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At the end of the 19th century in Middletown, USA, Wilbur Atwater invented the food calorie. He did this by placing different foods in a sealed chamber, burning them and then recording how much heat they gave off. He then translated the temperature readings to a number of calories - the higher the temperature the greater the calories.

Fast forward to me this morning. I’m scrolling through instagram and some guy is telling me with conviction that I need to consume 2000 max-protein calories each day. He recommended the best way was to go to Tesco, buy some packaged cooked chicken, some vacuum sealed wraps and some energy bars. With this he then showed me how to prepare a meal-prepped plan for a week of chicken wraps and energy bars. He conveniently also tallied on screen the running sum of calories.

It would be wonderful if this garbage was just part of all the other garbage we all scrolled through this morning. But unfortunately calories are a foundational pillar of our modern food world. It’s what we learn at school and it’s part of the recommendations from the NHS.

As of 2022, the law in England requires large food businesses to display calorie information on their menus. What this means is that if you go into Mcdonalds, the government supports your health by making sure you know that the Big Mac has 509 Kcal. The industrially farmed beef, the pesticides, the hormones, the antibiotics, the preservatives, the cruelty, destruction and poison, is not important - what is important, is how much heat it will give off when it is burnt.

Provided you are a man, you could eat 4 Big Macs today and you will be at a “calorie deficit” from your 2500 recommended daily intake. However my friend, if you are a woman, I’m sorry to say that you unfortunately would be above your recommended 2000 calories. But don’t worry you can still eat 3.

The issue I have with calories is part of a much wider problem that modern science has created for food. It seems that we have never known more about the science of our food, but at the same time, we are eating worse than ever before. Growing up my Nonna and Nonno wouldn’t have had the faintest clue of a protein, a carbohydrate or a calorie, but they ate very well, and were much less fat and much less sick than us.

Not only do I believe that modern nutritional science hasn’t helped our diets, I in fact believe that it has degraded them. Nutritional science is a symptom of the human-centric disease that rejects nature - the same disease that led farming into N,P, K and pesticides.

As our food becomes a series of chemical compounds and energy stats, we forget about the two fundamental pillars of our food: ecology and culture. We forget our food can only be as good as the living ecosystems it has come from, and we forget our cultural wisdom of health and wellbeing.

Nutritional science has also helped the wrong people decide what we should eat. The majority of scientific food reports are funded by large food conglomerates to support their products’ success.

Why did Ancel Keys decide to convince us that animal fats were bad? So that we would buy margarine. And the only way they could convince people to replace the natural fats that we’ve eaten for thousands of years with this ultra-processed, hydrogenised soy bean oil from deforested rainforests, was to drown everyone in scary scientific noise that they couldn’t understand

“What actually is cholesterol?! What on earth is a polyunsaturated fat?! Who knows, but it sounds serious, so let’s listen to them!”.

I think food belongs outside the lab and that we need to focus on rekindling our relationship with the ecology and culture of food. I think instead of reading nutritional charts on packets of food, we should focus on knowing where it has come from, how it was grown and by whom. I believe the way we can regenerate the health of our diets is by re-learning the cultural wisdom and the ecological relationships of food.

If the past 50 to 75 years has been Science’s Food Movement, now it’s time for Nature’s Food Movement.

Matteo

05/04

The story of humanity has very much been one of deforestation. Over the past 5000 years, the more there have been humans the less there have been forests. The quintessential patchwork in the British countryside, for example, is a rather modern site for our land - Britain was once 75% forest, now it’s less than 14%. Today one of the most famous remaining frontiers against deforestation is the Amazon rainforest.

Almost all this deforestation over the past 5000 years has been due to agriculture, 98% to be precise.

For thousands of years, forests grew more and more abundant, building more and more fertility underground, which when we then cleared into fields for farming. Year after year we yielded from the fertility, eventually reaching an unsustainable violence when, at the end of the Second World War, we waged a chemical-farming warfare on nature.

Our history of deforestation and field-farming is founded on one important preconception; you can’t produce food in a forest. It is this preconception that we, alongside all our food-forest and agroforestry folk, are here to question.

We believe that the forest is an inspiration for farming. We believe that the forest’s health and abundance is like none-other, and that we can learn from it to create a food production that is more healthy and more abundant than agriculture has ever seen.

The way we farm here at Higher Farm is by planting highly diverse forest rows, and then we grow our crops in the strips of land in-between the rows. We call the strips in between the rows ‘alleys’. The alley-crops in our case are currently mainly beetroot, onion, garlic and horseradish, which we use for our ketchup.

