428 John Gilliland - Why a top UK regen farmer hasn't sold his carbon yet

John Gilliland is a sixth-generation UK farmer and advocate for sustainable agriculture with a legacy in policy, academia, and innovation. As a leader of the ARC Zero project, his own farm is a model for "Beyond" Net Zero practices, where willow cultivation, livestock grazing, and renewable energy initiatives work together in a circular system.

He has credits he could sell tomorrow and hasn't sold any. The reason cuts to the heart of the whole carbon market: on the voluntary market, he says, the same people who measure your soil also buy your credits. They are judge and jury in one. Until that changes, his clocks keep ticking and his carbon stays in the ground.

We get into why his 250-year-old woodland — kept fenced off from animals for most of its life — has no earthworms, a soil pH of 4.8, and trees toppling in storms, while feeding willow leaves to his cattle has cut their methane by 28%. John walks us through the fertiliser crisis he thinks is bigger than the Ukraine war, the chicory root he uses instead of a diesel subsoiler, and a 36-hectare trial that lifted meat output 83% while cutting nitrogen 65%. 

More about this episode.

This podcast is part of the Carbon Series supported by the OGCR project, with aims to create a trusted open source framework and make sure the benefits of carbon are shared across generations.

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Transcript

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Koen van Seijen 0:00

The fifth generation farmer of today doesn't trust the financial markets, the investors, and the companies trying to sell his carbon credits. He's been carbon negative, certified and measured for years and sits on a pile of credits, but doesn't want to sell. Why? The MRVs are still untrustworthy. The marketplaces are jury and judge at the same time, and that's problematic. We talk about his farming practices, the mistakes his ancestors made when planting a now 250-year-old woodland, the fundamental integration of animals back into the agriculture system, the resilience of silver pasture systems when it comes to drought, flood, and superstorms, how he talks about regenerative to his fellow farmers, hint. He doesn't talk about soil health, but talks about soil function and how he talks to policymakers all around Europe. And we put despair versus share myth really too bad with a massive amount of peer-reviewed papers. Sharing is way more productive when done well, and yes, you can produce the same or more food per hectare and have massive ecological benefits, aka public goods, so we won't all starve when we go regen. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. This podcast is part of the Carbon series, supported by the OGCR project, which aims to create a trusted open source framework and make sure the benefits of carbon are shared across generations. Welcome to another episode today with Fifth Generation Farmer who influences government and food chain policy. Welcome, John. Thank you. And to start with, a personal question, I mean, in this case, Fifth Generation is pretty not clear, but I mean there are other career paths you could have chosen. But how come you spend most of your waking hours thinking about food policy, thinking about government agriculture policy, and of course having built or let's say grown very actively a farm over the last decades? Was that always in the stars? Were you born, of course, born on a farm, but were you the one that really wanted to take over? Or was it a meandering path calling you back to the farm? How did that go?

John Gilliland 2:16

Well, actually, although I was encouraged to farm, I wanted to be a sailor. I wanted to go to sea. And at the age of 15, there was a bit of a reckoning with my parents and said, No, an agricultural career is the right thing for you. You need to go and get educated. And as a very obedient child, that is what I did. But it always has given me a hunger just to challenge and interrogate what I'm told. So I'm very independent. And before I go down a rabbit hole, I want to know why I'm going down the rabbit hole and what might be at the end of that rabbit hole. So I am a person with a mind who likes to be intrigued and investigated.

Koen van Seijen 3:03

Absolutely. And as a sailor, you mean you wanted to work on like commercial boats, or you literally wanted to sail?

John Gilliland 3:09

So I want to I wanted to work on commercial boats, right? I'm born by the sea. I'm from Ireland. It's an island nation surrounded by sea. We used to build boats, and I spent my childhood actually out at sea and sailing around Ireland and sailing to Norway. And so always had the passion for outdoor life, but also it really instructed me why the natural environment is so important to our daily lives, and how when it goes wrong, there are consequences. And so that certainly has homed in my senses about biological cycles, natural cycles, the roles of plants and animals together, the role of weather, the role of our changing climate. And actually, where I am in my own mind, so much of our work is about mitigation for climate change. Very little, or not enough, is about adapting to the climate that has already changed. And so a lot of my work in soils is about building resilience in soils to be able to adapt to these huge weather swings from no water to too much water. And that is really the engine for my interest and why I'm so passionate about soil and actually understanding it better and communicating it better. Because there is a reason United States' soil is called dirt. And I really wish my great friends across the Atlantic would find another way of describing what is the most essential asset in any food-producing business.

Koen van Seijen 4:51

And when you got involved, so you went to educate, did you go beyond the farm as well? Did you go work with other places? Did you come straight back to the farm? And what did you find when you came in?

John Gilliland 5:02

So, well, the course I did, I was never academically gifted. I'm dyslexic and I was late diagnosed. So I the course I did was uh what we call a sandwich course. So I did a year out, a year in, a year out, a year in. So I learnt on the job, and that really helped my dyslexia because textbooks were a disaster for me. But actually learning on the job and observing and asking questions actually took me a long way in my my career. I have to say, since I came back home, I was guilty of finding home a bit claustrophobic. I was still had my father around, and anyone who's been in an intergenerational family business. So, lo and behold, my farming peers asked me to get involved in agricultural politics. So by the age of 35, I became the youngest ever president in the farmers' union in Northern Ireland, just in time for the outbreak of foot and mouth or hoof and mouth disease in Ireland. So if you want a baptism of fire of agricultural politics, have it one when you're young, and two, have it with such an episodic disease, only surpassed by the advent of COVID subsequently. But foot and mouth was animals, COVID, and we went to Hellenbank. But it really educated me, gave me a taste for that interface between practitioning farmers, policy, regulation, science, innovation, and that really gave me a hunger to know more, but also articulated more because an awful lot of that work is top-down, not bottom-up. And I actually believe that practitioners like me and my peers, our views are not properly embraced in how we go forward, how policies are developed, whether it's in the food chain, whether it's in government policy, whether it's in regulation. And so I'm known to be quite loud, sometimes brash, but putting very much the view of the land manager and the farmer first. And I have a habit of looking at a journey through the lens from the bottom up rather than the lens from the top down. I had the privilege then of being appointed on to the European Commission sole mission, and one of the reasons I was there was for my track record and my ability to articulate the journey through a different lens.

Koen van Seijen 7:29

And that crisis, which I think some might remember, some don't, what did it, apart from farmer representation or land manager representation in those decisions, specifically in crisis for sure? That I mean, in general, that goes wrong, but in crisis, I think it's even worse. What did it teach you now in a fast changing climate? Like you mentioned before, the climate change that is already here, or the change climate actually, what are lessons we can learn from that super fast, huge emergency happened not overnight, really escalated very quickly. This is a much slower-moving thing, but it's still as bad or worse. Like, what can we learn from your experience there?

