The FarmED Podcast: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World, with Sarah Langford

Mar 26, 2025

Following the huge success of her book, Rooted: Stories of Life, Land, and a Farming Revolution, Sarah Langford has become a voice for the regenerative farming movement and she talks to Alex about her writing and career, her belief that regenerative farming can change the world and what’s next for her.

For nearly a decade, Sarah Langford was a criminal and family barrister.  While on parental leave to have her two children she wrote her debut narrative non-fiction book, In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law.  Part memoir, part narrative account of cases she was involved in, the book sought to shine a light on the unseen, untold stories behind the world of law. In 2017 she moved with her family from London to the Suffolk countryside, expecting to stay for six months. In the end, they stayed for two years, taking on the running of her husband’s small family farm. Their story is woven around the stories of other farmers she met in her second narrative non-fiction book, Rooted: Stories of Life, Land, and a Farming Revolution. Part-memoir, part narrative account of a selection of farmers from around the country, it seeks to shine a light on the world of farming at a critical point in the future of the countryside. Rooted was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for conservation writing. 

Transcript

Alex: There’s a scrabbling in the soil. Claws appear. Feathers fly. But what is this? This is the chicken of chat and it has discovered the FarmED Podcast. Welcome to the FarmED Podcast here at FarmED. My name is Alex Dye and I'm your host for the day. Follow us on our social channels, on Instagram, all the good things. And if you like the podcast, consider subscribing, leave us a review, it really helps. So my guest today is a barrister, not barista, we've mentioned this, we'll leave that, a farmer, someone who comes up in all sorts of regen farming circles around the UK. It's Sarah Langford.

Sarah: Hello.

Alex: Hello, how are you today?

Sarah: I’m very good. I can make a good coffee, but not one that I charge for.

Alex: So like we've just sort of said you were a barrister for quite a while in criminal and family law, right?

Sarah: That’s right.

Alex: And then you're now known across the UK as a bit of a linchpin of region agriculture. So how did you get into farming?

Sarah: Completely by accident. I was, as you say, a criminal and family barrister for 10 years. And I lived in London, but I travelled all over the country to courts in places that you have probably never visited, representing people who were accused of doing terrible things. And then I made a sort of reckless decision if you're a court-based barrister, which is to have not one but two children, which is difficult because you can't take them with you to court. And while I was doing that, when I was pregnant with my second son, I met the woman who is now my literary agent. And I wrote a book called In Your Defence, which was kind of a human take on a system that we're all reliant on and touches our lives every day, but which we know very little about, which was the law, is the law. And while I was writing that, my husband lost his job and we moved from London to Suffolk, which is where we had been going back and forward for years, where he grew up. And we found ourselves kind of renting a cottage at the edge of a field that his parents owned, and his father had just bought 180 acres of arable nearby. Having long held the dream to have a farm and realised this at age 81. 

And so in that kind of glorious naivety that is born out of total ignorance, said, well, we're basically unemployed, we'll manage it, how hard can it be? That was kind of 2017. So it was just after Brexit, and just after the decision that many farmers I think, thought would never actually be realised, which is the end of the Common Agricultural Policy, and the stopping of payments for owning land, and transferring those payments to public money for public good. And so I sort of found myself in the world of farming, at one of the biggest changes to agriculture since the Second World War. And I guess whilst it's completely right to say that I'd been living in the city and had been cut off from the world of agriculture for the whole of my adult life, I did have that in my background. My grandparents were post-war farmers, so my grandfather took on his tenancy in Hampshire five years after wartime rationing ended. My dad was a land agent. Most of our friends growing up were in the farming world. And my uncle, who is called Charlie Flint, was a sort of... Well, actually, I think he probably would... I mean, probably styled himself on being the Jeremy Clarkson of the farming world, which is awkward now that Jeremy Clarkson is actually in the farming world. But Charlie had a column in Farmers Weekly for 25 years called Flint on Friday, where he was just sort of mostly cross about the way that agriculture was going. 

