The Midlife Rebel Podcast

Rewilding Midlife: Self-Sufficiency, Soil, and a Life That Makes Sense - Max Cotton

• Host - Nadine Shaw - Midlife Rebel; Natural Wellness Advocate, Astrologer, Gene Keys Guide,Human Design Enthusiast • Season 15 • Episode 16

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A midlife plot twist doesn’t have to look like a crisis. It can look like soil under your nails, bread you milled yourself, and a dinner you can trace back to land you actually know.

In this episode, I sit down with BBC journalist Max Cotton, who spent an entire year eating and drinking only what he could grow or raise on his small farm in South West England. What began as a one-man protest became a deeply human exploration of resilience, reconnection, and a slower, more intentional way of living.

Max helps reframe self-sufficiency—not as an extreme lifestyle or purity test, but as a spectrum anyone can step onto. Together, we explore how agency expands when you choose seasonal food, shorten supply chains, and build relationships with the people behind your milk, meat, and vegetables. We move beyond headlines about cows and climate, digging into soil health, regenerative grazing, and how herbivores on diverse pastures can actually store carbon rather than release it.

Max shares the whole journey: the surprises, the melons that worked, the wheat that didn’t, the fat, the time, the learning curve. He offers deeply practical advice for beginners—start tiny, buy trusted bulk staples, budget realistically for dairy and meat, and let local community be part of the solution rather than going it alone.

This conversation is as relevant for city dwellers as it is for homesteaders. We talk veg boxes, UK-only sourcing that feels quietly rebellious, ethical dairying, micro-dairies thriving with just four cows, and the overlooked art of turning a harvest into meals. More than anything, this is a case for belonging—to place, to neighbours, and to a rhythm that finally makes sense again.

If this conversation inspires you, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review so other midlife rebels can find it.
 What’s one imported item you could swap for a local option this week?

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Midlife Rebel Podcast. It's time to rewrite the midlife story for women who refuse to be put in a box. Because maybe midlife isn't a crisis. Maybe it's an awakening. Today's guest is Max Cotton. Max is a British television journalist who has worked as a reporter at BBC News Westminster since 1995. Between September 2022 and September 2023, Max embarked on a total food self-sufficiency project, only eating and drinking food produced on his small farm in South West England. And today Max is joining us to share his experience. Thanks, Max. I can't wait for this conversation. It's a big one. Yay.

unknown:

Yay!

SPEAKER_00:

I did muff up the intro. I got my words.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm worried.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, thank you so much for joining me. I've been watching your you've uh created a series about your project, your 12-month project, living off the land, off your own property, and basically eating nothing, eating and drinking nothing else apart from what was produced on your farm. And so um let's uh yeah, can we start at the beginning? Like what inspired you to set about doing this?

SPEAKER_01:

To do that, yeah. I think it well, I did it morphed into different things as I started to do it because I thought I was learning short and like really, really fast. Um, but I start it started out as a one-man protest. I was so fed up with being a consumer, being a victim, being uh someone who big companies and big government and stuff just sort of, and I had to do whatever they wanted to do. And I I wasn't a citizen of the world, I wasn't a human. Um and so uh yeah, I so I did this sort of one-man protest. It's been coming on a while, Nadine, I have to say. I'd say it's been coming on for 40 or 50 years, um, ever since I was a kid, as a function of my upbringing, probably. My my great-grand my grandfather were, you know, they had a small holding during the war and a milk to cow and stuff to get through rationing and all the rest of it. Mum was a terrific gardener, my grandfather, uh, his grandfather, huge influence uh in his life, was uh crosser in the very, very north of Scotland um uh in the 19th century. So we had this sort of little family, not a huge thing, but this little family uh little lineage of um of smallholders and small growers and everything. And I think I was tapped into a bit of that too.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's it gosh, it I love how this is it's almost like like I've gone, I'm going straight down like the spirituality path here with that kind of like you've been on this journey for such a long time, and and it's like it's come to fruition. This you you talk in your videos on YouTube about uh a book that you looked at when you your mum had a self-sufficiency book, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That you read and they inspired you and you kind of escaped into this this book. And you've like brought it to brought it to life. Um yeah, so yeah, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01:

It was it was great. I mean, during this year of a hundred percent total food self-sufficiency was is absolutely my my magnum opus. And you know, I might I might go on to um to write a book about that experience. I've done a few YouTube things, I've made a radio series about it for the BBC. But even if I do nothing, that year of total food self-sufficiency is going to be my magnum opus, absolutely. It was definitely the crowning sort of moment of Max's life where where where rivers converged, diverged. I'm not sure what rivers do, but they're in game together. Yeah. And um uh and yeah, it was very, very meaningful.