John Gilliland 8:08

For me, I was very fortunate. I had a very good chief vet. A chief vet within two hours of the outbreak had managed to go off and get an executive summary of the previous outbreak and how they cleared it up. And it was basically looking at the evidence of the science and trying to dial down the emotion and the subjectivity and to look at the data and look at objectivity. In that case, it was a disease of livestock which was highly contagious, and we made the decision that we needed to euthanase livestock within four hours of them contracting it. Not four days, not 40 days, but four hours. And in Northern Ireland, we conquered foot and mouth within 18 weeks. Great Britain took 18 months. And it was this objectivity using science, using data, analyzing it to make an objective assessment so that you could make good quality decisions that you didn't have regrets about subsequently. And that's no different to the approach I have taken on improving soil health, is I have been forensic at getting really granular measurement and data from individual fields to build up the case so that when I make decisions and my day-to-day decisions as a land manager are judgment calls. We have to make trade-offs on a daily basis. Is the moment I make that decision, make it be an informed decision on the best of information available on the day when I make that decision? And that means that certainly when you look at it retrospectively, you have far less, far less regrets in the quality of your decision.

Koen van Seijen 9:55

Do you remember when soil health became quote unquote a thing? When it became like such a focus of you in your own farming operations, that okay, that's what I'm focusing on. Because it was it because you saw the climate swings, you said that is actually the lever we have to pull, or the weather swings, did you was it the drought versus not? When did that start to become such a focal point of your attention?

John Gilliland 10:18

Well, for me, soil health is a collective term. And I have to say, I came to the collective term late. I looked, I was very much engaged on soil functionality. So for me, the two, three areas that I was very interested in was we were already experiencing climate change in extreme weather. We were going from droughts to floods. So for me, soil trafficability, soil drainage, soil water infiltration, I was there. I was there straight away, okay? In the issue of nutrient cycling and root activity and productivity, I was there very quickly as such. And I've been there for 20 plus years. Coming to the collective name of soil health, probably only in the last three or four years, because ironically, as a decision maker, I react to what I'm seeing, okay? And I don't always see the collective that is soil health, the collective of the five functions that we expect of soil. Two or three were prioritizing my agenda and I was focusing on them. It would be saying now that I am more knowledgeable and I've learned as such, I certainly respect the collective term more, but in my job also as an advocate for positive change on farms, I have to say I don't use the term soil health when I'm standing in front of farmers. And I will focus on parts of soil health that I know are relevant to them to hook their hearts and minds, and then I will sew the wider parts, the wider definitions of soil health into that conversation. But I might only use soil health in the summary. The actual phrase, I think one of the things we don't always do well is actually message in a way that actually hooks properly to the audience. And you know, I have two distinct audiences. I am a farmer, I'm involved in peer-to-peer learning with other farmers. I am a policy advocate, and I engage with national and European governments, and I'll use a different language for them than I will for my peers.

Koen van Seijen 12:42

And so let's double-click on that because we've spent quite a bit of time talking about narratives on the podcast, talking about storylines, like what actually connects. So let's start with the first one with your peer farmers, and let's also describe what you actually farm so people have an idea of size and just from the mental picture. This is audio only, and we are not on the farm, so you cannot see it with us, but just to bring people there. And then I would love to understand what are our ways you have been using successfully to connect with other peer farmers on the larger topic of soil health, but you already mentioned, I probably don't mention that specifically. I mentioned other functions. But let's start with the farm. Where are we farming and where do you bring us?

John Gilliland 13:19

So well, I I farm immediately outside the city of Derry, so three kilometers from the center of Northern Ireland, second city, right on the northwest of the island of Ireland, with every Atlantic depression seemed to be wedded over the top of me, beating me up. Our farm is a family farm, it's being continuously in transition. If I go back 60 years ago, we had a dairy herb with grass and we supplied milk to our neighbouring city. As my father took it over, my father was less interested, my father was also a lawyer, so we became an arable farm and we got rid of our animals and we went arable, and it was far easier managed, and and then 30 years ago I came back and I was successful as an arable farmer, but already 30 years ago we were beginning to get more extreme weather, we had more difficult harvests, and I said there has to be a better way to farm, and then I became an energy farmer. I started to plant my farm on short rotation willow trees. We still kept some cattle, so we were both a beef and a renewable heat farmer where we grew willow trees, harvest them every three years, and we sold heat, renewable heat. We did that right up to the last three or four years, and now we're hybridizing them, and now we are actually using willows as a fodder for my cattle because our willows are full of condensed tannins, which encourage our cattle to belch less. And we have now this time last year, we published our PhD student from Queen's University in Belfast, published in nature science articles that we had managed to reduce methane, but methane from cows by 28% by including willow leaves within their diet of grass and herbs and legumes. So we've been we continuously change, and I think our farm is no different. You react to the circumstances, the market signals, the climate, the economics, you know, and our farm has been no different to that. The key constant in that is our soil. Whether we were livestock farmers, whether we were arable farmers, whether we were renewable energy farmers, or now in where we are, as dare I say, pioneers of land sharing solutions, complex solutions of trees, cattle, herbs, legumes, all in the same space, delivering multiple public goods. The constant in all of that journey is our soil and how we look at our soil and the challenges facing our soil. And it's been an extraordinary journey. On our farm, we have five different long-term land uses. So we've been able to tie up with leading universities like Wagner University, Queen's University, Belfast, Harper Adams. We've been able to tie up with them and get master's students and PhD students to help us. And so we've got long-term deciduous woodland, 250 years old, 30-year-old deciduous woodland, long-term silver pasture, trees and grass, long-term grass and long-term willows. And we've now gone and sampled the soils under each one of those land uses and done a compare and contrast. And it's extraordinary to see how different land uses have different impacts on soil. Not all of them positive, I have to say. And there are some surprising results in there. And I would say it anyway because I come from Ireland. There is one thing that is really working for us, and that is the inoculant that of feces from big herbivores in driving the microbiome in the soil. And in our long-term woodlands where there have been no animals for 250 years, we have not an earthworm. Our soil pH has plummeted to 4.8. We're really struggling with soil respiration. And it has really opened my eyes that three, four hundred years ago in agriculture, when we went to enclosed agriculture, that's for trees, that's for crops, that's for animals, we actually broke the cardinal sin. And the cardinal sin is that actually biology works on complex cycles. It is a loop. And there is a reason our ancestors cropped, had livestock, and trees in the same space.

Koen van Seijen 17:55

Not because they didn't want to separate or because they didn't have the technology or because they were stupid, no, because it worked.

