, ranch, or garden in nature's image.

So this is dirt Soul by gay Brown.

And my dad actually gave me this book when I was living in London.

This passage really relates to me because it talks about the senses and like in photography, that's what I was using.

I was using all of my senses to observe And look, that's kind of what Regen does in a way.

You are looking, you are smelling, you're touching, you're feeling you've gotta make a profit, but you've still gotta enjoy the job and you've still gotta have a thriving, healthy nature led farm at the same time.

And I think that's something we've lost in conventional agriculture and we need to actually go out and see what's going on.

And I think if we do that, we'll probably be happier people with happier farms, which would just be a great outcome.

- It is not been easy to gain the knowledge that I have.

I've had to travel a lot.

I've had to take a massive hit to my earnings.

I've risked my future security, but I also acknowledge my privilege that I have family support.

I have a place to go if it all fails.

So we need a way to support people to take these risks, to start these businesses that are providing the solutions to the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and the people who've been doing this work, they have the answers and they have them ready.

So we just need to support them.

- There is a coming together now of the farming community from the most conventional to the most forward thinking, regenerative farmers all who are beginning to understand that actually we can't go on treating the soil as we do.

We can't go on farming as we do.

And I find that change even the last three years, incredibly energizing.

And it makes me optimistic.

- I've been working in food and farming policy for 30 years and we absolutely know what needs to happen to solve the climate crisis, the nature crisis, and our obesity crisis.

What we absolutely need now is urgent action from the government to provide the support for farmers to do nature friendly farming, go organic, go regenerative.

But they need the support to do that because it costs a lot.

There's big risks involved and they need the government also to build up the alternative routes to market.

And they need the government to regulate supply chain so they play fair.

These things we know absolutely need to happen.

Let's get on with it.

- The earth is my mother.

I am of the soil and I will return to soil.

So healing the soil is really, really important.

There's so much work to be done, but it isn't just about soil.

We're regenerating people.

We're regenerating relationships and we're regenerating values.

- I build the energy coming into spring.

The world is suffering.

I can see my future working on this farm, holding the harvest in my palm.

It's easy to ignore.

What we can't see - Be of sws, nems and fungi under a beat.

They grow the food, we harvest their roots, they grow the food, we harvest.

Let's.