Episode #64: Ben Taylor-Davies
Regenerative Agriculture Podcast
AEA Marketing
4.7 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2021
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Taylor-Davies is a farmer and regenerative agriculture consultant from the United Kingdom. Ben was a conventional agronomist until his wife persuaded him to apply for an award through the Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust which enables farmers to travel and learn agricultural methods from around the globe. This ignited Ben's passion for regenerative agriculture and discovering better ways to treat soils, crops, and livestock. Ben currently shares his stories, both personal and professional, on his website RegenBen.com. He is also currently finalizing his first book, "MORE-ON: How to get off the UK agriculture's treadmill of input farming."
Throughout their conversation, Ben and John discuss:
- How the Nuffield scholarship program allowed Ben to broaden his views on successful ways to farm from around the globe.
- The current management practices being implemented on Ben's 500-acre farm in the UK and how these practices have evolved over the years.
- Ben's "three free things" (sunlight/energy, precipitation, and carbon dioxide) and why they should be priority number one for all growers.
- Perspectives on carbon dioxide delivery and how farmers can improve their CO2 supply.
- The vast diversity of soil types and climates found within the UK.
- The UK's current mainstream agricultural methods and financial shortcomings of managing an ecosystem through high input costs.
- John and Ben discuss their recommended reading lists for growers.
Check out Ben's website at www.regenben.com!
For more information on his latest book, go to https://www.regenben.com/about/the-book/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, friends. Welcome back. This is John, and you are at the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, |
| 0:05.7 | where we talk about the agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate |
| 0:10.9 | plant health, soil health, and of course, ultimately public health, which is what regenerative |
| 0:15.8 | agriculture really should be about. My guest for this episode is Ben Taylor Davis, who is a farmer and regenerative |
| 0:23.6 | agriculture consultant from the UK. Ben, I'm really glad to be able to have this conversation |
| 0:28.5 | with you today. We're going to have some fun with people listening to you with your accent. |
| 0:34.4 | That's going to be an interesting exercise for some people, I suspect. |
| 0:39.5 | So welcome here. Tell us a little bit about your personal story and background. How did you |
| 0:44.6 | get to be in this spot of having, as you say, all of your play and pleasure being in your |
| 0:51.7 | business of doing regenerative agriculture consulting. |
| 1:01.0 | Thank you very much for having me on. And yes, my accent is a very broad Gloucester accent. |
| 1:09.6 | So from the West Country of the UK. The story as I, for myself and to get to this point where we're having this chat today, quite a long story, |
| 1:12.1 | to be honest. And I'll keep it as brief as possible, but essentially I went to university, |
| 1:17.5 | graduated, I thought I'd come back to the farm. My father decided that there really wasn't a |
| 1:22.4 | position for me on the farm back here. So I applied for a job to become an agronomist. And that was in the traditional |
| 1:30.2 | sense of the word with agam and fertilizer and everything that came with standard agronomy. |
| 1:35.8 | And that rather took me on a path and a very comfortable path for an awful lot of years. |
| 1:40.6 | And I married my wife, Helen, three beautiful children. And then unfortunately on the |
| 1:46.1 | 28th of September 2012, my son, aged 16 months, was tragically kicked in the head by a horse |
| 1:53.3 | and suffered some very severe brain damage. And what was a very comfortable life and a lovely life, all of a sudden was thrown into disarray and we spent months and months by his bedside and intensive care and pretty much my world collapsed and mostly mentally. |
| 2:11.6 | So from that moment on, I probably spent a couple of years just wondering why and how and who was I and what was I and what did I want. |
| 2:21.9 | And my wife finally persuaded me to apply in the UK for a Nuffield scholarship that is offered to young farmers to travel the world, an opportunity to travel the world and learn about agriculture from around the world. |
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