So I, sort of found myself in this odd position where the landscape was shifting, both literally and figuratively. And on one side, I had a very loud man, my uncle, saying all this organic stuff, all this saving the world eco-nonsense is just a load of rubbish, how can we ever feed the world without artificial nitrogen and all the tools that have prevented hunger. On the other hand I had my father who was chair of the Climate Change Committee, who had been an agricultural minister under Margaret Thatcher and was one of the people involved in certifying organic in the 90s, saying this has got to be the only way forward because my daily reading is made up of the consequences of industrial agriculture on the climate.

So I sort of was caught between these two very convinced men and thought, which one is right and how do I go about finding out and that was when I ended up going down this path that I had no plan to go down but it was when the word regenerative was just starting to be talked about in really niche circles like you know you were the ones in the corner at stuff that no one else is really talking about that much.

Alex: People sort of think, oh they're the hippies, the hippies over there.

Sarah: I don't know, yeah, I mean even in the places where there were hippies, it was still, it was quite niche. 

Alex: Even the hippies were thinking, oh no, I don't want to get involved with that. 

Sarah: And you know, here we are, however many years later, with it basically as government policy and having just, I've just come off the back of hosting a two-day sustainability conference which involved basically the people who are running our food system.

All of them were talking about regenerative agriculture. So the speed at which that has motivated is huge. But it wasn't part of, not that I've ever had a life plan, but it certainly wasn't part of my life plan. But once you cross over, it's hard to go back. And so I then had the pretty difficult task of convincing my literary agent that rather than becoming a very lucrative, best-selling crime fiction writer, which was her plan for my career, that I wanted to write about this world in which I found myself, which I thought actually had some parallels to my previous book, in that agriculture also is a system which touches everybody's lives and very few people really understand it, know it or appreciate it until it breaks down like the law. And so initially she just held up her arms and went absolutely no way that is so boring, no one cares about farming, no one's going to read it. And I talked her into it and well I mean there was a wave at the time English Pastoral by James Rebanks hadn't come out yet but there was certainly a building and I could sort of smell it coming I knew it was going to be huge because within the umbrella of regenerative farming or agri-ecological farming you are talking about all of life you're talking about the air we breathe, the water we drink, the world we live in, food security, health, physical and mental health, it's sort of, it's the answer, potentially, to all of it. And I, turns out, well, it worked out alright. 

You know, I think one of the biggest things for Rooted, or rather, my sense that this was the right thing to write about, it was nominated, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, which is the biggest nature writing prize, but it was shortlisted in the conservation category, not the nature writing category. And to have a book about farming, only about farming really, nominated in the conservation category, for me was proof that people are beginning to understand that farming can be the answer and not the problem, can be the solution and not the problem.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So Rooted is your book as we've mentioned, I don't know if we've made that explicitly clear, but it is available in all good bookshops, is that right?

Sarah: I jolly well hope so, yeah.

Alex: So you find yourself in a position where you're now on this farm. Were you not tempted to go down a very commercial route looking at yield, high production, chemicals. You said you had these two people on either side of you talking about regen farming and aspects of that. Was it as simple as saying I'm going to do regen and I'm going to ignore all the rest of that or what was your thinking in terms of regen?

Sarah: Well, we were in the incredibly privileged position of not having to pay our rent or live off the proceeds of the farm. And whilst I was very clear that it had to do much more than wash its face, it could not lose money, it had to make money, we also had other income streams. At that point we're trying to get other income streams, but it meant I felt like we had a sort of duty to experiment and be brave about techniques when other farmers were not in that position, because they couldn't take a punt on a particular crop, because if it failed, then they wouldn't be able to pay their rent. And we weren't in that position.

So that kind of extraordinary privilege of being liberated from that meant that we could be more experimental. I didn't set out on this journey, and I know that's an overused word, but it is what it is, and it feels like it when you're in it as well, and I'm not sure it ever ends, but I did have a sense in not just what I read, but what I saw that we couldn't carry on as we were. So whether that was yields plateauing, whether that was extreme weather where you would get an entire month's rainfall in a day and then no rainfall for two months, you could see it in front of you. You could see out the window, as one dairy farmer said to me about those who were climate change sceptics, it's like it's outside your window, you can't dispute it anymore. So I knew that we couldn't carry on as we were. I knew that we were overproducing enough food globally to feed 3 billion more people than actually exist, that we threw away a third of it, threw away or waste of a third of it, that we were growing grain to feed herbivores and so on.

