In the first episode of our 2026 summer series, Farmerama hears from Sam Sivapragasam and Summayah Zannath, part of the core collective at Land in Our Names, about the progress of their Land Project for Black and people of colour.
Plus Julia Kirby-Smith, executive director of Better Food Traders shares how this membership network is supporting independent sustainable food retailers.
Thanks to the Six Inches of Soil podcast, we’re sharing Sheila Dillon talking about her long-time work in the food and farming broadcasting world and Abby Rose’s reflections on Cereal Revisited.
And finally we’ve got a couple of voice notes to share from our Cereal Revisited Digital Soundmap.
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Land in Our Names (LION) is a land and racial justice collective that envisions spaces where BPOC communities can grow food, learn skills, rest, and strengthen resilience, fostering a relationship with the land beyond extraction. Their main aim is working towards establishing a land project for Black and people of colour; on this episode, they share some updates about where they’re currently at with this project, and talk about the brand new visualisation that’s helping them move forward with the work.
Find out more about the Land Project and donate to LION.
Better Food Traders executive director Julia Kirby-Smith speaks about how this membership network supports independent sustainable food retailers, campaigns on structural issues like business rates, and engages with UK policy debates on food security, procurement, and horticulture support. They work with all kinds of businesses, from market stalls and veg box schemes to shops and bakeries, providing training, peer learning and advice. She also talks about Baking a Better Tomorrow, the magazine which Better Food Traders co-produced with UK Grain Lab and the Real Bread Campaign, documenting stories of people working to do bread differently.
We have seen increasing discussion about not just food security but national security and how that is linked to food production both globally and at home. It is worth reading the report that DEFRA released in January this year called Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security. It is a national security report produced by the UK government, an interesting and alarming read regardless of where you are based, which essentially links the escalating progress of collapse in key ecosystems globally and how that will put pressure on current food supply systems. It says: “Countries best placed to adapt are those that invest in ecosystem protection and restoration, and resilient and efficient food systems.” After reading this report and thanks to the work of groups like Better Food Traders, it seems the definition of ‘resilient and efficient food systems’ is starting to shift and people are realising that we need to value the smaller supply systems that many of the Better Food Traders members are part of – they are emerging as the most resilient and efficient.
Find out more about becoming a Better Food Trader.
Find Baking a Better Tomorrow here.
Six Inches of Soil is a monthly podcast from the team behind the brilliant Six Inches of Soil Documentary. Their June episode brought together some of the long-time farming podcasts from the UK and the US to reflect on what it takes to share the stories behind our food and farming systems. We’re sharing clips here from Sheila Dillon, long-time host of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, and Abby Rose reflecting on Farmerama’s Cereal Revisited Project.
You can listen to the full episode here.
And finally we’ve got a couple of voice notes to share from our Cereal Revisited Digital Soundmap: from Thomas Vroom, a baker in Washington state, and Greg Mueller from Australia who has a research garden where he grows different population wheats.
This soundmap, created alongside the Cereal Revisited podcast, offers the opportunity to explore listener stories from around the world, from farmers, bakers, millers, and those who have engaged with our 2019 Cereal series. Cereal explored how the needs of industrial bread production have come to dictate how seeds are bred, grain is grown, flour is milled, and bread is baked and eaten. Alongside this, the series documented the emergence of local grain networks in the UK and the ideas and challenges within this growing movement.
The soundmap traces how Cereal has shaped thinking, practice, and connection across grain and food systems, and what actions people are taking today – from Scotland to Australia.
This is an ongoing project and we’d love to hear from you! If Cereal has resonated with you in any way, or sparked a shift in how you think or work with grain, you’re warmly invited to add to the soundmap.
Send us a voice note via the Farmerama WhatsApp +447466301300, telling us who you are, how you came across the series, and how it inspired any change or action – big or small.
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Transcript
Abby: Hello and welcome to Farmerama. This is the first episode in our summer series for 2026, and we have two more on the way for you.
Abby: This month we’ve got an update from Farmerama friends Land In Our Names on the vision and new visualisation for their Land Project. We hear from an organisation working with independent food traders and so helping farmers retain sustainable routes to market, and finally we share some clips from the Six Inches of Soil podcast, reflecting on how audio storytelling is a vital tool in the farming landscape. We’ve also snuck in a couple of audio notes from our Cereal Revisited Digital Sound Map – more details on that at the end of the podcast.
