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During the two hours or so I spend sitting at Patrick Holden’s farmhouse kitchen table – introduced at various points to his wife, Rebecca, and some of his children as they buzz about the place – he serves up a feast: of stories from his life in sustainable farming and the ingredients he feels will help fix our broken food system. He often gets sidetracked, thoughts whirring in his mind no doubt as he juggles a farm, cheese business and heading up the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT).
He name-drops throughout (though ‘Charles’ – as in the King – isn’t one of them). Not to boast but rather to back up what he’s saying; that there are other people who believe what he believes; that farming can work in harmony with nature; that dairy and meat producers should not all be demonised.
There is a farmer called Richard who runs a biodynamic farm with livestock and cereals and he is “sequestering 10 times more carbon than the cows are emitting”, Holden explains. The ability of soils to sequester carbon – and how much and for how long – is a subject we come back to a few times. But it’s the moment of self-reflection as we reminisce about my last visit many years ago that I can’t shake from my mind as I return from West Wales to the east of Scotland afterwards. “We have not been influential enough,” he says of the movement to mainstream a more sustainable approach to farming and food – one that works with nature rather than against it, as he has put it during conferences, interviews and panels over the years.
Indeed, we talk at a time of considerable upheaval in UK and world farming. Climate change is wreaking havoc on harvests, both here and overseas. Geopolitics and a cost-of-living crisis have led to tractors being driven into major cities as farmers challenge the ‘green’ rules that they say won’t deliver food security. EU regulations designed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from farming and protect nature (food production is the major driver of biodiversity loss globally) have been trampled over by muddy boots.
Farmer confidence has also hit rock bottom. The UK government recently pulled funding for farmers through its Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) at short notice, prompting a challenge from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), thanks to which many have now been able to continue the process of applying for the subsidy. And the changes to Inheritance Tax still hang heavy over the sector, while the phasing out of direct payments, a fallout from Brexit, is leaving a lasting and painful legacy. A survey of the NFU’s members in March showed confidence at record lows (and that was before the SFI scandal). “I’m realising there is no such thing as rock bottom as far as Defra is concerned,” said NFU president Tom Bradshaw at the time.
Holden is a Union member but is clearly not happy with the way things are being run. Since taking over from the popular and persuasive Minette Batters in February 2024, Bradshaw “hasn’t done a great job”, Holden suggests. It’s a difficult position, mind: the NFU is at the behest of everyone from small, mixed farms like those here in rural Wales to the large agri-barons of South East England, right up to the sheep farms of Scotland’s hills. And everything in between.
There is a “gulf” that the NFU has to straddle, Holden says, from the “small, beautiful and magical ones like us” to the “big, intensive brigade”, who often seem to shout loudest. “The intensive farms are not providing a public service,” he adds.
We are already into the nitty-gritty of food policy. This is not surprising given that the UK government has promised a trio of new policy packages this year: a national food strategy, a roadmap for farming, and a land-use framework. A consultation on the latter was launched in January, and will be finalised later this year; so too the roadmap. Sewing all this together will be the food strategy.
The Conservatives were roundly panned for their strategy, ignoring many of the recommendations put forward by restaurateur Henry Dimbleby, who conducted a two-year review for ministers. “This mix of half measures
and future promises misses a huge opportunity to transform the way we grow and eat food,” said Holden of the short document in 2022. The strategy created “a false choice between food security and the environment”, he added.
This is still where we are – and Holden and his team at the SFT understand that more than most. They have also done as much as any to evidence the right mix of policies and incentives for a strategy that could build national food security, fight climate change, protect nature and improve our health.
The registered charity, set up in 2011 by Holden, has slowly but surely become a recognised voice in discussions around food policy – here and overseas. Holden and the outgoing executive director, Adele Jones, have been the public faces of the Trust, but behind them are a serious and technically minded team with a passion to deliver more sustainable food systems. “This is about how to finance the agricultural transition,” Holden says.
Work on financing the agricultural transition is at the core of the SFT’s mission. “Our vision is for future food and farming systems which nourish the health of people and planet and are equitable and accessible to all,” the website reads. That doesn’t mean everyone producing and eating organic food. In fact, Holden readily admits that one of the unintended consequences of organic farming is that it “polarised the farming sector”.
