Transcription

• Speaker #0

  then covid hit and the prices of everything rocketed sky high and i did go into like a a downward spiral of depression and financial difficulty i think we lost a hundred thousand pounds a year over three years um whilst selling everything we've got as well i ended up um filling my whole house full of peonies and doing tiktoks um basically in desperation of uh um TikTok was taking off during COVID, so I thought we'd give it a go. And a couple of the videos done all right, and it gave me a little bit of motivation to carry on. I sold over 100,000 stems of peonies direct to the consumer in the post for four times more money than what the supermarkets paid.

• Speaker #1

  My name's David Wheatley, and sometimes people don't take me seriously. I grow peonies, and peonies, each variety, only lasts for two weeks picking. and 50% of the flowers will probably be picked in two to three days at a time. To get them at their best you want to have them while I'm picking. I can store them for three to four weeks in cold storage but they're always best when they're freshly picked.

• Speaker #2

  Back in 2020 during Covid, David decided to start posting videos on social media to save his farm. He needed to connect directly with potential customers to sell his produce. And after that was quite successful, he decided to continue posting almost every day over the last few years. He has now hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram and tens of millions of people have watched his videos. I really love the content he's posting because it's so raw, honest, unfiltered. David is sharing his everyday struggles on the farm, the successes, the challenges, the failures. All of that in a very honest and natural way. Most people know David for his short video format on social media. But today we have a long format conversation where we get to know David better. We get to understand his farm and context, his problems and struggles and the solutions he's coming up with to solve them and his vision for the future. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I'm your host, Raphael.

• Speaker #0

  And this is the Deep Seat Podcast. Hi David, welcome to the Deep Seat Podcast. No, it's good to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. How are you doing today? I'm very well, thank you. I feel quite good.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I'm really pleased that you took time to receive me on a Sunday morning.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm getting in the habit of saying yes to most things now. And although I do feel a bit uncomfortable sometimes talking in front of real people, but it's getting better and easier now.

• Speaker #2

  Right. You find it easier talking in front of the camera when you're recording yourself?

• Speaker #0

  Well, when I'm by myself, that's fine because nobody's there and nobody's there to judge or anything. And although there's like there might be millions of people that might watch it, that doesn't seem to bother me a lot. When I'm in front of real people, I usually mess up a little bit or get my words mixed up. So you have to bear with me a little bit.

• Speaker #2

  Okay, yeah. But so that we can get to know you a little bit better before we get deeper into the conversation, maybe you could sort of introduce yourself for the listeners.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So for anybody that doesn't know, my name's David Wheatley. I'm a fourth generation farmer, but my family, they own like 80 acres of land. which my granddad had and then my father there wasn't enough for him as well so he he managed to get a council farm um which uh uh is renting from cambridge county council and i grew up on a cambridge county council farm all of my life and then i ended up um applying and getting one for myself um you start off with a start holding of um i think it was 32 acres a bare land and then over a period of time you build up your money and your machinery and your knowledge of, we were growing wheat and potatoes and sugar beet at the time. And then after a period of time, more land becomes available, and then you apply for that and see if you can get it, basically like a job. And then in the year 2000, we moved to this farm, and it's eventually got up to 450 acres of predominantly arable land. But there was some orchards. and woodland that come with it.

• Speaker #2

  Great. Now that we have a little bit of the history of the farm, could you maybe tell us what you've been farming the last few years, so we sort of get a picture of your current situation?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so predominantly the arable is Pretty much stayed the same. Wheat, potatoes and sugar beet, although we dropped the potatoes a few years ago. We do grow some more seed rate, field beans and barley, depending on what the weather's like. But we're fairly heavy lambs, so it suits to autumn cropping than spring cropping. Although the sugar beet has been, it does grow a crop where some of the other crops, if it's a dry year, it's a bit hit or miss, whether the bugs or the weather will get it going enough. in order to get enough yield to make some money on it. And then the rest of the farm was made up. We had a 22-acre neglected old orchard when we first moved here, which I knew nothing about apples at the time. We put that into an environmental scheme, which is subsidised by the Royal Payments Agency at the time, in order to preserve old orchards as an old orchard restoration, because they've got a wildlife value. for basically the habitat. It's nearly as good as ancient woodlands in a much smaller space of time. That got me into farming with no sprays and fertilizers in my orchard, although I do use sprays and chemicals and fertilizers on the rest of the arable. And then there was also, as council farms go, they used to be all split up into two to five acre blocks probably about 50 years ago. And there was one guy left on this holding, which was on a lifetime tenancy. He had two acres of peonies in the middle of one of my fields. And he was probably about 60 years old at the time. But they're quite hard work. And I got to know him and helped him for eight years, which taught me everything there is to know about peonies as well. So peonies are a cut flower. So you plant your seed, you have to wait three years for it to flower. But once they're down, as long as you maintain the weeds and look after them. They'll keep producing cut flowers every year that he used to sell to Covent Garden. And then when he sadly passed away, he gave the field to me, or he just left the seeds there. And then I also bought some off his wife and expanded the area up to seven acres of peonies, which we eventually supplied to supermarkets and other local markets and florists and shops.

• Speaker #2

  You've also recently, well, a few years ago, started using social media to talk about your daily lives on the farm and to try and connect more directly with the customer. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, well,

• Speaker #0

  I'm not very good at talking to people at the best of times or wasn't. But we in 2019, we did have a fire on the farm, which took out 95% of everything that we that we owned. And we were insured and everything. But, um, When it come to rebuild everything, then COVID hit and the prices of everything rocketed sky high. And I did go into like a downward spiral of depression and financial difficulty. I think we lost £100,000 a year over three years while selling everything we've got as well. And COVID hit the flowers badly as well. We could still supply some to the supermarkets, but all the other markets were gone. and we'd picked all the flowers and we had to either dump them um uh but instead of dumping them straight away i ended up um filling my whole house full of peonies and doing tiktoks um basically in desperation of uh um tiktok was taking off during covid so um i thought we'd Give it a go. And... And a couple of the videos done all right and it gave me a little bit of motivation to like carry on and we started posting more just about the flowers basically on social media and started selling directing the consumer the following year. With the cut flowers, sending 15 stem boxes anywhere in the UK. And although it didn't pick up straight away, I started off small. And this year was the first year I actually said no to the supermarkets. I sold over 100,000 stems of peonies direct to the consumer in the post for four times more money than what the supermarkets paid.