John Gilliland 18:01

The one thing our ancestors were really good is they observed. They weren't distracted by flat screens or social media. They observed. And certainly I look back through the heritage of our own place. And I have learned a lot by looking back at successive generations of my family, how they managed it. And right at the moment, my son is now running the home farm, so that's the sixth generation, the seventh generation, already there. And on our farm, we don't always make decisions just about economic return. We also make decisions, we have a naive belief, each one of us is we are tenants for life, that when we die, we would like to think that we have left the farm in better heart, better quality for the next generation. And so, particularly farming families actually make decisions which many bank managers, many accountants say, Why are you doing that? Well, it's because actually, I would argue when you're a part of a farming family for that many generations, sustainability is in your DNA. You know, when you have this issue, you do not want to leave a negative consequence from this generation for the next generation or the next generation. You want to tackle it. So to give an example, 30 years ago when I took over the farm, it was quite clear on our farm, after 30 years of continuous tillage, of ploughing, of making ground ready, our soil organic carbon levels had dropped quite dramatically. Our soil bulk densities were high. We were struggling with root architecture, with freedom for good root movement, and we had very little biological activity. And it is interesting how our 30 years of short rotation willow corpus has, to the best of our ability, shifted our soil organic carbon levels from about 80 tonne per hectare per year, 80 tonne per hectare, up to 135 tonne. And that is dramatic. And it actually showed how trees and animals back in there, how you can repair soils that have been exercised too much and try and bring the biological system back in.

Koen van Seijen 20:37

Are you now like I remember because we were on stage together in Padova, you're mentioning the same thing you just mentioned on it's suffering without the animals? It's clearly like from all the the analysis you've done, it you can clearly see that. Is that then something you try to repair? Are you allowed to even bring back animals in there? What as a long-term steward of you see that forest suffering basically, or the woodland suffering. Is that something okay? Let's bring in the animals there as well, let's start experimenting, or are there what are you thinking to do with that as a long-term observer?

John Gilliland 21:10

Well, the first thing is I wanted a really accurate baseline. And I now have a very accurate baseline. The second thing, if I look retrospectively, the mistake my ancestors made is where we are in the world, we don't have natural big herbivores other when we don't have any deer, for example, we don't have any bears. You know, what we do have is we have cattle. And, you know, when those trees were planted, we put a fence around them to protect the trees, which is the right thing to do. Trees need protection for a while, they can't look after themselves. But 10 or 15 years after those trees were planted, we should have let those fences come back down. We should have let animals back in again. But we didn't. Those fences kept big herbivores out, but they also kept the lime spreader out. Because I'm on a thousand eleven hundred millimeters of rainfall a year. Our rain patterns have changed with climate change. So we always have a phrase in Ireland: it's a soft day. What do we mean by a soft day? It is light, drizzly rain that will last for three days. Okay? Now we actually get far less soft days now, but we get far more thunder plumps, where we will get, you know, dare I say, three, four, five, six centimeters in half an hour. Okay? And so we're getting soil slump, but we're also seeing our soil pH leach. Um, so we've got this sort of perfect storm, is that one, we're not inoculating our soils with new biology. Two, we have fenced out something we would do in all our productive land is every five years we would put five tonnes per hectare on of ground limestone just to maintain our soil pH, our soils are mineral. So we look to maintain our soil pH at five or six point five. So that's our so we haven't put been putting lime in the woodlands, we haven't had livestock in it. And thirdly, then our weather, our rainfall patterns are different in regards to we have less soft days, and we have these really intense rain periods, and so we're seeing pH drop. And so where we would maintain our product productive land to pH 6.5, we are now recording pH 4.8 in a brown earth mineral soil under deciduous woodlands, which I am astonished, and the consequence of that, we have a lot more diseases in our trees. And I would argue everyone says, well, for example, in Europe and in the United Kingdom and in Ireland, we have a lot of problems with a tree species called ash, with ash dieback. And everyone said, Well, that's the fungi doing its business. Well, yes, it is, but what I learned as an agronomist when I was an arable farmer, the health of your crop depends on the soil to which it grows within. If you've got a soil that's not healthy, your plants will show deficiencies, and plants, just like humans that have deficiencies, are open season then for any pathogen or fungi out there looking to do its business and beat your crop up. So we have had in our part of the world, in the last 18 months, we've had six named storms over the top of our farm. We have lost more trees in 18 months than we've lost in 20 years. And we're really getting our head round because everyone says get rid of animals, plant trees. Well, if your trees are all going to blow over and lie on their side, they're no good for climate change either. And what we have found on our farm is 80% of the carbon in my farm is in the soil. When I do it with my neighbors, 95% of the carbon is in the soil. It's only I have more trees than them. And so we are really soul searching as we look not only to mitigate but actually remove carbon from the sky. Where do I want to put it into? And at the moment I want to put it in the soil because it's a better bet there. The storms can't get at it. And so we're fairly bruised at the moment. We've seen good, what we would call heritage landscapes for trees and parkland trees, been absolutely destroyed by storms. I am a nerd or an anorak. I normally go out a day or two days after those storms with a camera. And I photograph the root balls of the trees that are upended because of the storms. And it is really interesting to look at the root ball of a tree that's been sitting in a grassland field compared to the same species of tree that has been in my deciduous woodlands. And what you will find is first of the root ball scale could be five times bigger on the grassland field. You'll see a lovely gradient of changing of soil color with thousands of fine grey roots. And the other one, you'll get a far smaller root ball. The first thing hits you is an odor. Is there a rancid anaerobic smell? The roots are black, black and really short and stunted. And certainly for me, that really has got me worried. And for us, even on our non-food production land, we are now applying lime and we're quietly letting cattle back in. We have a baseline, we have a really accurate baseline, and our plan is to revisit the baseline every five years to see what actually works best. But is there a way that I can do that? Because I actually want healthy trees as well as healthy crops and animals. Yeah, of course. And one of the things that delights me as a former member of the soil mission for the European Union is actually they looked at all soils. It is not about food production only, it is also the soils under woodlands and forests, it is also the soil in urban areas. I think we do have a duty to try and understand those systems as well. And for too long, we haven't analyzed them or put them under the same microscope as well as we have for food-producing soils.

Koen van Seijen 27:41

And coming back to then what you use as a narrative to your peer farmers, like in this moment of crisis, I think it's clear that the amount of water you get, the amount of drought you get, the amount of wind you get is unprecedented in the last couple of years, probably not going to change in a sense it might get weirder. When you talk to your fellow land stewards and farmers, what is the language you use in terms of what you've learned, where you stand now, and what you without advising them, but how do you connect with them to start figuring out this at larger scale? Because only your farm obviously is not going to be enough to draw down or to store water, etc.

