Groove Armada’s Andy Cato has had good reason many times to regret selling his music rights to buy a farm.
He is one half of the British electronic dance duo with Tom Findlay that had three UK Top 10 albums and put out the big hits Superstylin’, My Friend and At the River.
Mr Cato admitted to a large farmer audience at Foundation for Arable Research’s (FAR) CROPS 2022 field day in Mid-Canterbury’s Chertsey that he had sold some of the band’s back catalogue to finance the farm in France’s Gascony.
"I took, with hindsight, a madly naive decision to sell my publishing rights to songs that I’d written ... to finance the purchase of a farm and try to do [growing] on a bigger scale.
"That was a moment of absolute madness, obviously now I don’t regret it, but I did regret it for several years after that."
The tall, multi-talented musician was in Christchurch to perform with Groove Armada in a farewell tour and agreed to give his time to walk growers through his own unconventional start to farming.
Today he is nearly as well known as a regenerative mixed arable and livestock farmer and co-founder of Wildfarmed, as for his prowess in the music studio.
Trial and error — including GPS horse-driven tilling — pushed him to the brink of winding farming up, but he has stuck to his bid to change thinking on farming and food production.
Farming here is much different than the UK, he says, with pasture in almost all of its arable rotations and he wished he could say the same in his home country, but cannot.
Mr Cato’s foray into farming started about 15 years ago when he was coming back from a gig. Reading an article about conventional industrial food production and its consequences for health, the environment and soils struck a chord with him.
"I was quite shocked by what I read and at the end of the article he said ‘if you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it’, which is a phrase I really took to heart."
That put him on a quest for self-sufficiency.
He went from never planting a seed to growing vegetables "not very well" and tilling and rotivating the soils like his neighbours, but refusing to use herbicides.
Then his vegetable garden became a weed jungle.
"I started going down a rabbit hole learning about soil health, companion planting, no tilling and so on and eventually ended up with a vegetable patch that was a little bit better."
In Gascony he set up a market garden, selling vegetables at the local market.
Before long he became convinced that he wanted to be part of growing on a larger scale and that was when the music rights were nervously handed over in exchange for cash to buy the 100ha farm in the southwest of France.
The farm had 0.5% organic matter after growing maize for 60 to 80 years and he went into it believing he would grow organic cereals and everything would be fine.
He quickly reached the conclusion that everything was far from fine and the cold realities of farming and the need to be an innovator, mechanic and expert started hitting home.
"It was a very, very difficult first few years and I basically did a Sri Lanka: it was a chemical farm and I basically turned off the chemical tap and didn’t really have a plan to put things in place and it all went wrong.
"What happened is the soils I inherited were much better at growing weeds than crops — a whole variety of weeds. There was creeping thistles and dock weeds everywhere and a plant the French called datura which is a highly toxic weed and it suits irrigated systems.
"I was growing some soya beans and everything was hanging on these soya beans which I was trying to produce to keep me in the game because I’d lost so much money by this stage. These plants started emerging in their tens and then the hundreds and then the thousands and ten thousands until the whole field was a forest of this."
In a desperate act he borrowed from a neighbour a home-made machine with five lawnmowers on a bar to cut the weed tops off above the soya beans to prevent them seeding and bring light back to the crop.
About halfway into this he realised he was on an utterly futile "road to nowhere" path and he was never going to win a war with nature.
Mr Cato says he had inherited the consequence of a world growing 1.7 times more food per person than it did in 1961, causing soil exhaustion.
Broke, close to despair and realising he had bitten off more than he could chew, he would talk every day about selling the farm and moving on.
The only reason that did not happen was because he read a book by author Albert Howard on sustainable agriculture. First published in 1943, its timeless message that nature works by having diverse plants and animals in the same place struck home with him.
The humiliation of chasing the cows back from the local village had to be endured before there was a measure of success.
Realising there was no shade on the farm, corridors were planted so the animals could access the stable for shade.
An unforeseen consequence of opening up the morning or daily pasture was that they could come and go as they pleased over three or four miles on occasions and do the same for their water.
That turned out to be important because it meant they could easily graze any corner of the farm when needed.
Further reading led him to organic no-till and following pioneers of growing different plant combinations.
From that, he was inspired to try mob-grazed herbal leys and crimper-rolled cover crops. Once a few teething problems with the roller were sorted out he put maize into rolled vetch and soya into rolled rye.
Buckwheat was his favourite with barley drilled into buckwheat regrowth after harvesting which was removed naturally by frosts to let the barley come through.
Good success particularly with buckwheat encouraged him to grow rye with oats and clover.
"All of that led me to think that maybe not a permanent no-till organic system, but maybe a good two to three years without tillage to grow those different products and the thing that was holding me back was the wheelings from the tractors, trailers and combines and still very low organic matter with very heavy clay. That led to another mad chapter to try and farm with horses."
He went to see the Amish in Pennsylvania and did not let the fact that he had never ridden a horse get in the way of this new direction.
Convinced this would work, it ended up becoming a fairly sizable horse-drawn cereal farm.
"The reason I mention that is we were using GPS with the horses and I’m definitely having that as a world first."
The horses forced him to look at other solutions as he did not have a lot of power to pull a direct drill through a rolled cover crop of veitch.
So he tried broadcasting seed into standing veitch and rolling it afterwards to put the seed between the mulched crop and soil.
Mr Cato was struck visually by how the soil was repairing itself from the mulched cover crops in pastures.