• Speaker #2

  So when you say stems, what are we talking about?

• Speaker #0

  A stem is, so peonies grow in stems and you get paid in stems. So you have to walk through the beds of the peonies. So you get a clump of peonies and they might have 10 stems on a plant, but they don't all come at the same time. So it's all It's got to be done manually by hand. So we have some saccatares or I have a penknife. And then you pick them individually in stems. And then we sell them in stems. So we either sell them in a 15-stem box or a 50-stem box or whatever you want. And it's also become a lot easier because I can send them on the day that they're picked. I don't have to refrigerate them. I've got no risk of waiting until we've got a whole lorry full of peonies. And then you can store them in a cold store. And the thing is, each individual variety lasts for two weeks. But in three days, we can pick 60% of the crop. And if it's hot, we'll have to pick 80% of the crop in three days. But we don't know what three days that is. So you have enough labour to pick them at the correct stage. And if you do it wrong or get it wrong, then they'll either get damaged or won't open. So they are a tricky crop to deal with. And I do like them. that they are so tricky because um i can compete against other bigger farmers that may want to plant like 100 acres of peonies or something because they are i feel like they are um they are sought after and people do like them But it's really difficult and it's easy to mess it all up and everything goes wrong. So because I've been doing it for so long, I feel like I'm in a better position than some other people. And the social media as well. I can change things from a day-to-day basis because we don't know what we've got until we've got it. So I can put stuff out there, tell people what I've got available. And this year it has... They have sold really easily and really well. And we're just about getting the price that we need it to be in order to make the farm good again.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. I suppose the difference between selling directly to customers and selling to supermarkets must be quite significant.

• Speaker #0

  It's amazing. If you sell stuff cheaply to the supermarket, you don't see any other benefits apart from the money that you do get for them. What I started off doing is, and because I wasn't, nobody knew who I was. Nobody knows where you are. And even if you've got the best product in the world of what you think it is, nobody's going to buy off you. So I started off cheap. And the thing is, if you start off cheap and offer a good service and offer something that people can't get anywhere else, and it's bringing back the contact to the public again. where we've lost all that from the supermarket. We haven't got human contact with anything. And although it's over social media, I'm in front of people 24 hours a day. And I feel amazed of how well it's worked. And I don't meet many people now that don't know who I am. And before we started on social media, not even my family knew I grew flowers. Whereas it seems like the whole world knows, not only knows that I grow peonies, but they know what a peony is. because not many people know what it is or what to do with it. And they're tricky as well. So not only have I got the customers that grow them themselves and are interested to find out more, I've also got people that know more than me and then they're telling me what to do as well. So it's the point of contact that we're not going to get anywhere else. And if I sell stuff cheap or have offers or competitions, I get all the benefit from that myself personally with my name and my brand. And that does everything for the following year and the year after that.

• Speaker #2

  That's incredible. That's great, right? Let's talk a little bit about the more conventional and arable farming side of your operation. Because you post a lot on social media about how difficult it has been in recent years. And maybe you could tell us more about that.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so when I was going into my downward spiral, it just didn't seem like no matter how hard you work or how hard you try, there's something that goes wrong. And it only takes one thing with farming. For one year it was yellow virus in sugar beet. I think we lost £60,000 on sugar beet in one year just because, well, we didn't use the neonate treatment, which I'm not going to get into that subject, but it had a knock-on effect. And we didn't see that until later on in the year because you don't know whether you're going to get it or not until... you lift it and the crop looked fine at the time and then there was no yield and then suddenly you're 60 000 pounds down and there's nothing you can do about it and then you've got to decide what i'm going to do next year but there's not a lot of other options because you set up and you've already made your rotations and you're already setting into contracts for next year and you're just like hoping next year is going to be better in it and uh and then the next year um it was so wet that we couldn't plant. many of our crops so I think it started raining on the 1st of October when we normally start drilling and uh and we couldn't start drilling again until like the end of March which we've lost all of my winter cropping which that's the stuff that earns me the money and then the following year and and you're going through it through the year as well so you um you know and it's like I don't worry about stuff what's happening now I worry about what's going to happen in 12 months time and that's That works in your mind 24 hours a day, knowing that you're just going to lose money. And I think I did have my notice in from my landlord three times during COVID. And they didn't accept it. And I was getting myself more and more into debt. But coming from a place of survival, I couldn't give it up. And I don't think I couldn't give it up basically because. I knew I could have got a job and I got offered jobs for fairly good money and my wife was like, why don't you just like get a job and we'd be better off. And I know we'd be better off financially, but it would break me as a person if I knew that I hadn't done everything I could possibly do. And the social media as... That's taught me I was so uncomfortable, like talking in front of the camera. And you don't even know whether it's going to work or not. So there's no guarantee that anything's going to work. But it's taught me that you don't have to know what the future is. If you just carry on. And if I'd gone bankrupt and things had finished, I could have lived with that. But it didn't. And things started working. And now I can see like a future, even though the farm's not got any better. And I'm still... This year, we're either breaking even on wheat or losing a little bit. And I don't know what the sugar beet's going to do yet because we haven't lifted it yet. But it looks, it doesn't look great because it has only rained 12, but two times in the last six months. And the reports I'm getting from other people are not amazing. But I've got these other things on my other hand now that I'm concentrating on. And the more I'm telling people over social media, I think it's easier for me. So I did have a little bit of counseling in my worst stage. And I thought it was pointless and I'm not going to get anything out of it. But just getting it off your chest. talking it through with some people helps and if there's any other farmers out there feeling the same it's just to like open up you don't have to keep it all in because that's what normally happens is um i don't i don't want to put any of my problems on other people um but the more i'm getting it off my chest i'm seeing more things and then people are telling me things and we're trying that and and some things are working some things aren't and it just seems like um Thank you. There's answers out there for the problems that I've got, and I just need to find the people that's got the answers to tell me, and then we'll give that a go and keep going.

• Speaker #2

  Do you feel like... The problem of mental health, depression among farmers is something that's under discussed and that needs more attention?

