A global pandemic had trashed a decadent plan for my wife Pel and I to start a flower farm in Tuscany. We needed an escape.

The route out of London came with the offer to help out on a farm in Maidstone, Kent. We were to live in an abandoned worker’s cottage and help out at Blooming Green, a small flower farm within Loddington Farm, a 5th generation commercial fruit grower.

Loddington is a thoroughly modern farm—the growing is intensive and efficient, with the majority of the seasonal labourers housed on-site. In the main farmyard is Musket—a brewery producing perfect, traditional Kentish ales—the labourers’ caravan park. There’s also selection of small businesses housed in former mushroom growing sheds: a gym, a car garage, a coffee roaster, a wood workshop, and Blooming Green flowers owned and operated by cousins Bek Bibby and Jen Stuart-Smith.

In normal, non-Covid times Blooming Green operates both as a florist and as a pick-your-own garden, offering customers the chance to cut their own bouquet of seasonal blooms. With their workshop and office in the mushroom sheds, the main growing area sits adjacent—a colourful oasis surrounded on three sides by the orchards of the main farm.

The growing at Blooming Green is all no-dig—the practice of leaving the soil largely undisturbed and feeding it with compost on the surface—encouraging microbial life, insects and worms to feed whilst allowing for soil structure and mycelial networks to remain undisturbed. Plants are planted gently through the compost into the soil and, as evidenced here, they absolutely love it.

With all of the beauty and abundance on show at Blooming Green, it was easy to assume that Loddington Farm, which encompasses it, was an illustration of poisonous modernity, witnessing the sprayers and machinery in contrast with our hand-tooled toil. It took a meeting with farm manager James Smith, younger brother of Bek, for me to see that her enlightened thinking was rubbing off and that after nearly a century, change was finally afoot.

***

Loddington Farm is set over two sites: the main farm of 184 acres in Linton, just outside of Maidstone and the other, the 75-acre West Pike Fish Farm, deeper into the Kentish countryside near the village of Marden. Loddington supplies apples and pears to companies ranging from supermarket giant Tesco to independent soft drink producer Square Root.

I was excited to understand why—and how—such a huge commercial farm was turning to ideas of regenerative agriculture, and inspired that such a big business would take the risk of manoeuvring in these crisis-stacked times. The truth was that it was partially a personal reckoning—an awakening within farm manager James—that all wasn’t well in the world he grew up in.

“I look around now at these fields, this rural idyll, the British farming that I used to love: the harvests, combines rolling, bailers,” he recalls. “Now I just look at it and think it’s just not right. It’s not functional. There are ways of doing things differently. The biggest thing we can do as farmers is to keep the soil green. Soil doesn’t produce plants—plants produce soil. And soil without biology is just geology.”

James speaks in long, articulate bursts, whipped up by modern movements and harsh environmental lessons. Like a growing number of farmers and smallholders, James sees solutions in new systems, moving to more mixed farming with fewer chemical inputs and more sophisticated trophic systems [food chains] to help with, as he says, “the complete regeneration of our soils to turn them back into this amazing living entity, rather just the substrate that we’ve treated them as for the last 20-30 years.”

I wondered what the next stage of the process would be, and if he could really follow up on something he’d told me in the farmyard one day, about being chemical-free within 5 years.

“We’re already herbicide-free, already chemical fertiliser free. My target for this year was to reduce fungicide use by 20%,” he says. “I think I’ve already beaten that target; insecticide use 15-20%, I’ve already beaten that. So I actually think [being] chemical-free in 5 years is beatable. It could be 3.”

James studied Crop Science at the University of Reading and has a couple of decades of practical experience on the farm, but now he’s having to unlearn things, embracing new ways of thinking and new techniques, countering the tide of received farming wisdom and economic pressures.

““We’ve lost our way over the last 30-40 years in the way we farm and this massive industrialisation of food.””

— James Smith

“It’s a self-fulfilling exercise. The more I’m self-educating, reading about the chemistry of the fungicides and plant protection products, and peer-reviewed research, I’m realising a lot of this stuff isn’t new: a lot of this was being done in the 40s, 50s, 60s,” he tells me. “It’s not mainstream because there’s an awful lot of money made from agrochemicals and fertilisers; they’re multi-billion pound businesses.”

“I’ve basically been analysing my trees every two weeks for the last few months—I haven’t applied a single kilo of synthetic nitrogen to any of my orchards and all of my orchards have ample nitrogen in the plants,” James says. “So, it begs the question, why, for as long as we can remember, have we been putting nitrogen on the soil to get nitrogen into our plants?”

James explains that farms are judged on their nutrient management by being held to a standard called RB209, recommended by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), an offshoot of government body DEFRA. By adhering to these accepted norms when James gets inspected he gets a nice big tick that says he’s doing things properly.

The traditional thought is to replace nitrogen that is used in growing the apple by adding it back into the soil in the form of fertiliser. In a regenerative model, like the one at Loddington, nitrogen can be fixed into the soil through plants such as peas and clover.