Our forest rows include the whole range of stratification and diversity you would see in a natural forest: large trees, medium trees and small trees; shrubs, large herbaceous plants, smaller plants and eventually fungi. For example in one of our rows we might have oaks, cherries, plums, willows, poplars, gooseberries, blackberries, comfrey, mint, garlic and mushrooms - all growing together, densely planted.

It’s very early doors and we are still learning a lot, but I believe farming in this way can completely turn the effects of agriculture on their head. From a system that degenerates land, emits carbon and poisons its eaters, to one that regenerates land, sequesters carbon and increases nutrition.

There is much to discuss on food-forests, including methods, benefits, challenges and scaling . “What about the shade?” is a question I get a lot. I’ve not yet gone deeper into farming here with our mighty group of food-movement friends - so today I thought I’d first test by sharing this introduction, and if it seems of interest we can then start to delve deeper.

13/02

Matteo

This morning whilst I was drinking my tea, a lovely lady on the BBC was telling me that Ozempic is now being used by 1.6M people in the country and that the predictions are these drugs are the future. After I threw my mug at the TV, I felt the urge to write to you, my NFM friends.

When you hear news like this it seems like all the work is not working. That instead of regeneration there is degeneration - that the baddies are winning. I’m not here to write about the details of why Ozempic is part of food degeneration, because I hope it’s obvious. Instead I’m here to give my rebuttal against this gloomy news with a battle cry to get us pumped and rallied against the baddies - so that I can re-start my day with some motivation!

I believe that the imprisonment which industrial food places over our health, our environment and our communities, means that the movement for natural food is one of greatest freedom struggles of our time.

I disagree with those who think industrialisation will conquer food for good. Those who think food will only get further processed and that farming will continue to destroy nature. Those poor bastards are stuck in a degenerative mindset.

I think that humanity is uniquely positioned in this space in time, to completely regenerate food and to completely shift to a nature-centric consciousness. I think whilst Ozempic, ultra-processed food and chemical farming looms over our shoulders, we have never had more power to turn this ship around.

The power comes firstly from the information. Which today can move very fast and more freely than ever before. Albeit sometimes for the worse, but when it comes to this movement which requires exposing harmful truths and better ways - it is vital.

Secondly the power comes from the anger. Because we are an entire generation who are fed up and want to make sure our children will be safe and happy.

Thirdly the power comes from the fear. For the same reason as above.

Finally the power comes from the truth - many of us are proving there is a regenerative way, a healthier way, and an abundant way.

THIS IS THE WAY. LET US NOT BE QUASHED BY THE GLOOMY OZEMPIC NEWS!

Have a great day friends and VIVA LA KETCHUP REVOLUCIÒN!

Matteo

20/01

I haven’t been able to update you since April, because every time I noted down an update it would completely change a month later:

We planted the beetroot

It turned out to be the wrong variety

Then we planted the right beets

Then the weather was terrible

So the beets didn’t grow so well

We added carrot to the recipe

We took carrot off the recipe

We swapped the honey for apple syrup

We swapped the apple syrup back to the honey

The sauce consistency was coming out wrong

So we reduced it more

The reducing made it go brown

And on

And on

For 9 months

But we got there in the end! And two weeks ago we soft-launched our first bottles into local shops.

The final recipe is; beetroot, onion, raw apple cider vinegar, honey, horseradish, sea salt, thyme and bay leaf.

Our aim is to grow as much of it as we can here on the farm. The main ingredient we will struggle to grow enough of here is honey, because we don’t have enough money at the moment to set up a commercial honey operation. But we have found a great local beekeeper who has hives in the area. And soon he will also put hives on our land as well. Some of it is rape honey and some it is hawthorn honey.

What’s amazing about our ketchup is how it’s directly linked to regenerating the land. Literally the more ketchup we can sell, the more trees we can plant - the more we can increase biodiversity, regenerate ecosystems and sequester carbon.

But it’s been a crazy amount of work, and it seems like it will continue to be. I can see why it’s not been done before and why no-one’s doing it. To manage the process from soil to bottle, whilst maintaining rigid values on local and natural, is not easy.

Whilst I couldn’t be more against any of it, I can start to see why the standard approach to so many food products is to use industrially farmed and ultra-processed ingredients: good honey is hard to find, expensive, and hard to work with; nature is unpredictable and the customer wants predictable; naturally farmed crops are more likely to change in shape, colour, size and flavour - all things that refined sugar, preservatives, thickeners and colourings fix quickly.