• Speaker #0

  Well, it's been talked about a lot and I think it's well known in the community now. But I think it's the farmers that don't talk about it so much because they're proud. For me, I didn't want anybody else's help. And when we had the fire, I had loads of friends and people, even people. people who didn't know offered me help like tractors and machinery and stuff I didn't take it because I didn't want it it wasn't their problem I just wanted to sort my own problems out and that's not the answer um that and I wanted to like I wanted to do it when I started off my business I wanted to do it on my own and and and you can't do everything for yourself um but I've learned to accept other people's help and guidance and it's been a learning curve but it's very difficult and it's hard to get out of your own head sometimes.

• Speaker #2

  I imagine. I imagine. Tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels like farmers used to be a part of the community. The community was built around farms and farmers and the food they produced. And it feels like in the last century that has kind of changed and farmers got a lot more isolated. And there may be when you do have problems or you do have difficult situations, you can't rely as much on a tight-knit community. But in a way, by... using social media and creating all of these relationships with people online now you've sort of in a way rebuilt a sense of community yeah i think that's completely true um when i was growing up um it's like we didn't have the machinery we got these days and things used to break down quite a lot and uh but

• Speaker #0

  as a kid growing up i knew every single field and every single farmer of that field and there was a lot of them because there was a lot more farmers farming time. the same amount of land now. And if somebody saw somebody in trouble, they'd go and help them. And then vice versa, we didn't have mobile phones, but we didn't need them back then because somebody would be driving by and they'd just stop and help. And you knew that if it was going to rain and you got in trouble, you only got to call in to see your neighbour and they'd go and help you. But there are, like now, there's bigger and bigger farms which are owned by investors and other people now. The one next door, me, I've never even seen the oven, let alone talked to anybody there. And I think that's where the community base is gone. And there's still like the family farms out there, but it's not the same. And it is a lonely place because you spend hours and hours by yourself most of the time, which is all right. Well, everything's going all right. But when it's not, it's not a very good place to be in.

• Speaker #2

  So you posted a video, we can use that as an example, about sugar beets recently and how you're actually potentially losing money.

• Speaker #0

  I've just had my phone call from British Sugar asking me if I'm going to grow sugar beet or not next year. I asked them if they're going to pay me any more money and they said no. So I said no as well. I'm not going to grow sugar beet next year. I've got a 13 acre field of sugar beet here. It looks all right. And if I leave it in the ground as long as possible to get the most amount of yield off it, I'm still not going to make any money out of it. I reckon I could have done nothing with this field. I could have not spent any money on sprays, seed and fertilizer growing this crop. And I would have been better off. And I would still have to find the rent to pay the land. But I would be better off than what I'm doing this year. So why would I grow sugar beet next year when you're offering me... £4 a tonne less money than this year. I know this year's been bad, and next year's not going to be that bad, is it? But I said that last year, and this year's worse than last year. If it is better weather next year, I'll be able to make more money on something else.

• Speaker #2

  First question will be, could you explain... why that is, like maybe the economics of it and why you're actually losing money on it. And then second is, if it's so complicated to make money with these kind of crops, why continue doing it? Are you kind of locked into a system where you have to? What's the story?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so I can grow anything I want on this farm, but I need to pay the rent to Cambridge County Council as we get kicked out. So sugar beet, we agree a price 12 months in advance for the following year, which is fine until you don't grow enough yield in order to... pay the all the costs associated with it so um it say it costs x amount to grow sugar beet you divide that by by the price that you're getting paid that's your break-even point of what yield you need um but we don't know what the weather's going to do and and on different soil types there's good there's good soils and there's not so good soils and i've got a bit of both um And I've got a five-year average of what I know that I can grow sugar beet for, which is my good years and my bad years in one, and that's my five-year average. So me personally, I take my five-year average times that by the amount of money that they're going to pay, and then that will determine. And I already know my growing costs anyway because they usually stay the same or get a little bit more, depending on if nothing major has happened and we've already bought the fertilizer and everything else. So I know how much it's going to grow to cost, but I don't know how much yield I'm going to get. And this year specifically, I'd say it's rained twice in six months. So without rain, the sugar beet's not going to bulk up in size. And although the sugar content will probably be higher, which we get paid for sugar content and yield, it doesn't look very good. So I know that it's not going to be like the 24 tonnes an acre I need in order to break even. And we can grow up to 30 tonnes an acre. So if we grew 30 tonnes an acre on everything, we'd make a profit. And some farmers do that. So they haven't got a problem. But me personally on this farm with my five-year average, and next year they've brought out the price. So I post on social media what's going on at the time. They've reduced the price next year, £4 a tonne on average. It's a bit more complicated than that because they've got a complicated system of working it all out. But on average, it's like £4 a tonne less than this year. And it's going to cost me the same, if not more money to grow it. And my five-year average is going to go down because this year is going to be less than my five-year average. So I've just said I'm not doing it anymore. And for me, there's a breaking point in everybody and it's at what stage are people going to say no. But most farmers are in a position, that's what they've been doing, that's what they know what they're doing, that's in their rotation. And it is really difficult to get out of what you've been doing for like ever. I've seen it a little bit different because I've got some other things that have been working better for me, which don't rely on selling to wholesalers or monopolized businesses like Rear Sugar. But it still doesn't solve the problem as what am I going to grow? Because although like last year, I didn't want to grow Sugar Beet last year because I knew it was going to be tight, but it was bad the previous year and I thought it's not going to get worse than that, isn't it? and on the basis of What else am I going to grow? I've got quite a bit of black grass on this farm as well. So I do need to have some spring cropping will reduce the black grass burden than just growing all winter crops. Or I can't just grow winter wheat continuously as I'll get less yield from all of my wheats because you get more from your first wheats, not so much on your second. And as soon as you go into third or continuous wheats, then you're at risk of losing a crop in there from take all. side There's all these other problems associated with it. And although I've lost money in the past on sugar beet, it seemed the best alternative option of what I've got available. And the other options are, whether I put spring barley, beans or peas, but these other crops, they either get eaten a lot by pigeons, and in a dry year, they won't grow on my heavy land. And I know other people that... put spring cropping in this year and they haven't got hardly any crop at all so although it's cheaper to grow them crops they'll be losing more money than growing sugar beet because i find that sugar beet i will get a crop every year but you don't know what yield you're going to get and it costs you more money so um i need quite a big yield in order to break even um and I don't know how much we're going to lose or even if we're going to lose at all. I was hoping if it rains now, it's still quite warm, it can still carry on growing in the land, but the longer you leave it in the land you're at risk if it comes wet you can have tricky harvest in it and then there could be frost that could take out a percentage of the crop. We lost 200 tonne the other year because of frost and then it could mess up next year's crop as well ideally i want to get a winter crop in after the sugar beet so I'm leaving it in until November which is really risky on some heavy land because if it comes wet I won't be able to drill it with my winter wheat as well so um next year I've told everybody I'm not growing sugar beet and I didn't think it would be a a major issue but it has exploded quite a lot on my socials because people don't talk about this stuff the farmers just carry on regardless uh whether they're happy or not and some of them probably make decent money out of sugar beet and they should be carrying on but british sugar it's like just make no sense that we're getting paid less this year than next year than this year and it's going to cost us more to grow just based on the price of the the world sugar markets dropped out completely and uh and there's nothing we can do about that