John Gilliland 28:21

So I'm always very clear whenever I'm speaking with an audience, whether it's a farming audience or a policy audience, I shape my message in a way that it's best received. When I'm on farm, if I talk about emiji in the last three weeks, I've been on 18 different farms doing one-on-one training sessions. There are two things that will absolutely get farmers interested. One is how do I do better nutrient cycling when there is a real threat to fertilizer availability in price in the next six to 18 months. Okay? And that is worrying, absolutely worrying an awful lot of farmers out there. The second thing is how do I make my soils more climate resilient? We have gone through huge pendulum shifts in the last three or four years from drought to floods. Now, so we will talk about those two areas, and then I will then sit down with them and we will look at their soil fertility, we'll look at their soil pH. But then we'll go under the bonnet a bit or under the hood if for our American audiences, and we'll look in underneath, and we'll look then at soil organic carbon, but we do it down to one meter deep. So we'll do 0 to 15 centimeters, 15 to 30, 30 to 60, 60 down, and we look at our SoC, our soil organic carbon percentage in each case, but we also look at our bulk densities in each case. And actually, bulk densities are really hard to measure, but if you measure them correctly, they are a very interesting indicator of the potential for root activity. And what a lot of people don't realize is that as soils get tighter, whether it's through compaction or whatever else, the activity of those roots really are restricted. And whether you're in plant-based agriculture or livestock-based agriculture, you rely on roots to do the business in the soil to give you the productivity above ground that you then harvest in whatever way you harvest it. And what we are seeing certainly is soils are slumping, they're getting tighter, roots are struggling. And I'm particularly interested because if I look to tackle the fertilizer crisis, the impending fertilizer crisis, I'm really wanting to get legumes better wedded into a rotation. And the first thing I'm looking at there is soil pH. And it'd be fair to say that many farmers across the world have been on honeymoons from applying lime or correcting soil pH. If you want to be successful with legumes, all right, if you're in chalk soils, that's fine, but many of our soils are not chalk, where we've got low pHs. There is a reason that legumes flourish between six and a half and seven of pH. And we I've seen a lot of soils below six. So they're planting legumes, but the legumes are not working for them. And so when I sit down with them, the first thing I look is their soil pH and encourage them, can you get your as long as it's a mineral soil. I wouldn't ask in an organic soil, but in a mineral soil, can you get your pH up to 6.5? The second thing is I look at the bulk densities, I look at soil tightness, soil compaction. I'll take a spade out, we'll dig a pit, and we'll look physically at the tightness of that soil. Now many people know, well, then I'll have to go and get a subsolar. Well, a subsoler means diesel and a tractor. And diesel's also something that is now pricing itself out of the marketplace. So I'm trying to encourage people to look at what I call biological subsoilars. What do I mean by a biological subsolar? Well, in grassland, for us, our biological subsoilar in our part of the world is chicory. Chicory has an extraordinarily long tap route, it goes down 60-80 centimeters. And where we found chicory is transient, you'll have a good crop for two to three years and it'll die back. But if you plant red clover with it, as the chicory dies back, the red clover follows the chicory roots down and it gets its feet down. And we've had far better performance of red clover as a legume where we'd plant it with chicory than if we had planted a monoculture of red clover, because red clover does not like soil tightness or soil compaction. And so looking at these sort of biological solutions in herbal rotations, you know, the use of oyster grape or canola, really getting roots down and acting as a biological subsolar and breaking that and giving that heave and lifting that up, that allows legumes to flourish. Okay, it allows you to get better nutrient cycling. But it also allows then better earthworm movement, it allows better earthworm activity, but it allows you to lay more carbon down so you've got better moisture retention, but you've got more better water infiltration. And so you've got an upward spiral rather than a downward spiral. And so I try to put that into context and I give them the information about their soil pH, I give them the information on their soil fertility, their carbon stocks, where is it? Where is currently their carbon sitting? Is it just in the top or is it right through the soil profile? What are your bulk densities? Where is this soil tightness? And out of that then becomes actually really quite a well-crafted response for decision making. And without exception, I have found that farmers have really embraced this. They found it really enlightening because we're doing it on a field-by-field basis. And being able then, when I do it, it's like blind to me because I don't know their farm. I see their data, but I see the anomalies. Some fields are a lot better than others. Why is that? You know, and and they then bring out their field maps and they see which fields the data belongs to, and then a light bulb goes, oh yes, well, we had potatoes in there last year. They were late harvested and we weren't able to sort it out. So we direct-drilled wheat in it, and basically they inherited the compaction from the potato crop into the wheat crop. Instead of the wheat crop doing 10 ton per hectare, it did six ton per hectare, and then they're saying, Why? And so the data actually helps shed light on some of those anomalies that they find on their own farm. And that's when I win hearts and minds. John, this is really constructive. I've I have found this really valuable, is you are actually uncovering the journey of my soils, and you've only been on my farm for four hours.

Koen van Seijen 35:15

And has that changed now? I mean, you mentioned price a number of times of diesel fertilizer. Is there a stronger signal hunger for these kinds of things? Is this a not going to say a watershed moment, but an important moment in getting of the addiction of a lot of these inputs that have been available and were always expensive, but not this expensive or not available? Is that have you seen some kind of shift over the last months as this massive crisis has been unfolding?

John Gilliland 35:44

Well, first of all, it's always easy to do the easy thing. Okay? It's always easy to do the thing you've done before. Okay, so you are pushing people out of the comfort zone. Now, we had a not a dissimilar crisis at the first year of the Ukraine war, where we saw fertilizer up over nitrogen fertilizer up over a thousand euros a tonne. And some people said, Well, I'll go and plant legumes. And they did go and plant legumes, but they were mitigating disaster because they didn't correct the soil pH first. Okay. And so there were some people who did it and got burnt, said I'm not going back. Okay. I think slowly people are beginning to realize that our situation in 2026 into 2027 is an awful lot bigger than where we were at the start of the Ukraine war. You know, not only are the Straits of Homo still closed, but the Iranians have done quite a good job of damaging fertilizer plants in the Gulf. And probably the bit that nobody's talking about is over the last six months the huge successes that the Ukrainians have had in damaging Russian oil and fertilizer businesses. Okay. Now we can sit, you know, I sit in the United Kingdom, we can sit high and might go, well, we don't buy Russian fertilizer. No. But the Brazilians do. And if the Brazilians can't get Russian fertilizer, where are they going to get their fertilizer? Well, they're going to come into our marketplace and outbid us on fertilizer. Okay. So this is absolutely a global problem. And I don't think it even is going to be a price. I think it's going to be more than the price problem. I just don't think it will be there. And so what we are seeing, and certainly some of the farms I'm seeing, is there's another way to get fertilizer. And that is certainly on farms that have been singly focused on arable, on you know, plant-based food production rather than animal-based food production, is there is a role for the animal back on those farms again. Is you know, animal feces is not just about nutrient, it's about biology. And so certainly I am seeing farmers beginning to think actually, either I'm going to put animals on the farm or I'm going to do a deal with the neighbor who is a livestock farmer, is I'll give him some lovely multi-species swart or herbal lay forage for his animals. In return, I'll get his farmyard manure and I'll put it on my land. And so I think we are beginning to see people looking at those things that they beforehand wouldn't have done, now out of necessity of finding no better way. I'm passionate. I am a great believer of the role of animal manures, farmyard manures, as a catalyst for good soil health. You know, they not only deliver fertility, but they deliver biology. Earthworms are just love it. Watching earthworms take farmyard manure that's put on the surface and taking it down to 60 centimeters is stunning. And I think one of the things that we in progressive agriculture undersell ourselves is we don't measure what's going on our soils properly. And certainly for us, I think one of the things that really helped us on our journey is we now measure soils down to what we call the sea horizon, the bedrock, or one meter deep. And we certainly in our farm found that 38% of our carbon was deeper than 30 centimeters. And as we switch to more plant diversities, likes of chicory, lengths of woody species, we're laying a lot of carbon down from 15 centimeters to 60 centimeters, which we were not picking up beforehand. And, you know, if I'm going to be critical of, if I dare be critical of the regenerative movement, is we tell with great passion and subjectivity. We don't necessarily tell with great objectivity and hard data. And that's something that I personally have championed for the last eight years. Can we put hard metrics around it? Can we take it from being a freak show on the side to mainstream where it's embedded in policy, where it's embedded in whether it's the land sector removal standards or whether it is in a climate change committee report? Is they now recognize this movement for what it is, but it is hardwired that they can actually see the improvement on soil metrics. And I don't think we do enough measurement and therefore enough articulation of the benefits why regenerating soil has to be front and center for any food or tree policy. They both need healthy soils.