To eliminate all things industrially farmed and ultra processed in a product, we have to work daily in connection with what nature is providing. It’s much harder but I believe it’s worth it - it tastes better and feels much better to eat.

We’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how to market our product - our label still needs some work, and thanks to those of you who have given your feedback.

It’s funny; ketchup has become so notoriously bad for you that the main marketing we now see out there is how people are making ketchups that are “not bad for you”. Why can’t it be GOOD FOR YOU?! Our ketchup has highly nutritious beetroot from healthy soils, gut-enhancing apple cider vinegar, living honey from hard working bees and powerfully healing horseradish, not to mention a large dose of love from passionate farmers. And I believe this is how all food should be - healthy, ecological and extremely delicious.

I hope one day everyone will be able to walk down to their local chippy, their local pub, corner shop or supermarket and be able to choose a ketchup that isn’t full of preservatives, pesticides and sugar but instead full of life-giving nourishment.

I hope the same for children in school canteens across the country.

I hope one day my generation will be able to live in a world where they can trust their food, and trust the people who make it for them.

Whilst a lot of the hard work getting it ready is somewhat over, it seems we’ve only just started - we’ve now got to start selling it!

If you can help, if you know any restaurants, shops, pubs or in particular schools who might be interested, please put me in touch. And finally if you haven’t already, you can order some of it to your home here; https://www.higher-farm.co.uk/shop

Thank you for all your support, it makes it all worth it.

Matteo

12/11

Bex is one of the fabulous growers who tends to our natural forest gardens. If you’ve ordered from our shop on Crop or eaten at our restaurant, it is very likely you’ve eaten some of the delicious food she’s been growing. I recently discovered that Bex is also a fabulous writer, so I invited her to join me on the NFM letters, and today she is telling us some stories from the forest garden in July.

Over to you Bex…

Anyone wandering through the market garden today might think I’d gone a little mad. It’s a mild afternoon in the middle of July. The recent, relentless heat has got me wishing for autumn’s more forgiving temperatures. We’re partway through a busy harvest, and the heavy rain is soaking me to the bone — I’m ecstatic about it. I look up at the sky with pure joy — a harvest knife in one hand and a bunch of chard in the other — and do a happy dance in the pouring rain. There’s nothing quite like seeing your crops watered from above after what feels like months. Each plant is finally having a well-earned drink the way nature intended — long may this continue!

When you work on the land, there’s no hiding from the extreme weather we’re increasingly experiencing. You’re at the behest of nature’s rhythms, which isn’t always easy. This summer has been hot and incredibly dry. But it still surprises me how resilient our land is. Surrounded by a sea of yellowing fields across Somerset, our wonderfully diverse, forest market garden appears green and abundant. The hot, humid days have brought an onslaught of flea beetle (who have a penchant for our brassicas), and irrigating the land will always be top of our minds. But looking out at the abundance of vegetables we’re producing, I can only think that these extreme weather events showcase why we need diverse, regenerative farms more than ever.

Our plants are only as resilient as the soil they’re grown in. As climate change causes more uncertainty in our weather systems, we need to be growing in a way that strengthens our soil’s immune system. That’s why we’re building a farm that doesn’t solely rely on outside inputs, but is working towards being a self-sustaining entity that thrives from within. We’re growing a diverse range of vegetables, flowers and fruits to maintain a healthy ecosystem while providing beautiful, nutritious food to local people. While we can’t change the weather, we can build resilience both outside on the land and inside our own bodies — who knew vegetables had the power to do all that?

The market garden is at the height of production at this time of year. The polytunnels are overflowing with cucumbers, tomatoes, basil and monk’s beard (aka agretti). We’ve found busy bees taking naps in the calendula flowers when we start our early morning harvest (very cute); our veg boxes are stuffed with kohlrabi, courgette, patty pan, French beans, beetroot and much more; and the Farm Caff is crafting exceptional dishes with all of this seasonal abundance.

So, we invite you to come on down and take a walk around our little slice of Somerset, taste the produce, and if you think it’s any good, you can order some to enjoy at home. We’re passionate about regenerating our land, and we’d love for you to be a part of it. Who knows — maybe we can change the weather one vegetable at a time.

My Seasonal Star: Kohlrabi

If you’ve received one of our veg boxes this month, you might be wondering what to do with the extra-terrestrial vegetable with antenna-like leaves. Slightly sweet and peppery in flavour, this wonderfully diverse brassica is a kohlrabi. It can be eaten raw, roasted, fried or grated into a slaw. We remove the leaves to ensure the plant stays succulent. Store them in the fridge and consume within a week or two.