• Speaker #2

  It's absolutely crazy the amount of factors and issues and things that you have to deal with as a farmer, right? And the risk you have to take because you have to make all of these decisions not knowing what the weather is going to be like or what the price is going to be like and so on. Yeah, it's just a comment. I guess that's not a question. It's just that I started learning about the world of farming two years ago and every day I learn something new and gain another level of respect for the hard work that farming is.

• Speaker #0

  but and Anybody that's been into farming, they're used to it. And it's like, potatoes is like the ideal example of, I used to hate potatoes because I used to say, nine out of 10 years, they're not all right. And you only need one year for it to make up for the other nine. And because the price, and there's more of supply and demand. So if you get, if you grow less, you get paid more. But we're not even in that system anymore because we're locking into something we don't even know what we're growing. So I'd even like I'd like the system to go back to like supply and demand, waiting to see what you've got and then sell it. But it doesn't make any difference anymore when you're on a world market because somebody's also grown more in another country than what we have. And and it just balances out on everything. So there's going to be losers and winners. And... It just seems like I'm on a losing battle. Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  everything you just said is super important. And I don't understand it fully. It'd be great if you could just go back and explain the same thing, but like go into more details about supply and demand and different ways of selling.

• Speaker #0

  I really hope you're enjoying this conversation so far. Don't go anywhere.

• Speaker #2

  We have plenty of interesting topics to cover in the second part of this episode. I just want to take a couple seconds of your time to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast, Soil Capital. Soil Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so where did we get up to? Actually, because it goes back to a phrase that you said,

• Speaker #2

  and I wrote it down here from one of your recent videos, where you said, the old conventional farming system is broken. The more we grow, the less you get paid.

• Speaker #0

  So, I feel now is, the more we grow, the less we get paid, which is supply and demand, but I don't feel like we're in a supply and demand. pricing system so say with sugar beet and even the flowers they set the price up so they set the price now for the following year but we don't know how much crop we're going to grow so um as a farmer my money comes from how much we grow in yield and the price that we get paid you times that up and that will get you all of your income um for what we need the expenses what we pay on it pretty much known by us so we know how much how much it costs for machinery seed fertilizer and sprays within a bit the prices can go up a little bit and down they normally go up every year but they don't come down a lot but the price we get paid if we get paid less next year than this year we have to grow more yield in order to break even or make a profit and that don't happen every year. So we can't control the weather and the weather is the biggest thing that affects everything that we do. We can just, the only things that we control is when we do something, how we do it and how much we want to spend on it in order to try and maximize the yield from what we get from every field that we do and that's why I've been using sprays and fertilizers in order to maximize the yield and it changes from year to year so some years you've got more yield potential than others and then you can push it a little bit harder to try and get that little bit more yield but I do feel like most farmers are competing with each other and so we grow more food every year and then the price goes down because and that's supply and demand but you It's not supply and demand if we've already set our price a year in it, like last year. And it was the same with the flowers, so they used to pay... um like 33 p.m stem for peonies but we don't know how many we're going to have but we know pretty much our costs associated with it and we can get and and some crops are worse than others so like potatoes um your yield can go up and down dramatically like this year there's been no rain and although people can irrigate they're going to have less potatoes than if we get a wet year but then um That's why I packed up growing potatoes, because it just seemed like one out of, say, one out of five years in potatoes are good, but then the other four are really bad. But that one year can make up for all the other years put together. And that's what most farmers are doing now is like they know it's not very good, but they only need one year that's going to be good. And then they'll get themselves caught up. But that year's not come for a little while.

• Speaker #2

  Right, right. This podcast is centered around the topic of regenerative agriculture. And I speak to a lot of regenerative farmers, including just yesterday, James Buescher. And maybe I'm living in a bubble a little bit, but all of these farmers transitions from a more conventional system to something called regenerative, seem very pleased that they did that and that they evolved into a different way of farming with nature reducing use of synthetic products and so on. Is that something that you've looked into and considered at this stage?

• Speaker #0

  It's something that I'm looking into now. I've always known about it. But when you've got no money, there is no room for error. So a lot of the people that say that go into regenerative organic practices, they all say it gets worse before it gets better. And there's got to be a period of time where you've got to leave your land to let nature come back from what we've been doing to it, which I kind of understand. the reasoning behind it but i can't afford to do that because i'm paying um we pay 58 000 pounds a year in rent every year regardless of whether we get any crop and if we're putting fields down that are not earning any money out of it um i'll go bankrupt in one year so um it has given me a little bit of hope with like farming my apples because We don't use any sprays or fertilizers in there. And 25 years ago, my 100-year-old orchard that came with the farm, it was labelled as commercially unviable and never going to make any money. I personally thought that the fruit was worthless and I just let it fall to the floor because I couldn't actually pick it. I couldn't pay the labour to pick the apples for what the money I would get for like... cider and juice apples even when the price was high um but last year um i tried selling them on social media as well and that and that took off as well because people are getting fed up with what they're getting in the supermarket and i have got another orchard which has got 250 different varieties of apples pears plums and cherries which are heritage varieties from the seven counties of east of england and i can give them something that they've not tasted before and it hasn't had anything added to it and it is just grown the way nature intended and um i don't certify it as organic i just tell people what I do on a day-to-day basis and they're paying me like I've sold them for a pound an apple uh which sounds ridiculous but this year um I've sold 30 acres of apples through the post and we've sold out just recently um and that tells me that there's a market there selling direct to the consumer and they want um they want what I've got at the minute and and so that made me look into organic practices more and i have this year i have started growing i'm trying to live off an acre for a year starting from the first of january but my rules were i'm not going to put any sprays or fertilizers on my crops and the seeds that I want to plant, I want to grow the crops that produces seeds for the following year in order to live off that. And that went a little bit nuts on social as well. And that kind of steers me into the direction of what I feel the consumer wants, which is more than what maybe I want. But I think there's something in it and it was only an acre and next year we've uh we've started putting some cover crops in we've done some direct drilling and I'm trying some different practices and I'm speaking to all these different people they're sending me messages every day about have you tried this or have this crop and I wouldn't find that anywhere else apart from what I'm doing on social media and I and it goes back to the stage of like I know the answers are out there and I'm willing to try stuff, but I can't. do it i can't put the whole farm down because i can't afford it to go wrong yeah um but if i've found out with like the other stuff that i've been doing on social media as soon as you get something that works then everybody will follow and it could change everything that we do um so i haven't found what works yet but when i find out i'll let you know yeah sweet but it's It's...

