Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Last year, a third more tenancies were awarded to new entrants than 10 years ago. Many are breaking the rules, and promising to restore not just soil health, but the value of the industry
Thirty-year-old Sarah Dusgate never imagined she would become the first new tenant at New House Farm in a century. For a hundred years, a single family had dedicated itself to cattle, sheep, pigs and cereal production across 240 acres of gently rolling Monmouthshire hills. When the final generation retired, the Bosanquet family, who have owned the land since the 1800s, searched for someone new.
Dusgate stumbled across their advertisement online. Despite growing up in rural Wales, she was not fromfarming stock. After studying veterinary science, Dusgate worked for an agricultural charity where she found herself “inspired by the principles of regenerative farming and mob grazing”, a way of farming that “focused on soil health, organic matter, water quality and reducing artificial inputs”.
Yearning for the practicality of hands-on farming — “No number of Zoom meetings can compare to the tangible win of fixing a leaking water trough!” — she took on part-time and weekend farm work. A job rearing cattle across thousands of acres followed, transitioning herds from conventional to regenerative systems. “My eyes were opened to a whole new way of managing land and livestock,” Dusgate says. “It was the best job and lifestyle satisfaction than I’d found anywhere else”.
Dusgate is one of a new wave of climate-aware, digitally savvy millennials looking for a life of purpose beyond a desk-based nine-to-five, and finding their way into farming. In an industry where the average age is 59, Alex Cherry, co-founder of the UK’s regenerative farming festival Groundswell, says this change is reflected in this year’s event’s 8,000 attendees, “55 per cent of whom are under 50”. Regenerative practices are encouraging “a new era of farming talent” among “younger people who might otherwise have been turned off by conventional farming”.
But the challenges of breaking into the industry — and making a living once you have done so — explain why the British Farming Awards has a prize called the “New Entrant Award: Against the Odds”.
Thirty-year-old Sarah Dusgate never imagined she would become the first new tenant at New House Farm in a century. For a hundred years, a single family had dedicated itself to cattle, sheep, pigs and cereal production across 240 acres of gently rolling Monmouthshire hills. When the final generation retired, the Bosanquet family, who have owned the land since the 1800s, searched for someone new.
Dusgate stumbled across their advertisement online. Despite growing up in rural Wales, she was not fromfarming stock. After studying veterinary science, Dusgate worked for an agricultural charity where she found herself “inspired by the principles of regenerative farming and mob grazing”, a way of farming that “focused on soil health, organic matter, water quality and reducing artificial inputs”.
Yearning for the practicality of hands-on farming — “No number of Zoom meetings can compare to the tangible win of fixing a leaking water trough!” — she took on part-time and weekend farm work. A job rearing cattle across thousands of acres followed, transitioning herds from conventional to regenerative systems. “My eyes were opened to a whole new way of managing land and livestock,” Dusgate says. “It was the best job and lifestyle satisfaction than I’d found anywhere else”.
But the challenges of breaking into the industry — and making a living once you have done so — explain why the British Farming Awards has a prize called the “New Entrant Award: Against the Odds”.
Until now, becoming a farmer was a job that was usually inherited, along with the land, machinery and knowledge. The cost of UK farmland is second only to that of the Netherlands. In 2024 an acre of the best arable soil sold (on a sale of more than 100 acres) for the record high of £17,000. As a result, a third of British farms are tenanted rather than owned by the people who live and work on them.
While views differ as to whether Labour’s proposed changes to agricultural inheritance tax will kill family farms or disincentivise tax-dodgers and reduce land prices, the 20,000 farmers who protested in Westminster last month are likely to agree on one thing: the job they do is woefully undervalued. According to a 2022 Sustain report, farmers sometimes keep less than 1 per cent of the profits from some of the food they produce. The postwar industrialisation of agriculture and the artificial fertiliser and pesticides that enabled it have, among unintended environmental consequences, turned food into a commodity. Globally, enough is now produced to feed 1.5 times the population, 40 per cent of which is lost or wasted.
