(Bloomberg) -- Grammy-award-nominated musician and award-winning farmer are careers that aren’t typically synonymous.
But Andy Cato straddles that line. He does around 40 gigs a year as half of DJ duo Groove Armada, but he’s also a farmer who was knighted in France and is one of the UK’s most prominent voices calling for an overhaul of how the world produces its food.
Over the past six years, he built a network of more than 100 farmers in the UK and France to grow wheat using regenerative farming methods. He’s also convinced some of the UK’s biggest retailers and restaurant chains to pay a premium for the flour and bread made from the wheat, known under the brand Wildfarmed. And he’s also been waging a public education campaign, appearing everywhere from this year’s UK Labour Party conference to an Amazon Prime show hosted by former Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson.
“We live in a world where the impact of your farming practices on water quality, nutritional quality, or biodiversity — none of it’s on the spreadsheet,” says Cato. “It’s critical that we change that” by accounting for the benefits of climate-friendly farming and ensuring the “field-to-plate supply chain is traceable.”
Regenerative agriculture has been hailed as a climate solution for farming — one that makes crops and soil more resilient to weather shocks, while helping protect soil, water and biodiversity. It’s an umbrella term, encompassing practices that include planting cover crops, not tilling the soil and avoiding chemical inputs.
“We’ve got good evidence that those practices benefit soil," says Lizzie Sagoo, principal soil scientist at agricultural and environmental consultancy ADAS. It can also help cut emissions, though the benefits are a little less clear cut.
Major corporations such as McDonald’s Corp, Nestle SA and Unilever Plc have shown interest in environmentally friendly agriculture as part of their sustainability goals. Yet it’s failed to attract enough finance to gain widespread traction. As a result, uptake by farmers has been relatively minimal. While data is hard to come by, about 107,000 hectares (264,000 acres) in the UK have been set aside for regenerative projects by some of the major agrifood companies, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. That’s a sliver of the country's 6 million hectares of arable land.
But the need for increasing adoption is growing. While modern industrial farming has helped ensure affordable food for more people, it’s done so at a cost to nature. Tilling the soil and using excessive fertilizer are both major sources of greenhouse gasses, while runoffs pollute waterways. The United Nations estimates that a third of the Earth’s soils are already degraded and over 90% could become degraded by 2050. Almost 3 billion people and more than half of the world’s food production are in areas experiencing worsening water shortages and intensive farming has contributed to a decline in insect species.
It’s changed soil from a “living biological medium … into a dead mineral medium that essentially kept plants upright while they were fed with chemical inputs,” Cato says as he swerves around the potholes on the muddy tracks cutting through his Oxfordshire, England, farm in September. The fields will soon be filled with wheat and beans, a cover crop that helps fix nitrogen in the soil.
The start of his regenerative agriculture journey began about 20 years ago when he read an article on the environmental impact of industrial food production while traveling back from a gig. The piece’s bent was “if you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it,” he recalls, fresh from the rain-drenched fields.
The article sent Cato down a “rabbit hole,” leading him to sell his music rights so he could try his hand at regenerative farming in France before landing on 730-acre Colleymore Farm in the UK. He has the rangy, weather-beaten air of someone much happier outdoors than cooped up inside, and his T-shirt is spattered in mud. Despite the glamor of being a world-famous DJ, he calls farming “the best job in the world.”
His vision extends beyond his secluded farmhouse, though. Wildfarmed helps farmers transition from an industrial approach. The company pays them a premium for their wheat once they commit to farming in line with the group’s standards, which are third-party audited.
“If you make the environment better when you're producing food, you don't get rewarded for it. At its most basic, that's the problem,” he says.
To address that, Wildfarmed does outreach to businesses interested in purchasing regenerative goods. Over 400 brands across the UK use its products. Retailers Marks & Spencer Group Plc and Waitrose & Partners sell bread made from Wildfarmed flour. Restaurant chains like Franco Manca as well as several London coffee shops are also customers.
"Customers are wanting to understand more about where their food comes from and how it's produced," Jake Pickering, senior manager for agriculture at Waitrose, said at this year’s World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London. The company committed to sourcing all UK-produced meat, milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables from farms using regenerative practices by 2035.
There are also benefits for farmers. The climate resilience brought by regenerative practices can boost long-term farm profits by up to 120% in some cases, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. However, it can take up to five years for the benefits to become apparent, and it can be risky for farmers dealing with thin profit margins and increasingly erratic weather.
The sheer size of that $9 trillion supply chain is also a challenge to the change Cato wants to create. Annual support for the widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture globally is approximately one-tenth of the estimated $200 billion to $450 billion needed to spur the transition, according to a Rockefeller Foundation report published in June. Of the total global climate finance in 2019-20, a scant 4.3% went to agrifood systems.
Farmers will need more support to adopt new farming methods, says Alice Legrix de la Salle, impact and regenerative financing lead at AXA Climate. The insurer recently rolled out a product that aims to protect farmers’ margins and the initial hit to yields when they transition to ecologically friendly practices. While she wouldn’t disclose the exact number of hectares covered, she notes it's still a relatively small-scale program.
Farmers can also benefit from selling carbon credits or certificates generated by their practices, while bank loans are another avenue to make the transition. In addition, corporate giants have also offered support.
Cato’s name and efforts have helped open some doors for the regenerative farming movement, but it can be challenging for other farmers operating without support or fame. Of 79 agrifood companies surveyed, 50 publicly report regenerative agriculture initiatives, but only 18 have formal quantitative targets in place, according to an analysis by FAIRR, a global investor network. Just four are offering financial support to farmers making the transition.
While the lack of a formal definition for regenerative agriculture gives farmers flexibility, it also gives companies wiggle room to greenwash. “Most companies setting regenerative targets do not specify what climate outcomes they hope to achieve; they just commit to implementing regenerative practices,” says Helen Ramsbottom, an analyst at BloombergNEF. Companies may not know the extent of how much carbon is captured in soil for many years, she adds.
The research conducted by FAIRR also found that the lack of a clear definition makes regenerative agriculture claims “hard to substantiate, creating significant risk in terms of regulation and changing reporting frameworks.” Cato agrees on the need for clarity: “I don't think everyone has to do the same thing, but I think people have to be clear about what they are doing.”
Still, regenerative agriculture isn’t “as simple as ‘we’ve discovered the secret of good farming and it is regenerative agriculture and everyone does this and we’re all saved,’” Sagoo says. “Those practices we’ve got are not necessarily easy for all farmers or all cropping systems.”
For now, Wildfarmed is focused on supporting farmers growing wheat regeneratively. Cato is busy building on growing the company’s influence. Over the summer, he appeared at the Groundswell Regenerative Agriculture Festival where he touted Wildfarmed’s approach and marketed its products. That included delivering pizza made with the company’s flour to a customer who’s also trying to help shrink agriculture’s climate footprint: Prince William.
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