You Are What You Eat: Soil, Seeds and Social Justice

Hello and welcome to our Asian Optimism, I'm Tom Rekanik. I'm Cristiana Fijeres. And I'm Paul Dickinson. This week we asked what lessons agriculture needs to learn for the future. And Paul and Cristiana travel to Umbria in Italy to meet twin brothers Nicola and Alessandro who left behind city careers to reinvent the way we grow food. Thanks for being here. So friends we're going to hear about a very exciting trip that you took recently to Italy and learn a great deal about the future of food production and what it might look like. But I wonder if we should just take a minute or two at the front end to talk about what's wrong with how we produce our food. Now this will not be an alien topic to many listeners and indeed we've covered it before on the podcast. But to just kick off, this is something I discuss a lot with my good friend George Mombio down here in Devon who I see who's made it his life career to focus on this. He essentially says that modern farming creates the majority of our challenges in the world. If you look at the emissions associated with it, the terrible use of land and all of the pollutions that come from that. So many of our challenges have come from the way we produce our food. So of course industrial agriculture contributes to around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. And it may be more than that depending on how we calculate it. Monocultures and chemical inputs, degrade soil and pollute waterways. And of course as we know have a devastating impact on biodiversity. And what's more, our reliance on fossil fuel in the form of fertilizers and global supply chains increases our climate vulnerability. Now that's only the environmental issues. If you expand that out and look at it socially, farm work tends to be underpaid seasonal. And sometimes it can even be exploitative in certain instances. And in many places farming is no longer seen as viable or attractive career, especially for younger generations. And in many cases it is just the government subsidies that keep this moving forward. Not only that, but an over reliance on a few varieties of crops makes food systems vulnerable to disease and climate shocks. And global food supply chains now tend to break down under pressure. Perhaps though the biggest impact that our food system spaces the soil. 33% of the world's soils are seriously degraded and some scientists warn that the number of harvest we have less may be something between 50 and 60. Healthy soil is critical, not just for food, for carbon storage, water retention and biodiversity. And yet conventional farming treats our soils as inert. So to just start off with that litany of challenges, you two recently had a visit in which you saw some other ways in which we can do this. But what would it be like if we listen to our soils? Do you feel like you got a sense of that when you were in Italy? Well, how could we not because sadly you were not able to join us Tom, but Paul and I went to Henrietta Lee for the wedding of a colleague and listeners have to like imagine that the whole wedding took place between rows of eggplants, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes or tomatoes. And we're sitting on bales of straw in the middle of a vegetable and fruit garden. It was an amazing experience because we were there certainly to celebrate this beautiful wedding, but also to remember as you point out Tom that soil is anything but inert. Soil is the very source of life. That's where the roots grow. That's where every single plant takes its nourishment from and grows into the plants and the fruits and vegetables. And I almost felt like I wanted to take off my shoes and walk barefoot because there is such a reverence for soil on this quintu support farm. It was founded by twin brothers Nicola and Alessandro five years ago. In the middle of the pandemic, they bought a piece of land that was basically barren right in front of their parents house. And they bought over 80 acres. They today grow 1,600 varieties of fruit and vegetables. And it is just a completely different experience of farming and in particular of our human relationship with fruits and vegetables than I have ever had. And our different friends went there and visited and then just thought we want to get married here. Now that's an unusual response to a farm, but it's pretty normal when you meet these two and the wonderful people they work with. I mean, I've got to say the first thing that just blew my head off was to hear two founders who've had kind of city jobs in kind of media and such like talk about a farm the way people normally talk about a startup. They had all of that joy, passion, sense of creativity and excitement completely about a farm. The second thing they said and let's just, you know, ground ourselves in pretty far from reality. They are saying farmers are going to get ready for a 10 degrees hotter. Well, 10 degree said the Mediterranean is already seven degrees hotter and it is in some places at sometimes. So this is like a real thing. They're not just starting kind of farming as entrepreneurs. They're also thinking about inevitably what we've got to do and a wonderful story about essentially the sort of pivotal moment for them when they discovered whilst they were suffering this terrible drought, which of course we're going to experience more and more of the forest managed to retain moisture. And that's just an amazing story. So I think this is such an exciting insight into how we can completely reframe what we do and becoming almost the excited about food systems. And I think the standout to them is for you and your friend George Mambionne to go over to meet them in Umbria and to sort of become messengers for what I think listeners are about to find is a fascinating