Lucy: Long time Farmerama listeners will know Land In Our Names’s work very well, including the podcast series and zine, Cultivating Justice, which we co-created together with Out on the Land a few years ago. For anyone new to their work, Land In Our Names is a land and racial justice collective that envisions spaces where BPOC communities can grow food, learn skills, rest, and strengthen resilience, fostering a relationship with the land beyond extraction. Their main aim is working towards establishing a land project for Black and people of colour. Here, Sam and Sumayya, members of the core LION collective, share where they’re at with their vision for this work, and how a brand new visualisation of it is helping them move forward.
[00:01:30] Sam: I’m Sam Sivapragasam, and I’m part of the core collective, Land In Our Names.
[00:01:35] Sumayyah: I’m Sumayya Zannath. I’m also part of the core collective at LION.
[00:01:39] Sam: Right now we’re working on projects such as, like, Dandelion, which is our drop-in community garden sessions that happen fortnightly on a Friday and monthly on a Saturday for Black and people of color to learn food growing, connect to the land, and we also run another project called Fallow, which is, creating wellbeing spaces where we’re looking at the politics of reparations and also connecting it to healing and repairing our relationship to ourselves, to the land, and to nature.
[00:02:12] Sumayyah: I think maybe the last time that people have heard from us through this podcast, we would’ve had more of, like, that research focus, on how we could get BPOC communities into the existing spaces that were in the kind of land and food growing sector.
[00:02:27] But I think since then we’ve really shifted priorities. And so now instead of kind of speaking to the sector, we focus more on, like, building something for our communities with our communities. We see each of those projects as feeding directly into our main aim, which is setting up a land project for Black and people of color communities to explore things like, healing with the land, food growing.
[00:02:51] Sam: All of these steps towards this work is, this vision, which is about creating a land project that is rooted in not just about running a food growing business, which we think is really difficult, especially in our current economy, to do it in a way that is centering climate justice and also workers rights.
[00:03:11] So for us, the food growing would exist to support providing food for those who access the space, and if there’s more and we’re able to organize it well, is to provide food at a subsidized rate for local communities rather than trying to, like, make money from it necessarily. It’s about seeing food as a right and, making sure that’s accessible to different types of people and not just those who can afford to choose an ethical or, environmentally friendly option.
[00:03:40] And education to us is actually one of the main activities that we see happening on the site, like creating opportunities for people to learn different land-based skills, specifically Black and people of color, young people, elders, creating spaces for people to exchange knowledge and wisdom and skills, and also, like, offering that space for people to come to us and be like, “Oh, I would love to host a retreat here or a residential or training here,” and just creating more spaces for people, radical spaces, spaces rooted in politics and care that people can then use that for their communities or for people in their networks and so on.
[00:04:20] And rest and healing is also a huge part of that work as well, like what we see happening on the land, creating spaces for people to connect and rest and retreat into nature, into the land, to build relationships to different ecosystems to support the repair of repairing of the land and our relationships to the land, and also to have that space to just rest, especially for a lot of organizers.
[00:04:46] You know, it’s so easy to burn out, and so few of us have access to our own spaces to be able to process and, breathe through whatever we’re working.
[00:04:57] Sumayyah: We’ve been working with Migrants In Culture, who are an amazing organization, their work is to kind of visualize the movement, the organizing work that we all do. And so we had a, a few dreaming sessions with them where we brought together not just our kind of individual dreams, but kind of reflections from the community dreaming sessions that we’d been having over the last couple of years. We brought kind of the systems and the structures that we were thinking about too, to kind of build something that brought together the formal work that we were doing with the emotional, spiritual side of things too.
[00:05:30] And I think the visualization does an amazing job at doing that because it doesn’t just show, the practical side of the work, but it also feels alive. It feels like there’s kind of, the love and the care that we have towards the land project feels like it’s present in it.
[00:05:44] The five pillars of the Land Project are food sovereignty, global majority land stewardship, education, community, and reparations. I think the land visualization does a really good job at bringing each of the five pillars to life and showing how even though they are five pillars, they are, like, deeply interconnected.