Koen van Seijen 41:07

As you've shown in your 250-year-old Woodland, and around the carbon piece, carbon is getting a lot of, I mean, bad rap, first of all, of climate change. But in general, in the food and eggs phase, it seems to be, I'm not saying a hype, but definitely a lot of attention. And obviously, this is part of uh the OGCR series we're making to critically look at that. The European Union is critically looking at that. It's such an important lever, it gets people more people on the boat, let's say, than we ever had, but it also leads to a lot of confusion, for example, not measuring deep enough to pick up 38% of your carbon stock, etc. What have you seen over the last years? And what is your your observation, let's say, where we stand now? We are talking in May 2026 in terms of carbon farming in Europe, let's say, as a bit of a geography limit. What do you see?

John Gilliland 41:58

Well, if I look at my own farm, I mean, on my own farm, I'm now certified to be beyond net zero today. In other words, I am taking out of the atmosphere more than I'm releasing into the atmosphere. At the same time, we as a family have invested that in our own right. We don't participate in the voluntary carbon market, we don't participate in any of those other things. We have done really accurate baselines, so our clocks are ticking, okay, in regards every management change we make. Let's hope it's a positive one, is we're building for the future, okay? But what most people don't realize is solar organic carbon is a proxy for many other things going on in your soil. I will always argue the first customer for any of this journey is the farmer decision maker themselves. You know, where I see fields within a farm where solar organic carbon is collapsing, I'm seeing quite often that bulk densities are getting really tight. I'm getting restricted productivity. You know, so actually, soil organic carbon measurement highlighted a wider problem that was going on in that soil. And so I'm very keen when I'm speaking in farms. I actually take them through the five key soil functions. Climate regulation is only one of them. Okay, and but it just so happens the process of good measurement of soil organic carbon and bulk density helps shed lights on water infiltration, water runoff, biodiversity, nutrient cycling. And so it is about putting carbon in proper context to those farmers, which allows them to build more resilience, whether that's productivity. Resilience, economic resilience, or climate resilience. So I always will pitch it. The first audience for this are farmers themselves. The second audience then is the food chain, the value chain that they're in. I personally have yet to engage with the voluntary carbon market.

Koen van Seijen 44:19

Why have you waited until now? What's the reason of that? But for sure they've come on the farm, for sure they knocked on your door, for sure, and you very deliberately say we haven't done any engagement yet.

John Gilliland 44:29

Well, for several reasons. I don't like the way the voluntary carbon market is structured. Because they come on my farm and they're the judge and the jury. So where is the transparency in that emerging relationship? I am a great believer whoever is the jury should not be the judge. You know? There is a reason. So that's the first thing. The second reason is that I am not happy that they are measuring what's going on in my soil correctly. They're looking at cheaper ways that, you know, they're looking at earth observation or they're looking at tier three modelling. But the one thing I know from my soil, every part of my field is farm is slightly different. Soils are variable. And actually, nothing beats ground-truthing. So at the moment, I have to be convinced that the measuring, reporting, and verification is of a standard that actually captures my change. It may be Vero accredited, it may be carbon removal certification framework certified. But is it truly capturing the consequence of how I'm managing my landscape? I'm not convinced they are. I know certainly in the measurements we have taken, we have gone beyond all of those methodologies. But we are now picking up, if I switch my plant diversity, I know the consequence in my soil. If I go and plant a new tree or a new hedge, my aerial lidar will pick it up every time I fly my landscape every five years. I will pick it up. So I have a really good feedback loop that is credible, that has integrity. I'm not certain that the MRV of the voluntary market, it has all been focused on cost rather than does it actually pick up the behavioral change, the output of the behavioral change that we've done? And I'm not convinced they're there. I've been quite outspoken about that. And that is why, from our point of view, we as farmers set off with say, well, what is the measurement we need to pick up the positive changes that we're doing in our landscape? And so we've absolutely taken a bottom-up approach, not ignoring the journey that we have to go on, but we've done it with a granularity and an accuracy that's second to none. Our clocks are ticking. And certainly at some stage we may enter, but I would like to see equity and transparency. I am not convinced yet that that certainly transparency is there. You cannot be judged and jury. Sorry.

Koen van Seijen 47:04

And these measurements being that granular, how has that been influencing your decisions now? I mean, you say carbon obviously in the soil is a proxy, but it's a proxy of soil health as well. What are the most surprises now? You said we actually have a really you presented some details also in Paraguay. We have a really clear understanding of different land uses and how it influences, how deep, etc. How is that? I mean, apart from the woodland where you have to figure out what to do with your new pH knowledge you have, but what are what is it influencing now in terms of decision making? Of course, with your son, to figure out, okay, where are we actually doubling down? We see that this has more potential in terms of flood drought we're getting and the high winds and the crises that we're facing, the double or the polycrisis we're facing now. How has that been influencing your decision making and what is in line, let's say in 26, 27, 28? Where do you see the biggest opportunities? Also, when other land sewards knock on the door and say, Okay, what should I do? Like neighbors, etc., like Kishli, what seems to be working on your land and what should what are you doubling down on?