Now farming is undergoing a radical shift. Dusgate’s epiphany of how she might produce food in a way that also restores nature is not unique. Regenerative farming has captured the imagination of both big business and government. Last year PepsiCo doubled its regenerative footprint to 1.8mn acres, as Nestlé pledged to source 50 per cent of key ingredients from regenerative systems by 2030 and Unilever launched its first regeneratively farmed product: Colman’s mustard.
When Brexit brought about a break from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the UK government also went “regen”. Its new sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is part of the move to transfer subsidies from Defra’s £2.4bn budget from payments based on land area to payments for how that land is managed. Nascent carbon credit and biodiversity net-gain private markets have emerged, while businesses such as water companies are paying farmers to farm regeneratively, reducing fertiliser and pesticides leaching from soils and so preserving waterways while also saving on the costly clean-up bill.
The unexpected result of this means it is not just farming that is changing. The farmers are too.
Some doors are being opened to this new “regen” generation by progressive landlords. Gavin Lane, deputy president of the Country Land and Business Association, thinks that “many landlords are now looking for ‘regenerative tenants’ to get maximum revenue out of farmland with SFI and Biodiversity Net Gain income being so crucial”. Hollie Byrne, a chartered surveyor from Middleton Advisors, agrees: “We are seeing an ever-increasing trend of clients coming on to our books wanting to buy farms, estates and farmland, who want to manage that land with conservation and improving the environment as their priority.” Figures from the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers 2023 report make it clear who is being offered these opportunities. A third more tenancies were awarded to new entrants in 2023 than in 2014.
While Dusgate may have understood that farming regeneratively was what she wanted to do, she did not find the challenge of restoring degraded soils reflected in the tenancies offered: “Most wanted someone to do everything — pay high market rent and also increase biodiversity and sustainability — but [the tenancies] were for three to seven years. It’s just not feasible. You only start to see the results of a change in land management after about five years. It just doesn’t stack up.”
Then she found the advert for New House Farm. The Bosanquet family not only wanted someone to farm regeneratively, the tenancy was for 15 years. “There were heaps of challenges for the kind of system I wanted to run,” says Dusgate. “Too much ryegrass and bare, compacted soil. Lots of infrastructure was needed too.” Even so, she saw its potential. “I put a tiered rent offer in, with lower rent in the first five years. But I thought they wouldn’t go for it.”
She was wrong. “We had 57 applications,” says Clare Bosanquet, “Thirty were good ones. But Sarah put in a thesis. I blew two ink cartridges printing it off.” Dusgate’s rent offer was half that of the other applicants. “But while she wanted to do holistic management, she had attainable goals. She’d absolutely thought through every stage of it.”
New House Farm is one of three on the Old Lands estate producing a range of arable crops and animals. All farm regeneratively. The farmers are also all new entrants. This, says Bosanquet, is by accident not design. Their applications just stood out. New entrants, she says, “are not burdened by the usual narratives and tackle problems in a different way. They have a freshness.”
When Simon Hill-Norton, co-founder of the activewear company Sweaty Betty, and his siblings inherited a farm of undulating pasture and ancient woodland in a valley within Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, he was clear that “our responsibility is to leave it better than we found it”. Following a trip to Knepp, the rewilding mother ship in Sussex, Hill-Norton challenged himself to find a way to “feed the world while also increasing biodiversity”.
It took two years to find the right tenant. Ben and Claudia Thomas (then aged 30 and 29) were, he says, “dynamic, brilliant, embraced every opportunity”. Their first year of farming regeneratively was captured in the crowdfunded film, Six Inches of Soil, which shows them learning to keep their herd of belted Galloway cattle outdoors all year, moving them on to fresh grass daily, and selling the meat directly to customers.
