Wise Farmers: Ben Andrews

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After leaving University Ben briefly tried a life in the city, but after 18 months returned to his roots on the farm where now lives with his husband John who is a GP.

The farm is a large-scale supplier to organic veg-box retailer Abel and Cole who write, “We’ve been working with them since Colin’s son Ben was just a nipper, making them one of our longest-standing partners in the organic world. Now Ben’s all grown up and, aside from his main role as shepherd to their herd of organic Jack Russells, he mucks in with his dad to help fill your boxes with the best of British veg.

Ben in the kale field at Broadward Hall Farm. Photo: The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission

“It’s not just us hungry Abel & Colers they’re looking after either. When we popped in for a visit recently, we were treated to the sight of rows upon rows of beautiful, swaying sunflowers. Planted to encourage buzzing bees and other handy pollinating insects to move in, they’ll provide valuable seed for birds over the autumn and winter too.

That’s just one small part of their commitment to farming with, rather than against nature. Organic farmers often tell us that they don’t really own the land. They’re only looking after it for the next generation. The Andrews family really embody that philosophy – that’s what makes them our kind of people.”

Photo: https://stopfarmwashing.co.uk/

Ben is one of the Farmers against Farmwashing which is a campaign led by Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford Organic Farmers, to expose how supermarkets label produce with fake names of farms that don’t exist to deceive consumers to believe that the produce is UK-sourced. Ben’s video statement for the campaign describes how these fake farm brands undercut real small-scale farmers and asks ‘Should Fake Farms be Legal?‘

Ben is one of Soil Association’s ‘Agroecology Ambassadors’, and is committed to nature-friendly farming, using social media to teach the public and fellow farmers about agroecology and organic food production.

His passion is to increase biodiversity on the farm, by sowing wildflower borders, and allowing weeds to grow, ensuring that there are attractive habitats for beetles and butterflies, bees and other pollinators, and birds such as linnets finches and skylarks.

Ben says, “We’ve been organic for 21 years now. We find that being a mixed farm is really easy and goes so well with being organic. It makes us really resilient as well, we’re not relying on inputs bought in from elsewhere.

“We grow all the feed for our own cattle. The manure from the cattle provides the fertility to help grow the crops. So we’ve just got that lovely little closed loop system which works really well.

“We do things to support bird life on the farm and I never really knew what the birds were, I mean they were all just sparrows or blackbirds or pigeons. But getting binoculars out and seeing what we’ve got on the farm, it’s fascinating to see so many red list species, species that seem to be declining elsewhere, actually increasing in numbers on the farm.

“A lot of people call our farm a bit messy because we’ve got weeds and we’ve got thistles and when you see goldfinches feeding on thistles, the seeds makes you realise that you can’t have biodiversity without a bit of messiness, because nature is messy, it’s not tidy. So it’s part of my passion to try to increase the amount of biodiversity we have on the farm, but at the same time maintaining it as a productive farm that is growing food, and it’s so important that we get the message out there and we get the backing of consumers because we need the demand.

“I think there’s a statistic that in a teaspoon of soil there’s as many organisms as there are humans on the planet. It can be incredibly rich with life. And when managed properly, the soil will provide the nutrition that the growing crop needs.”

Ben has been named top rural influencers by the Norwegian influencer marketing platform inzpire.me, and came third in the ‘Britain’s Fittest Farmer’ competition.

He now has over 95,000 followers on Instagram and regularly shares updates from his farm.