roller coaster. Okay, so let's get into it. I mean, I would love to ask you is there anything we should know we're going to hear these interviews that you you made while you were on the ground there in Umbria. What should we know? So set it up for us. Wind barking dogs. That sort of thing. It's a far right. Any terms that we're going to hear? There are a few terms that can be used and one is EM technology effective microorganisms that comes from a doctor here car in Japan. A set of rated way of adding kind of extremely effective and fast multiplying microorganisms to soil to give it greater effectiveness in terms of growing things, which is kind of what farms all about. But it's not been trialed at the kind of scale that people would want. You know, the science is still a bit on the fence, but I think you have to kind of really go for it. You know, it goes to something that they pointed out about how the crops would come more resistant sometimes 80% of farming is killing this said, leaving a void. So some other terms that you may come across are heirloom seeds traditional sea varieties passed down through generations often region specific and genetically diverse and they've very much embedded themselves in that world. Unlike commercial hybrids, they're open pollinated and can adapt to local conditions over time and adaptations are very critical part of their story. You remember what Darwin said it wasn't survived of the fittest. It was the survivor of the best able to adapt. And then the other term you're going to hear is biochar, former charcoal made from organic material like crop waste that's added to soil and it improves soil fertility helps retain water and locks away carbon critically into centuries old practice actually. But we discovered in modern climate agriculture. So you're going to hear from the we don't say culface anymore. You're going to hear from the spinning the spinning blades of the windmill of modernity in terms of farming practice. We have heard about organic farming and there's so many cutting edge efforts at organic farming and organic produce. We have heard about regenerative agriculture. We've heard about rewilding all of these efforts have in common that they are trying to kill the soil less than what we have been doing in the past. But what I just found was absolutely fascinating about Nikola and Alessandro's efforts here is that they go above and beyond all of these efforts and they actually say what we really need to do is learn from nature herself bio mimicry. And then Benius who invented discovered developed the concept of bio mimicry and who we've had on the podcast. But the applications of bio mimicry have more been about design of architecture of packaging of transport such as the bullet train Velcro is another very famous example of bio mimicry. And what these brothers have done is learn from nature to treat nature like nature would treat itself. So it is it is not extracting from nature for human things services constructs constructions. And actually learning from nature to behave as nature to produce as nature I just was blown away by that concept. So let's go to the interview. you have previous professional lives that had nothing to do with farming. But at some point, you decided to come home to the land where you grew up. Your parents still live just very close here and you decided to buy this farm and start a farming profession. Can you tell us why you decided to do that? Are you still happy with that decision? Everything started few years ago. We were kids, we were, as you said, spending most of our weekends here in Samhattan. And the best way to keep a two twins busy is to give a house. The very old man was to use to do the vegetable vegetable garden for my parents. And this man was pretty unique even for that time because he was really passionate with seeds. He reproduced his own seeds, his grandfather, his name was Renato. So we teach the passion for green vegetables, most of all for seeds. And basically when we were kids, our friends used to collect stamps and everything else. And you collected seeds? Yes. Yeah. Those strange kids. And in the years growing this passion, we also grow with an idea of one day we said, "When we're going to be retired, we're going to open a farm, you'll understand that that will be up." Let's say, "Okay." Then life, I started working in cinema production, Michela opened a company in London and sustainability. And our business plants finished in a row for a few years, several years. Then I was 39 and I was back in Rome and suddenly this place was put in sale. And we decided that probably we could buy the land as a family just because the excuse was, "Nobody's going to be nothing in front of my parents house." So the original motivation to buy this farm is to prevent anybody from building anything obnoxious in front of your parents house. Right. Then I came here, I was alone. I see the land, it was completely abandoned completely. And there were olive trees and an abandoned being there. Then I see, you know, this potential cycle, as I say, I can make, I say, "Maybe I can start. I'm going to spend three days here, four days in Rome, keep doing my job and we signed the paper. And I arrived here and I came back to Rome and I started learning everything because I knew we knew how to grow vegetable, but we didn't knew nothing about olive trees, vineyards. So with very old men of the area, as teachers, I started learning how to grow. And ancestral wisdom. Exactly. Wise men. And then suddenly something very, very extraordinary somehow happened. COVID, COVID arrived. I was locked down here, Nick arrived and we say, "Okay, it's time to maybe do this something for real." And we started. That's how things to support it. We know really an idea to be honest of how to run a farm. That