So the system as it currently was wasn't working. So the idea of just picking it up and doing what had been done, which was on the arable fields, a very conventional rotation of wheat, barley, oilseed rape. And farms with all the chemical tools that had been used up until then. I knew that we had to change that. I didn't know how. I mean, I did go, I took it, like, went to it like a lawyer would and read everything I could and visited as many farms as I could. We were incredibly lucky to have the great John Pawsey down the road, well 40 minutes from us, and he was a mentor to us. He's an organic farmer, but he does it at a very large scale and a commercial scale, which is important. And there were some other organic farmers who are in my book who also helped me a great deal. And then I went and did a postgraduate diploma at Cirencester part-time for two years and just tried to get out there and see as much as possible. And I think that is that was half of the quest in a way. Because it's one of those, I suppose it's like lots of things in the natural world, seeing is believing. And until you've walked through a field that has not had any chemicals on it for 20 years, and it isn't covered in weeds and disease and pests and it is getting a really decent margin of yields off it you sort of have to see it with your own eyes to think that this is completely possible, this is possible.

Alex: That’s that's it that's a very good point to make because we get questions here all the time of lots of farmers young farmers who come to us and they say, regen ag, it's a nice idea but can it actually make ends meet? Will I actually be able to live on that? And it's quite nice to have examples of cases where, yes, you can do it at scale and it does work and it's great.

Sarah: I think for us, we decided to do, we went organic, so we converted to organic. And of course, regenerative isn't certified. It doesn't have an agreed definition.

It's a bit more woolly isn't it?

Sarah: I don't know if I'd say it's woolly, I mean like a friend of mine gives a really good definition to it and the clue is kind of in the title which is that if at the end of your rotation you've got more, if you've regenerated, if you regenerate your soils, what's below ground, what's above ground, then you are regenerating. And I think regenerative agriculture stands on the shoulders of the work that the organic movement did for so long because a lot of the techniques that people use within it are organic techniques whether that's green manures or cover cropping or so on. But going organic in a couple of fields that have.

Alex: Sorry, can I just interrupt you really quickly and just say. Yeah, yeah. That was a fantastic description of regen. Um this is that's definitely gonna be on the Instagram feature. So, hello, Instagram. Nice to see you that because that was perfect. That's a perfect little sound back there. Sorry.

Sarah: Going organic where you're basically if you sort of think about the soil as being a heroin addict and it had had…

Alex: That wasn’t where I thought this was going. 

Sarah: Well, it you know, there's a cold turkey element to it if you take away if you take away what it's become dependent to grow cold turkey, there are consequences to it. And it's not necessarily a straightforward transition. You get money from the government to go through your two years of certification for organic and then you get a little bit of money to cover your yield loss, which there is a loss in yield. But where there's a loss in yield, you are missing a column on your end of year spreadsheet which is monthly spraying schedule so you're looking at operations and seed and that is the consequence I suppose, not looking at profit instead of yield, it’s a consequence of the government paying a big fat cheque, well a cheque, into your bank account every December whether you have had a good year or a bad year. And because that buffer is coming, the amount of profit in your account is less important, still important but less important, that doesn't happen anymore. There is no big fat cheque arriving in December anymore, it's gone. And I think that is the thing which is so underrated still, amongst a lot of people is, the sustainable farming incentive, whilst flawed, and whilst we can have niche arguments that no one will listen to about what, how it should be done better, it's a radical government policy. And I don't think that there are that any other governments in the world doing it where they are paying farmers to change the way they grow food, not take land out of production, not flowers around the edges, but how they grow food and paying them to do that. And that could be the £45 that you get for no insecticide, for agroforestry, for bi-cropping, for under-sowing, all of that is now covered within a sustainable farming incentive. It's a pretty kind of radical, it's very complex, but it's a pretty radical policy. Yeah, great.

Alex: Yeah, great. So your book, Rooted, available in stores now, had the subtitle of how regenerative farming can save the world. Do you still think that it can? Are you still hopeful about that? And how do you think it can?