[00:06:03] And those five pillars have come from, our experience at Lion, our experiences kind of working with our community, seeing what the priorities were, in terms of what we would want from a land project, but also visiting projects around the world, across England and Wales, and kind of understanding how, kind of how do we kind of take a really deeply, emotional spiritual dream, how do we translate it into a, a practical functioning project, that allows people to kind of tap in and out, that is expansive enough to be able to hold people regardless of where they’re at in their journey, but is also kind of concrete in what it’s trying to build, and unwavering in kind of the political ambition of what we’re trying to do. A big part of the work we’re doing that’s attached to that is… we want the land project to be something that is replicable.
[00:06:52] We don’t want kind of LION’s land projects to exist in isolation. So how do we take the kind of, quote-unquote, “boring,” governance and how do we translate that into something that is interesting so that people can, one, join us on this journey, but two, start their own journey as well if they want to.
[00:07:08] So we’ve been doing a lot of like communications work, a lot of storytelling work, um, in order to try and kind of, yeah, bridge that gap between the office and real life. And our land visualization is a big step towards that.
[00:07:20] Sam: We’re in the process of incorporating as a charitable community benefit society. It would be a separate entity from what we are at the moment. Land In Our Names is a community interest company, and we are an asset lot, and we wanted the land project to be held by a charitable community benefit society.
[00:07:41] So we’re working with these amazing folks, Sistren, to help us with the paperwork ’cause it’s a lot, it can be quite overwhelming. At the moment we have a core collective, who have been basically the folks who’ve been working in the organization for the past few years.
[00:07:58] But then we also wanted to bring in having an advisory board, and the advisory board would become trustees for the land project, and for that entity. We just thought it was really important that it’s, like, a membership base, model, for owning the land because we know that we’re going to expand and grow once we get the land, and we wanted to have people who are stakeholders to be able to participate in the decision-making for the land, and it needs to grow past, like, a very small group of people, um, having that much power over it.
[00:08:31] We’re also raising a lot of money, so we’ve raised around 770,000, um, from a mixture of donations and grants. And, um, one of the brilliant, like, innovations on our website is that now people, or for the past couple years, people can do recurring donations and they can be whatever amount of money is accessible to you.
[00:08:57] And we can also do one-off donations. It can be recurring every month, every year. And so that allows people to support us at whatever stage. Like, we value folks who have money and want to, you know, think about a way of redistributing that wealth.
[00:09:13] But we also value, like, all of our supporters and folks who just believe in our vision and want to, like, contribute whatever amount. So that has allowed us to grow the land- Fund to this amount. We want to buy land that already has infrastructure, that is accessible to London because that’s where a lot of our community is, and has buildings so that it’s easier to get planning permission if we wanted to build new buildings and so on.
[00:09:39] Sumayyah: Fundraising for a project like this, it is a big risk. I think the sector right now is less good at kind of trusting people earlier on in the journey, right? And what we’ve been met with is like, you know, when you’re in a moment of like scarcity, almost when you’re in a moment of like high risk, then we’ll be there for you. Like, then we’ll show up. If you do like a crowdfunder, um, you’ll get tons of donations.
[00:10:02] And what we’re kind of asking, what we’re requesting is that particularly as BPOC people, we don’t want to be existing just in moments of precarity, just in moments of scarcity. What we want is for this land project to be coming from a place of abundance, and that requires a level of trust from, from funders, from like big resource holders, from our community to kind of buy into our journey at an earlier stage.
[00:10:27] If we don’t have support earlier on, it kind of requires us to limit what we can build towards. It requires us to limit our dreams.
[00:10:34] The land project, I guess it is an offering to our community, like to the world even of like what could our relationship with each other and with the land look like if we were given space. Like, actually, like physical space but also just, like time away from capitalism, time away from, like extracting from the land and from each other.
[00:10:58] What could those relationships look like? What could repair look like? It’s different to running just a food growing project or just a farm. Although those are, like beautiful things in their own right. It’s like what could our relationship with the land look like if we went beyond that, if we had time to rest and heal with the land.
Lucy: You can find the visualisation and donation links Sam and Sumayya have been talking about through the Land in Our Names website, please find the link in our show notes.
Abby: Better Food Traders is a network supporting and promoting sustainable independent food traders across the UK – a vital part of the agroecological food ecosystem. We spoke to Julia Kirby-Smith from the organisation about who their members are and how the network supports them, the kind of challenges currently facing food traders prioritising agroecological food and organic produce and how national government policy is shaping their work.
