potted, the better.

Yeah, I feel Ollie... feel free to step in and correct me because i'm sure you're a better historian of this than i am but um i guess for listeners that aren't kind of you know au fait with it um especially around the time of the second world war when we had things for like dig for britain and um a huge focus on sort of national food security because of other supplies being sort of damaged um we yeah there was a big focus on only increasing yields to pretty much like any degree possible so that led to things like ripping out hedgerows increasing field sizes around that time we got a lot of larger machinery which needed bigger fields as well and then there was sort of the green revolution just after that time i believe which is when new technologies and chemicals like pesticides came into use and everything was very very yield focused to the detriment of almost everything else But I think we've come to realise in more recent decades that actually we kind of need nature and we need ecosystem processes in order to grow food in the long term.

So I hope at least trying to reverse some of the damage that has been done through new kind of things like reintroducing agroforestry into the landscapes.

And would you be happy to read them all?

I can do my best to do it justice.

To whoever is reading this, 100 years from now, my name is Professor Simon Wilcock and I am 40 years old.

I'm writing to you as Director of Sustainable Farming Systems at the University of Reading in the early decades of the 21st century.

I don't know what your world looks like, but I spend a lot of time wondering how much of it could have been different.