Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castle My castaway this week is the chief executive of the Soil Association Helen Browning.

A farmer and campaigner, the journey food makes from the land to the plate has been central

to her life and work. She was as they say ahead of the curve. 30 years ago you would

have found her in the fields newly preoccupied by crop rotation, compost, manure and clover,

or at the farm gates trying to flog her organically reared meat to pass us by.

She is by no means the first pioneering woman in her family.

She was inspired at an early age by her five great aunts who all after the First World War

remained unmarried and running a farm together, making

delicious salty yellow butter and enjoying a regular sniffer or two of whiskey at the end of a hard day.

One can only think that they'd raise a glass to their

great nie's achievements as well as leading the Soil Association for the last five

years. She's chair of the Food Ethics Council, runs a 1400 acre farm, her own meat business, and the local pub to boot.

She says, one of the ways I measure success in the farming business is how many livelihoods it sustains,

how much vitality can you create from a place.

For me, complexity is what one needs in life and I'm sure we'll explore that complexity

in farming a little bit later on, Ellen Browning. I read that you say that when

you're on the farm it inspires you. That's interesting. How does it inspire you?

Oh it does completely. I think everything that I've done in life and that I do in life is

really about the farm and the countryside. When I'm outside, when I'm walking the

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