• Speaker #2

  great that you can start experimenting on a small piece of land already and see what works that's that's something i've heard many times as well that it's better to start small and go progressively rather than just you know bet the whole farm on a on

• Speaker #0

  a bet yeah and what what works for one year yeah don't necessarily gonna work forever or the next year because um it's like with my my 250 different varieties of apples It was a really wet year last year, and it was one of the worst disease years in orchards that you can get when it's wet. But some varieties have done really well. But they haven't done very well this year because it's had no water. But then other varieties have done well this year. So having a range of different crops instead of coming away from the monoculture of just growing wheat and sugar beet. feels like that's the direction that I will be concentrating some of my efforts into.

• Speaker #2

  When we look at the difference between going organic or regenerative, I mean, organic is very strict in what you can or cannot do. And you do hear that transition can be a little bit difficult, what's called a J-curve, right? That's what you were saying, it gets worse before it gets better. But with regenerative agriculture, there's maybe more room for progressive progress. And I've had several farmers tell me that actually if you do things right, if you get the right information or the right agronomic help or something, that you can actually do it without a dip or a J-curve.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I think you can do. And as I say, we've done some direct drilling this year, and that's gone really well, a lot better than this machine that we use here, which takes a lot of diesel and horsepower. And we do still plough most things, but I've still got in the back of my head all the knowledge and experience that... failed in the past because i've tried i've tried crops without plowing before and on some of my heavy land um it may work on other farms um it caps and it gets flooded and if you're only doing if you're only working the top couple of inches um i've got a lot of land that will get flooded and that just holds me back a little bit from trying vast areas without um

• Speaker #2

  I get it, of course, of course, yes. What would it take for you to be more, you know, ambitious in trying new methods of farming? Because you said right now you can't afford it, right? You can't risk it. But what kind of help or what kind of, I don't know, government scheme would you kind of like to see that would allow you to take a bit more risk there and go for it?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so money, basically. So... and and i've been chasing the money from the government and people people say like subsidies are bad but subsidies are a way of like forcing the hand on farmers because that's where they follow they follow the money um and i've done this by we've got we've got we've still got land in a mid-tier scheme which is an environmental scheme for my orchards and then it's paid for a bit of fencing and uh i'm putting um water drinkers and buffer strips and pollen nectar things so we're doing a lot of that already and i've been doing that for quite a few years but the problem is when you take it away and the same with like we've been having subsidies for the rest of the farm in order to um it started off from like stopping the grain mountains of what we've been having and then they've followed on and done something different and the general public don't like farmers getting paid money for nothing but it's But without the subsidies, I don't think the government's got any control of what we might do. And we'll just follow the money. So if one particular crop decides to make more money than others, then that's where we chase the money. So it's like the government control things with money, but without it. I'm not sure where things are going to go at the moment because they've took all the subsidies away. And at the moment, I'm still getting a little bit from my environmental stuff. But once that's gone, I don't know what I'm going to do with my orchards. Because without that subsidies, they would have been ripped up by now. And a lot of them already had done. And once they're gone, you don't get it back again. So what I'm trying to do now is, if I can start selling stuff for the amount of money that I need. it to be without the subsidies i'm not in nobody's control of what i'm going to do and that's where i want to steer my own ship without relying on an outdoor factor that's telling me what to do whether it's good things to be regenerative or not i want to try it with the no subsidies because it's got to stand up on its own two feet and if it doesn't then it's not going to work and if it does then everybody will do it makes sense yeah

• Speaker #2

  it's easy isn't it yeah i mean if it's already hard to to make it work without the subsidies uh try doing it without it yeah on a five-year average because there will be some good years and there will be some bad years yeah

• Speaker #1

  Can I feed one person for one year with one acre of land?

• Speaker #0

  That's what I'm going to try next year. I've got a spare acre here. I'm going to start growing stuff now to try and feed me for the entire year next year. I don't know if it's possible. But I do think it's easier to feed 100 people with 100 acres than it is to feed one with one acre. So I'm looking for 100 people. that I can feed you next year with 100 acres. I've got a spare 100 acres because I'm going to stop growing sugar beet. I've not earned any money out of sugar beet for God knows how long, and I need something else to do. So if I don't earn any money out of this, I'll be in the same position I was for the last five years. But if you're interested, send me a message, and I want to know what you want me to grow as well.

• Speaker #1

  I'll grow it and then I'll give it to you and let you know how much it is.