John Gilliland 48:02

Well, I'm doubling down on one single word, and how do I build resilience in our family business? Let's dig into that resilience. Well, we have a priority, there needs to be an economic resilience in there. But to deliver economic resilience, I need to get my soil resilience right. Okay. Now, what do I mean by soil resilience? Well, first of all, I need to find a way that I have proper nutrient cycling without having to import great quantities of synthetic and expensive fertilizer. Okay. The second resilience is how do I traffic my land in extreme rainfall and how do I stop my land from droughting? So I need proper water cycling in my soil. I also do want to build better climate regulation, so minimizing nitrous oxide emissions, capitalizing and building carbon. So for us, our movement is towards more complex farming systems. So we are looking to switch from grass to herbalase to multi-species. We're looking to bring a fourth plant species into that, that being woody species. So we're looking to put grasses, herbs, legumes, trees, grazing trees and animals in the same space. Now that is a complex solution. It needs good management, so I need better education. But if you then look at through the other lens, look at the multiple of public goods that it's delivering and look at the climate resilience, particularly around adapting to weather extremes. I get better traffic ability in wet weather, I get shade for my animals in dry weather, I get above ground productivity, I get on-the-ground productivity, but I absolutely build my soil carbon below that. So our direction is walking away. I mean, I use a phrase in our business: the one thing you never find in nature is a monoculture. And we have had monocultures of grass and we've had monocultures of trees. And we're trying to move out of those monocultures and diverge to see where is the soft landing. So I'm putting animals into my tree landscape, I'm putting trees into my grass landscape, I'm putting herbs and legumes in. And as such, I don't know exactly what point will be the soft, happy landing of compromise. It does for us, certainly, we are investing more in our own knowledge, but we are very fortunate we have built relationships with good universities and research institutes. We give them access to our journey so they can help us measure our journey, and that gives us a very good feedback loop in sharpening the quality of our decisions. But for us, we are walking away from landscapes and monocultures into diversity of landscapes and diversity of plants and a diversity with animals in it as well, so that we're getting very similar to what my great-grandfather would have run, which is very interesting from a historic perspective.

Koen van Seijen 51:24

We don't want to go back to, but we definitely want to go forward, let's say forward, backwards to the future. And coming to the policy side, like policymakers, what are your main language there? Because you said I really talked to two two different groups, like land stewards and policymakers. What have you been finding, how do you say, more interested ears, let's say over the last months, maybe as these crises are unfolding, are they also starting to hit really about national food security? This is about food security, it's about production potential. Is actually do we get the fertilizer into the country or not? Have you seen some, let's say, stronger response from the policy side of things in Europe, within Ireland, etc.

John Gilliland 52:05

Well, you have touched on a raw nerve for me, and bearing in mind, I may be one, you know, one kilometer. 53 minutes in, let's go. I may be far one kilometer from the European Union, but I happen to live in the United Kingdom. Sure. And my challenge and the industry's challenge is we are asleep at the wheel in United Kingdom around food security. Or should I say nutrient security? I think is a better phrase than food security. And something in me, there's a sort of devil's streak of me saying, well, maybe we need one or two really tough years for politicians to wake up, is you actually need indigenous nutrient production in whatever form that comes in food. Because we have to look at what healthy diets are for people as well. It's a one-health journey, so you have to include human diets in there. I have to say, I think we have got very become very blasé. You know, certainly the United Kingdom was taught manners during the Second World War, nearly starved to death. But we have got too comfortable in the last 30, 40 years. We take food security and nutrient security for granted. So, certainly, for me, my journey has not to turn my back on food. My journey is I still want to have a productive landscape. So, my personal challenge and while on our journey is can we still have a livestock density of two animals per hectare as we go on this? So that food production is still a corn, a real central pillar in this, but I can deliver other public goods alongside that at the same time. So the journey we're on is not either or, it's both, and it is this concept. Certainly, in the southeast of England, there's a huge push to land spare. I am absolutely driven in land sharing. And I just disappointed that our academics, our policymakers, and our politicians don't have the bandwidth to look at complex land management solutions like of silver pasture and things like that, where you could absolutely drive food production, but also production of multiple soil functions and wider public goods. And that is very frustrating and it actually drives me harder to prove to them that actually there is a halfway house there. So you will always find me campaigning. I am a land sharing person through and through. It is complicated, it is more complex, it's harder to measure, but you certainly get a lot more public goods that way than you would if you just go, well, that's for solar panels, that's for carrots, that's for cattle, and that's for trees. And I think if we learnt anything, my I mean, I've you had a little you you cascade a little bit of me looking backwards, but I have to say, perish are ourselves if we don't learn from the lessons of history. My ancestors on our farm weren't slow, they weren't silly, they didn't have our modern science. So I am there are a lot of the principles that they had I'm reinstating. But the difference is I now have modern science to measure its journey and to be able to actually physically show the positive impact of that journey. My ancestors didn't have that. We do have that, and so our key farm output is not only are we changing what we're doing, but we're turning our farm into a living lab that has an open door policy to let society come and see the journey, see the scientists at work, see the animals. It's extraordinary watching the general public watch my cattle eating leaves of willow trees. And you know, watching how you know year-old cattle form their own social groups of two or three animals, and they're standing in a field of willows that are three or four meters tall, and they've grazed all the handy leaves at their height, and they look up and they see all these leaves above, and then one of them realizes well, if I lean my neck against those willows will bend down and the others can eat. And it is fascinating within three days, people forget that cattle were browsers, in other words, they ate leaves of trees first and grazers second, and it's extraordinary to watch what is a latent gene hiding in their brains somewhere, yeah, give them three days and it's there. And they can suddenly eat leaves that are you know sitting three and four meters above ground level. Just astonishing. Part of our commitment is not only to the public, but we have we open open farm weekend, you know, we'll be doing that again in six weeks' time. We've normally have somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 people come to visit our farm over two and a half days. And some of them are three generations of farming families who wouldn't normally come out to visit my farm, but it's Father's Day, and so mum and and and wife are pulling their men folk out. Come on. So we're the best of the of a bad bunch, and they come out to visit us, and they watch and they see, and then they look at me and said, Gilly Dant, do you know something? You might be onto something. It's fascinating watching that, and them watching how year old we we take basically crosses from the dairy herd and the beef industry. So the male animals out of the dairy industry that have been crossed with a beef bull, they come to us and watching them then grazing trees, grazing you know, this dense willow crop, and their behavior. People forget willow is full of salicylic acids, so it's aspirin. And within two days, three days, they're like pussy cats. And it is just extraordinary. So we have learned so much from doing this and experimenting, putting the science around it, facilitating master students, PhD students, getting it written up, getting it published, getting it peer-reviewed. And if my if I have a plea to my colleagues that are on a regenerative journey in whatever shape, we need to work harder in putting the data and science around our journey. And we need to use that better to communicate why regenerative farming is really important, but it can still deliver productivity. I mean, I ran a research project in the Republic of Ireland at the Lands of Douth. We had five PhD students from Wagnham University and University College Dublin. We did a full-scale 36-hectare replicated trial on switching from a monoculture perennial ryegrass to herbolace to multi-species swords. We increased herbage by 42% in a year while reducing nitrogen by 65%. We increased meat output by 83% per hectare. Wow. And that was through regeneration. Okay, so a lot of people in one year. Now it are they are these are now published and peer-reviewed. The PhD students have graduated. So that data is now published and people to read. The data is an average of three years, not just one. Okay. And what we proved is you can deliver regeneration and food output simultaneously. Which is such good.