Ben Thomas grew up a farmer’s son, but without the land that came with the title. Now, three years in, he “feels lucky to have been given the chance to learn this way of farming early on. The more you go down this route the more you love it.” Thomas had already seen the alternative: “I worked on an intensive 600-cow dairy, and a big beef and sheep farm. Most animals were housed all year round. You spend a lot of time scraping shit. It’s not what farming means to me. I much prefer walking out into the field to sitting on a tractor.” He is enthusiastic about seeing rapid increases in bird, insect and plant life. Not housing cows over winter had other benefits beyond the cost of buildings and feed: “We haven’t used a wormer for three years.” This way of farming, Thomas says, “really suits new entrants because it is so low cost”.
Such is the enthusiasm that farmer Tim May co-founded Pitch Up: a Dragons’ Den-style competition that invites those with farming enterprises but without land to pitch them to landowners who might also benefit. Pitch Up began in 2021 with one farm. “This year,” says May, “we’ve had 15 more wanting to join.” To get into farming, May says “there’s a perceived barrier that you have to buy farmland or pay massive upfront rent — it’s not true”. The applications tell their own story: “90 per cent are from new
In Cambridgeshire, Tom Pearson farms more than 1,000 acres of productive arable land. Three years ago, he took 3 acres out of cropping and handed it over to Adrienne Gordon to start her SweetPea Market Garden. Pearson “put in some infrastructure” and initially charged “a peppercorn rent”. Having crunched the numbers, he is clear that giving up a portion of land to a new enterprise like Gordon’s “doesn’t take anything off your bottom line as a farmer . . . we won’t lose money”. Long term, he foresees other upsides: “If we, as an arable farm, move into shorter supply chains, it takes a bucket load of work to create a customer base. Having a brand on site is . . . worth its weight in gold.” There are also less tangible benefits: “The best bit is just having more enthusiastic people around you.
Gala Bailey-Barker, 34, who grew up with a yearning to farm but nowhere to realise it, found an alternative route in. Farm manager of the biodynamic Plaw Hatch in Sussex (where she has been visiting and volunteering for 13 years, first on school trips), she works alongside shop manager Jenny Thornhill and business manager Rebecca Heys. The women form a limited company that rents the land from a trust. “The limited company is owned by the Plaw Hatch co-operative,” explains Bailey-Barker, “which is owned by 700 shareholders.” This not only means “the farm is very secure” but that “there is a lot of autonomy in what we are doing”.
Until now, becoming a farmer was a job that was usually inherited, along with the land, machinery and knowledge. The cost of UK farmland is second only to that of the Netherlands. In 2024 an acre of the best arable soil sold (on a sale of more than 100 acres) for the record high of £17,000. As a result, a third of British farms are tenanted rather than owned by the people who live and work on them.
While views differ as to whether Labour’s proposed changes to agricultural inheritance tax will kill family farms or disincentivise tax-dodgers and reduce land prices, the 20,000 farmers who protested in Westminster last month are likely to agree on one thing: the job they do is woefully undervalued. According to a 2022 Sustain report, farmers sometimes keep less than 1 per cent of the profits from some of the food they produce. The postwar industrialisation of agriculture and the artificial fertiliser and pesticides that enabled it have, among unintended environmental consequences, turned food into a commodity. Globally, enough is now produced to feed 1.5 times the population, 40 per cent of which is lost or wasted.
New entrants are not burdened by the usual narratives and tackle problems in a different way. They have a freshness
Now farming is undergoing a radical shift. Dusgate’s epiphany of how she might produce food in a way that also restores nature is not unique. Regenerative farming has captured the imagination of both big business and government. Last year PepsiCo doubled its regenerative footprint to 1.8mn acres, as Nestlé pledged to source 50 per cent of key ingredients from regenerative systems by 2030 and Unilever launched its first regeneratively farmed product: Colman’s mustard.