Sarah: I mean, it's a punchy subtitle. It was how it could change the world, I think, if I've remembered it right.

Alex: Yes, sorry, yes. And the reason I put change rather than save was because I think, I mean, the book is a bit like my first one. It's part memoir and it's part narrative non-fiction, sort of stories of the people who taught me what it meant to be a farmer. And the memoir side of it is as much about me growing as learning about growing. Because it is, there are so many stories that I was told and heard from farmers who'd been doing this for a very long time that I thought, my God, this is advice for life. It's not just advice for how to grow a good wheat crop. I remember one small example and I was standing in front of a field of barley with one of the farmers who's been an organic farmer for 25 years. I think if you turned organic 25 years ago, you have to be a bit of a maverick, because most people thought you were mad. And there wasn't a huge amount of incentive to do it. And I looked at, I was looking at this barley and I went, oh, this is a disaster. It's a disaster. Look, all I can see a wild oats, which I didn't want to be there. And he went, isn't that funny? All I can see is barley. And as soon as he said it, the way I saw the entire field changed. And I thought, even in that, if you focus on something, if you focus on the negative and what you don't want to be there, that will be all you can see. And if you flip it, you end up with a totally different image in front of you and attitude about it. That is advice that we can apply to every part of our life. And I kept coming across these small, but they're not small, they're huge, ways of looking at the world, whether that's what we feel about our connection with nature, whether we, our sense of home and belonging, how I don't think you need to be born in a particular place to feel rooted to it. You can grow roots wherever you are, but how you do that. All of these different kind of parts about what weave life and community and purpose together, they reach way beyond the field. And it felt like people, especially in cities where you are cut off so much from the natural world, but there is such a yearning and a searching for something which is connected, which you can sort of see in this multi-billion dollar wellness industry, which is trying to fill this vacuum. And I saw it all the time in the way that farmers talked, the way they interacted with their farms and their animals and their connection with the natural world. I thought, you know, all of these people who are sitting in Lululemon leggings kind of omming in a studio in Westbourne Grove, like that's what they're looking for, that sense of rootedness and connection and purpose and meaning. All of these guys who represent just 1% of the UK workforce, who are so...what they produce is so woefully undervalued that a chicken costs less than a pint, and bottled milk costs less than bottled water, and you know, a takeaway coffee is £4.50 and a loaf of bread is £1.50. The people who make the stuff which is so woefully undervalued have got a way of living in the world and experiencing the world that so many in the city are looking for and imagine if we learned a lesson about life from them that went beyond the farm gate. 

Sarah: And do you feel that your life has, your life and your outlook has changed as a result of being on the land a bit more? 

Sarah: Radically, radically changed the way…I mean you can get evangelical about it so I won't, it's a bit like finding God. You just, you sort of, those who have also been also down the same path get it. And it feels like a veil lifting. It makes you see the world different, it makes you see your place in the world differently. It’s an extraordinary gift. Given that we live in a country where 87% of the population live in urban areas its a gift that lots of people are denied. Although when people say that they don’t like nature, or they don’t understand nature or nature people. I think everyone has a love of nature intrinsically in then and you see it in kids. When we teach our kids to wash dirt of their hands or not touch the nettle in case they get stung or all the things where we basically push nature into one corner and us in another. I think that is, that's this separation from us from the natural world. 

Alex: You are right and I think approaching kids about a lot of these things is the way forwards in a lot of ways.  If you can reach them before they’ve learned…I’m an entomologist, when I have an event and I show kids around and show them insects, it’s amazing the number of parents or adults who will go oh don't don't touch that that's nasty that's dangerous that's scary that's this that's that the other and if you sort of come over and say well that's that's actually not as dangerous as you might think it doesn't sting it doesn't bite it's before the kids learn that something is squishy or gross or weird, it's quite a good way to get them because they are so open-minded and receptive to so many of these different things.

Sarah: Our definition of nature. And there's a caveat to this. If you look up in the dictionary what nature is, it's defined as being separate from us, things that aren’t human. There’s a group called Lawyers for Nature who three months ago got that changed, which is, seems like semantics, but isn't, because the way you look at something, the prims through which you look at something informs the way you look at it. 

