Terms like "Wild Farming", "Regenerative methods", "Holistic Land Management", "Pasture Cropping", "Carbon Sequestration" etc... are finally creeping up more frequently in mainstream conversations in the context of agricultural practices, environmental issues, consumer health & choices etc... But what do these mean? These terms are not always easy to understand and often dismissed as "folklore". It's hard from a consumer point of view to understand the practical applications of these terms & their direct implications in their daily lives.
For this reason, we have decided to prepare a condensed in the next few paragraphs for you to digest information easily. It s very difficult to make an educated opinion these days, especially in a world flooded with contradictory information. So for the sake of clarity, the following is our personal distillation of knowledge passed on from encounters with regenerative farmers, natural wine makers, scientists, texts & books, conferences, podcasts, studies etc... spanning from 17 Century essays on good land husbandry to modern scientific research papers. We hope it can spark your personal pursuit into the fascinating world of the soil, living better, breathing better and being an active cog in the soil regeneration movement if only by making more considered choices in your daily life and eating better.
First, a little context:
When David and I (Jeremie) started working in restaurants in the 1990s, the world was a very different place. The hospitality landscape, behind the façade of fun, glamour & gastronomy was a dark reality of low pay, long hours, abusive & sexist behavior, shabby work conditions and sourcing was often an after thought dictated by profit. Cheap, even in high end restaurants was the norm. Margins upwards of 78% was the minimum target in food and beverage which often meant sourcing cheaply and selling at a premium.
The awareness of the environmental & ethical implications of the industry's activities was very much non existent.
So in 2014, after more than 20 years spent from washing dishes in small independents to managing and cooking in some of London s top restaurants, Dave and I decided to go for it on our own and we chose to let go of all the fanciful crockery, furniture, lighting, glassware and conventional wisdom to focus on what was important to us: what goes in the glass, what goes in the plate and the people who bring it to your table.
As we started to meet small scale producers and visit farms & vineyards, see the animals' welfare, inspect fields, helped with picking, pruning & gathering and shared numerous meals with all these formidable characters from across Europe & the UK, David and I discovered, after 20 years in the industry, that we knew very little about the considerable dangers of big agriculture and knew even less about a quiet movement called "regenerative farming".