• Speaker #0

  Living off an acre, I thought it'd be quite easy growing crops because I'm a farmer and that's what I do. But we planted over 70 different crops on an acre and 90% of the crops failed due to pigeons, rabbits and things eating them and bugs and diseases. But the main reason this year was no rain and I didn't have any irrigation on my field either. So I've ended up with a limited supply of... wheat beans and we've yet to harvest a bit of rape and sunflowers but I don't know whether they're going to be done or not but I am trying another experiment at the moment where conventionally on the farm I grow wheat beans and oilseed rape so I've gone on an oil like a whole wheat field bean and oilseed rape diet and I've been on that for the last three weeks I've lost a stone and I feel quite good at the moment and i'm still quite active and i've started working out as well so on the basis of i've got to live off my acre on the first of january and i've got um i've got some wheat oats and beans and some other stuff but i'm not gonna people don't understand that you can grow food when it's growing what you're gonna eat in january february and march so i'm coming from a like I like being in survival mode. That's what I do best. And I feel like I find more answers while I need to find the answers because if you put yourself in a position of difficulty and it's do or die, then there's only one way that you can look out of it. And going back to like a whole food, diet of i'm just boiling up like wheat and beans and it's not very tasty but i am surviving on it and i want to see where that goes and i want to add to it throughout the year from everything else that i'm growing and i might even try and source stuff from other farmers in order to do that as well um i don't actually know whether it's going to be healthy for people or not but do feel like my diet before and where it wasn't very good anyway and the majority of people that are uh living on processed foods and stuff like that and i've not got anything against processed food but um things have gone a lot more extreme and i think the world's come to like make food to last as long as possible on the shelf because the the people selling the product

• Speaker #2

  don't want to lose any money and the fresh produce is not getting eaten anymore um that's just another experiment i'm doing so so if so if i understand correctly you've set yourself a challenge to live just of one acre that you've planted here on the farm so you just selected an acre and so you planted a few things in on there but most of it didn't work out yeah and so you only have beans a week.

• Speaker #0

  I've got some, yeah, I've got wheat, beans and oats. I've got a load of potatoes and onions and I've got a load of leafy vegetables and salads, which are probably not going to make it to the 1st of January.

• Speaker #2

  Right.

• Speaker #0

  And then, and then I did think I'll have a lot more stuff.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, yeah.

• Speaker #0

  And then, but, and to be fair, it's not. a very good year but it highlights the fact of how vulnerable we are at growing our own stuff as even if a farmer and and most farmers are specialized in one thing so and the thing with what covid like taught me is like we shut down yeah we're an island and we don't produce enough food to feed ourselves we're reliant on the world to bring stuff in which is okay because we can buy it in cheaper but what happens if it happens again if it happens once it could happen again uh and are we going to get prepared for that at all in order to like at least be some way self-sufficient and if we lose if we lose all our farmers that want to grow like um energy crops because they make more money than food or or just going into environmental stuff to grow uh things for the environment it might be all right for a little while you But the patterns in the past of bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for it, then I don't think it will end up very well.

• Speaker #2

  So that's the idea with this challenge is to try and learn to be prepared for the future or to...

• Speaker #0

  sure message that actually well no no me personally i just thought that if i put um 70 different crops in i'll find out what grows on my land and i want to grow more of that so um and i'm i'm doing it kind of selfishly that uh i want to see um i basically want to make money out of my farm and in order to do that i've got to find the right crops which can grow on this farm year in year out and a way of doing that uh and a way of selling it direct to the consumer and that's that's that's all i'm doing but um if i put them in like a a kind of story or an entertaining value then um i get more people following me as well yeah

• Speaker #2

  win win well uh it must be difficult though um so you're only eating that right for a whole year you're trying to well i don't know yet i don't know how it's gonna last i did go on the potatoes and onions diet a few weeks ago and that only lasted three days you

• Speaker #0

  yeah okay and uh and i've tried this i didn't think to be fair i didn't think i'd last three weeks but um i think i could do it for quite a while um and i've got a nutritionist that's keeping an army he's getting a little bit worried about my proteins i was gonna ask about that and some other things which um um and i'm hoping that we could add more stuff to it as we go along so So...

• Speaker #2

  But then next year you're going to be ready to step it up. Well, yeah,

• Speaker #0

  next year, the 1st of January, I'll need a new challenge, don't I say?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, okay. Okay, maybe some chickens to have some eggs, things like that, or a mixed farming system.

• Speaker #0

  And everybody, they like the mixed farming, but I say my dad used to keep pigs, and although I've got two pigs, and we've got a few sheep that are not going to be ready until like April, May. And we've got a few chickens. I've not been a very good livestock person. I had asthma and allergies when I was little and I wasn't allowed to go in the buildings on the intensive places. So it's the crops where I feel more natural.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, okay, fair enough. You mentioned the orchard. We spoke about it a little bit, but there's one of the videos you posted also recently that I wanted to discuss. is the fact you said you decided not to... to certify organic your apples even though you are organic i can't sell my apples as organic because i don't pay 600 pound a year to get them certified but i don't use any sprays or fertilizers so

• Speaker #0

  if you want some apples that haven't had any sprays and fertilizers but are not organic i'll sell them on my website in boxes of 20 all one variety but these are from 250 different varieties of apples from the east of England this one is Histon Favourite it's a pale yellow skinned with a pink flush might have some pink stripes on as well tasty dessert apple from cambridgeshire I used to be organic. So when I took the orchards on, I said we had some funding to restore the old orchards back into their original habitat, which we did. And we undergrazed it with sheep and they are organic. But I went through the whole certification process with organic farmers and growers, paid my fees and tried to sell the apples as organic. But some years... they crop better than others. So, It's all right while there's, what normally happens, the same principle is the more I grow, the less I get paid. So if I've got a lot of apples, there's a lot of apples out there and then the price goes down and then it's not worth picking. In the years where there's no apples, the price goes up, but I've got no apples. So the system, it didn't work for me. I hung on probably a little bit too long and I used to make juice and cider and myself and I wasn't very good at selling it back then I probably it probably worked better now but um I had to pay the subscription fees fees every year and um I kind of resented it a little bit because uh I didn't do anything with it and they used to come round and then they say well what what did you do I said well I do nothing yeah I don't spray anything I don't put any fertilizers on it. And then there was restrictions on the livestock as well. So we were only allowed to put the livestock on there for, I think, 120 days of the year. But I did bring in sheep from other places because we needed more sheep than what we wanted ourself. And then we got nowhere to put the sheep after the 120 days of grazing. And it didn't work the system very well. So we did pull out of it after a period of time. And then I let the fruit just drop on the floor for a few years until... I went back to selling on social media. And then last year, I made that post. Yeah, I don't sell my apples as organic because I don't pay £600 a year. But I don't use any sprays or fertilizers. And I think it kind of went nuts because that is the system that we're in, that we're getting certified and we have to pay for these certifications. It's not the £600 that I'm worried about. It's all the stuff that I have to do before the certification in order to prove that i'm doing what i say that i'm doing and and people say that you should just pay the money it's not a lot of money but when you're not making anything out of it anyway it's a lot of money yeah um and and this year um i've been selling apples for a pound each which is more money than what you're ever gonna pay an organic apple so i'm selling you my apples and they're saying like if you paid your fee how much more would you get paid well i wouldn't because i'm getting paid more than everybody else anyway even already in the whole of the uk and there's more people i can't i ain't got enough apples for them and i'm not going to get another orchard like that because it's i've only got one um and and the people and that's the power of the the social media is they're not just buying apples they're buying me and who I am as a person and whether they believe me or not that I've sprayed them or not most of them I do get comments every day because we we do have problems with our apples there are a few bugs in some and I get people messaging me and saying there was four of my apples had bugs in but I know you don't spray yeah and and and they just open the box and they say i know they're organic because you can see they're all yeah they're not they're not all the same they're not all perfect they're not all man made to be this perception of what food is and food isn't like that it doesn't grow perfectly in the same size and have exactly the same taste and i think that's what we've lost is we've lost some of the flavours that are in some of these other varieties of apples and they've only been lost because they either bruise too easily or don't keep very well or they've got a problem along the supply chain that the middleman or the wholesaler doesn't like because they