[00:11:56] Julia Kirby-Smith: I’m Julia Kirby-Smith. I’m the executive director of Better Food Traders. So we’re a membership body. Our members are a really wide and diverse range of enterprises, so everything from market stalls and veg box schemes through to shops, bakeries, into some really big online sellers and wholesalers as well.
[00:12:18] We do a lot of enterprise support, training, peer learning, that kind of thing, the kind of very practical side of running a food business. But we also do a lot to speak up for the sustainable food sector, with DEFRA, with the National Food Strategy, and also on things like business rates and how local authorities can work better to support sustainable food retail, how local authorities can build this kind of retail into their high streets and their placemaking and really thinking what role independent retail plays, especially those that are really promoting agroecological food and organic produce.
[00:12:59] The origins of Better Food Traders actually came out of an organization called Growing Communities. They are a kind of ecosystem of food growing and supply. They run a big organic farmers market and a veg box scheme across Hackney and South London now. They ran a kind of incubation scheme many years ago for a cohort of veg box traders, and that then spawned this idea that those people wanted to stay in touch, keep learning from each other, sharing ideas, and best practice. And that’s really where Better Food Traders has come from.
[00:13:33] We know that sort of 95, 96% of food in the UK is purchased through supermarkets, and that is a radical change from even 50, 60 years ago, and that’s just become completely normalized. So we’ve lost all these independent food outlets on our high streets, the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer. Often those sorts of shops and businesses are the ones that have a much more relational way of working with farmers.
[00:14:05] Supermarkets are driven by price, by shareholder value, by so-called efficiency, but actually which leads to overproduction, massive food waste, and so on. People who are Better Food Traders do those things entirely differently. They’re about reinvesting profit in either their own business or their own workers or the farmers they buy from.
[00:14:27] And they’re about having those relational dialogue-based relationships rather than contracts where farmers suddenly get told, “No, we’re actually not gonna take any of your cauliflowers after all.”
[00:14:39] We try to support that bit in the middle. It’s that route to market, and it’s all those ways that farmers can get their produce to eaters, but it’s looking at those independents that just will work more relationally, will sell different products, will work seasonally, and really give a much better cut of the value chain back to the farmer, which then in turn means the farmer can reinvest in more sustainable growing practices.
[00:15:04] Clearly retail is really difficult right now. I think for any small business, you’re facing energy costs going up, you’re facing your labor costs going up because of changes to National Insurance and minimum wage quite rightly increasing, but that does put pressure on business owners. For better food traders, there’s the additional challenge that they’re driven by this triple bottom line, so they’re trying to do good for people, good for planet, and turn a profit to be viable and sustainable.
[00:15:36] But often being good for people and planet is more expensive, so that also increases your, financial pressures. We give advice on everything from marketing to crowdfunding to really detailed stuff about social media and all sorts of things about selling and tech. But it’s often those actually big structural challenges that are also part of the problem. So we campaign on things like business rates for our members and arguing that small food retailers should be given a discount compared to the large food retailers, which is something that we have seen in the last budget we saw a kind of move towards that, but we kind of wanna see more happening in that way.
[00:16:15] I think now is a really interesting time because there actually is a lot of talk about food in government. I think DEFRA is starting to recognize that national food security is a genuine issue that we’re gonna be facing into in the next 5 to 10 years. Like, how do we feed ourselves as a nation? There’s also some really exciting stuff going on in the devolved government. So, in Wales we just saw, Plaid Cymru get in in the May elections, and they’ve committed to a Welsh National Food Strategy.
[00:16:46] They’re talking about labeling for produced in Wales. They’re talking about a lot more kind of rural and farming support. And likewise, in Scotland, there’s some really interesting thinking around food, and particularly around public procurement and getting more sustainable food into the public plate.
[00:17:04] Another thing that we’re involved in is the Fruit and Veg Coalition, which is a coalition pushing for, a horticulture support plan.
[00:17:14] And we fully endorse that ’cause we can see that if more UK, small-scale agricultural growers can be supported, then that also builds the supply that our traders can then be selling at that kind of local level.
[00:17:28] Earlier this year we did a collaboration with UK Grain Lab and the Real Bread Campaign to produce a really nice magazine, booklet-y thing, which basically documents all of the great stories of people working to do bread differently essentially.