was the biggest problem. How to do this scale? Yeah, the challenge was, you know, it was nice to do a vegetable garden and grow, you know, a few plants of tomato, but how can we do this scale? And how we can provide consistency in the product that we offer. How do we actually work a winter vegetable garden that no one ever did in Umbria? So at the beginning, we were literally a blank page in front of us. And I would say that blank page that everybody thought it was a limitation became our biggest strength because we didn't have a playbook. We could just do however we like. But you had values and principles. And Paul talked to you about your values and principles. I mean, when we spoke about this, I was very struck because I said, what is the big learning that you've had? And you know, the first time I think you made it, and it was like empathy. And I thought you were going to say something about what we learned about these chemicals. And we learned about this process or something. And you said, we learned empathy. And then later we spoke and you said, respect. And so how is it empathy and respect? Our critical features of successful farming because they seem like words from a different part of the planet. But for let's start with empathy because of respect, I think it's the next step. Do you think I learned, since I opened the fan one, it's to be patient. First thing. And second, at the how difficult it is to try to understand and somehow communicate with species that doesn't talk or they don't talk the same language. So to understand is really you have to open your heart, which seems really fair, but it's true. That's how it worked for us to understand what was happening in the farm around us. You have to open your heart and listen and try to understand. That's why I think the most important thing is empathy, which we don't have much in the world at the moment. Empathy with the other species that we share the planet with. And we do. Doing sustainable farming is means to produce something for other human beings that are good. So that's empathy and then to respect. I think respect we can divide it into very big pillars here. And one of course is a bit more like sound also said is respect for nature, respect for the environment as around us, learning from it rather than trying to teach to it. But what I think is very important in farming especially and is often overlooked is the respect for the people that work for you. Is the social aspect of farming because farming across the planet is almost now a tool for modern slavery by pushing the price down farmers don't have other choice but to use what we call in Italy. But at Chanty these are people usually immigrants that get paid by the hour to come and do one job without the security of having the same job tomorrow or in a month time. And that resulted in farming job not being attractive, aspiration anymore, not leading young people to want to do this job because you can't be the life on this. And so since we started we had this very strong idea that social sustainability had to be one of the main pillars of the farm and how does that translate in practice. It translates by giving people full-time contracts long term with a living wedge at least that can allow them to support themselves and their family. We need to retain talent and I understand that the talent comes from farming is something that people don't even look at. But we trained these people, these young people for now four years. We don't want to lose them. You know they're good at what they do. They learn a lot about the technique that we use and so we want to retain this talent. So good salaries, good welfare, pension, medical insurance, you know working hour there are decent and flexibility. We always say we work hard and play hard because also we play a lot. You know often the sound track of the farm is laughter. People joking, you know and sometimes running and you know it's a you create a beautiful environment and it's inspiring a lot of young people that come here and visit to maybe one day choose the same job which is probably one of the most important missions that we have. Apart from doing fantastic food is actually influencing young people to choose this as a job. I'm going to argue that you're doing more than that not just encouraging young people to take farming as a job but to have entrepreneurs choose farming as their profession. And just this my last framing question really we had a lovely conversation where you talked about how language is important which is I think something we believe very very much on the podcast and you talked about going from producing to growing and how does that different language work out? Well it's so we grow food okay farmers grow food don't produce food. Produce is a mechanical industrialized process. Growing is witnessing the magic of seeing a seed of life. A seed that becomes a little plants you put in the soil in the farm. It grows. You produce fruits. They arrive. You taste. You extract the new seeds. It's the most beautiful I think romantic a fascinating part of this job but if you go to production you take away all the romans and actually I have to say unfortunately today food is mainly produced which means that we also mix it with substances that shouldn't be there. They're harmful for the planet and for human beings and for what reason just to make the food cheaper but then we need more food because it's less nutritious. So it doesn't work. I mean the system is kind of you know broken on all sorts of aspects but terminology is important. It's a bit like I start all my lectures saying that to me the biggest green washing has always been done is that a human have to save the planet. It's not for us to save the planet. We need to save ourselves. So agree with you. The planet will