Show Notes
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.
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.
This month, Alex is joined by science communicator Sally-Ann Spence who has spent many years enthusing people about the wonders of the natural world. Her boundless and passionate enthusiasm for the earth sciences has taken her from being a dung beetle expert to ecology, archaeology, paleontology and travelling to fourteen different countries last year exploring sustainable farming. She’s also a member of the fabulous Hawkstone Choir who we hosted at FarmED for rehearsals ahead of their next big day on Britain's Got Talent!