When Brexit brought about a break from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the UK government also went “regen”. Its new sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is part of the move to transfer subsidies from Defra’s £2.4bn budget from payments based on land area to payments for how that land is managed. Nascent carbon credit and biodiversity net-gain private markets have emerged, while businesses such as water companies are paying farmers to farm regeneratively, reducing fertiliser and pesticides leaching from soils and so preserving waterways while also saving on the costly clean-up bill.
The unexpected result of this means it is not just farming that is changing. The farmers are too.
Some doors are being opened to this new “regen” generation by progressive landlords. Gavin Lane, deputy president of the Country Land and Business Association, thinks that “many landlords are now looking for ‘regenerative tenants’ to get maximum revenue out of farmland with SFI and Biodiversity Net Gain income being so crucial”. Hollie Byrne, a chartered surveyor from Middleton Advisors, agrees: “We are seeing an ever-increasing trend of clients coming on to our books wanting to buy farms, estates and farmland, who want to manage that land with conservation and improving the environment as their priority.” Figures from the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers 2023 report make it clear who is being offered these opportunities. A third more tenancies were awarded to new entrants in 2023 than in 2014.
While Dusgate may have understood that farming regeneratively was what she wanted to do, she did not find the challenge of restoring degraded soils reflected in the tenancies offered: “Most wanted someone to do everything — pay high market rent and also increase biodiversity and sustainability — but [the tenancies] were for three to seven years. It’s just not feasible. You only start to see the results of a change in land management after about five years. It just doesn’t stack up.”
Then she found the advert for New House Farm. The Bosanquet family not only wanted someone to farm regeneratively, the tenancy was for 15 years. “There were heaps of challenges for the kind of system I wanted to run,” says Dusgate. “Too much ryegrass and bare, compacted soil. Lots of infrastructure was needed too.” Even so, she saw its potential. “I put a tiered rent offer in, with lower rent in the first five years. But I thought they wouldn’t go for it.”
She was wrong. “We had 57 applications,” says Clare Bosanquet, “Thirty were good ones. But Sarah put in a thesis. I blew two ink cartridges printing it off.” Dusgate’s rent offer was half that of the other applicants. “But while she wanted to do holistic management, she had attainable goals. She’d absolutely thought through every stage of it.”
New House Farm is one of three on the Old Lands estate producing a range of arable crops and animals. All farm regeneratively. The farmers are also all new entrants. This, says Bosanquet, is by accident not design. Their applications just stood out. New entrants, she says, “are not burdened by the usual narratives and tackle problems in a different way. They have a freshness.”
When Simon Hill-Norton, co-founder of the activewear company Sweaty Betty, and his siblings inherited a farm of undulating pasture and ancient woodland in a valley within Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, he was clear that “our responsibility is to leave it better than we found it”. Following a trip to Knepp, the rewilding mother ship in Sussex, Hill-Norton challenged himself to find a way to “feed the world while also increasing biodiversity”.
It took two years to find the right tenant. Ben and Claudia Thomas (then aged 30 and 29) were, he says, “dynamic, brilliant, embraced every opportunity”. Their first year of farming regeneratively was captured in the crowdfunded film, Six Inches of Soil, which shows them learning to keep their herd of belted Galloway cattle outdoors all year, moving them on to fresh grass daily, and selling the meat directly to customers.
Ben Thomas grew up a farmer’s son, but without the land that came with the title. Now, three years in, he “feels lucky to have been given the chance to learn this way of farming early on. The more you go down this route the more you love it.” Thomas had already seen the alternative: “I worked on an intensive 600-cow dairy, and a big beef and sheep farm. Most animals were housed all year round. You spend a lot of time scraping shit. It’s not what farming means to me. I much prefer walking out into the field to sitting on a tractor.” He is enthusiastic about seeing rapid increases in bird, insect and plant life. Not housing cows over winter had other benefits beyond the cost of buildings and feed: “We haven’t used a wormer for three years.” This way of farming, Thomas says, “really suits new entrants because it is so low cost”.
