82: Regenerative Agriculture in the Lake District

The PloughCast

James and Helen Rebanks talk about raising sheep and cattle in the Lake District. James describes the landscape where their families have lived for six hundred years, and how they have begun practicing regenerative agriculture as a way of restoring the land that recent conventional agriculture had damaged. He gives details about the sheep and cattle herds and the grazing systems they’ve established.

Then Helen describes what led her to write her book on the work of the farmer’s wife, and addresses mothers, who are often the ones making choices about food that are linked to questions of sustainable agriculture.

They discuss the concept of rewilding, and how that is not necessarily either possible or desirable – the landscape has not been wild for thousands of years – but that increasing complexity and biodiversity is both possible and necessary.