survive as a ball of fire. Perfectly well. Perfectly well when we are not here anymore. Exactly. Maybe you're trying to get the planet to save us and just the last thing I wanted to frame this is the soil here is not especially good right? This is not the easiest place to start up for. The soil was awful when we started to the farm. I mean it's this soil, so it can't be. not be awful, but it's pretty intense and tough. Everything is a good soil, I think, but there was not the right soil to grow vegetable. It was chemical free. It was chemical. That was good, because it was a bangle. How did you restore the soil? So, when we started the farm, we literally took the most easy choice, which was we want to be sustainable. Let's take the organic certification, and we started following the organic methodology to grow vegetables, but that didn't really change the soil. Organic is a lot about what products you use, what spray you use for your products, and it's about rotation of crop. Is it conventional farming? A bit cleaner. A bit cleaner, next up. Nothing different from that. So, we started with a bit of a random not dogmatic approach of taking inspiration from all the techniques that we were aware of, from regenerative farming to biodynamic farming, scintropic farming, and trying to get the ideas that could work on a scale. Because permaculture, it's lovely, and I will do my vegetable garden through a permaculture technique, but when you work a scale, it becomes rather financially inefficient and it's very challenging. So, we took some principle of it, like the racebeds. We took some principle of regenerative farming, which was a lot of focus on the soil. We had the priority, now you change the soil. We took biodynamic scintropic in terms of understanding the natural cycle of plant succession and biodiversity, but then something happened, which was. I am mimicry. Where did my mimicry come in? It comes from a trauma. It comes from the second year of the farm. Umbre was hit by the worst drought in history. It didn't rain from February till November. November. It did not rain. Not a drop. Not a drop. And we were hit by four heat waves during the summer, where the temperature almost rise to 40 degrees Celsius, which means that we basically started losing all the crops, and whatever it was not lost was cooking on the plant directly. Literally. Literally. We were harvesting tomatoes, we were really roasted. Pretty much. One day with me and Alessandro and Mr. Dispair, that we were with us because we were literally desperate. We were walking back to our parents house and we had to go through a woodland to do that. And literally, we get into this woodland and the light bulb starts. We start noticing the temperatures, what different was fresher. The soil was probably not wet, but moist. And then we started looking as specific issues that we had in the farm, like infestant weeds. They are here in every shape of form, but they don't take over. Pathogen. Pathogen. Parasites. You've got them all. How come they don't kill the woodlands? And no one waters the woodland or one rotates the woodland, no one fertilizes the woodland. And no matter what is lush, productive and stable. So we said, "All done." Because there is something to learn from this. And having worked in sustainability for many years and approaching a lot of tech solution, I knew about biomimicry as a principle in tech, biology, chemistry. The most simple approach would be applying biomimicry to farming. Why has no one done anything like this? That's the most adjacent application. Exactly. So we, likely enough, we get the contact of the head of the biomimicry in some Francisco that we're now panning with. And I explained what we wanted to do. And I was like, "We want to imitate the woodland." And she told me, "You're right. How weird that we are actually develop enzymes that eat plastic and have got sugars at dropping. They're amazing. But we haven't worked around farming. And actually, what you're trying to do can be really classified as biomimic farming. And biomimicry is an approach where you imitate nature. I say, non-dogmatic again, because it's not about this specific solution. It's about understanding a system. For example, we solve the problem of trees through the planting of these species called Paulonia, Tumentosa, arrived in Europe in the 17th century and used as an ornamental tree so far. And never in agroforestry. Now it's widely used in wood production. Why? Because it's the fastest growing tree on the planet. And we don't have 20 years to wait the shade. I need the shade in three, four years. So we put these trees that are growing four, five meters a year. The roots go deep and search for water independently. We don't need to water them. The leaves have the highest content of NPK, which are the substance that you have in chemical fertilizers. So when they lose the leaf, they fertilize the soil. We started using biochar to reproduce that organic matter in the woodland that acts as a sponge. We started using microorganism inside the soil to fast-track soil the regeneration. And we discover that when they work with biochar, they augment each other and they double the speed of reproduction. The Paulonia works with a microorganism as well. Where did you find the microorganisms? I was me because I was given a conference in Perugia, a university about this way of farming. And then when I finished the conference, these men came to me and say, "I'm Vanny." His name is Vanny. So yes, Pierre Chere. I had really interested in your farm. I did try the E-M technology. So I heard about it. No, yeah. E-M technology has been invented by Dr. Higa in Japan a few years ago. It's a mix of 86 bacteria, yeast, lactobacteria that you usually find in every people's kitchen. Okay? Put it together. They found out