[00:17:46] So it’s all of those people along the supply chain who are looking at how to de-commoditize bread, how to diversify our grains, how to bake differently. It’s also got some quite stark facts in there, as well as hearing the stories of people doing well or hearing the stories of people doing things differently.
[00:18:06] So we are really keen to support more and more organic bakeries.
[00:18:10] We’ve done some really nice training sessions with bakers sharing their advice and tips, so people like Kim Bell from Small Food Bakery, Saudo Sofia, and The School for Artisan Food. we’re, We’re always trying to kind of expand how we can support the whole ecosystem of food trading, which is obviously really diverse when it’s at its best.
[00:18:31] So if you wanna become a Better Food Trader, you can go to our website and have a look on our Join Us page. Essentially we have six standards that we define as this is what makes you Better, and we ask you to really think about those questions, so they’re all set out there. It is largely about the majority of your products being sustainably produced and how you can describe that and evidence that, and things like having a triple bottom line, being community-rooted.
Abby: As Julia says, anyone interested in applying to become part of the Better Food Traders network can head to the website. We’ll put the link in our show notes, where you can also find a link to the digital version of the magazine they produced with UK Grain Lab and the Real Bread Campaign. We have seen increasing discussion about not just food security but national security and how that is linked to food production both globally and at home. It is worth reading the report that DEFRA released in January this year called Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security. It is a national security report produced by the UK government, an interesting and alarming read regardless of where you are based, which essentially links the escalating progress of collapse in key ecosystems globally and how that will put pressure on current food supply systems. It says :. “Countries best placed to adapt are those that invest in ecosystem protection and restoration, and resilient and efficient food systems.” After reading this report and thanks to the work of groups like Better Food Traders, it seems the definition of ‘resilient and efficient food systems’ is starting to shift and people are realising that we need to value the smaller supply systems that many of the Better Food Traders members are part of – they are emerging as the most resilient and efficient.
Lucy: Six Inches of Soil is a monthly podcast from the team behind the brilliant Six Inches of Soil documentary. . their June episode brought together some of the long-time farming podcasters from the UK and the US to reflect on what it takes to share the stories behind our food and farming system. Sheila Dillon, the longtime host of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme talked about some of her experiences sharing stories from the food and farming system over the last 40 years, and how the world has changed during that time.
[00:23:56] Sheila Dillon: I think what we did on “The Food Program” was make the connections, which were pretty obvious to me because I had grown up in the countryside and, and I’ve worked on farms as a child. You know, once you were 13, you could, you know, work so many hours a week. And so I’d grown up with that. Then I’d gone off into journalism, nothing to do with food, nothing to do with food, until one day in New York, we were living in New York, and something happened.
[00:24:24] I, um, you know, I read a story in The New York Times about pesticides and poisoning wells and just realizing and just investigating pesticides. And just made an abrupt about change about what, what I was gonna focus on, and that my focus was gonna be on food and farming. And, and my husband was horrified by this, and he said, “If you’re gonna do this, follow the money.”
[00:24:47] So– And he’s an investigative financial journalist. Anyway, so I– for about three years, I wr- wrote a column called “Food Biz” for a magazine, a quite radical magazine in the US, which was following the doings of the global and national, but it– mostly global companies like, um, you know, Coca-Cola and Kraft. And-
[00:25:09] so when I came and heard “The Food Program,” and there was Derek Cooper with his anti-authoritarian skeptical stance who knew bugger all about economics or, you know, money. But I knew about money, and I knew something about, you know, from doing this column. So right at the beginning, we sort of, we made that connection between what was in the fields and what was going on in this money world, and joined the dots, I felt, in the stories we did.
[00:25:40] One of the great influences on me was Susan George, who wrote “How the Other Half Dies” and “Another World Is Possible.” So I suppose what I’ve seen is that the perceptions of a few people, including me and specialists in this world back in the ’80s, you know, have become– it’s that spread. We now, you know, everybody understands what, you know, I, I understood.
[00:26:11] So that movement, while things have been getting worse in terms of diet and the power of the global companies to impose their values on society There’s also been this step up in understanding of what we’re all facing, and, you know, you- the Six Inches of Soil film, the very existence of this podcast. You know, these, these things have changed, and we’ve got the regenerative agriculture movement.
