While travelling back home from a gig, something happened to Andy Cato, one half of electronic DJ duo Groove Armada, that made this journey different to all the thousands of others he'd done over the decades of his music career. And unexpectedly, it changed his course in life.
"I picked up an article about the environmental consequences of food production. It was brilliantly written, and it had a line in it which said, 'If you don't like the system, don't depend on it'," explains Cato.
That single succinct line sparked something within him. It led to him growing his own vegetables at his home in France, where he'd lived since 2008. "I had never planted a seed in my life at the time, and when I saw them become plants and then food, I found it absolutely fascinating," he explains.
This new found green-fingered love grew from a vegetable patch into his own market garden, where he was soon selling his own produce at his local market in France. Then, Cato made a big leap. "I took the absolutely mad decision to sell my publishing rights to the songs I'd written to to finance a farm to try to do it at scale".
He began growing wheat. "It's the crop that covers the most acres in the world. If you're going to be serious about creating a new model, you can't do that if you ignore wheat," he says. But he quickly learned as a farmer, when you go to sell it, the only measure is how many tones you have produced. "No one cares about its quality or how it was grown, or anything else".
That was about 15 years ago, and after more than a decade experimenting on how to regenerate the health of his farm and how to grow nutritious crops, he's become a leading voice of the regenerative agriculture (often shortened to regen ag) movement. His efforts also eventually won him the Lauréat National de L’Agro-Écologie for the most innovative farm in France in 2020.
Regen ag is a holistic way of farming with nature, not against it. The idea is to rebuild the depleted nature back into farming and increase the microorganisms in soil that have been degraded over decades of monoculture farming. It also reduces the reliance on chemicals, making the eco system resilient to the effects of the changing climate.
Cato was inspired by reading the book Agricultural Testament by Albert Howard, published in 1943, which he says "changed my perspective completely", as when he fully understood the reality of the situation of farming the way we have since the Second World War, where the focus was on increasing production, he says he realised "we've got such little ecological road left". Howard's writing was "what we now refer to as regenerative agriculture, in the sense that it was moving food production from being based on chemistry to being based on biology".
Cato says "regenerative is quite a technical sounding term," but essentially, it's a method of farming, bringing together the ability to both produce food and increase biodiversity. He also believes it paves the way for positively helping the crisis we are currently dealing with, such as drought (as healthy soil retains more moisture), polluted water ways (using none or far less chemicals means less chemical run off into rivers) and preventing avoidable ill health (seeing food as medicinal) which putting less strain on the NHS.
When we started Wildfarmed just one in 500 people had heard of regenerative agriculture – now it's one in five. That's rapid change.
"That's what regenerative farming, when properly applied, actually means. And it's such a hopeful story in a world a bit short on hope at times, that I wish we could just shout that from the rooftops a little bit more," he says.
Technically, regen ag is still a fringe movement. "If you look at the amount of acres that are being farmed in this way, it's hard to argue against that," says Cato. Yet, awareness of it is quickly gaining pace. "When we started Wildfarmed just one in 500 people had heard of regenerative agriculture – now it's one in five. That's rapid change." The company was co-created in 2019 with friends George Lamb, former presenter, and Ed Lees who has a finance background. Now, its bread is available in Waitrose, Ocado and Tesco, reaching the goal of making it readily available, which Cato describes as a "landmark" moment. Plus, its flour, barley and oats are used by highstreet restaurants such as Franco Manca and ASK Italian.
Though 'regenerative' has garnered buzzword status, its lack of definition means it's a wide umbrella term. That's why Wildfarmed created a set of standards in 2023. "We drew up the first UK regenerative standards for arable farming, and we followed the Organic example of a list of practices," Cato says.
The idea behind Wildfarmed was not only to prove that it's possible to farm with nature, but also to create this huge network of farmers. When Cato took on the farm, he describes it as a "very humbling lesson on how hard it is to be a farmer," and the huge array of skills it requires, as well as making huge decisions on your own. He admits that some people laughed at him when he took on the project, "and quite rightly so, because I just didn't know what I was doing," he adds.
Now the network includes more than 150 British farmers as well as some in France, some of who are now in their fourth year, who can all share knowledge, learnings and advice on a Whatsapp group, which is something he wished he'd had when he started.
Farmers can sign up to trail a single field, allowing them to see what could be done without taking on the burden of risk themselves. The most famous is presenter Jeremey Clarkson, where Cato appears in an episode of Series 3 of Clarkson's Farm in 2024, to convince Clarkson to trail regen ag. By showing the difference in soil health between the fields, where it was terrible, to under the hedgerows which was full of life, Clarkson was onboard and the trail was a success. In those few minutes, it not only catapulted regenerative farming to the millions who watch the show, but also, Cato.
"What's been really interesting is that after 25 years in music as a very tall person (he's 6ft 8"), I've been fairly anonymous, and after my few minutes talking about regen on Clarkson's Farm, the reach of that program is extraordinary. I now get stopped all the time." Now, Cato has become the inspiration for others to depend on a different food system.