Such is the enthusiasm that farmer Tim May co-founded Pitch Up: a Dragons’ Den-style competition that invites those with farming enterprises but without land to pitch them to landowners who might also benefit. Pitch Up began in 2021 with one farm. “This year,” says May, “we’ve had 15 more wanting to join.” To get into farming, May says “there’s a perceived barrier that you have to buy farmland or pay massive upfront rent — it’s not true”. The applications tell their own story: “90 per cent are from new entrants.”
In Cambridgeshire, Tom Pearson farms more than 1,000 acres of productive arable land. Three years ago, he took 3 acres out of cropping and handed it over to Adrienne Gordon to start her SweetPea Market Garden. Pearson “put in some infrastructure” and initially charged “a peppercorn rent”. Having crunched the numbers, he is clear that giving up a portion of land to a new enterprise like Gordon’s “doesn’t take anything off your bottom line as a farmer . . . we won’t lose money”. Long term, he foresees other upsides: “If we, as an arable farm, move into shorter supply chains, it takes a bucket load of work to create a customer base. Having a brand on site is . . . worth its weight in gold.” There are also less tangible benefits: “The best bit is just having more enthusiastic people around you.”
Gala Bailey-Barker, 34, who grew up with a yearning to farm but nowhere to realise it, found an alternative route in. Farm manager of the biodynamic Plaw Hatch in Sussex (where she has been visiting and volunteering for 13 years, first on school trips), she works alongside shop manager Jenny Thornhill and business manager Rebecca Heys. The women form a limited company that rents the land from a trust. “The limited company is owned by the Plaw Hatch co-operative,” explains Bailey-Barker, “which is owned by 700 shareholders.” This not only means “the farm is very secure” but that “there is a lot of autonomy in what we are doing”.
Of the 35 people on the payroll, “basically all of us come from outside the farming industry”. Not having a farming family to show her the ropes meant “I taught myself a lot. If you’re farming a mixture of animals and crops you have to be good at so many things. I’m a proficient tractor driver now. I learnt how to fence by watching YouTube.”
There is, however, a rub. Despite beneficent landlords, Thomas, Gordon and Dusgate cannot make enough money from growing food alone: all have second jobs to support their income, from managing other farms to café work. Bailey-Barker is clear that Plaw Hatch “pay all our off-site staff the living wage”, but this is possible because of their business structure and the success of their near-to-London shop: “We could sell a lot more than we do.”
This too may be about to change. Lane knows of “large institutional landowners working on a new Environmental Farm Business Tenancy” designed to financially reward those who restore soils and biodiversity by changing how land is farmed. Giles Hunt, land and estates director for the National Trust, one of Britain’s biggest landowners, confirms it is already working with a group of farming tenants “to understand how direct payments from the Trust could support those who farm regeneratively”.
Rent decreases or direct payments for nature-friendly farming may not be the only way to make farming pay. The new subsidy payments have also changed the dynamic between the landowner — who typically would pocket the subsidy cheque — and their tenant, who would keep production profits. Byrne confirms: “There are more farm-share partnerships being offered, where tenants are getting some of the money for how they are farming.” So too: where a “tenant improvement” once meant a new barn had been built, this definition may widen now nature is getting its own column on the economic spreadsheet. “What about soil improvement?” says Dusgate. “That’s an asset that belongs to the landowners. If I’ve added value to their asset, that could be reflected as a tenant improvement.”
Changing how farming is paid through a combination of the kinds of tenancies offered, public subsidies and private markets seems likely not only to change the business of farming. It may also change who is doing it. This may more than revitalise an industry that represents 1 per cent of the UK workforce. If the people who feed us start to be properly paid for growing food in biologically rich systems, it will mean more than valuing nature. Those who drove their tractors through Westminster warning “No Farmers No Food” may finally start to feel valued too.
Sarah Langford is the author of “Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World” (Penguin)