[00:26:39] And not that long ago, I read English Pastoral by James Rebanks, you know, which made me cry- Yes … because that is the best description of what happened. That’s what happened. We destroyed an integrated food system, a human farming system. We destroyed it in the terms of economic efficiency with this madness of, of free market economics, and there’s a fight back now.
[00:27:04] So what have I seen? I’ve… That’s what I’ve seen. I’ve seen a small group of people, and I’ve seen issues which seem to be s- for specialists, become much wider issues. And h- how have we, how have we done it on the Food Program? We’ve done it by trying not to wag fingers, and to try and make the link between the pleasures of what’s on your plate and what’s going on in the boardrooms and in the monocrop, you know.
[00:27:35] In the early days, we were seen as very disruptive, and most food companies, a lot of food companies in Britain used to record the program.
[00:27:43] And, uh, you know, and gover- and, and the Minister of Agriculture, Defra, used to record it, and the Department of Health and so on. Um, now we have a much more diverse group, and, and Radio 4, of course, is always terrified about the, the listenership, that it’s, that it’s an older listenership. But in fact- what we’ve seen since the podcast revolution is that we have a really, really good listenership of young people, because there is this generation of people who want to be in, you know, they wanna farm, they want to make cheese, they want to be involved in food. It’s, it’s not the future that was predicted 15, 20 years ago.
[00:28:21] They’re not all hooked on technology. They’re sick of technology. We have a different list- yes, a wider listenership I think now than we did when I first joined.
Lucy: We will put a link in the show notes of where to go if you want to listen to the whole episode and find other Six Inches of Soil podcasts! Farmerama was also invited to be part of this episode and on it Abby Rose shared some reflections on the recent Cereal Revisited project, and how the impact of Cereal continues to surprise us.
[00:19:53] Abby Rose: The whole world of grains, it was just such, um…
[00:19:56] You know, we’re all engaging with it so much, it’s almost like it becomes hidden or invisible. Um, you know, I was sourcing my tomatoes well, but I had no idea about where my cereals were coming from, um, and hadn’t even thought about it. So that Cereal series was one of the kind of key moments of learning for me.
[00:20:12] Well, one, it opened my eyes to the whole world of grains, um, and, and the people who were thinking differently about it. So we both looked at, you know, the commodity grain system, um, and how that works and, and maybe how it’s coming to the end of its reasonable lifetime, as in making flour that has zero nutritional value, maybe that doesn’t make sense.
[00:20:34] Uh, maybe it made sense as we were getting to that point, but now we’ve got to a point where actually could we ask some different questions? Maybe we wanna do it slightly differently. And so talking to the people who are doing it slightly differently and asking those questions, that was the UK-focused community.
[00:20:48] But actually the other side to it, which is more like a, a podcasting or a storytelling viewpoint on it, is that so six years on, we just did this, uh, bit of research and going back, um, and asking… ‘Cause many, many people wrote into us similar to you saying like, “I’d never thought about this. I’m changing my life.
[00:21:07] I’ve, I’ve changed career. I’m doing this now.” A- and so that was amazing at the time, but we didn’t really take it any further. So six years on, we went back and recontacted some of those people and recorded their stories. Um, and we’ve just released a podcast called Cereal Revisited. It’s just one episode, but it tells some of the stories of people whose lives have completely changed.
[00:21:28] One farmer who shifted his system, they were growing commodity grains, and now they have their own farm shop where they mill their own flour and bake their own bread and sell to their local community, something they hadn’t ever conceived of, and, and also how that affected their mental health as well. So things like that.
[00:21:44] And then also there’s a girl on there who was an engineer, and after listening to the episode about the miller is missing- Um, she became a miller, and now she’s a miller in Nottingham. So that’s a pretty radical life change, and also not many people at school are like, “Oh, maybe I’ll become a miller.” Um, because it’s not one of those things that’s in our heads as a, a career or vocation.
[00:22:07] My final reflection is that the other insight that came out from talking to both the original contributors to Cereal and people who had listened and shifted their ways, was just how powerful it is to tell this interlinked, interconnected story about a system. You started with, what even is bread? And then how do you breed and come up with these seeds?
[00:22:30] What are some of the restrictions there? And then, what are the farmers doing? What are the millers doing? What are the bakers doing? And then also, what about people eating it? So you really saw the whole system in one, and it wasn’t like a hero’s journey narrative. It was an interlinked, connected narrative that really took people along the whole way, and the number of people who reflected, “Oh, I saw myself in the system for the first time.”