With love,

Bex

2/08

Dear Friends,

Over the past two months we’ve been introducing livestock into our young forest farming systems. We now have 150 geese, 350 ducks, a few pigs, a few goats, several sheep and 50 trout. We have two goals: to bring health and abundance to our ecosystem, and to raise the happiest, healthiest animals we possibly can.

I’ve been learning about how to give animals the best possible lives, and how to produce the tastiest and most ecological meat. Through this journey I’ve been processing the very concepts of livestock and meat, and it has left me pondering some questions, which I thought I would share with you.

Why is it that most of us wouldn’t kill an animal ourselves, but are happy to kill one vicariously at dinner every day?

The first thing that happened when we brought animals onto the farm is that people became quite upset that they would eventually be slaughtered. I was actually told this by someone over lunch at The Farm Caff, whilst they were eating ham and parsley sauce.

Why are we ok with eating some animals but not others?

It seems the British majority has concluded: “Pigs, cows, chickens and sheep - actually only the baby sheep - we are going to kill and eat you. However, older sheep, goats, rabbits, deer, horses, and most other birds - we’ve decided we are not going to eat you”.

How on earth does a Tesco chicken cost £3.9?

Even accounting for all the horrendous practices of a poultry factory, I still can’t understand how the numbers add up. For £3.9 I can hardly buy one of our day old ducklings from our hatchery.

Why do we continue to abuse and poison animals, and then eat them?

It seems us humans think we are winning by managing to malnourish, poison and abuse other animals, and then eat them. The laws of the food chain have at this point shown us quite clearly, that in doing so, we are merely malnourishing and abusing ourselves. And yet, we continue.

But are they really ranging freely?

Our 350 ducks live in our 6 acre forest garden. This is a number that so far feels right - they have lots of space, with an average of 70m2 each, a diversity of delicious forage and a dynamic landscape.

I was curious to know what the UK standards are for keeping birds, and I discovered that free-range duck must legally have: “5 birds per m2 indoors, with outdoor access of 2m2 per bird”. This means we could have 12000 “free-range” ducks in our 6 acre forest garden where we now have 350. 12000!!

Just wait till you hear what the standards are for free-range chicken - “13 birds per m2 indoors, with outdoor access of 1m2 per bird”. So basically if you hold out your arms at a right angle that is where a free range chicken spends its whole life.

Because it’s mostly done by weight you can actually extrapolate free-range standards to humans - which I found quite fun. According to my calculations, if I was a free-range human in the UK, I would have 23m2 to live in. A bit bigger than the room I’m in now.

If you have answers, please share them x

Matteo

6/07

To start with, when I refer to natural food I mean food that is grown in healthy ecosystems without chemicals, that supports our environment and that supports our health. Food that you won’t put down when you find out how it was made, that is not ultra-processed and that has real-life ingredients.

It’s quite heartbreaking that we live in a country where the majority of people are born into a life pre-destined for poor health just because they don’t have access to natural food. Actually - it’s totally fucked up.

We all know natural food is expensive; you often choose vegetables sprayed with pesticides, and meat from a factory, not because you want to, but because it’s cheaper than the natural option. So the immediate impression is that there is a financial problem.

There's a lot at play behind the price of food in the UK, and most of it is out of our hands: taxes on farmers, laws on importing, laws on exporting, supermarkets, supply chains, distribution methods, farming subsidies, all the way through to what’s happening in the wider economy whether it’s immigration or land prices.

Something more tangible that I think will reduce the price of natural food is the evolution of scalable, natural farming methods. Which is what we are trying to do on our farm. For example, I believe that once our biodiverse forest systems are more established, they will be more efficient than current organic, field-scale rotations.

I also think that “non-natural” farming methods will start to see continuously reduced yields from increasingly degenerated soils which, alongside the already rising costs of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, will increase the price of “non-natural” food on the shelf; closing the price gap between natural and “non-natural” food.

However, I believe that deeper than the financial problem in food accessibility lies a cultural one. I found a series of stats that explains this quite quickly: In the UK we spend around 10% of our household income on food whilst in Spain they spend 15%, in Italy 17%, and in France 18%. Today adult obesity in Spain is at 19%, in Italy 12% and France 11%, in the UK it’s now at 30%.

The stronger your food culture, the more you value what you choose to eat. If you understand the profound impact food has on your health, on your happiness and the future of your planet, you quickly realise that spending more time or money on your food is probably one of the best investments you could ever make. I want to emphasise the time, because often, when trying to eat better food, spending more time on it is more important than spending more money.

