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成人快手 Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Green Farm Collective

Charlotte Smith and Lucy Speed are judging the Farming for the Future category of the 成人快手 Food and Farming Awards. In this programme, they visit the last of their three finalists.

Michael Kavanagh says he hasn't used insecticide 8 years on the farm he manages. Tim Parton says his wild bird numbers are booming. Both, say it's down to regenerative farming.

What is regenerative agriculture? The Green Farm Collective is a group of farmers - including Michael and Tim - who think they know. By concentrating on the health of their soil, through growing cover crops and reducing cultivation, they say they are able to use fewer inputs like artificial fertiliser, insecticide and fungicide. In turn, they say, that leads to increased biodiversity on their farms and higher levels of carbon sequestered into their soils.

At a time when Government money for farming is changing - since leaving the EU's Common Agricultural Policy - this group wants to help farmers find new sources of revenue that reward them for farming in this way...through selling carbon and biodiversity credits, and by getting a better price for their crops using a Green Farm Collective regenerative brand.

The Collective has been picked as a finalist in the "Farming for the Future" category of this year's 成人快手 Food and Farming Awards. It's being judged by Farming Today presenter, Charlotte Smith, and actor, Lucy Speed - who plays Stella in The Archers. In this programme, they make their "judges' visit" to farms run by two of the collective's founding members.

Presenter by Charlotte Smith and Lucy Speed
Produced for 成人快手 Audio in Bristol by Heather Simons

Available now

22 minutes

Broadcast

  • Sun 22 Oct 2023 06:35