🌳 Groundswell Agriculture 2025 is a wrap, and the Common team were blown away by the experience. Despite almost no sleep across two nights of camping ⛺ we felt topped up by what is truly a festival of collegiate spirit on farming 👨🌾 food 🌽 land ⛰️ nature 🦉and community 👯
Our panel – How to Build a Movement of Community Nature Recovery – was possibly a curveball for a regenerative agriculture festival, so our thanks to the organisers for including it in the programme. In the event our brilliant panellists Charlotte Hollins, Helen Avery, Mark Walton, and Ben Goldsmith drew a crowd of almost 400, and justified the move. Indeed, Ben observed that ten years ago, when the festival began, a community panel might not have been programmed or drawn only a handful, so this was a sign of hope.
Discussion amongst panel and audience ranged across precedents for community inclusion in land projects, including Charlotte’s own Fordhall Farm in Shropshire, and the projects Common is developing around the British Isles, four of which are either farms or have farming components; finance, for which Helen set out how community has moved in the understanding of decision-makers from being a complicating factor to being a source of integrity, reputational durability, and increased valuations of hashtagnaturalcapital credits; and also took in community asset transfers, green social prescribing, the evolving policy landscape, partnerships and networks, skills, design, and the fundamental importance of human connection in creating positive engagements and collaborative dynamics. We’ll post the event recording should it come to light.
The rest of the festival was marked by fantastic talks on food security (with Tim Lang – whose “Feeding Britain” I’m now devouring), beans (with Henry Dimbleby and others), weeds (with Lynn Tatnell and others), water management (with Lottie Alves), nature markets (with Helen Avery again alongside Alexander Begg and Ivan de Klee), as well as workshops, poetry, yoga, birding, and listening to the soil (with Jackie Thoms). Not on the programme but another sign of the importance of the festival, Nick Gardner of Environmental Funders Network (and a Common advisor) convened a gathering of pioneering nature investors in the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation tent.
Also glimpsed and in the mix Sarah Hedley Liam McAleese Edward Thorne Eoin Murray Harry Farnsworth Jack Arbuthnott Hugh van Cutsem Mark Hilleard Michael Flint Anna Austin Ben Constable Maxwell Laura Hampton Edward Morgan-Evans Maarten Van Dam Froukje Remmers Mairead Cahill Jo Ralling Richard Allan Black Mountains College and a cast of thousands, including Suffolk ewes, fine jersey calves, a marmalade hoverfly, and the skylarks 🕊️
All this and a zinging DJ set by farmer (and Groove Armada man) Andy Cato which set loose a storm of pogoing farmers of all ages, and we embark on summer feeling truly Groundswelled. (The image above was even used to headline the roundup email sent out by Groundswell to all 8,000 participants 😊 )
And back to work… 🌳