This ‘them and us’ attitude is something Holden has long fought to overcome. “Perhaps we have upset the conventional farming community by continually saying we were right and they were wrong,” he said at the Wales Organic Producers’ Conference in October 2010. The following year he left the Soil Association, having built the charity from a handful of people to almost 200 during his 15 years in charge. Sales of organic produce had also increased from £50m to £2bn, according to a profile on Holden in The Guardian in 2014 – an interview in which he described the image of the countryside that people have of mixed family farms thriving in bucolic conditions as “fantasy”.
That is, however, the image I leave with (and many more will too as Bwlchwernen Fawr welcomes visitors in a bid to educate everyone about farms, food and farmers as part of the Beacon Farms Network).
This is certainly an opportune moment for engagement as momentum gathers behind a regenerative farming movement that might truly threaten the dominance of conventional, chemically concentrated approaches. At its simplest, regenerative agriculture is any form of farming, that is, the production of food or fibre, which at the same time improves the environment. Primarily this means regenerating the soil. Inputs are also reduced to a minimum. It’s also seen as a direction of travel, not an absolute – which makes certifying ‘regenerative’ products a lot trickier than, say, organic, with its strict rules on inputs. “At the moment people don’t trust regenerative,” Holden says – much like they don’t trust carbon credits, he adds.
Claims have begun to pop up in supermarkets and restaurants as some of the big brands buy into ‘regen ag’ – or rather profit from it, according to sceptics. This is where Holden’s passion for ‘outcomes’ comes to the fore. He sits forward, serious: “If you want credibility then you need to measure what you are doing and the difference it’s making,” he explains. “This is about funding the agricultural transition.”
This transition will take time, patience, effort and investment – as well as buy-in from everyone, including politicians. Holden’s comments echo those of Jones, who explained in an interview in Meat Management how data is going to be important in understanding “where and how future money should flow through. It will also allow us to regulate the practices that are causing harm, based on actual information about what’s happening on the farm rather than the ‘blame game’ that we sometimes see at the moment.”
This is where the SFT’s global farm metric comes in. Years in the making, it is billed as “a holistic framework to establish a shared understanding and facilitate measurement of whole-farm sustainability”. So not just measurement of carbon, methane or water – or even just environmental metrics. “This isn’t launching another certification scheme,” Holden insists, but rather a common framework for measuring sustainability on farms through 12 interconnected categories that reflect the key environmental, social and economic dimensions of a sustainable farm system.
Research from 300 farms across 23 countries and six continents, and published in the days following my visit, showed how a shared sustainability framework can transform the way progress in agriculture is measured and valued. “I don’t care what we call it … but we need this,” Holden says as he decries the Defra approach to measuring ‘public goods’ as “pathetic”, and challenges the relevance of only measuring emissions.
Holden also leads a taskforce on measuring land-use sustainability for the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), established by the then Prince of Wales in 2020. As a friend of King Charles, what Holden says these days may well attract more interest than ever. He chuckles, a little embarrassed, when I bring up a pre-Christmas piece in The Telegraph: “Arla accused of ‘re-engineering the cow’ by farmer who advised King.” This is on the back of his criticism of a feed supplement called Bovaer that promises to reduce methane emissions from cattle burps.
Holden has also just been in a public spat with George Monbiot following a new SFT report that challenges the current orthodoxy that meat and dairy products from cattle and sheep are always part of the problem for climate and health. Lord Deben, former chair of the Climate Change Committee, who says meat and dairy production and consumption need to fall significantly to achieve net zero, wrote the foreword, in which he explained: “… what few seem to understand is that there is a need to differentiate between those livestock systems which are part of the problem in terms of net emissions, and those which, under the correct management, are potentially part of the solution.”
The dairy is at the heart of the farm here. The cheese cave is quite something, and the Ayrshire cows are “looking great” in the lush grass fields and under the sunshine. Holden fell in love with cows after his mum took him into a cowshed at the age of five. “Seeing is believing,” he says. Bwlchwernen is testament to that – especially if you have the pleasure of Holden’s company too.
David Burrows is a freelance writer and researcher