With agronomists and governments all in agreement with the chemical companies on how best to grow our food, it’s a huge challenge to make changes and to make yourself an outlier.

James asserts that it’s the “drive for producing nutrient-dense food [that] underpins everything,” and a belief in self-sufficient localism that will see results. “Keep everything local. Don’t buy external products to fertilise your land and feed your animals. Grow it all at home. Sell everything within 30 miles,” he says, resolutely. “We’ve lost our way over the last 30-40 years in the way we farm and this massive industrialisation of food.”

There’s also the matter of creating jobs and getting more people back on the land. According to the Office for National Statistics, less than 1% of people in the UK are employed in agricultural work. Monoculture and mechanisation have played a part in making farming less labour-intensive in part, but this leads to more fossil fuel use, and also the loneliness of farmers.

“It’s soulless, it’s dull, it’s hard work, it destroys people,” James tells me. “Suicide rates are so high in farming, and that’s because you’ve got a bloke with a tractor farming a thousand acres doing it all himself. A thousand acres could employ a thousand people, easily.”

James cited Blooming Green as a good idea of how much labour you can concentrate onto a small piece of land. With the systems Bek has in place, there’s always work to be done—from seed sowing to planting and weeding—there’s a constant turnaround to be kept up with. With no-dig farming, you’re constantly feeding the soil, and aiming for the bare minimum of disruption.

““Soil doesn’t produce plants—plants produce soil. And soil without biology is just geology.””

— James Smith

When a plant has finished flowering, we’d sometimes simply chop it to the ground, recover the bed with compost and then plant through, leaving the old roots to the worms. The simplicity was staggering—the kind of growing espoused by no-dig pioneer Charles Dowding, whose online course we’d study by night before getting back to wheelbarrowing compost in the morning, listening intently to our leader Bek to work through her extensive to-do list.

I wanted to talk to James's father, Alan—the 4th-generation farmer who took over the farm in 1972, and has since taken a more backseat role—to get further into the heart of the business.

By the late summer, Coronavirus had been downgraded enough in people’s minds that it was fine to meet up, at a distance, with Alan and Mary Smith. Mary’s a big fan of Charles Dowding’s work too, a fine horticulturist in her own right, and all-round rural super-matriarch. Even Mary’s adult children still hold their breath for the next batch of jam, cake or Discovery apple juice.

***

Alan Smith met me at my door with an umbrella. He beamed a broad smile and looked up to a turning sky. Alan is nearly 80, but still an imposing presence, and has been watching the weather intently for most of his life whilst steering the ship at Loddington Farm. He passed me his spare umbrella and he led me out to the apple orchards of West Pike Fish Farm, a 75-acre patch of the business and home to himself, his youngest daughter Catherine and, just up the lane, Bek and her family.

As we walked through the orchards Alan talked me through the various varieties of apples and differences in growing techniques. Across the two farms, they grow Gala, Braeburn, Bramley, Evelina, Red Windsor, Discovery, and Magic Star apples, plus Conference pears. As conversation turn to the business of farming itself I learned more about the changes over the decades as supermarkets became the main supply line for their produce.

“When we were mainly supplying the wholesale market, we ran our own transport, we had our own packhouse, [and] we kept all these costs in-house,” Alex says. “Now you’re into this industrial production you have to contract out all of the haulage [and] packing is by a contractor. It’s an interesting scenario.”

When I asked about when the rot set in, I got the answer I expected. “We made some money in the 1970s, we even had a drought and it was still a good time,” he says. “But then a certain Mrs Thatcher came to power.”

“I’d like to think we’re at the cutting edge. The problem is the more efficient you get, the more the retailer screws you down,” he says. “‘Oh you’ve got wonderful economies [of scale] in production, so we’ll only pay you so much per kilo,’ so no sooner do you make a step forward the retailer makes sure you come back, so they can keep their snouts in the trough and get their margin, keep their margin, and keep their shareholders happy.”

***

It’s difficult within a time which seems apocalyptic to find any real optimism, but away from the plague, the fascism, and open government corruption, on the periphery good things are happening, as they always are. At Loddington I understood more about how farms are treated by supermarkets—it felt very gloomy, given their power within our food supply, but there was a lot to feel good about, witnessing a business change in response to environmental degradation.

In times of crisis, the nature of the response is vital. Our government showed us how not to do it, but fortunately, I was working with people who aren’t self-interested monsters. I felt particularly privileged to be able to interact with nature and learn skills that aren’t common in city-dwellers. The biggest issue in England is lack of access to land and inequality in land ownership—something that will take some force to sort out.

I talked to Bek about everything in my time at Blooming Green, and understood it is people like her who are the real drivers of change—educators and innovators who think about people first. It’s imperative that people connect with the natural world, and that it is reclaimed from those that will churn it solely for profit.

“People benefit from interacting with plants,” she says. “When people are given a free rein to pick their own flowers, they tell us that they feel that they are in a dream or paradise, heaven.”