Across the world, the culture for proper food is under attack (including in Spain, Italy and France). I feel the problem is that the defences in the UK are particularly weak, and that this weakness is more dangerous than we think. An ignorance of food can be lethal; it makes us powerless pawns in the game of the large ultra-processed food brands and the poison-farming companies - people who do not have our health or our planet in their best interests.

I believe that if we want to access better food, one of the most powerful things we can do is increase our knowledge and connection to it. Knowing more about our food allows us to choose the right food, in the face of hundreds of millions of pounds of marketing spent on getting us to choose the wrong food.

With rising awareness, many of us are going through changes in our relationship with food. Through becoming aware of the problems in industrial food, we research, explore and seek to understand how to eat more naturally. We begin to learn about where our food comes from; we start reading the ingredients on the back of the packet and spending more time in the kitchen; we start to travel further to go to a farmers market or order produce online directly from a farm; we realise that it’s worth spending the extra pound on a natural vegetable that is higher in nutrition, to save spending two pounds later on in supplements and medicine; some of us maybe even find small spaces to start growing our own food. Slowly but surely, through this process we create our own access to natural food by improving our own personal food culture. Not by getting richer.

I believe it’s empowering to think that through propagating a stronger food culture we are increasing access to natural food in this country. Because for once, it's something in our hands - something we can change, starting today. One meal at a time, we can contribute to our food sovereignty, to regenerating our earth and to saving our health. This is part of what I like to call Nature’s Food Movement.

08/05

Matteo

Surely if we’ve been blessed with this weather in spring, it’s going to be a horribly wet summer? But yesterday I heard the crows are nesting high, which supposedly means they know it's going to be a good summer. Let’s hope they are right.

March was a lot about ketchup. For those of you who have been to our restaurant, you’ll likely be familiar with our ketchup. This year we are hoping to start selling it outside the farm to local pubs and shops.

We're fed up with ultra-processed, imported crap, so we’ve decided we’re going to do our best to give people an option for a 100% natural, 100% British ketchup. Our recipe is beetroot, honey and vinegar.

This month we’ve been finalising recipes, developing labels and packaging, setting up our kitchen and getting ready to go. We are also gearing up to grow tonnes and tonnes of beetroot. Because we don't have so much land, we’ve also got our most wonderful neighbour Andrew on board. Andrew is a veteran of the game and has a wonderful agroforestry set up over Glastonbury way, where he’s going to grow beetroot for us in between his hazelnut trees.

It’s almost time for sowing the seeds. As Andrew says, you know it's time when you can put your bare bum on the soil and it doesn't feel cold. The plan is to start harvesting in June and to bring our first batch of ketchup to market just after.

We aren’t quite sure how it’s going to go, as we fear the beetroot – in place of the more traditional tomato – might scare people off. But it’s delicious, and helping people wean off imported, chemically farmed, sugar-loaded and additive-infested tomato ketchup is an important mission, so we must give it a go.

The reason we are using beetroot instead of tomato is because tomatoes don’t grow naturally in this climate; they originate from South America in western regions near the equator. This means that all the tomatoes in the ketchup we consume here, are either from artificial indoor growing systems, or from countries far away, usually China.

We are undecided on which of the final two label designs to go with, so if you’ve got time to support Mission Ketchup, please let us know which of these two labels you prefer: A top and B bottom. I’m looking for your opinions just on the design styles so ignore the details of the text when you’re deciding. 

The restaurant is getting busier which is exciting, and on May bank holiday we are going to open the bar, hopefully with some pizza on the weekends as well. If the weather continues on like this, it should be glorious, especially with our brand new lake (we aren’t calling it a pond anymore because it’s far too magnificent to be a pond). 

Other spring advancements on the farm this March: the daffodils came up and the first budders and blossoms are out (sloe and cherry my personal favourites); our propagation tunnel is full of seedlings ready and rearing to go in the ground; Claudia, our newest superstar table-to-farm member, has been protecting a hidden wild garlic spot, feeding many of you our wild garlic soup in the restaurant; Claudia also found hemlock in the courtyard which was less exciting (Hemlock can kill you if you eat it and burn your hand if you touch it) and she’s been on a brave mission to exterminate it.

