Welcome to farming fashion, our three part series co-produced by Southeast and South West England Fibresheds and Farmerama Radio. In this first episode we speak to farmers who grow and produce yarns from their own flocks and explore what regenerative fibre farming, and adding value to that fibre, really looks like on the ground. The first voices we hear from are Leila and her mother Ellen from Tamarisk Farm, a Soil Association certified mixed farm on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset. Then we hear fr...
Jan 15, 2023•27 min
In this episode we have 2 interviews for you. First, Olivia visited a community garden in her homeland, and then Abby chatted with a winemaker in California who walks us through the organic no-till vineyard system he has co-created with his team. This episode of Farmerama was made by Olivia Oldham, Jo Barratt and Abby Rose. A big thanks to the rest of the Farmerama team Katie Revell, Fran Bailey, Annie Landless, Eliza Jenkins and Dora Taylor. Our theme music is by Owen Barratt Thank you to every...
Jan 01, 2023•34 min
This month we are hopping all over the world. Firstly we hear from Andre Miguel of Hortas de Cascais about how community gardens have spread across a whole region in Portugal. Next, we head to Amaqanda Learning Garden in Philippi Village, South Africa where we speak to Yanga Gceya of Captain Fanplastic about how kids are connecting with their ecosystem by becoming plastic pirates. Then, we’re in Bulgaria where we hear from Filip Harmandzhiev, owner of Livadi farm, about an interesting membership...
Nov 27, 2022•34 min
This month we hear how one ranch is managing to build green cover in its 22nd year of drought in California.. And about the vineyard they’ve designed to allow for grazing sheep below the canopy all year round. And we learn about the roots of the Fibershed movement, again in California, ahead of the release of our upcoming mini-series Farming Fashion from Fibreshed UK. This episode of Farmerama was made by Jo Barratt, Abby Rose and Olivia Oldham. A big thanks to the rest of the Farmerama team - K...
Oct 30, 2022•27 min
This is a bonus Cereal episode featuring an extended interview with Anne Parry, miller at Felin Ganol watermill in Ceredigion, Wales. Anne features in episode 4 of Cereal: “The Miller is Missing”. In this episode, Anne shares how she and her husband Andy restored and revived their historic watermill, and explains how the Welsh Grain Forum is working to rebuild local grain economies. If you haven’t listened to our Cereal series yet, we’d really encourage you to check it out. Listen here: www.farm...
Oct 02, 2022•12 min
‘Cereal’ bonus episode: Scotland the Bread This is a bonus Cereal episode featuring an extended interview with Connie Hunter, Miller-Manager at Scotland the Bread, “a collaborative project to grow better grain and bake better bread”, based at the Bowhouse in Fife, Scotland. Connie features in episode 4 of Cereal: “The Miller is Missing”. Connie mills small batches of heritage grain using a cool-running Zentrofan mill. She explains the many benefits of using fresh flour, and tells us a bit about ...
Sep 25, 2022•9 min
This is a bonus Cereal episode featuring an extended interview with Fintan Keenan, a regenerative grain farmer, miller and mill designer living in Denmark. Fintan features in episode 4 of Cereal: “The Miller is Missing”. Abby Rose spoke to Fintan at PX+ festival. Fintan tells us about his innovative hybrid stone/roller mill – which allows millers to produce a huge range of flours while retaining the whole grain – and shares his vision of what it will take to rebuild local grain economies around ...
Sep 18, 2022•12 min
This is a bonus Cereal episode featuring an extended interview with Angus McDowall and Alison Campbell of Mungoswells Malt and Milling in East Lothian, Scotland. Angus and Alison feature in episode 4 of Cereal: “The Miller is Missing”. In this episode, Angus explains how he – accidentally! – came to be milling the grain he grows on his 550-acre farm, and Alison gives us a tour of their very unusual Swiss Army flour mill. If you haven’t listened to our Cereal series yet, we’d really encourage you...
Sep 11, 2022•11 min
Welcome to Cultivating Justice! Our 6-part series in collaboration with Land In Our Names (LION) and Out on the Land (OOTL, part of The Landworker’s Alliance) which weaves together interviews, conversations, music and reflections from Black people, people of colour, trans people, queer people and women, on their relationships with land, growing, and identity. In the final episode of this series, our producer, Katie Revell, hosts alongside LION’s Sam Siva and OOTL’s Hester Russell, who add their ...
Jul 31, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Welcome to Cultivating Justice! Our 6-part series in collaboration with Land In Our Names (LION) and Out on the Land (OOTL, part of The Landworker’s Alliance) which weaves together interviews, conversations, music and reflections from Black people, people of colour, trans people, queer people and women, on their relationships with land, growing, and identity. Our host for episode 5 is Marcus MacDonald – Land in Our Names member, grower, tour manager and organiser. Marcus takes us on an auditory ...
