George Lamb on how an Ibiza dance floor set him on a farming odyssey: ‘We need resilience in our food system’

The year was 2013 and George Lamb had decided his life could amount to more. “I had a kind of Damascene moment in my early 30s, realised my star hadn’t been called out of the ether to be a gameshow host,” he says. Turning his back on broadcasting, Lamb went on an “Eat Pray Love” journey, searching for meaning.

But at the point he felt ready to come back to the UK and try “George 2.0”, he decided to do one last summer in Ibiza. That was how he ended up in Space nightclub. “I walked in and saw this huge man, and he looked absolutely exhausted. And not, like, party exhausted – real existential, end of the line, man on the edge exhausted.” So Lamb asked him if he was OK. 

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“Not really,” was the reply. That tall man was Andy Cato, one half of Groove Armada. Through the madness and the lasers of the club, Cato began to explain what was eating him. 

Cato had been in an airport on his way back from a gig when an article in a magazine changed his life (it happens). Astonished at the impact of food production on soil quality and biodiversity, Cato had tried to opt out of the system. He sold his publishing rights to Groove Armada’s music and bought a farm in France, then brought the farm back from barrenness. 

Lamb went and visited the farm. He was hooked. Their nightclub conversation was the seed that led to them, along with financier Edd Lees, founding Wildfarmed in 2018. 

“For the last 100 years, humans have done a wonderful job of feeding ourselves, but unwittingly, we’ve put food and nature in conflict with one another. Now [the UK is] one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,” Lamb says. “So the idea of this is, how can we grow all this great food, but not be wrecking the planet, basically.” 

Regenerative agriculture is the name of the game – trying to produce food without ruining the soil, environment, and the content of the food. The way our food is grown, Lamb and co contend, strips the earth of the nutrients and life it needs to make food. It’s a recipe for disaster, both for food production and the wider world – biodiversity is lost, agricultural runoff pollutes rivers. 

“We are living in a time where there are increasingly erratic weather conditions. It’s just what’s happening. It’s not going to change any time soon,” Lamb says. “The main thing that we need to do as humans and certainly as a food industry, is build resilience into our food system. And nothing builds resilience into a food system like regenerative agriculture.” 

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Wildfarmed work with more than 150 farmers who grow wheat to meet their regenerative farming standards – drawing on lessons Cato learned on his French farm. Seeds are put into the ground without tilling soil, a variety of “cover” crops are introduced to farmland, and animals can graze the land to recycle nutrients. Pesticides and fertiliser are verboten. 

It’s something that’s been done before, but Lamb says the trick is to try to make it a solution for the high street. Farmers get a fixed price for their wheat and oat crops. Lamb and his colleagues take the wheat grown the Wildfarmed way, turn it into flour, and sell it. 

“If we’re not incentivising farmers to grow good food in nature-rich landscapes, then we’re in big trouble as a species,” he says. 

It appears to be doing well – and not just because it earned Cato a cameo on Clarkson’s Farm, with two fields on Diddly Squat Farm now using regenerative techniques. Nando’s and Ask Italian are among those who buy Wildfarmed oats and flour. Tesco sells its bread. Last year saw the firm’s total equity go from a shade under £700,000 to £2.1 million. 

Key to making it work, says Lamb, has been getting costs down in their sales pitches. “At the beginning, we were going in, and we might have been double the price of a lot of other people,” he says. Efficiency, better processes, and being “sharper and smarter” – by the sounds of it, good old-fashioned capitalism – got them down. 

“That’s how we’re able to get in and have conversations with people,” he says. “If you’re only 20% more, you can get into the room and you can talk to other humans, and you can say, hey, listen, look, this is the situation at the moment. The food industry isn’t paying its bills, and food prices are illusory, and it’s too cheap.” 

Of course, the idea of food being too cheap may come as news to many – certainly among the 7.5 million people experiencing food poverty. But for Lamb, the regenerative approach could fight future price rises. “If we don’t build resilience into our food systems now, then there’s going to be a shortage of food,” he says 

On a wider level, Lamb believes the cost of cheap food is passed on elsewhere. “We’ve created a falsely low price for food. And so if you’ve got a National Health Service that is buckling as a result of a load of food-related illnesses, yes, for sure, you’re getting the food cheaper at one end, but then your tax money’s going to the other end to hold it up. 

“If you’ve got an economy which is not where it should be, because loads of people aren’t going to work because they’re sick, again, you have to say, is it really the right thing that we’re paying nothing for the food in the first place?” 

He adds: “We’ve created a system that promotes yield above all else.” Instead of fields which can provide
10 or 15 tonnes for a short period, why not fields which can give five tonnes indefinitely? 

This focus on resilience has helped win over businesses, even as sustainability falls out of vogue and
cost pressures rise, he says. 

“I think perhaps there’s been a kind of global step back from such a sustainability focus. But at the same time, we’ve seen coffee prices and cocoa prices go through the roof over the last two years. You can see supply chain resilience is a big worry for any food business. So what they do know is, while it’s a bit more expensive, a regenerative system will build resilience,” says Lamb. 

Individuals, he says, might not take to growing food – though courgettes are his top tip for an easy crop – but reconnecting with nature can take all forms. “If you want to be part of the solution, how we spend in every sector is effectively, like our biggest vote,” he says. 

“If you’re lucky to be having three meals a day, you’ve got 21 votes a week, and you can decide what food system you want to support.” 

Find out more about Wildfarmed and regenerative farming.

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