Alex: We are a part of nature, is that what it is? 

Sarah: I think both the new one and the old one are still in there. But yes, yeah, the idea that we aren't nature, I think lies at the heart of many of the problems of our food system and the way we have treated the natural world since the industrial revolution and realising that we're part of it, is part of the solution. 

Alex: So you’ve been on this regen journey. You’ve become this big character in the world of regen in the UK and you’ve got your book, Rooted, available in store now. I'll do the promo for you.

Sarah: I mean, it came out in 2022, but it's definitely. That's still relevant. You know, they'll get it for you if you ask for it, I hope.

Alex: Is that an open invitation to anyone, any of our listeners, or they have to pay?

Sarah: Oh no, they have to pay. Not me, though. Waterstones, wherever they're getting it from, whatever local bookshop they're getting it from.

Alex: So anyway, anyway, sorry, anyway. So you've been on the Regen journey, you've become a bit of a name, you've put your book out. You've become, well, I suppose you've, I've come into the Regen scene from a slightly different angle than most, because being from a law background, you probably are much more aware of how some of these things can be changed on a policy level. I mean, is that a fair comment? How do you feel your life... How do you think things have changed since the book came out?

Sarah: Oh my gosh. I didn't know that my presence has changed anything in the scene. I do think that the timing, I do think I was right about the timing and I could feel this wave beginning because all the threads were coming together and you could see it was going in one way and so I'll give myself credit for that I won't give myself any credit for changing anything apart from I suppose I guess being able to give people who don't have a microphone a microphone, even if it's written. I was really, it was really important to me in both Rooted and my first book In Your Defence to feature just ordinary people who didn't have a platform, didn't have a microphone, didn't have a podcast. They were just getting on with it and no one knew about them, but they were sort of the backbone to everything. And I mean, I hope that in part that's what I've been able to do is through the book, just tell the stories of ordinary farmers. I mean, there is no such thing though, really, as an ordinary farmer. All of the people in it are extraordinary and have been on their own sort of journeys but I suppose I wanted to say through telling those stories it's possible you can do this, we can all do this. You don't have to be a policymaker, you don't have to have a particular brain or background, you just have to have maybe just bloody mindedness, maybe that's the unifying factor amongst them all is the ability to go I know this is not what I want to do and I'm going to figure out a way to do it differently. That decision is far easier now than it was five years ago, let alone 25 years ago. And you just need to look at events like Groundswell, which is the Regen farming festival in June, which started with 450 farmers in a shed six years ago, seven years ago.

Alex: And now it’s like the farming Glastonbury.  

Sarah: Eight and a half thousand people, including all the big players like Nestle and all the rest of it and Defra and, you know, shadow ministers and, you know, people who run the global food system. They're all there. That's how quickly it's moved. 

Alex: So to turn to your farm, over the past seven years, how would you say your farm has changed? Does it look, I assume it looks totally different from when you first started. 

Sarah: Yeah, I think that one of the things that I've heard the most and have experienced directly from other people who have gone into regenerative farming, which basically means for most people relying on natural systems rather than chemical ones. But rather than organic, where you just start the clock and you just stop putting anything on, no artificial fertilizers, no pesticides, there can be a kind of gradual weaning to allow your biological systems to recover and to reboot.

There is this realization that given half a chance, nature comes back so much faster than you think. I mean, one farmer I know called it crikey farming because he kept going, crikey, I didn't expect that to happen. Crikey, look at that. Or even I was walking in a herbal lay from Cotswolds Foods, a herbal lay that we use in our rotation both as a break, so to break fungal disease, pests, weeds, but also as a sort of bank, to bank loads of fertility for our next big crop, which is wheat, walking through that with our contractor and a bird sort of took off from our feet and he stopped and he went blimey look at that I said what is it he went snipe I haven't seen one of those in 10 years and I could see him think the only reason it's here is because of the way we're doing it differently. So you get these little examples all the time whether it's wildflowers up the bank which came back within a year of not spraying glyphosate you get a bumper of primroses or you know a whole all sorts of flowers that people who live at the end of the lane, you know, they hadn't seen them and they'd forgotten that they grew there once and now they're back. But you see it across all sorts of examples, our worst field where we had really bad black grass an arable weed, where we had I think sprayed on our last conventional year three times and then got five Lithuanian guys to pull them out by hand that was the first field that went into a break into a herbal ley like a mixture of all sorts of herbs plants legumes and so on.