Jul 24, 2022•46 min
Welcome to Cultivating Justice! Our 6-part series in collaboration with Land In Our Names (LION) and Out on the Land (OOTL, part of The Landworker’s Alliance) which weaves together interviews, conversations, music and reflections from Black people, people of colour, trans people, queer people and women, on their relationships with land, growing, and identity. Episode 4 is hosted by Hester Russell and Zoe Miles, who are both from Out on the Land (OOTL), and also involved in an emerging grower’s u...
Jul 17, 2022•48 min
Welcome to Cultivating Justice! Our 6-part series in collaboration with Land In Our Names (LION) and Out on the Land (OOTL, part of The Landworker’s Alliance) which weaves together interviews, conversations, music and reflections from Black people, people of colour, trans people, queer people and women, on their relationships with land, growing, and identity. Episode 3 is hosted by LION’s Sam Siva and Farmerama’s Dora Taylor. In this episode, we dig into the practices and meanings around callalo...
Jul 10, 2022•32 min
Welcome to Cultivating Justice! Our 6-part series in collaboration with Land In Our Names (LION) and Out on the Land (OOTL, part of The Landworker’s Alliance) which weaves together interviews, conversations, music and reflections from Black people, people of colour, trans people, queer people and women, on their relationships with land, growing, and identity. Episode 2 is hosted by Assistant Producer Nadia Mehdi and Farmerama’s Abby Rose. Woven throughout we are taken to the fields, pots and all...
Jul 03, 2022•44 min
Welcome to Cultivating Justice! Our 6-part series in collaboration with Land In Our Names (LION) and Out on the Land (OOTL, part of The Landworker’s Alliance) which weaves together interviews, conversations, music and reflections from Black people, people of colour, trans people, queer people and women, on their relationships with land, growing, and identity. Episode 1 is hosted by OOTL’s Hester Russell and LION’s Sam Siva. Woven throughout we are taken to the fields, pots and allotments of a ch...
Jun 26, 2022•51 min
This month, our first stop is UK Grain Lab, a gathering in Nottingham of farmers, millers, bakers and scientists who are building a new grain system for the UK. We speak to baker Kate Hamblin and miller David Howell about their close working relationship Next, we head to Aotearoa New Zealand, and hear from Jake Clarke, the head farmer at Organic Market Garden - or OMG - a model farm set up by For the Love of Bees in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Finally, we share a preview from our upcoming series, C...
May 29, 2022•23 min
This month we hear from three practitioners about what it takes to transform minds and hearts. Firstly we hear from Bea Alvarez, Climate Resilience Projects & Outreach Coordinator at Carbon Sink Farms and Foodshed in San Diego County, California abouut how collaborations between multiple farmers and indigenous landholders have built a new vision for the food and farming system there. Clare Hill at FAI Farms tells us about her journey, moving towards a regenerative farming system and we hear ...
Apr 24, 2022•36 min
This month we have voices on three continents. We begin talking to Juani Lisboa, part of a natural cider-making collective in Chile - Agricola sin Patrones - who are working to support more diverse rural ecosystems. Then our co-creator Abby Rose puts her Vidacycle hat on and talks to agroecologist Nicole Masters about a powerful new tool they worked on together - the Soilmentor Regen Platform - which uses the 10 Regen Indicators to help farmers learn from their in-field observations. And finally...
Mar 27, 2022•34 min
This month we hear about the new food and farming media and how the two are becoming ever closer, we head to a medicinal CSA and we end with a technology that may be part of our toolkit for a regenerative future. This episode of Farmerama was made by Jo Barratt, Abby Rose and Olivia Oldham. A big thanks to the rest of the Farmerama team Katie Revell, Fran Bailey, Annie Landless, Eliza Jenkins and Dora Taylor. Our theme music is by Owen Barratt. We’re very grateful to those of you that support us...
Feb 28, 2022•30 min
In this month’s episode, we bring you three conversations with farmers and researchers who spoke at this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference. First, we hear from John Letts - a wheat grower and crop developer living in Buckinghamshire, known for growing heritage grains. He joins us to explain Continuous cropping, something that got a lot of attention this year at the ORFC. Next, we speak to Frances Northrop, who works for the New Economics Foundation and is an associate fellow specialising in ...
