On Your Farm

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Getting to the heart of country life with a look at individual farming endeavours

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On Your Farm: BBC Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Green Farm Collective

BBC Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Green Farm Collective

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, BBC Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Green Farm Collective

The judges visit two of the founding members of a farmers collective.

Charlotte Smith and Lucy Speed are judging the Farming for the Future category of the BBC Food and Farming Awards. In this programme, they visit the last of their three finalists.

Michael Kavanagh says he hasn't used insecticide 8 years on the farm he manages. Tim Parton says his wild bird numbers are booming. Both, say it's down to regenerative farming.

What is regenerative agriculture? The Green Farm Collective is a group of farmers - including Michael and Tim - who think they know. By concentrating on the health of their soil, through growing cover crops and reducing cultivation, they say they are able to use fewer inputs like artificial fertiliser, insecticide and fungicide. In turn, they say, that leads to increased biodiversity on their farms and higher levels of carbon sequestered into their soils.

At a time when Government money for farming is changing - since leaving the EU's Common Agricultural Policy - this group wants to help farmers find new sources of revenue that reward them for farming in this way...through selling carbon and biodiversity credits, and by getting a better price for their crops using a Green Farm Collective regenerative brand.

The Collective has been picked as a finalist in the "Farming for the Future" category of this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards. It's being judged by Farming Today presenter, Charlotte Smith, and actor, Lucy Speed - who plays Stella in The Archers. In this programme, they make their "judges' visit" to farms run by two of the collective's founding members.

Presenter by Charlotte Smith and Lucy Speed
Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Heather Simons

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On Your Farm

BBC Food & Farming Awards finalist: The Green Farm Collective

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