[00:22:54] You know, like, “Oh, as a baker, suddenly I understood it wasn’t just flour, water, and salt that I was putting together and making bread. I was actually, by the flour I was choosing, completely shifting what was growing in the fields, sh-shifting what people bred.” And so it brought a new level of meaning to each of the individual roles.
[00:23:11] And for me, that was like when I started to understand that, I got really excited, and I would love to be able to do more of that going forward. And I think it’s something that all of us is, is lacking in our society in general, is like just the power of that systemic storytelling. Um, and how can we do more of it, and particularly on the land.
[00:23:31] You know, these stories are complex, so we can’t always focus on one person to, to tell them So yeah, those are some of my early reflections.
Lucy: Finally, we wanted to share a couple of voicenotes we received in response to our Cereal Revisited callout. We’ve had responses from people all over the world who were moved by the original Cereal series to make some sort of change in their lives, big or small. You can listen to all of the voicenotes together on the soundmap on the Farmerama website – find the link in our shownotes. Here’s a couple to whet your appetite.
[00:29:01] Thomas: Hello, my name is Thomas Vroom. I own and operate Fernhorn Bakery on Vashon Island in the Salish Sea in the state of Washington, located in the upper left corner of the United States. When I first heard Cereal, I was an electrician and hobby baker on my way to the 2019 Cascadia Grains Conference. After listening to this inspiring series, my resolve was steeled to establish a grain economy on the island.
[00:29:31] I joined the board of a local nonprofit agricultural organization, which works with farmers and growers on the island, called Vashon Island Growers Association. We applied for and were awarded a grant to purchase a grain cleaner and a granite stone mill from New American Stone Mills. This equipment is available to farmers with just a small percentage of the grain donated to our local food bank.
[00:29:58] We worked with the WSU Bread Lab to get seed to the farmers and give them the knowledge of the correct varietal, planting timing, and soil conditions so they could grow successfully. This last year of 2025, one of the farmers was able to sell all the flour from the grains they grew to the food bank through a contracted grant.
[00:30:20] That was a huge milestone for making nutrient-dense food accessible to all and building a resilient food web on the island. Our farmers continue to work with the Bread Lab and have done trials with buckwheat in the 2025 growing season. I have completely changed careers and now bake full-time using some island-grown grains in my mix of other local and regional flours.
[00:30:48] My bakery works directly with farmers in the state to support rural economies and to be able to pay above commodity prices direct to the farmers. Thank you, Farmerama, for the series, and I have- that I have recommended to many other bakers and farmers.
[00:31:04] G’day, Farmerama. Greg Mueller from Southfields, say, near Bendigo in Central Victoria, Australia. Um, I’m standing here in my research garden where I work on, um, some populations or land races of a range of different vegetables, and I’ve got a meter by a meter and a half of, um, wheat growing here, which I’ve never grown before.
[00:31:27] Uh, in fact, some of this is YQ wheat from the UK, and there probably won’t be enough here to mill, but there’ll be enough to spread the seed around a little bit and let some other people have a bit of a play with it. I’ve also started growing some flour corn, uh, for the first time, which I’ve never really dabbled in much before.
[00:31:48] Um, so that was really inspired by your, um, Cereals podcast. I was particularly struck by the one on industrial, um, production of bread and, uh, the high-protein wheats that had to be imported to the UK to run that process. And it, yeah, really changed the way I was thinking, and I’ve made contact with a, um, really small micro, uh, miller who’s also here in Central Victoria.
[00:32:17] And, um, yeah, thanks again for your work. It’s actually changed, uh, the way I grow and what I grow, and I really enjoy your podcast. Cheers.
Abby: It’s not too late to contribute your own voicenote to our digital soundmap. Find out how to share it with us in the shownotes, and don’t forget to listen to Cereal Revisited if you haven’t already.
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Abby: This episode of Farmerama was made by Lucy Dearlove, Abby Rose, Dora Taylor and Rosie Baldwin. Big thanks to the rest of the Farmerama team, Katie Revell, Jo Barrett and Lucy Fisher. Our theme music is by Owen Barrett. It. Thanks so much to all of you for tuning in. We’ll be back next month with the second episode in our summer series.