Jan 30, 2022•29 min
This month we hear about more resilient grape varieties and growing grapes in the UK from new grower Victoria Vine Lizard, we are offered a mind bending new way of understanding what soil is from Rothamsted research scientist Andy Neal and you can sit back and relax as we take you on a farm tour on the other side of the world with Greg Hart of Mangarara Station in Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s been a long year and we don’t know about you, but here at the Farmerama team we are pretty exhausted. We w...
Dec 26, 2021•26 min
This month, we’re heading to Glasgow to bring you three stories from the fringes of the COP26 conference. We’ll hear from Tenement Veg about the challenges of growing food in Scotland’s largest city. We’ll highlight Nourish Scotland’s involvement at the conference, and speak to Warami Jackson and Marlon Opigo, two participants in Feedback’s “participatory action research”- an innovative and inclusive project researching young people’s experience of the food system. We’ll visit the Landworkers’ A...
Nov 28, 2021•42 min
This month we speak to Cumbrian sheep farmer and celebrated author James Rebanks about the collective discovery of aligned interests of farmers as they are regenerating their landscapes together. And Abby has visited, Erica ten Broeke, Landscape Manager at Commonland, a Dutch NGO that bring a holistic approach to landscape restoration as initiator, catalyst and enabler of large-scale, long-term restoration initiatives. This episode of Farmerama was made by Jo Barratt, Abby Rose and Olivia Oldham...
Oct 31, 2021•34 min
This month we begin with a story from Rosie Bristow, MSc student of Fashion and Textile Management based at Phantassie Organic Farm in Scotland. We learn from Rosie about a farm to fashion project she’s pioneering as part of her studies, to prototype a UK textile economy in collaboration with George Young at Fobbing Farm in Essex. Next, we head to Uganda, where we hear from Noah Ssempijja of YICE (Youth Initiative for Community Empowerment), a social enterprise focused on providing smallholder f...
Sep 26, 2021•35 min
So if, as it turns out, the family farm is a colonial concept, what are the alternatives? And if we’re to address the tangled mess of challenges we’re faced with – the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, farmer burnout, food inequality and the need for reparations – then perhaps we need to be thinking not at the scale of the individual farm, but of the entire landscape. In this final episode, Col explores the patchwork of pre- and post-colonial land relations that already exist across Scotland...
Aug 08, 2021•48 min
In Part 2, farmer’s son Col Gordon explored the ways in which the colonisation of Highland Scotland destroyed a rich pre-colonial culture and relationship to the land. But in Part 3, he learns that the story of Scotland as the victim of colonial practices is just one part of a much bigger narrative. The Highlands is one of the least racially diverse parts of the UK, and it would be easy to think of the area as far removed from the UK’s grim colonial history – a place where racial justice and rep...
Jul 25, 2021•53 min
Over the last 250 years, Gaelic culture in the Highlands of Scotland has experienced what academic Iain MacKinnon refers to as “cultural devastation”. For farmer’s son, Col Gordon, the forced displacement of people during the Highland Clearances, and the dismantling of Gaelic language and traditions, are best understood through the lens of colonisation. Now, only small pockets of Gaelic culture remain, detached from the conditions and ways of life that they evolved in. In this episode, Col learn...
Jul 11, 2021•48 min
“What if we’ve been getting this wrong?” Col Gordon is a farmer’s son from the Scottish Highlands. After a decade away, he’s finally returned to the place that he loves: his family farm. Now, he’s eager to start realising his vision for an agroecological future: a future in which rural areas are alive with culture, many more people work on the land, farms operate in sympathy with nature, and nutritious food is available to everyone in society. But now that he’s back, Col’s starting to wonder whe...
Jun 27, 2021•31 min
This month we are introduced to the importance of ecosystem architecture by a forest ecologist and winegrower. We hear from two researchers investigating a shift in how we understand our relationship with the natural world - from one where humans are in control, to one where we work with other life-forms and biological processes to build human and ecosystem health. And we finish hearing one grower’s experience of implementing regenerative techniques on her flower farm.
May 30, 2021•33 min
This month we start with a fond farewell to internationally renowned water specialist Professor Tony Allen, most noted for his pioneering work on the concept of virtual water. We’ll hear a conversation with him from 2017 about the OurField Project. We then hear from the Kindling Trust. They work on a range of projects that model a fairer, more responsible, ecologically restorative food system, and are opening up an opportunity to invest in their new farming endeavours in Manchester. Next, farmer...
Apr 26, 2021•36 min
This month, we learn from an entomologist in Wiltshire about the importance of dung beetles in our farming systems. We hear how a medical herbalist in London is bringing people together to care for and heal each other and a soil microbiologist shares how restoring hydrological cycles is vital in mitigating the climate crisis and how the soil carbon sponge is core to that.
Mar 28, 2021•34 min