that they work as a supercharge for vegetable and they help the soil to regenerate much more fast. So we start trying them and it comes with a liquid solution. It tastes like apple. It's good for us as well. So actually, before you put it on the plot, you drink some yourself, which shows that we're eating the same thing. It's good. Exactly. I actually eat every morning a bit of E-M technology. Yeah, pretty good for your organism. And when we started, I remember we did we need three raised beds, one with our soil, another one with our soil and biochar and our compost, and the other one with our soil, biochar compost and E-M technology. Because we're looking at a laboratory, right? Yeah. Where you perform constant experiments. What happened? I mean, something was okay, normal. So of course, the one that grew with compost and the biochar, they were growing bigger and faster. But sadly, something really strange happened because the first two were eaten by pests. All of them. The third one, I'm talking about one meter of distance. The last one, they were pests, but they weren't eaten them. What is happening here? It's really strange. I mean, we called the E-M house in Japan because we are working along with them. They say, "Why does this happen?" And apparently, yeah. Well, Dr. Riga was a bit like humans. You know, when you've got a very good and balanced gut, the microbiome, you develop natural barriers. So you don't get viruses that easily and over like, of course, that's easy. The same happens to plants. You know, roots and the microbiome is exactly the same dynamic that happens in our guts. But although the answer was somehow satisfactory, you know, our push was to understand the scientific mechanism that behind this. And it couldn't only be that the plants were stronger. So we started testing the plants with universities and the GNR, which is the Center for National Research in Italy. And after one year, we made a discovery that changed our farm forever, I think. And it was that the plants feeding on a healthy soil were vibrating at a different frequency than the other plants. Vibrating. So they were literally emitting a frequency. And we learned that actually is one of the means of communication in nature. Of course, we some of us know that plants connect through the Mycelial Network. So mushrooms are actually internet of plants. But a lot of us didn't know that actually plants communicate through specific frequency. We haven't invented anything. Okay. In the way we do farming, we actually, now we are discovering the biochar was used 4,000 years ago by the Amazon tribes to make the soil more fertile, that pushing biodiversity and not tilling and just leaving everything green is a technique that we've been using always and is ingrained in our DNA until the 1930s. So a lot of the things that we are actually doing is just a process of being curious and rediscovering what we've always been doing. What are ancestors knew all the time? What we're doing probably that is different is the way we are mixing these things. You know, is that probably a bit more modern systematic approach is that the ability that we've got today, of course, that we didn't have before to test the effects of these techniques by I can tell you that the water retention of the farm has improved by between 50 and 60%. I can tell you that our vegetables, because we have tested them into a microbiology lab, have been in 301,000 percent more nutrients than the one that you buy from the supermarket. So we've got the modern technology tool in a way super support the results of the farm and we are looking now after five years of a bit, you know, our material discovery, we now are working and we are planning to actually develop a paper, a scientific paper that can be shared with other people with the collaboration of university to put some science, packing and data behind what we observe every day because then again, you know, if your tomato plant is good and it tastes good, you know, you can do any test lab that you want, you know, there is more nutritious, it's got more sugar, more minerals, more salts, more, you know, antioxidants and vitamins. So we, but we want to have a data support to what we're doing. I think it's important also in light of the fact that for us, one of the mission is sharing what we're doing. I want to you to talk to us a little bit about the concept of heirloom seeds. When we opened the farm, we soon realized that all these variation variety that arrived to us, I didn't know nobody goes anymore. Some of them because the consumer doesn't recognize the caller who's going to buy a white tomato or a green tomato that for people doesn't taste nothing, I can assure you, it's the most sweet tomato in the world. Some of them because they don't last much after you harvest them. So if you think that now a courgette trouble more than I do, because most of them, they're produced in Brazil, packed in Thailand and sold it everywhere in the border. It seems crazy about these things. It is crazy, but that's the way it is. That's the way it is. These heirloom seeds, they have a genetic memory, which is pretty long, a thousand of years, okay. So they are our, let's say, wise companion and they evolved already so many times. And once you put them all together, they keep evolving really, really fast. They keep changing. But if you buy the seeds as every farmer does, we buy seeds from big multinational company that grows in one type of variety, not even GMO, let's say natural, but still one variety that is grown in a greenhouse to produce millions and millions of seeds. You are breaking the first mechanism of nature, which is adaptability. Animals like us, they develop a fantastic skill in front of danger, which is running away. We escape. Plants can not. So they develop another