Nature Friendly Farming Podcast

In this bonus episode we focus on the question of how best to tackle the big climate issues of our time on a practical local level?
Hosts Will Evans and Ben Eagle are joined by three guests – Jenny Phelps MBE who is Senior Farm Conservation Adviser at FWAG; Fiona Galbraith who is the Founding Director of RuralLink which helps people get into land based careers as well as a former Project Lead for the GREAT Project on Rural Facilitators, Mentors and New Entrants; and Ian Simpson who is a founder member of the community led Bledington Flood Group, committed to preventing flooding in Bledington, a Cotswold village on the border of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. 
Integrated Local Delivery website
Animation about integrated local delivery framework
Rural Facilitator Training
Rural Link website
FWAG South West
In this episode we look at the catchment based approach and how you could train to be a facilitator to bring local people, farmers and organisations together in your local area to tackle the issues that your area faces as a result of climate change.

Ben and Will are joined by Sue Pritchard, Chief Executive of The Food Farming & Countryside Commission (FFCC). The FFCC is an independent UK charity whose mission is to find radical and practical ways to improve climate, nature, health, wellbeing and rural economies across all four of the home nations; England, Wales, Scotland and NI. The organisation commissions and conducts research and reports relating to agroecology and local food systems, hoping to influence policy reform and future policy development.

Sue has also been an organic livestock farmer at Llananant Farm in the heart of Monmouthshire, Wales for over twenty years. Having an extended family full of agricultural workers and smallholders in the Welsh Valleys, Sue had spent many years dreaming of owning a farm before joining forces with her miner father to make the move into agriculture in 2001. She has a herd of Hereford suckler cattle that she uses to produce high-quality, pasture-fed beef.

This episode focuses on the final section of the Nature Friendly Farming Network's Rethink Farming report: Prosperity. Will, Ben and Sue discuss the importance of professor Tim Benton's statement from the report; "over the next decade, the profitability of sustainable agriculture will become increasingly apparent – especially in the UK as public monies invested in agriculture change, where perhaps only those farms that truly value natural capital will survive".

Sue also shares her opinions and experiences on valuing a "generative" mindset over an "extractive" mindset to help run a flourishing, profitable and sustainable farming business that reduces reliance on fluctuating input prices, while nourishing the environment that feeds into it.

Ben and Will are joined by Jenny Phelps MBE who is a senior farm conservation advisor for the Gloucestershire Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) and guest lecturer at the Royal Agricultural University.

Jenny has over 30 years of experience in giving on-farm advice and has been with FWAG for 10 years. She leads many different projects, including the Upper Thames Catchment Based Approach and Defra's Payments for Ecosystem Services Pilot.

Several years back, she developed the integrated local delivery framework with the support of Countryside and Community Research Institute and Natural England. The framework puts the emphasis on local knowledge and draws together funding and support from multiple sources to put into projects that improve the environment and make local communities more resilient for the future.

This big picture thinking episode looks at managing land across the wider landscape and Jenny shares her experience of how landscape-scale projects rely on local communities and their resource, knowledge and connectivity to the land.

Ben and Will head to Aberdeenshire to speak to first-generation farmer, grazier and NFFN Scotland Steering Group member Nikki Yoxall. 
From agroecology to agroforestry, Nikki shares how an agroecological approach can go beyond food production and how building community can help manage a wider landscape. She shares her journey into farming, a decision that came after working as Head of Department at an agricultural college in England and that brought her and her husband to Scotland and their 18-acre farm, Howemill.
Nikki talks about her introduction to holistic farm management as the gateway to owning Shetland heifers through pasture-fed, low-input systems and her experience of entering the sector as a new entrant farmer.

Ben and Will head to County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, to talk about all aspects of food quality with farmer, Helen Keys, and to hear about her exciting business, SourceGrow, a platform that helps farmers decide what to grow and supports local by allowing restaurants to find suppliers.
Helen also shares how she, and her partner, Charlie, are working to restore locally-grown textiles by bringing Irish linen back to its roots. In the past, Belfast was known as "Linenopolis" but in recent decades linen production had all but disappeared. Now, Mallon Linen are In their fourth year of growing flax for linen as the first commercial producers in over 40 years.
Helen's Rethink Farming Q&A:
https://www.nffn.org.uk/rethink-farming-helen-keys/