Minette Batters

As the first woman President of the NFU, Minette Batters represented the interests of over 46,000 farming businesses through unprecedented times, navigating the challenges of Brexit, Covid 19 and the war in Ukraine, until she stepped down in February 2024.

Campaigning about the importance of British food and farming and its ability to achieve Net Zero has been a key driver for Minette. She also co-founded ‘Ladies in Beef’ and the Great British Beef Week.

Minette is mother to twins and is a tenant farmer, on the Longford Estate near Salisbury, Wiltshire. The farm has a Spring and Autumn calving Aberdeen Angus beef herd, arable crops and a few sheep.

Harriet Bell

Harriet is the Regenerative Farming Lead at Riverford. Having started her career focusing on mobilising people to action, she’s been taking a ‘learn by doing’ approach to agriculture since 2011. Harriet’s over riding interest is in building resilience to climate change within agriculture.

Chris Berry

Chris farms over 450 acres near Exeter. Over recent years he has made significant changes to his farming enterprise with the aim to reduce the business’s risk to higher input costs and potential loss of payment schemes.

The outcome has been a pasture-based system with complimentary, simple enterprises made up of 60 Angus X suckler herd and a 950 Spring lambing flock. Functional, efficient and with the ability to thrive in a forage only system enabling them to increase productivity, reduce costs, and increase profitability, whilst improving lifestyle and enhancing the environment.

Dr James Dyke

James is an academic, writer, and author. He is an Associate Professor in Earth Systems Science, Director of the Centre for Environmental Intelligence, and Assistant Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the European Geosciences Union, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Earth System Dynamics. He is the environmental columnist for the I newspaper and has written over 150 articles for international publications including The Ecologist, The Guardian, The Independent and The Conversation. His book Fire Storm and Flood: the violence of climate change was published in 2021.

Jake Freestone

Jake manages the 1600Ha in-hand farming operations for Overbury Enterprises on the Gloucestershire/Worcestershire border.  The arable farm has been in in a Regenerative Agriculture system since 2015 and is integrated with a flock of 1000 outdoor lambing ewes. It is also a LEAF demonstration farm.

Jake is a farmer advisor for Trinity Ag Tech and a director of The Green Farm Collective. His topic for a Nuffield Farming Scholarship was ‘Breaking the Wheat Yield Plateau in the UK’. He has been British Farming Awards’ ‘Arable Innovator’, won the BBC Food and Farming ‘Future of Farming’ award in 2022 and 2023 and been Farm Carbon Toolkit’s ‘Soil farmer of the Year’.

John Gilliland OBE

Richard Harris

Richard is an agronomist and arable farmer on a small family farm in South Devon growing wheat, barley, linseed with multi species cover and catch crops, and incorporating livestock grazing where possible. Their system is based around a disc based direct drill with shallow cultivations where required. Richard is predominantly focused on what’s going on underground, soil, which for him is the foundation of the industry and the future of their farming system.

His passion for agriculture is based around the continual improvement of the soil, which he believes will return the financial stability to the business for generations to come.

Josiah Meldrum

Josiah is co-founder of Hodmedod, a Suffolk company whose aim is to encourage us to grow and eat a wider range of British grown pulses, grains and seeds – creating healthier and more diverse diets and farming systems.

Working with farmers, Hodmedod has pioneered ‘new’ crops for the UK, such as lentils and revived long-forgotten staples, like naked barley, central to this has been finding engaged markets to support primary production. This enables change by encouraging the creation of more complex rotations, through more direct routes to market, and ultimately by adding economic and agroecological value.

Fred Price

Dr Ruth Wade

Ruth is a Lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Leeds, School of Biology. She uses knowledge and ideas from ecological systems in agricultural systems, working towards sustainable farming whilst maintaining a resilient and productive farming system. She is passionate about designing and co-creating novel scientific robust experiments to answer stakeholder questions and fill evidence gaps. Her main interests are in plant-soil interactions, plant growth and defence strategies, and multi-species interactions. With advice from local farmers she has co-designed and installed a large, replicated plot trial at the University of Leeds farm measuring the impacts of stacking regenerative agricultural principles on soil health, crop production, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity and profit.

Sam Walker

Sam is a first–generation tenant farmer running a 140ha organic arable and beef farm on the Jurassic Coast of East Devon. He has a BSc from Harper Adams and previous jobs have included farm management in Gloucestershire and Cambridgeshire and overseas development work in Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe. He spent several years teaching Agriculture at Duchy College and is an opinion writer for Farmers Weekly.

Ian Warren

Ian Warren runs Philip Warren Butchers in Launceston-Britain’s Best Butcher’s Shop in 2022. He works with 120 similar independent farmers in the South-West dotted across the moorlands and grasslands, whilst also operating farms himself. Rather than focus on excessive outputs, they instead employ integrity and sustainability to their produce, which is 100% grass fed. Selling to high end London restaurants as well as local communities, Ian believes that trusting in time, slow methods, and quality Cornish produce is a recipe for success.

Session Chairs

Prof Matt Lobley,
University of Exeter

Dr Jennifer Rowntree,
University of Plymouth

Prof Andy Neal,
Rothamsted Research

Josiah Meldrum,
Hodmedod  (see above)

Other Speakers

Welcome:
Andy Gray
DCAA

Wrap Up:
Dr Robin Jackson
Bicton College

Prof Matt Lobley

Matt is Professor of Rural Resource Management and Director of the Centre for Rural Policy Research. He is a rural social scientist drawing primarily on the disciplines of Geography and Rural Sociology and has spent the last 35 years conducting research for a variety of government, private sector  and third sector clients. Matt’s research broadly addresses three key themes: i) agri-environmental management; ii) historical and contemporary agricultural change and restructuring; iii) the farm as a family business (including the well-being and mental health of farm family members)

Dr Jennifer Rowntree

Jennifer is an Associate Professor of Ecological Genetics at the University of Plymouth and Deputy Director of the newly established Centre of Research excellence in Intelligent and Sustainable Productive Systems (CRISPS), which aims to address the challenge of sustainably feeding a global population. For her research, she is currently working to develop integrated tools to assess soil health and determine soil biota and function in productive systems.