• Speaker #2

  won't be able to sell it i i don't think people understand how insane that is because we're so used to the way things are right it's been like that for for ages but the fact that organic growers have to go through all of these hoops and pay these extra fees to prove that they are organic and then put on a label on the product to say this is you know organic yeah and no one seems to realize that it well in a normal world in a healthy world it should be the exact opposite it should be that every product that It's been grown with harmful chemicals.

• Speaker #0

  Get up the list of all the sprays that it's been sprayed on.

• Speaker #2

  On the packaging, or like a little label saying, this has been made with harmful chemicals. You choose to buy it. We have it on our spray cans. And if it doesn't have that label, it just means that it's organic. You don't have to prove anything if you're organic. You're forced legally to disclose if you're not. I mean, that would be a normal thing to do, I think. But we're so used to the current system now. I know.

• Speaker #0

  And I've got the answer's Because I don't disagree with the certifications because you do need traceability and you can't trust everybody out there. And some people don't trust me. And they say, well, how can you not? Why should I trust you? Because you ain't got a certificate. But it's like, if somebody's not trustworthy, how do you trust somebody with a certificate that hasn't done what they're supposed to be done? And you could go on forever.

• Speaker #2

  Something else I noticed on that post, you sort of wrote down the maths of how much you sell your apples for, how much the packaging costs, the labor costs and all of that. Right. And I noticed that the packaging cost actually, not the packaging, but the shipping cost is actually a huge part of your cost. Right. And it made me think. Does that go quite far and you have to package it all across the UK? And the second part of that question is, are you sort of trying to connect with local markets? Have you thought about creating an on-farm shop or trying to find a way to connect directly face-to-face with customers more?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So I live in Whiz Beach and Whiz Beach grows a lot of produce. locally. I can't sell anything, I don't think, because there's somebody cheaper and better and next door. So I've found with, especially like the flowers, I don't sell anything locally. And it's easier for me not to have a shop because I don't have to run it. And we do everything through Royal Mail at the moment, which is quite expensive. And there's other companies that I could use that are cheaper and they've contacted me. But I like what we're doing. And I send everything track 24 first class, which is the most expensive one, because I need you to have it as fresh as physically possible. And if it's not, I'll send you another box. So posting packages is a massive expense for me in all of my direct sales, but they can go anywhere in the UK. So suddenly I've gone from a local market, which I can't sell anything for any money, to a massive market that I could sell everything within hours. And that's what we seem to do now is like, I put stuff up. I haven't got anything for sale anymore. We've sold out of apples. I've sold out of subscription packages for my flowers for next year. And I sold out of Christmas trees last year. And I've got loads of people because we sold, we sold thousands of boxes of foliage boxes of Christmas trees that we cut up all of my Christmas trees. and sold them in foliage boxes last year and i sold them in two weeks and it turned into it turns into more of a game because i don't know how else to deal with it you can't control social media but what i found is um years ago i used to hold myself back because i thought um what if we sell too many but that's not my problem anymore because we do sell too many and the same with my apples this year um and For 90% of the time, we've got sold out on the website until the next variety is coming. And I get loads of people messaging me, when is it coming? When are they coming? But I don't know when they're coming. We just pick them when they're ready. Then when we've picked them, we put them online. And we know what we've got. And if I can sell stuff before I've actually picked it, that's so easy in my eyes. So the packaging, the packaging is the best cost that I could pay. Because I wouldn't be able to send them. anywhere in the uk and i wouldn't have that market um and if i want to put my prices up i can do at the moment i feel like that's where they need to be and i could put my prices up for my apples i'm selling them for a pound each now and i think i could probably get more money for them and still sell them um but there are a moral opportunity of like how far do you go it i'd rather grow more stuff on the rest of my farm and keep my people happy on what they're getting paid okay Yeah.

• Speaker #2

  For what it's worth, two ideas that come to mind. One is, so the other big part of the expense is the labor costs, and that was picking and packaging, mostly.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, yeah.

• Speaker #2

  Do you need to prune the trees as well? Yeah, yeah. Now that you have such a big community of people following you on social media, a lot of people, you know, they... want to be involved they they want to be a part of a community you know if you organize the community day um when you need to pick the apples and get people to come and help you for a day or two i'm sure lots of people would come i think they would do yeah um

• Speaker #0

  I have worked with, I've done a volunteer woodland planting once and organised that. And my main problem with volunteers is they want to talk. They don't want to work. And I am coming from a business point of view that I want to know what my costs are. And then I want to be able to do it. And the thing with volunteers is they might not be so predictable about when you do need them and when you don't. And the same with the flowers. If I've got three days to pick flowers, to pick 80% of the crop, I need people to be there to work. A lot of people don't last a day picking flowers, let alone keep coming in. And it possibly could work, but I do feel like it might create more headaches and I could lose more out of it than not getting things.

