try it out yeah and i'm really interested to hear you talk briefly about uh plantain there because obviously there's the added benefit that um it's an anthelmintic and it can actually help with with animal health as i talked about in the 60 seconds feature at the beginning of the show um adele i'm interested in your thoughts on this you know we've heard a little bit about how ian's farming how do you think this can be applied to other farmers

I think, as Ian said, it's totally context specific and you have to work out what works on your farm, in your region, in your part of the country, in your part of the world, wherever you are.

Something we are quite focused on is the measurement of these impacts, which I think will help us all in making decisions in the future.

And by us all, I mean farmers as well as food companies, governments, insurers, banks, investors.

We all need to understand the impact of these different practices in order to be able to make decisions, whether it's about financing or management decisions.

And I think that the key is starting to understand, OK, I've changed the mix of my herbal lay.

Now let's start measuring some of those possible impacts.

And in trying to do this, it will be helpful to be able to measure how how each particular farm is doing using a common metric and by using the information that's already gathered so you touched there on earthworm counts and things like that and the onus seems to be on taking information that's already at the hands of farmers and not duplicating work not making any more work for the farmers but taking what they've already got One question that I have about the global farm metric is how can a tool like that practically help farmers choose positive actions to take in their businesses?

Um, Adele, do you wanna start by, um, telling us a bit about you, the farm at home, and what you do now through that con- consultancy lens?

Okay.

So, uh, my name's Adele.

I am farming on the Welsh borders with my partner, Will, and his family.

We farm regenerative, quote unquote, um, sheep, and we also have a, a beef business well, as well, which we're integrating into the farming system now too, which is very exciting.

We follow three main principles with our farming system: farming in harmony with nature, which I think is really the theme of this conversation; obeying the law of return, so cr- try- trying to create that more circular farming system which relies much less on external, external inputs and doesn't waste much from the system, really recycling everything in the process; and then thirdly, very much moving towards that more biological approach for producing food.

So we're not certified organic, but we are a very low-input system, and everything we do, particularly around breeding our animals, um, is to create animals which are resilient for the future and the climate we now see every year being different.

Um, so I know it's a big question, but what do you think that kind of fair, equitable farm supply chain looks like? Do you want to go, Adele?

Coming back to the Sustainable Food Trust and the 12 years you spend there, what would you say is your proudest achievement there?

So, in terms of my proudest achievement at the Sustainable Food Trust, I think my real passion, and it comes back to why I got into all of this, is a project called the Global Farm Metric, which we started back in... 2016 ish and it really came from this principle of true cost accounting where we were starting to think how do we how do we place a value on things that we don't value as society in monetary terms where we can And there were a few different initiatives starting to pop up at the time.

One was called TEAB AgriFood, which is a very long acronym.

It was funded by the UN Environment Programme and it stands for the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Agriculture and Food.

catchy so um it was initially called tea bag which we vetoed so it's called tea baggery food and um it was it's an amazing um amazing initiative that uh that is still running now and they back in back in the early days 20 maybe sort of 16 17 they commissioned um a load of true cost studies.

So we looked at the true cost of palm oil, the true cost of fisheries, true cost of beef, the true cost of sugar, like all these different commodities, basically.

And got different consultants around the world to undertake these analysis of the true cost of these products.

What does it really mean in your view?