Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast.

We're the charity and think tank that's all about achieving ambitious leadership of the environment.

I'm Dustin Benton, policy director here at Green Alliance.

How we grow food and feed ourselves while restoring nature and keeping our climate livable

is one of the most underappreciated challenges of the decade.

Since the Second World War, farming has been synonymous with growing as much food as possible.

It's been so successful that people in the wealthy world now suffer the diseases of overabundance,

including obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

So now we need the land to provide not just food, but restored habitats, carbon removal, wood

for construction, and land that soaks up flood water and stores it through droughts. In short,

we need more than one type of farmer. Green Alliance's most recent report called land of

Opportunity explores how we

get everything we want from the land, including good livelihoods for farmers. It shows how paying

for nature restoration on marginal farmland could raise farm incomes, radically reduce carbon emissions,

and increase bird populations by half. And it shows how we could make much more space for

nature-friendly farming everywhere in the

country.

Key to this is to rethink what farming is about.

To explore this, I'm joined by Helen Browning from the Soil Association, who will talk

about agroecology, organic and regenerative farming, and what these traditions can do to help

build a nature-positive, carbon-negative food system.

Any politician now, if they don't get this stuff right, it's going to be on their watch.

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