Koen van Seijen 1:00:12

Strong narrative, I think, to to debunk in that sense. It's not always switch to because which is a narrative I hear from investors, and I want to switch to some of those questions as well. Great, what you're doing, John, amazing. But uh, how do we feed the world? And the reality is, truth is like that's the butt and there's a lot of science, a lot of peer-reviewed papers, there are a lot of very interesting data showing that in these complex systems, when done well, and nothing, none of this is easy, and there's always interesting periods and dips, et cetera, depending on how bad the soil is. But you produce more, and at least the same, let alone more with way lower costs and way lower input, etc. etc. But still, that narrative is sort of lingering constantly, very interestingly pushed, obviously, by the input industry, but it's such a strong one that I've been hearing over and over again for 15 years, even though the data has been very clear.

John Gilliland 1:01:01

Well, I would say it's more than lingering, it's screaming. And I hear it regularly when I'm in London. But I would argue it's a bit of the horn versus corn because actually it is very hard to take corn production, you know, herbal crop production on a regenerative journey without some farm yarn manure or animal input. Okay. What I'm saying is where I have animals as a key plank, I can increase output and reduce environmental footprint simultaneously. But animals are part of that. And you know, people forget that particularly ruminant agriculture, they eat herbage that you and I can't eat on land that we cannot plow and grow human edible, plant-based food, and we upvalue it into highly nutritious meat and milk, and in a balanced diet gives very good health, human health. And you know, I think we do need to embrace some of those quite tough, meaty topics. But if you coming from a position, you now have a very good data set, it makes it very hard for the doubters. Yeah, and I have been shouted down many times, but I'm not one to be trod upon. Is I said, Well, I show them my donors and which bit of this data do you not like? And then they'll say, Well, it's not published and peer-reviewed, and then I show them the publication, the peer review. Well, it wasn't done by a good enough university, and they then see it's been done by Wagnham University or University College Dublin or Queen's University Belfast or Harper. Oh. And then they then go quiet, they turn around and march off because you've actually evidenced a solution that they're not ready to accept. I think one of the biggest successes we are having at the moment is we are challenging the myth that one, regenerative is about reduction of yields, but two, that farming, landscape management is just the problem and not the solution. I for seven years of my career chaired the United Kingdom's Rural Climate Change Forum from 2005 to 2012. I chaired a multi-stakeholder forum of environmentalists, of industry people. But we eventually came to our end seven years later, when our last advice, and we got unanimity, is this journey towards net zero, we need to change the language. For farm business, it's like a balance sheet that we should have a whole farm carbon balance sheet with assets and liabilities. And what we want as farm business people is we want to minimize our liabilities and optimize our assets over time. And if you do that, your net worth goes the right direction. And I was told point blankly, you would never be able to do that, you would never be able to measure carbon the landscape and create a balance sheet. Well, now we can. We now LIDAR surveyed 16 scans per square metre. We're measuring soils down to one meter deep. We can now do those measurements and we can do those accurately. And that's what we've we did in our first farm on the lands of Dowthan, Republic of Ireland and Arc Zero, the seven farms in Northern Ireland. And now through the Agriculture Horticultural Development Board and Quality Meat Scotland in GB, we're doing it on 36,000 hectares, is we're putting the data behind it across different soils, different climates, different enterprises to prove to the world that farming is the solution and not just the problem.

Koen van Seijen 1:04:59

Which is an amazing way to end, but we're not going to do that because I have a few small questions which we always like

What should smart investors, who want to invest in reg ag and food look out for?

Koen van Seijen 1:05:04

to ask. Let's say we do this in a room full of investors, let's say in London, in the city, and we've had an amazing meal, we have a lot of amazing footage from the farm, we talk about it in the evening. People obviously have a lot of questions, et cetera, et cetera. But what do you want them to remember the next day? Because people forget what kind of seed would you like to plant in the mind of people that are working with finance, their own money or other people's money. What do you want them to remember the next day when they're at their desk when they do something?

John Gilliland 1:05:31

So, well, I have done this, and I have two messages. The first message is my track record of already delivering and how I verified it. And here are my measurements and here are my publications. So I have a track record of delivering and having it published. That in itself is quite interesting because very few investors have actually seen successful projects published and peer reviewed. Okay. But I also have a rhetorical question to them. So I have proved that I can be done. Now you prove to me that you can earn my trust. Because we are now into a new era. I have had to work with governments, and I know the consequence of governments don't deliver. Where, you know, and my issue about trust is what happens if I do a deal with a private sector investor and something goes wrong. You know, what is in the contract? What's the force majeure? Who is doing the MRV? And so I am not convinced yet that investors understand that for people like me who are generational farmers, that I trust them that they will treat me fairly. And I'm not there yet. I have carbon I could sell today. I have not sold one ounce of it yet. I've yet to see someone who actually has the same ethos that we run in our farm. Now, I may at some stage be economically forced to do something, but I certainly will be looking for I need that investor to earn my trust. It's not at the moment, it's about you, you know, about them trusting you. I want the other way around, sorry. And that starts with I do not believe in the voluntary carbon market that they should be both judge and jury is the same person. My message to government in this is government, you should step up and do the independent MRV. My message to the private sector is you should focus on funding the behavioral change, but using the government's MRV. Separate this, give their transparency, give their you know, real integrity, then I'm listening. Okay? That is not the case. It's an unregulated market. They work to different metrics. I take my hats off to the European Commission and what they're trying to do with the you know the carbon removal certification framework to bring integrity into it, but I still really struggling. You cannot be judge and jury. There has to be independence. Good MRV is expensive at the moment. The MRV industry is in its infancy. In 15 years' time, the price will be a tenth of what it is today. And my again, my pitch at the public purse is you need to pump prime really good MRV. We need to calibrate the landscape. Once it's all calibrated, we can go to Earth Observation, we can go to three tier three modelling, but you can't go straight away. You need a ground truth to landscape. And at the moment, I don't think we are there yet. I have had the privilege of speaking to many private investors, and when I've walked them through that, they have never disagreed with me. The issue at the moment is there is not certainly there isn't you there is more in Europe than there is in the United Kingdom about leadership in this conversation, about how do you bring transparency, how do you bring equity, how do you make sure it's not greenwashing, and how do I make sure that I'm not shafting my sons and daughters.

What would you do if you were in charge of a 1B investment portfolio tomorrow morning?

Koen van Seijen 1:09:26

And what if we switch the let's say table setting and you'll be on the investor side, and suddenly overnight we like to say, not because we think anybody should have this concentrated wealth, but let's say you do. You have a billion dollars or a billion euros to put to work or a billion pounds sterling, whatever currency you prefer. We are not looking for exact amounts, but I'm looking what would it be the main priorities, the main buckets? Would it be driving transition in the food sector? Would it be dry uh investing in technology? Would it be buying farmland or leasing farmland? What would be the main things you would focus on if suddenly you would be on the investor side and had a one with nine zeros to put to work, which could be extremely long term. There are no, I bet it had to be put to work. What would you focus on?

