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On the day that changed my life, I found myself sitting bedraggled in an eastern European airport. A few hours earlier, I had been DJ-ing atop a faux Greek temple while a mankini-clad microlight pilot dropped confetti on the dancing crowd. Now, with a ten-hour trip home, I picked up the only magazine in English I could find and came across a disturbing article about the unforeseen health and environmental consequences of our industrial food system. It was a call to action and contained the line: ‘If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it.’
At the time, life’s unpredictable path had taken me to rural south-western France, where we lived in one of the seven north-south valleys that shape the Gers region. Andy and friend Tom formed a band called Groove Armada and had the good fortune to make albums and perform all over the world. True, our son Theo’s first word was ‘tracteur’, as he pointed to the farm traffic that passed the kitchen window. But I was completely divorced from the landscape, with no understanding of even the most basic seasonal flow of a farming calendar.
Now, inspired by the article, I decided to have a go at growing my own food. Armed with a 1976 Guide To Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour and with the help of our farming neighbors, a corner of the garden was prepared. I built a small greenhouse and, for the first time in my life, planted some seeds.
From the moment I saw seeds become plants and plants become food, I was hooked. Why wasn’t this miraculous process the first thing I had been taught at school? This was the start of journey which would leave me convinced that solutions to our health and environmental problems begin with the way we grow food. This conviction, and how to make it a mainstream reality, set me on a path from DJ to an unlikely French farmer and baker, and on to becoming a tenant of a National Trust farm, discussing soil health with Jeremy Clarkson.
But all of this was unimaginable as I grew my first vegetables. At that point, music was my life: in 1997 my friend Tom and I formed a band called Groove Armada. Since then, we’d had the good fortune to make albums and perform all over the world. Festivals, nightclubs, after-parties — a DJ’s life is a parallel universe, and a world away from the quiet miracle of vegetable seedlings.
Happily, my newfound feeling of wonder about natural food production survived the difficulties of my early vegetable growing; the prototype mobile greenhouse that was blown onto the road, the sheep, ducks, rabbits, and wild boar that relentlessly tested my attempts at fencing. Combined with beginners’ incompetence, it made for challenging moments. But, eventually, that patch of land grew into a small market garden, productive enough to begin selling vegetables at the local market.
As a novice English grower, selling food to French people was nerve-racking. It got off to a terrible start when a sharp-eyed lady spotted that I’d undersold her and broadcast this to the whole market. It was news to me that brand-new scales need calibrating and was a tough reputational blow. But in time, a reliable supply of tasty vegetables built up loyal customers.
I’d head off for DJ gigs with John Seymour’s book still tucked in my record bag and amidst the sweat, noise, and lasers, find myself thinking about topsoil — in one teaspoonful of which there are a greater number of living things than there are humans on Earth. As my understanding of soil grew, so did a sense of impending crisis. Great civilizations have fallen because they failed to prevent the degradation of the soils on which they depended. A post-war miracle has, for now, saved us from the same fate, but with dramatic, unforeseen consequences.
In 1939, Britain was importing 70 per cent of its food. As German U-boats began to sever these supply lines, the ensuing crisis unleashed an extraordinarily rapid increase in domestic food production; 66 per cent more wheat and barley in three years. By the end of the war, a botanist from Iowa called Norman Borlaug had revolutionized farming.Growing up during the Great Depression, he had seen hunger close up and set himself a lifelong mission to ensure people were fed. Breeding wheat varieties suited to newly available fertilizers and pesticides allowed him to bypass any deficiency in the soil, creating a system that massively increased production. Dubbed ‘the Green Revolution’, Borlaug’s miracle spread around the world.
Combined with the wartime emphasis on production, by 1986 the New York Times reported ‘Western Europe’s grain mountain . . . stands at close to 17 million tons, stockpiled in regiments of ugly concrete silos that disfigure the countryside’. My musical career began with the Doncaster Youth Jazz Orchestra just when the grain mountain was hitting its peak. My parents came from families that had known genuine hardship. For them, the abundance of the modern supermarket must have been an extraordinary thing. For me, food was something I took for granted.Until picking up that article in the airport, I’d never considered grain mountains, or that behind them lay farmers reduced to the tightest of margins, or a 68 per cent decline in wildlife during my lifetime — equivalent in human terms, to killing off everyone in North and South America, Africa, China, Australasia, and Europe.
Or that agricultural run-off is a greater source of water pollution than sewage, and the NHS crisis is largely a crisis of poor nutrition. These uncomfortable truths combined with my newfound love of growing food led to another pivotal moment: I decided to sell the publishing rights to the songs I had written, a musician’s pension, to finance the purchase of a nearby farm in France.
The first few years were a disaster. I quickly came to appreciate the vast array of skills that were required to be a farmer. I also realized that I didn’t have them. I wanted to farm without chemicals but didn’t have a plan to improve the soil to make that possible. Under a tsunami of tractors, grain cleaners, seed drills, and other large pieces of complex kit, I was overwhelmed.
When I stopped using the chemicals on which the previous owner had depended, it revealed that the soil was much better at growing weeds than crops. Familiar weeds cover post-industrial wastelands for a reason; they are pioneers, able to thrive in poor conditions, and pave the way for the next wave of species. But these pioneer plants suited to poor soils were proving nightmarish for me.
I wanted to farm without chemicals but didn’t have a plan to improve the soil to make that possible. As I struggled to make it work, the farm bills rolled in relentlessly. Farm work began when weekend DJ work often finished — at dawn.
I was lucky to be able to prop up finances with these gigs but, after a few years, I was broke, exhausted, and humbled. There seemed no option but to cut our losses and sell the farm. Until a book in a charity shop changed everything again.
An Agricultural Testament, published in 1946, was written by Albert Howard, an English botanist who traveled to India and collated decades of experiments about agricultural production methods. Howard was part of a visionary pre-war group of farmers and researchers whose work began the modern organic movement.
He explained that one of the ways nature maintains its fertility is through a diversity of plants and animals, as we find in undisturbed woodland or grassland, and the opposite of large areas of single crops that dominate the farming landscape. I decided to try again. This time, I realized part of the solution involved livestock. With a last roll of the financial dice, we bought some Red Sussex cattle.
For a vegetarian of 20 years, who hadn’t had a dog or cat, this was a steep learning curve, not helped by the neighbor’s untrained collie chasing the cows all day long.
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