Within a year of mob-grazing, the "forest" of datura weed and creeping thistle in the pasture fields had gone.
"Actually seeing that was an absolute breakthrough for me and gave me faith in biology to solve a lot of problems."
Initially he was going to follow the standard organic direction of three to four years in grass, turn the soils over, plant cereals and repeat.
But he decided against that because the pastures were looking so nice after coming back from their fragile position and the horses put a brake on this too as it would have taken too long to plough them.
So he opted to try pasture cropping and tie this in with a local farmer-bakery tradition in the southwest of France. By sowing taller wheat grasses still used there into pasture he thought they might stay above the grass.
Another hurdle was reached when he found they looked good in the autumn and terrible in the spring.
What changed the game was getting back to the grazing of cereals tightly to growth stage 31 — the point when the ear is in the above-ground stem — so the wheat could forge ahead.
"I was just trying to make the farm work economically and I was faced with the problem of value. I had all these lovely grains with highly nutritional content and growing these lovely eco-systems, but nobody places any value in that. Coming into the food system from the outside it was just weird that the only measure was tonnage, not quality. So that forced me into adding value initially by making flour."
A mill was set up, but they found nobody wanted to buy the flour because of the strong French tradition of baguettes with their high gluten and yeast content.
So, from necessity, he began making bread and eventually found a market with people who had digestion problems.
Word spread and that paved the way for him to employ a baker and expand into setting up a farm shop.
"We even had French people queueing for an Englishman’s bread, which is possibly a first and we started baking for schools and schools would come around to see where their bread came from. . . . We kind of got to a point where we created employment, had a local grain economy and finally the Phoenix had risen from the ashes a bit."
They saw much of the land surrounding his "small postage stamp" of a farm was depleted and low in organic matter with bedrock coming through. The dire state was most graphic where a nearby farmer had got a garden back from a neighbour and put this in buckwheat. A clear line of fertility between that and exhausted fields showed when the plants poked their head above ground.
"All of these farming neighbours had become friends of mine and there was a great solidarity amongst the community whatever your approach is to growing and we thought how could we help them to change with all their financial barriers and cultural barriers and that led to Wildfarmed."
Part of the programme was agricultural, embracing Mr Cato’s pasture cropping, and the other part was consumer awareness.
A strip till system was devised to create two rows of wheat initially at spacings of 75cm centres, since narrowed, and combined with a lethal inter-row mower to control the grass.
That showed great promise and future adaptations of the mower became more accurate and less dangerous with GPS added so row widths could be modified.
This led them to try to introduce diversity into inter-rows over time in UK fields stifled with couch grass. After a cold winter and wet spring it all went "horribly, horribly backwards".
After much deep thinking and reading, this brought him to the conclusion that rather than his crimper-rolled monocultures being "perennial versus annual" they were actually about the diversity of plant families.
That reframed for him the idea of pasture cropping with the inter-row mower just a way of managing these different families in the field.
"Actually doing that in a pure stand of ryegrass was absolute bonkers as I discovered the hard way and now had this understanding."
So they began working with more farmers with many of them now working with a wheat and bean bi-crops.
Soon it became clear to him that he had to return to the UK to try to build this community.
By then the Gascony farm organic matter in the soils had risen to 3.5% and he had been awarded the Chevalier l'Order Merit de Agricole - the equivalent of a knighthood for services to agriculture.
Back on UK soil, he and his family took over a National Trust farm in a 20-year lease over 295ha in Oxfordshire.
A set of regenerative protocols was developed - no monocultures, minimised ploughed earth and no herbicides, fungicides or pesticides
Any farmer adopting this philosophy and prioritising soil health and biodiversity receives agronomy support and a price premium from the flour made into bread.
The growing story is told to consumers so they can make food choices and become part of transforming the local landscape.
Today the company’s stoneground flour is made from wheat varieties grown alongside many plants, grasses, and legumes.
The Wildfarmed community has grown to about 50 farmers who service about 500 retail outlets including bakers, restaurants and supermarkets.
Mr Cato says the price premium for producing local quality-based grains is great for growers, but he likes to think the real attraction is growing food they want to eat and know where it is going.
Bi-crops have progressed to more plant families creating biodiversity through polycropping combinations of barley, peas and rape.
He says much of the UK population is urban and while a lot of people are concerned about biodiversity and climate change, few of them have made the link that how food is grown is critical.
"We’ve had to go out there and start telling this story that everything starts with soil if you’re concerned about climate change, biodiversity loss or flooding or human health it all starts with the soil and how we grow our food."
He says it’s fascinating to now see how resilient these diverse plantings are in sandy fields in a drought year on a farm close to the end of its fertility cycle.
He freely concedes that tilling is a compromise away from herbicides.
One of the reasons they have decided to go down this route, he says, is the commercial reality of going to "High Street" and telling a complicated story of soil health in a noisy world where on must compete with artificially cheap food.
"In the herbicide/tillage compromise we’ve gone for the tillage option and personally I don’t want to get into anti-messaging because they don’t serve a real purpose, but personally I don’t want to build a future around glyphosate as some of the things I read about it don’t sit very well as what it biodegrades down to is just as toxic as what it started with long shelf lives.
"There are issues there which as far as I’m concerned have yet to be resolved."
Inspiring for him is seeing a conventional grower who would never consider growing an arable crop without herbicide or fungicide previously now admitting in their WhatsApp group that the results of a wheat and bean crop were "blowing his mind."