John Gilliland 1:10:12

I would always focus around the land. Okay. If you're looking at transition, remember if it's around climate change, 80 to 90 percent of a carbon footprint of food happens inside the farm gate. Land is a great asset, we all understand it. We've got markets that work around it as such. I may not want, I may look to do it in a sort of farming partnership. I'm not, you know, if I was an investor, I wasn't the farmer. But I would be looking for a you know, the equivalent of a John Gilliland out there who knows his numbers, who's measuring frequency. What I you know, as an investor, what I don't like are shocks. Okay, so I I want to see waypoints, you know. If I'm in a 30-year deal, I want to see it reported every five years to see where am I on my trajectory. So if something starts to go wrong, I have an early indication, then we can step in to help. Well, is there another way of doing this? Five years might be a bit too much.

Koen van Seijen 1:11:08

I would say six months every year to have an indication a bit earlier. Yeah, but yeah.

John Gilliland 1:11:14

Well, I don't think, I mean, certainly in the issue of carbon stocks, you can't measure carbon stocks every year. It'll cost you uh an arm and a leg, and also carbon takes time to build. But you certainly can look at the processes, and you can continuously then you have waypoints between that as such. I mean, for me, the place I'm probably looking most at is in Australia at the moment. The clean energy regulator, the Australian Carbon Credit Units. You know, they are now starting cycle two and cycle three for some of the early movers. And I have to say, on that, I am particularly interested more in the soils than I am in the trees. I just think you know, this dash to plant trees everywhere. One, we end up putting it in the wrong soil type in the wrong place. Two, we're now getting more storm damage, three, we're getting more forest fires, four, we're getting more disease. And I'm saying to myself, actually, if I'm going to buy something in this and I it's I'm in for 20 or 30 years, I think I'd want it in the soil. And certainly that is more and more we're losing trees to storms, but we're planting trees. But our main effort is in our soils. You know, on my farm, 80% of the carbon is in my soils. On my neighbors, it's 95%, and that's where most farmers are. I just have more trees. But I'm sit, you know, I'm under attack from disease and pests, I'm under attack from extreme storms, and I'm scratching my head saying maybe the soil is the right place to be focusing on. So I would be looking, if I was an investor, I would be looking for the right land managers that give me confidence that they're at the top of their game, that they're measuring on a regular basis, they're connected in with the science as the science evolves. They're, you know, the they're the pioneers of the early adopters of science, and but they have this policy, measure manage, so that there are if things start to go wrong, there's an early warning system, and we can all get around the table and say, well, what is it we need to do to correct it? So those would certainly be things I if I was wearing an investor hat, alas, I do not have that wealth to be in that position. But if I was, and someone wanted to employ me, those are the kind of things I would be looking for in that system. And it would be a partnership, a journey of partnership built on transparency, built on MRV, built on using the latest output of science, showing us what is working, what is not working.

If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the agriculture industry from a sustainability point of view, what would it be?

Koen van Seijen 1:13:55

And as a final question, because I want to be conscious of your time as well. We take away your fund, unfortunately, but you do have the power to change one thing. Could be anything. We've heard changing the cup, we've heard global consciousness, we've heard better taste, we've heard all animals outside or in their natural environment, anything or very small. But if you could change one thing, not like Aladin, where you get three wishes, you get one wish in the food and agriculture space. What would that one thing be if you had a magic wand?

John Gilliland 1:14:25

Knowledge availability and its translation to decision makers on land, on farms. This is a knowledge-based journey. This is not a top-down approach. You need to empower decision makers and win their hearts and minds, and only knowledge will do that.

Koen van Seijen 1:14:47

And most of the knowledge is available. Do you sorry? Do we agree on the translation of that knowledge is not available.

John Gilliland 1:14:55

I have to say the investment and knowledge exchange is awful right across Europe, right across the United Kingdom. We have any amount of research projects, we have heaps of publications sitting on shelves, but its translation into usable knowledge and actually getting land managers to take it up is woeful. And it we all should hold our heads in shame in that one. You know, I am very privileged I have spent my career in that space of translation into practice. And that is the one area we do not do well anywhere in the world. We, you know, we've no, you know, governments have backed out of knowledge exchange. That's the industry issue. It never has been topped up, it has never been replaced. And I, you know, you asked me for one wish. That is my one wish is translation knowledge into practice and impact change. And that is the bit that we are really missing.

Koen van Seijen 1:15:57

I think it's a perfect moment to wrap up. I want to thank you so much, Joan, for first of all, the work you do, obviously, and coming on here to talk about it and for the tired efforts you make to not only on your farm, but specifically outside as well, to really show up on these meetings, show up on the roundtables and the workshops and all of that to really bring the farmer voice, but also a very well-researched and scientific-based farmer voice to the table.

John Gilliland 1:16:23

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity. And I always finish with an open invitation. If this has been of interest to people and they want to know more, they are always welcome to receive an Irish welcome when they come and visit us. Amazing.

Koen van Seijen 1:16:40

Highly recommended. So thank you for listening all the way to the end. I'm super curious what you think of this episode and how specific John is about not wanting to work and not trusting the current carbon players. And because they don't measure deep enough, they don't measure enough, they don't measure accurate enough, and it's just fascinating to see somebody taking a stand and saying, I'm not participating until judge and jury are not the same person or the same organization. Very curious what you think of that and how that shapes you and how that affects you in the work you do. Of course, super interesting to hear, and this could have been part of the animal series as well, like the importance of animals to bring biology to the soil, the importance of a 250-year-old woodland that is suffering because it doesn't have animals on board. And it doesn't mean animals should be everywhere, it doesn't mean all the don't go on that bandwagon, please. But it does mean that we probably the biggest sin we've done in agriculture, and remember the word, is probably plowing to one extent, but also separation of arable and livestock. And to think that we could separate this to put animals in horrendous conditions inside and somehow fix up the arable situation with a lot of inputs. That's coming. I mean, the train wreck is definitely the train is definitely wrecking, or the train wreck is coming slowly, but we talk about it as well. The fertilizer side, how much of a crisis we're actually in, and he reckons like 18 months, because a lot of fertilizer production is actually taken out of production, not just because of the Strait of Hormuz, which is closed. So let me know what you think. This is a long one in the sense of five generations of farmers, 250-year-old woodland, but also very current in terms of policymakers and language, what to use with other farmers, how do we connect with other farmers? We don't have time to convince them, quote unquote, but how do we connect to them and speak language clear enough that people will start to make changes in the next couple of years? Because that's literally what we have. If any of this resonates, let us know as always and share this episode with a few people that really could benefit from hearing this content. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investinginregenerativeagriculture.com slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app and tell us what you liked most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.