• Speaker #2

  at the right time okay maybe something worse yeah given it i would like to try just limited amount of people with set rules saying okay we we're going to have a nice uh you know coffee together to chat and then we work the whole day then a nice dinner together but when we work we work yeah something i've

• Speaker #0

  got i've got lists on my phone as well so when something when something takes off i've got lists of like i've got a column in my note for helpers and there's like hundreds of people that have said, I'll be willing to do... day's works for you for nothing um and i think people just want to they want to know what it's like and just they don't have the physical work that i've had and that's that's the weird thing for me is like why do people want to do what i'm doing because it's

• Speaker #2

  not brilliant a lot of the time but i think a lot of people you know we're completely disconnected from the earth and from where the food comes from and we live in cities and we have jobs behind a computer and we crave you know yeah coming back to the country somewhere yeah being being a farmer is a different story you know um and also it's difficult to access land and you don't when you don't have uh the budget for it when you don't have any experience when you don't come from a farming family so it's difficult to actually become a farmer but uh

• Speaker #0

  yeah on the weekend from time to time being able to come on a farm and and put your hands on the ground and something physical i think a lot of people yeah and i thought the main problem we're gonna have is weed so if anybody wants to come

• Speaker #2

  weeding for the day then uh yeah i think i could find them a job yeah and then you're going to create a community as well you know you meet people face to face there's something nice about that as well second uh sort of idea that i came to mind was um when you're transforming products you can create a bigger margin you're selling you know apples raw raw apples um you said that you used to like make juices and other products but maybe now that you have this direct uh point of contact to customers, transforming your products and selling them to customers.

• Speaker #0

  Plus, they can keep for longer as well. Yeah, yeah. Well, the idea of the juice was I couldn't sell my apples for more money back when I was organic. So I started making juice and it went okay. But the margins were still really small and you've done a lot more work for it. Although you could keep... The produce wouldn't go off until like a year. So you've got a longer span to sell it in. But from the point of view from now, I'm selling my apples for a pound each. I'm making all the money on the day that they're picked. So we try and ship everything on the day that they're picked to get them as fresh as possible as well. And then they're gone. And the same with my flowers. If I can like... not keep them because people dry flowers and if i've got any we do have a lot spare and we i've been selling them to people that's going to dry them and i could do it myself but it's another thing but it just seems like now the the best money is in when it's at its best get it gone for half decent money um but saying that we have i have um just bought a flour mill um in order to try and process some wheat into flour um so watch that space exciting a lot's happening actually now yeah yeah um we

• Speaker #2

  we've been on the road for a week or so now here in england and i'm recording one episode every day. And I thought it'd be fun to ask everyone. every guest to come up with a question for the next one and yesterday we were talking to a farmer regenerative farmer about an hour from here in Suffolk called James Busher and the question he had for you was that's a big one what's your prediction for the future of farming and you'd say in the next maybe 10 years do you see this trend of having less and less and less farmers continuing or do you imagine something different?

• Speaker #0

  trend for the future of farming here in the uk so whether it'll happen or not so what i believe is i don't think we don't need the supermarkets anymore um people are buying more and more stuff direct to their house being delivered to their house so what i want but now's the time for farmers to get in on this so if the farmers Thank you. prepared to put a bit more work and effort into it or work with somebody that do i think selling direct to the consumer in order to make um it more accessible for anybody to buy anything from any farmer anywhere in the uk and get delivered to the door the very next day we can cut everybody else out

• Speaker #2

  Do you think that works as a systemic solution though? Because like from an individual perspective, a farmer like you can do great now on social media and create this network and sell your products at a premium because people are willing to pay for it because they know who you are, they know how you work, they trust you and so on. But would that work for every farmer in the UK?

• Speaker #0

  I don't know, but the systems are already in place. So the systems of like processing and packaging, say meat and dairy or like wheat or flour or anything like that, they're already in place. why does it need to sit on a shelf for a week or more for people to go and buy it? It could be in distribution centres and it could be done on a bigger scale. And I don't know, I'm not the person to do it, but I could see that we could keep the price the same of what the consumer's paying, but transfer where some of the money's going back into the farmer's pocket without some of the other people making a lot of money out of the middle.

• Speaker #2

  If you enjoy listening to the Deep Seat podcast, please support me and my work. You can do that in just five seconds by clicking on the like button down here at the bottom of your screen. On the subscribe button, that's even better. And if you'd like, you can also leave a comment in the comment section. You can also ask me or David a question and we'll do our best to get back to you with an answer.

• Speaker #0

  This actually makes a huge difference to stimulate the algorithms and help showing these amazing conversations to more and more. People around the world, thank you so much in advance. Well, let's get back to the end of the conversation.

• Speaker #2

  So tomorrow we are going to visit Professor Syed Azam Ali in Loughborough.

• Speaker #0

  Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah, that's pretty good.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, right. He's a professor. He studies many things, but including topics like forgotten crops and things like that. So do you have any questions that you might want to ask him?

• Speaker #0

  um i'm currently living off wheat beans and oilseed rape what three things would he live on if he could choose just three things to try and survive for a year that's a great question That's a great question.

• Speaker #1

  I don't know whether we want to answer that.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, yeah. I'll have a think on the way back from this interview and try and figure out what I'd eat if I was on the meetings.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, what would you eat?

• Speaker #0

  Well, the first thing that comes to mind, right, is because you heard of the Three Sisters? Yeah, yeah. The Milpa is this famous…

• Speaker #1

  Corn, beans and… And squash. And squash, yeah. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  yeah. And they're famous for being very complementary in terms of farming. Yeah, yeah. Take. kind of complete each other in many ways but also nutritionally i've heard that they also work really well they they give you like a complete diet yeah i'll have to try that one as well i think yeah yeah if there's like maybe one important message that you like to share with people what would you pick

• Speaker #1

  um my main message is i didn't used to have a lot of imagination because if i couldn't see it it wasn't going to happen But although I don't know where the future comes or where the future is going, I am finding a bit of hope that things will change. They will get better. And if you can just imagine a better future, then it could become reality. Beautiful.

• Speaker #0

  Perfect way to conclude this interview. Thank you so much for taking the time, especially on a Sunday morning. I know you must be very busy, so I really appreciate that.

• Speaker #1

  You're welcome. Thanks for coming.