skill, which is adapt. Very quickly. We believe today, science believe that plants can adapt in pretty much three years. Imagine we couldn't adapt in 25 generation. Plants are really fast. And the way they adapt is they produce seeds and new plants that are more adapted to the kind of soil and climate condition where they're present. So we've noticed here, some seeds that we started seeding the first year, they didn't grow that well. But then we harvest the seed from the best fruit. We replanted it any grew better and they year after grew better. And they grew also when it was colder or maybe when it was hotter, depending on the variety. So by reproducing your own album seeds, you follow nature is a solution, which is adaptability. For me, you know, coming from the environmental movement and working all my life in my career in environmental sustainability, my first focus was how do I develop a farm that is ready not to 1.5 growth in temperature to 5 to 6 to 10, because that's what I believe we need to start thinking about because okay, maybe the average temperature globally rises by 1.5. What in the Mediterranean basin? Yeah, well, the seed today is 7 degrees hotter than average 7. What if a heat wave arrives? Okay, average temperature is 1.5, but then I get 43 degrees for two weeks and I lose all my crop. So we need to be ready for that kind of climate extremes. And we believe by crossing, you know, trees that develop a canopy, the fresh and up the soil, but the soil is also fresher because it's green. It's not naked anymore. And the water is retained by simply because it's green, not only because of biota. And the pathogens are fought through doing nothing, which is incredible, you know, we discovered, rediscovered in a way that the approach of farming is I've got a problem, I kill it. If you go to a shock to buy agricultural product, 78% are specific killers with killer, pathogen killer, fungi killers. When you kill something, you create a void, an ecological void. Nature is marked and goes to occupy the very ecological void, usually with something stronger that you can't kill. And that's the reason why we are all linked in farming to multinational selling you pesticides pretty much because I create my own problem by killing species after species and having always worse problems than before. If you stop doing that and you let nature do its own thing, so we stopped with a decision, a bit risky, but we took the decision a couple of years ago to stop using these pesticides, even organic, of course, certified natural, but we stopped. And we thought, let's see what happened. And after only one year, so we don't have to wait for years and years and years, nature have reestablished the balance. And so we have every single pathogen, insects, slugs that you can ever imagine, but nothing becomes a problem because not a single species can overtake the others. I cannot avoid asking you this vision that you have and that you have proved works here. Is it scalable? Or is it something that can only happen on one hill in Ombria? Well, it's the focus of the solution that we're looking for is exactly that. So every solution that we are applying and of course is a solution translated from nature to reproduce that effect into a farming environment needs to have two essential things for us. One has to be as economical as the other solution. So for example, now we are testing a recycled paper mulching sheet to substitute the plastic that everybody use is not a league on competitive. It's 20% of the price and you don't need to change the machines. Okay. So no brainer, EM that classifies as a fertilizer, they cost four euros a liter, a standard organic fertilizer cost more than double. So they are cheaper, they are available worldwide and they are highly scalable and you use less and less and less rather than more and more and more. That's really, really important. The second thing is maybe we should ask a question that is does industrial farming has a future rather than am I scalable? That's a good point. Because probably I, not the only solution. I mean, there are a lot of people like us that are trying to change the system successfully and they also, we all align in thinking that we do this to produce good food, healthy food, social environment which is attractive to young people, etc. But also because we believe it's the only way in the future to grow foods because that farming system is already failing. You know, is either the crop of failing or the companies are failing under the pressure of the supply chain. So, and is there reason why a lot of farmers are protesting a European level against probably the wrong target sometimes like the Green Deal, which is not bad, but because they are under an enormous, and have been under an enormous pressure in terms of competitiveness, price structure and they can't do that farming any longer. Participating in a system that just is broken. It's broken because if you think about it, of course, you know, it's important to have partners that work with you. But if I do 10p on a kilo of tomato and the retailer that buys them from the important and from the distributor does 3 euros of margin per kilo, does something wrong. There is something wrong, right? There is something wrong. Thank you both so much for just completely reinventing farming and thinking of the food system. And I love this idea that growing food and cooking food are linked to concepts. I think that's absolute genius. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, your insight. And thank you for having fed us. Thank you so much. Thank you for the amazing opportunity. What a fascinating conversation you had. What an amazing place. I'm very jealous that you got together. I was very, very sad not to join you. Cristiano, you've already said this completely blew you away. Paul, you're not really a man. It spends a lot of time on a farm. What were your impressions when you came away from this? You know, along with that amazing farm that you just been hearing about, it was also the most extraordinarily wonderful venue for a wedding where we all ate and drank into the small hours, the most delicious food that was beautifully put together by amazing staff and really committed people. And it made me think that actually a farm is a great place to convene people. When I were used to convene people at the Finneural Foundation in Scotland, we'd often find the very best discussions kind of in the polytannel with your fingers in the earth, weeding or whatever it was. So I found that exciting. I found the idea of the fact that they're sort of growing food and thinking about cooking at the same time. It may be thinking of a three star Michelin farm. I'm sure they'll be the first three star Michelin farm. And above all, I just think this idea of empathy and respect, I found incredibly meaningful and born, the great mother of invention, necessity. Our world is getting hotter, we need smarter, better farming. Well, I am very, very jealous that you got to go there and hopefully one day I will follow in your footsteps and do the same and get to meet these brilliant characters and understand what makes it such a special place. I mean, I have to say just for myself, I've lived for five years now in my little farm in Devon and we've created vegetable gardens and recreated the soil. And just things like every year we gather up all of the leaves on our land and then we put them all in a pile and then all the fungus grows up through them. You see all the little threads of the fungus and then you gather them and put them on the vegetable gardens which creates the micro-risal associations and do the composting and grow the green manure and just watching all of this stuff emerge as the soils recover and how that changes the way you can grow your food is like the most satisfying part of my life. So I don't know about a broad application but I think for those people. Okay, Paul, take note, the podcast is not the most satisfying part of his life. Yeah, no, very sick kind of all the every last one of you. But I'm with you, I'm with you, Tom. I'm with you about the love of soil and what soil does. I mean soil, I know is incredibly important for one specific reason. Some years ago I was extremely worried about, I mean, I'm still worried about climate change and what we're going to do. But I thought that forestry might be incredibly important and it is important. But I checked in with Stefan Harding, the now saddest sister, the brilliant scientist who taught Tom and myself and others. And Stefan said, look, if you just go and put up a whole bunch of trees somewhere, they may not survive. But he said critically, there are so many microorganisms in the soil. You don't know what the trees are going to do to the microorganisms. They're going to increase them or decrease them. And that was the first time I became aware in a sense that there was this massive web of life under the ground in unseeable, too small for the human eye to perceive microorganisms that are critical to soil fertility. And so that was my sort of introduction to this kind of magical but slightly mystical world. Yeah, that's the reason Paul, why I said at the beginning, I felt when we were on the farm that I wanted to take my shoes off and walk barefoot. I bet the farm wanted you to take your shoes off also, by the way. You know, and I think we all should in in some way take our shoes off at least mentally and walk barefoot on soil in honor of soil. Because whenever we think about food, we think about what is above the ground and what we can harvest and what it looks like. And you know, what the season is for this or that or but none of that would occur without the soil that we take granted. The soil is actually the treasure chest of growth and of life. It holds water. It holds the nutrients. It holds carbon. Paul, we who work on climate change, how often do we think about the amount of carbon that is actually sequestered and held within the soil? It fixes nitrogen. It helps to decompose organic matter that falls on on on the ground. I mean, honestly, it is it's a miraculous, absolutely miraculous part of our planet. Let alone the fact that a whopping 50% of earth species live in the soil. We don't see them, but there they are. So, you know, we treat soil as inert and we walk on it with our shoes and boots and it is side by side with water. It is the fountain or the cradle of life. I have been able to put it. Well, let's get ourselves down to what's the name of your farm Tom? It's called halloween. You're welcome anytime. Let's get the team down there and learn from you. I'd love to hear the leaves rustling as they get the microbes and you do your kind of thing in the seed garden. What percentage of your food do you grow if I can ask? Between July and September, I reckon it's about 60 to 70%. Wow, that's really good. And close to zero. Can we buy it any way? No, close to zero. Each potato costs about 50 quid, given the amount of effort I put into it. Well, you can do magical things with finance or farming. I remember doing farming up at Fintorn and, you know, 50 people or 30 people worked all morning and minimum wage would have been 500 quid. The vegetables were worth 30 quid, but we were each paying 500 quid to do it. You can make magical economies if you think about farming as an experience rather than just a way to deliver a sort of weirdly pesticide-ridden potato. All right, thank you friends. Lovely to hear about this adventure you went on. Look forward to more. We'll be back next week. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Bye. See you then.