Field Report - Groundswell
Darlings.
Something unusual has happened to this fox. Something that, after weeks of gas chambers and bycatch and petroleum-waxed apples and weedkiller on toast, I was beginning to think might not happen again.
I feel hopeful.
I am writing this from a field in Hertfordshire. Specifically, I am sitting beside a hedge at Lannock Farm with a glass of something deliciously sour and pungent — acquired, mes choux, from a bar called the Earthworm Arms, which is both the best name for a pub I have ever encountered and, in many ways, the most perfect summary of what this place is about.
This place is Groundswell. And if you haven't heard of it, darlings, I need you to pay attention, because this might just be the most important thing happening in British food and farming right now.
Ten years ago, the Cherry family — farmers, proper ones, the kind who get mud on things — invited a few hundred people to their farm to talk about soil. Soil! Not subsidies, not yields, not commodity prices. Soil. The stuff beneath your feet. The stuff that everything — every carrot, every blade of grass, every animal that ever grazed, every meal you ever ate — ultimately depends on.
A few hundred people turned up. This year, mes choux, there are thousands. Nearly five hundred speakers. Three hundred and fifty exhibitors. Farmers from across the world sitting in a field in Hitchin, swapping notes on cover crops and no-till systems and how to get earthworms back into exhausted ground. They looked at the soil and understood that if they didn't change, there would be nothing left to farm.
That, darlings, is what hope looks like. It looks like a farmer kneeling in a field, crumbling earth between his fingers, showing you the worms. It looks like a scientist and a cattleman disagreeing furiously over grazing patterns and then shaking hands and going to the bar. It looks like the Earthworm Arms at eleven o'clock at night, full of people who got up at five to milk something and who will do the same tomorrow.
Yours truly has spent these past weeks telling you what is wrong with the food system. The glyphosate. The gas chambers. The gassed fruit and the fake farm names and the bycatch and the three-pound chicken and the labels you can't read. And all of it is true, darlings. Every word. This fox does not exaggerate — well, not about the important things.
But Groundswell is the other side of that story. It is proof that there are thousands of people — farmers, growers, food producers, scientists, some extremely committed earthworm enthusiasts — who are doing it differently. Not because it is fashionable. Not because it is easy. Because it is right.
And between you and me, mes choux — sitting here as the sun goes down over Hertfordshire and the last speakers pack up and someone in the Earthworm Arms starts singing something that may or may not be in tune — this fox has been doing some digging of his own. Into who really benefits when the food system works the way it does. Into who is whispering in which ears, and whose interests are really being served when the rules get written.
But that, mes choux, is a story for another day.
For now — tonight — I shall raise a glass of something improbable to the Cherry family, to the earthworms, and to every farmer who decided that the soil was worth saving.
There is, darlings, despite everything this fox has shown you — despite all of it — reason to hope. And hope, as a great woman once told me over a scone in Bournemouth, is not passive. It requires action.
So act. Buy from the people who are doing it right. And if you don't know who they are yet — well, mes choux, you know a fox who can point you in the right direction.
Toodle pip.
R.
X
PS — I should note that I attempted the wood-fired sauna. A fox in a sauna, darlings, is a sight one does not forget in a hurry. Nor, I am told, does one's fur entirely recover. But one's pores, mes choux, are immaculate.