Alex: Very soil improving.

Sarah: Oh it was a transformation it was a transformation and I think that is what gets people. That’s what gets people going is the fact that they can see it quite quickly like three years it looks and not just looks but…there’s a there was a woman in our in the village in Suffolk who grabbed me in the high street a couple of years ago and she went, I know who you are and I walk over your fields because there's a public footpath there and I say to my husband every time, it smells different, can you smell it? It smells different. And I sort of agree with her, I think she's right, it does. So it's not, it completely depends on the history of the field, the farm, and where it is. But I think that's the thing that keeps people going on it. Because it isn't easy. It's much easier to farm by spreadsheet than it is to have to respond farming where you're going out there thinking, why is that weed growing there? What's happening underneath the ground in order for that to go there? Is it compaction? What should I do about it? Why is it flooded here and not up there? What is happening? Should I grow these two crops together rather than separate them out? To be constantly measuring and evaluating is much more complicated. And you have to become a botanist and an ecologist rather than an agronomist. And that's not necessarily easy, but it also gives back the intellectual challenge to the job.It’s interesting.

Alex: And to touch on what you said before about people engaging the senses, being able to smell a difference, being able to see a difference. I don't think it doesn't even take an expert to notice that. Because we've had times where we've had people who come on our farm walk to have a look around our sites. And we go over to the kitchen garden where we grow a lot of our vegetables and pulling up a carrot and sniffing a carrot, a fresh carrot straight out of the ground that's not been grown with any chemicals. It's amazing some people who say wow that's not what I was expecting, I can't believe that. So I think it is in built in us and on a you know not a genetic biological level we know what's right, we know what's natural, we know what we like. I think you're right and anyone who doesn't take an expert to be able to spot that. 

Sarah: Well food tastes and smells delicious for a reason because it wants to continue its seed cycle and so when you get a raspberry from a wild raspberry the reason it sort of tastes like an explosion in your mouth is because it's trying to get yo,  it's trying to be eaten And when you get a pallet of raspberries from the supermarket and a plastic packet why it's incomparable in terms of its texture and taste especially if they're grown out of season at some random time of year. Or have just been on a ship on the way over, having been picked God knows when. You know the flavour that we have in foods is directly, I mean it's been an evidence gap that's now being filled along with nutrition, it's directly related to what's in the soil when it's grown. Because if a plant's allowed to communicate through mycorrhizal networks under the soil, allowed to defend itself, allowed to ward off pests. Part of that is all the micronutrients that give it flavour and smell and taste because it wants to be attractive so that it can continue to reproduce when the seeds come out the other end. I mean, it's part of its motive is to keep itself alive. I mean, it's why you now hear of roses that don't smell anymore or pansies that have changed how they are fertilized because there aren't enough pollinators to fertilize it so they've started doing wind pollination. I mean it is the flavor I think we are starting to get the evidence for is a really good indicator of nutrient value.

Alex: So you've come into the world of regen, you've found yourself in contempt of writing a good book, we can cut that. So what's your next project, what's the next big thing that you're looking forward to?

Sarah: Well I am still in the process of writing a proposal, I'm on draft something like 14 of a proposal which I hope is going to join both books up. And I won't say too much about it because I haven't actually sold it yet, let alone written it. But I think the other, a bit like Rooted, when you felt the edges of it, you felt the edges of something big happening. I think this is the thing that I can see now, which is about our relationship, our as in people's relationship with the law and democracy and who holds power and who can make change. And I see a kind of real sort of growing movement in people being incredibly frustrated with government and what short term government can do no matter who's in there, that we need long-term problem-solving which don't fit in a five-year election cycle. And I think we all think of ourselves as quite infantilised, like the government are our parents, we therefore have to do what they tell us, which to an extent is true, but I know from 10 years in a courtroom that the law is not God-given. The law reflects what society wants. We make the law. We empower our lawmakers to put it into statute or into common law, but it reflects what we want. And you can look at so many examples in history of that, whether that's been the suffrage movement or gay marriage or whatever it is. 

