The Extraordinary Benefits of Atlantic Temperate Rainforests with Merlin Hanbury-Tenison
The FarmED PodcastShow Notes
‘We are a rainforest people, who live in a rainforest nation,’ says conservationist and writer, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, speaking to Alex Dye on The FarmED Podcast and explaining why these ancient forests are so vital for combating climate change as well as for our own wellbeing. In his bestselling memoir, ‘OurThe Oaken Bones,’ Merlin talks about how, while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan, his armoured vehicle was hit by a landmine that momentarily blinded and deafened him, leaving him with PTSD. His wife Lizzie suffered several miscarriages and his father was hospitalised with Covid. ‘I felt so extremely lucky and privileged to have the farm at home and to be able to go and hide and retreat and heal within what we knew as the old oak woodland at Cabilla,’ Merlin explains. It was thanks to Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforest of Britain and David Attenborough who talked about rainforests in his Wild Isles series, that led to the discovery that the forest at Cabilla was much older than they’d originally realised, part of the Atlantic temperate rainforest, mythologised in stories and legends, which would once have cloaked much of Britain. When Merlin and Lizzie moved back to Cabilla seven years ago they wondered: ‘How do we make a living from this land? How do we restore the land as well? Agricultural consultants advised them to cut down the trees but instead they planted another 100,000, tripling the rainforest area, and brought back beavers. ‘The whole point is that it turns into a lower-yield conservation-grazing agroforestry scheme,’ Merlin tells Alex. ‘Atlantic temperate rainforests are a pinnacle habitat in the UK for a number of different ecosystem services. For example, they are one of our most effective carbon sequesterers. So at a time of climate crisis when we need habitats that absorb and sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere, nothing does that more effectively terrestrially in terms of what we can protect and restore than Atlantic temperate rainforests.’ Merlin and Lizzie have created a wellness retreat at Cabilla, so that others, including veterans and NHS staff suffering from burnout, can benefit from the psychological and physiological restorative properties of the rainforest. They have also established The Thousand Year Trust. The Trust is so named because it aims to pull people out of short-term thinking, ‘You see a lot of articles at the moment saying things like, can we reverse climate change by 2030? We absolutely can't. But could we reverse it by 3020? Well, yes, we could. We can set the conditions and it will be something that the next 20 generations will work on and then we'll get back to a place of climate health. And I think that the ability to think in multi-generational timeframes is really important.’ Hear how The Thousand Year Trust is also crowdfunding to build Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research field station, a place where scientists from across the world, can study these extraordinary habitats. Discover More: Cabilla Cornwall: https://www.cabillacornwall.com/ Thousand Year Trust: https://thousandyeartrust.org/
More from The FarmED Podcast
This month, Alex talks to Dr Ellen Fallows, a leader in the discipline of Lifestyle Medicine. Dr Fallows has over 15 years experience as a GP and Oxford University trained doctor and she begins by explaining how the term regenerative farming and lifestyle medicine make the ‘same sense.’ She discusses how lifestyle medicine ‘gives people the options beyond pills,’ and how ‘increasingly, reassuringly, I'm seeing that the public are asking for this’ but how she worries about the wellness trend on social media because ‘we're very vulnerable to people selling us things we don't need’. ‘This is where the lifestyle medicine community really has to step in,’ she says. She also describes the GLP1 medicines for weight loss, the benefits of fasting and why the NHS should look at prescribing food.
Presenter of the FarmED Podcast, Alex Dye, caught up with journalist, educator, author and founder of Just Farmers, Anna Jones, earlier this summer, just before Cereals and Groundswell. It’s a fascinating conversation during which Anna recalls her early career working as a newspaper journalist and making the move to the BBC where she worked as a reporter for the flagship ‘Countryfile’ and Radio 4’s ‘Farming Today’ as well as a brief stint as Farming and Countryside Advisor on The Archers. Her Nuffield Scholarship looked at the barriers to communication for farmers negotiating mainstream media. This led her to establish Just Farmers as a way to create opportunities for farmers to engage with journalists. ‘They can see that we're just normal people, too, trying to do a job in stressful circumstances like farmers. You know, we're up against deadlines, and I always say journalists are as obsessed with time as farmers are with weather. So, if you can understand the pressures that weather puts on you as a farmer, you can understand the pressures the clock puts on journalists and why they can be so impatient. So, let's try and understand each other better.’
Warming: Contains Strong Language Earlier this summer, Alex Dye spoke to one of our previous podcast guests, Sally-Ann Spence, after winning Britain’s Got Talent as part of the Hawkstone Choir. Sally was back in the Cotswolds to sing with the choir at the Cereals event and popped into our studio to give us an update.
This month Alex is talking to Katie Ward, MD of Microbz, a unique family business that’s on a mission to encourage everyone to reconnect with the power of microbes by embracing a probiotic life, not just using them in our bodies but also for our pets, in our homes and gardens, and on our farms. It all began when Katie’s dad, Jeff, returned from a trip to Europe and Australia where he’d seen a new technology that excited him: Microbial Balancing Technology. He saw a solution for the planet and started brewing jars in his kitchen. Katie talks to Alex about why microbes are the ‘foundations of health’, the amazing results from using Microbz probiotics on fields of oats where the yield increased by 50% and why we all need to ‘move away from a 1980s’ culture of using products in our home to kill 99.9% of microbes. She also explains what ‘swing voter’ microbes are. ‘There are good microbes and there are bad microbes, but there's only about 10% of microbes that are good and 10% of microbes that are bad. The rest we call swing voters. So in an ecosystem that is more pathogenic, your swing voters go to that side. So if you have food poisoning, you get it very quickly because of the swing voters. If you create an environment that has more beneficial microbes, the swing voters kind of go to that side and create an ecosystem which is balanced.
In this episode of The FarmED Podcast, guest host, Lydia Smith from NIAB talks to Minette Batters, the first woman to be President of the National Farmers Union, in advance of the publication of her autobiography and farming manifesto, Harvest. The wide-ranging conversation covers everything from how to command respect as the first woman President of the NFU and juggling a high-pressure job with motherhood. Minette talks about the challenges of leading the NFU through Brexit and the pandemic, why she was so angered, on behalf of British farmers, by the trade deal with Australia, the difficult debate around glyphosate and difficult interviews with politicians! She also gets a chance to taste hemp milk and talk about the legal complexities of growing this high carbon capture crop in the UK.