06/04

Matteo

I want to change the way we newsletter. A few years ago I was flying to Australia to research syntropic farming, using the 17 hours to scribble ideas for a project that now is Higher Farm. I remember deciding that the purpose of the project was going to be described as “Nature’s Food Movement”. The word ‘movement’ feels powerful, and it evokes the precise feeling that this project is all about; the feeling of people working together, united in the desire for change. And so I want to work more on that, on uniting and building community. I want our newsletter to not be a disguised list of things we want you to buy, but instead I want to share with you what’s actually going on on this farm; the ups, the downs, the problems, and the learnings. I’m inviting you behind the scenes, because I believe that by reading and learning what we are doing, you are joining in - you are creating movement. I’m inviting you on the ride with us, as we work to support the regeneration of our soil, our ecosystems and our food. So here we go.

We’ve not been harvesting as much food as we would have liked. Of course it's part of the seasonality of this temperate climate and the whole point of winter is that life slows down. But we also weren’t so good with our winter cropping this year, and next year we’re going to get on top of it. For this reason everything we are harvesting we are putting into the restaurant, and we’ve had to stop the veg boxes and the markets until May or June. Nonetheless, both in the forest gardens and the polytunnels, the brave plants coming out the ground are delicious: Leeks, lots of leeks, winter purslane, cime di rapa, radishes, brussels sprouts, red cabbage, pak choi, tat soi, red tongue lettuce, parsley, salad rocket, purple frills, spinach, kale, rainbow chard, mustard leaf, various radicchio, and a few other bitter beautiful winter leaves.

Bitterness is such an important flavour - it’s a flavour I associate with winter. Those bitter bitter greens that feel nutritious as you eat them; we don’t need a study to know it’s what we need at this time of year. Interestingly, someone I can’t remember who, was telling me how bitterness is a dying flavour. How younger generations don’t like bitter foods because of the dull ultra-processed palette they are accustomed to. What a shit show. How do we solve that one?

But as a child I didn’t like bitter greens either, and now I love them. I remember watching my nonno chow down on cicoria and puntarelle quite repulsed. Cicoria and puntarelle are almost enough of a reason to go to Rome in the winter if you haven’t already. I’m also quite sure that those bitter greens are why my nonno is still alive today. So let's hope what I hear is wrong, and that the children come round to the bitterness. On a separate note, this general subject is also why I refuse to serve a kids menu, and luckily George (head chef) agrees. But that’s a topic for another letter.

Some other things that happened in February. I ordered our first lot of livestock: 250 geese including Embdens and Toulouses. Geese are grazers unlike other poultry so are perfect for our land and all our grass. They will live free and naturally and then be on the menu. Hopefully, we can also produce natural foie gras, which I’ve been inspired by from Edoardo Souza’s famous farm in Spain. My question to you here is would you eat Goose on our menu? A goose breast? Roast goose? Goose pie? I want to know if my idea is going to flop or succeed, and that will be largely up to you. Please write back to me.

As the geese get older, because they graze, they get a beefier flavour, which is quite special and in another league to much other poultry I think. Anyway the large gaggle of goslings should arrive in May. I also ordered 50 ducks, Pekins and Campbells, for both meat and eggs; 60 Turkeys, Blacks and Norfolk Bronzes; 100 Cornish Celtics - these are very special chickens that are slaughtered at 180 days, making them the oldest chickens in the country. Your most expensive Waitrose chicken is usually slaughtered around 90 days, and your standard supermarket chicken is slaughtered at around 40 days. So, 180 days of foraging and adventuring amongst our baby trees should make our chickens taste quite special.

I also ordered several Iron Age pigs, which are a cross including Wild Boar and Tamworth. The wild boar-ness makes them hardy, healthy and fit animals that stay outside all year, roaming free. No other pig in this country stays outside all year. For now they need to keep away from the baby trees, but once we have larger trees, they will love the forest.

And finally of course, rain. As I’m writing, Big Acres is flooded, the polytunnels are flooded and the car park is flooded. Fucking nightmare. But at the same time, it reminds me of an amazing story I heard while I was in Australia. There was a food forest farmer (farming with trees like we do on our farm), whose trees were ten years old, metres tall and metres deep. When there was a historic rain event, every single farm around him that used “conventional” mono-cropping methods was flooded, but his farm was absolutely fine. The work the trees had done in his food forest, with thirsty roots and soft and succulent soil, had managed the water perfectly. A great story for how forest farming builds a resilient food system - how it builds food security. We aren’t there yet; our trees are only a year old this season. But it’s exciting to think that one day, when you come to visit, you can walk through the same fields where you will currently see tree guards, and instead be surrounded by a canopy overhead, picking fruits from the branches. The dream.

Matteo

26/2/25