Now, the climate crisis and what is happening in our natural world is one of the things that regularly comes up in surveys as being the thing that people are most worried about, as they should be, because it has never had a column in our capitalist spreadsheet and has been woefully undervalued, but ultimately is the thing that we all depend on for everything, food, water, clean air, the rest of it. And so I think we're at this kind of tipping point now where people are saying the law does not reflect what we need to happen. And how do we change that? Do we break the law, so that we get arrested and make a case out of it? And the jury decisions in those cases have been completely fascinating about what the juries say. Do we evade the law? Do we run around, do we drive around the country releasing beavers out the back of a transit van, for example, and prove our point in the process and wait for the government to catch up. How do we change the law when the law has not kept up with what we society need? And I think you just need to look at the growth of things like Lawyers for Nature and others in that realm where you've got companies now who are putting nature on their boards so there will be someone on their board whose only job it is to look at every decision that comes in through the eyes of, or the lens of, what would be the best decision for nature. Not for the company, not for shareholders, but for nature. And this brilliant campaign that Client Earth have been running about if a shareholder’s motive  is not how can I make this company the most profit next year, but can this company still survive in 20 years time? If it depletes the natural resource that inevitably that company relies on, that's not complying with your fiduciary duty as a shareholder. So if you say your fiduciary duty is to keep the company alive, you've got to invest in the natural system to do that. So how you kind of use and frame the law to basically do what a lot of people say that they want to happen and which we need to happen, which is restore, woefully depleted biodiversity, then that I think is a kind of way around it. So I, I kind of I hope I hope I'm right about this, but I can sort of feel it, I can feel that energy coming around it, around activists being more empowered and using very clever things like social media and the ability of having a computer in their pocket to spread that word and that companies and the law are starting to wake up to it. And, but I, a bit like the other two, I want to be able to go at it through human stories, say we are all way more powerful than we think we are. We mustn't let ourselves feel infantilized and disempowered. We do have the ability to do this on multiple different scales. We don't have to be Chris Packham with a microphone on stage. There are other ways of doing this and that collectively we all can change the world. I've just got to write it now.

Alex: Fantastic. So, for our viewers at home who are probably listening to what you've been saying and thinking, what can I do? What do you think is your take home message for them? What's something that they can, even if it's just something to think about, what do you think is your positive, hopeful note we can wrap things up on?

Sarah: I do this with the caveat that we're all human and flawed. And so when, as I last week heard Patrick Holden, the brilliant Patrick Holden, who is a great hero of mine, confess to really loving skittles, the fact that if we live in the real world and there is no purity pyramid that some people get to sit on the top at and cast judgment on everyone else, we're all flawed. It doesn't mean that you're either in the camp or out the camp. You just make that decision and then put it behind you and then move on to the next one.

I think the thing that all of us have within our gift is that we all make choices every day and we are only given the information we're given, but that has now never been easier to check. So whilst I appreciate having got two kids, that the idea of looking at every label in a supermarket is unrealistic when you're shopping with two small children. Consumer power is still power. The reason that we're sold what we're sold is because we buy it. Whether that's clothes, whether that's electronic goods, whether that's food. And so every time we make a decision about whether we're going to buy something or not, that is making a choice for what we want our future to look like. And I think we think that it doesn't make a difference but collectively it really does. So you're saying for people to think about where they sit in the system and vote with their wallets on the future they want? Yeah, shops will sell us what we tell them we want to buy. It's as straightforward as that commercially. So if you care about it, and you want to see something different put your money literally where your mouth is in terms of your consumer decisions.

Alex: Great. Well, thank you so much for coming in for a chat. I don't know about you, but I'm guilty of enjoying this conversation.

Sarah: I think that's okay. I've done my job as well.

Alex: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much again. It's been great having you here. Love to have a chat. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today on the FarmED Podcast. Please do check us out on all the social media. Give us a like, give us a subscribe, follow us wherever we go, and we will see you next. Give us a like, give us a subscribe, follow us wherever we go, and we will see you next time on the FarmED Podcast.