Pest confirmed on West Coast
A tropical insect pest with a big appetite for corn has been identified on the West Coast, the first time it has been found in the South Island.
British champion of regenerative agriculture Andy Cato recently provided the keynote address at the Foundation for Arable Research.
Cato is internationally known as one half of the electronic music duo Groove Armada, and his visit as guest international speaker at the FAR CROPS 2022 event was an aside to the band’s eight-concert tour of Australia and New Zealand.
But as a co-founder of the British-based Wildfarmed movement, Cato is also a spokesman for a farming philosophy that prioritises soil health and biodiversity above yield. He grows crops without the use of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides.
Cato is also the first Englishman to be awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre du Mérite Agricole – the French equivalent of a knighthood for services to agriculture. His original 100ha farm in Gascony, where his farming journey began, was recognised as the most innovative farm in France when awarded the prestigious Lauréat National de l’Agro-Ecologie 2020.
Describing his journey in agriculture, Cato concedes he had a “very very difficult” few years starting out.
The soils on the Gascony farm held only 0.5% organic matter, having exclusively grown maize for 80 years.
“Basically, I did a Sri Lanka,” he said – a reference to the Sri Lankan government’s disastrous 2021 attempt to convert the country’s agriculture to organic by banning artificial fertiliser overnight.
“It was a chemical farm and I turned off the chemical tap and I didn’t really have a plan to put in place of that. And it all went wrong,” Cato explained. “The soil I inherited was much better at growing weeds than crops.”
Broke and “close to despair” he then discovered the writings of Sir Albert Howard, the British botanist whose fundamental message in the 1940s was that nature works by having a diversity of plants and animals in the same place.
Cato tried a variety of no-till methods such as drilling seeds into rolled cover crops, or into frostsensitive cover crops that die back to allow the desired crop to grow through.
Using horses to work the fields – after a visit to Amish farmers in the US – Cato realised they didn’t have the power to drill through a rolled cover crop. However, he successfully tried broadcasting seed into standing cover crop, then rolling it.
Using livestock to graze the fields led to what Cato called an “epiphany” about weed control.
“We accept that weeds will appear because of certain things and it is logical that they disappear for the same reasons,” he added. “Actually, seeing that was an absolute breakthrough for me, that gave me faith in biology in solving our problems.”
However, Cato realised once he was successfully growing “a lot of lovely grains” of high nutritional content that no-one placed any value on that.
“Coming into the food system from outside it was just weird that the only measure was tonnes, not quality.”
They started making their own flour, then baking bread, and finally opening a farm shop.
“We even had French people queuing for an English person’s bread, which was possibly a first.”
Facing Commercial Reality
Now back BACK in England on a 295ha farm in Oxfordshire, Cato says the Wildfarmed project is about “a society-wide education programme” that everything starts with the soil.
armers joining Wildfarmed sign up to a protocol that avoids bare soil and a variety of ‘cides. It encourages species-rich cover crops, diverse pasture mixes, bi- or poly-cropping, and integrating animals wherever possible. It has now grown to about 50 farms, selling stoneground flours and breads through about 500 outlets – including Marks and Spencer.
“What we’re trying to do is open the door to system change.”
However, Cato says regenerative farmers have to face commercial reality.
“We’re trying to go down the High Street and tell a complicated story about soil health in a very noisy world and trying to compete with food that is artificially cheap.”
He adds that the challenge lay in getting the message to a population that was largely urban.
“A lot of them are concerned about biodiversity loss, a lot of them are concerned about climate change. But very few people have made the link – that actually how we grow our food is absolutely critical to those questions.”
Cato says his journey has involved some compromises, including accepting the distribution network in order to get into supermarkets and accepting the current system of land ownership despite the inherent entry barriers.
Some Wildfarmed members host young livestock farmers who couldn’t otherwise afford their own land.
“We realised there’s a danger in saying ‘I can’t solve everything so I’m going to solve nothing,” Cato explains.
“Actually, what we can try to do is improve the soil and the ecosystem and someone else can focus on the other stuff.”
