In this Food Thinkers webinar, we’ll hear from John Cherry, farmer over the past four decades and founding father of Groundswell, the Regenerative Agriculture Festival. This webinar will take an alternative interview-led format, focussing on John’s practice-led approach to food system transformation. The session will cover how he transformed his farmstead - which has been in the family for more than five generations - from conventional approaches towards low input, regenerative practices. This change sparked the establishment of Groundswell, which John co-founded in 2016, and has since grown to be one of the major events in the farming calendar, and a hotspot for food and farming policy announcements. Through John’s experiences on his land, at Groundswell and beyond, we’ll explore the meaning of nature for food systems, the complexity of food supply chains, the links between farming practices and public health, and John’s thoughts on food policy. This discussion will be animated by John’s stories from the field.
John Cherry has farmed Weston Park Farms in Hertfordshire, the site of the influential Groundswell festival, for nearly 40 years. The land, which has been in the family for more than five generations, is now divided into Lannock Farm, managed by John’s brother Paul and Irongate Farm, run by John. The duo, alongside John’s nephew Alex Cherry set up Groundswell in 2016, which has since had an outsize impact on regenerative farming in the UK and beyond. John continues to experiment on Irongate Farm, where he aims to produce financially sustainable agroecological and organic food in a way that regenerates soils, environments and communities. He is also currently helping set up Groundschool, the educational wing of Groundswell, which will play a role in his aim of changing current intensive and extractive industrial farming practices through conceptual and practical knowledge sharing and doing
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