SPEAKER_00:

I bet, I bet. And you know what? I've my husband and I moved from Sydney to the Mid North Coast, New South Wales. So we're in a cut small country town now, and this is something that we aspire to, and a lot of the people that we are living around now also aspire to, and some, you know, some are doing it more than others already. We haven't kind of started, although we bought our um property a couple of years ago, so we've got the land to start doing this. But there are a lot of questions about, you know, can we do it? And so having someone like you who's actually taken the ball by the horns and gone, I'm actually gonna show people that that it's possible was is very cool. Um, and I'd love to.

SPEAKER_01:

You can just ring me up and ask me questions when you're trying to do that.

SPEAKER_00:

Don't worry.

SPEAKER_01:

You've got my number. Just read it.

SPEAKER_00:

One of the tough ones is how do you make cheese?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. I will if you want to know how to do something, I'll just ring me up and I'll tell you. It'll be fine.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. I love it. Um I've got a whole bunch of questions that I think people will be really interested in about the practicalities of doing something like this, becoming self-sufficient. But before we do, I'd love to know what for you I've like, I've got a few questions about like the reasons behind um wanting to do it. Like what let's start with like what does self-sufficiency actually mean? And what does it mean to you?

SPEAKER_01:

So self-sufficiency is absolutely a spectrum. Uh, it's a roundabout. You jump on it, you're all somewhere on it, and you you can move around wherever you want to be on the spectrum, it's fine. It's a state of mind. It's absolutely about wanting to do things for yourself rather than having other things to uh to do about it. There are all sorts of uh there are all sorts of uh triggers that bring people into any community. Uh there are all sorts of triggers that make people ask for help with any kind of illness or or uh or problem. And um, and so people normally go, ah, I really don't want to do this anymore. And so they jump in and they go, I'm gonna do something about that. And mine was this idea about being uh being a consumer that I had to go cap in hand somehow to a multinational company once a week in an out-of-town shopping center for them to be able to provide me with my nutritional requirements to stay alive. How dare you? I mean, I was just absolutely sort of furious. Um, but but but but self-sufficiency can definitely be whatever you want it to be. So um I don't normally uh I'm not normally a hundred percent food self-sufficient, but there's lots of things I do not do. I don't eat rice. Rice doesn't grow in England. Um I don't eat I don't eat um corgettes in late winter. I don't eat uh aubergines in late winter, I don't eat tomatoes in late winter. Um I uh I buy, I get through the winter time with pulses and grains and stored things, I buy a veg box, so I do all sorts of things like that naturally all the time, whatever I'm doing, wherever I'm working, and try and buy a local and seasonal. And so I think that's terribly self-sufficient, and that's terribly sort of, and and that's just my sort of normal state. And I can grow wheat and grind it into corn and make it into bread, and I can milk a cow and turn it in the milk into cheese, and I can do all those things, but uh I can't do anything else when I'm doing that stuff. I haven't got time to talk to you, let alone do anything else. So uh so uh it's about how much time you've got, it's about how much you want to be committed. But buying staples in bulk from a wonderful source that you know about, and then just growing your own veg does the trick. I mean, it does so. What's important is this, why are we doing this? I'm doing this because I want to be a human being, part of the natural world, part of the landscape. That's what industrialization has robbed me of. And so anything that gives me that agency, anything that gives me that stake, anything that gives me that feeling of belonging in our environment and our landscape, is enough, surely. You know, and then and if I have to go the whole hog and catch my own fish and be knitting my own jumpers out of wool that I've, you know, gleaned from fences or whatever it is, um, if if I have to do those things to make it feel I belong, fine. If it's about just sourcing things locally and you think, yeah, I feel like I belong to the natural world and the landscape and my environment by doing this, that's fine.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a real sort of um move towards being more conscious, isn't it, about just about what's going on in in our lives. It's so easy to get caught up in the the system of, like you said, going to the supermarket, expecting to see certain foods. Um, even the shape of our vegetables is perfected. So if we see a nobbly potato in the supermarket, no one will buy it because we've been completely conditioned into like potatoes aren't nobody. It where in fact they are. And you can in our supermarkets here sometimes you can buy special, you know, um misshapen ones, and it's kind of like this novelty thing that they yeah, we have that in the UK.

SPEAKER_01:

An odd odd box, it's called you could have one or have one order, then it's a gnobbly veg.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. But um, so br starting to bring our awareness to where where our food is actually sourced, and um yeah, what can reconnecting to to how that actually happens is is kind of the the start, the starting point, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And and you can do it in any way, even if it's just making your own homemade sham. If that gives you the agency that you feel is your joining fee, then then great. Uh um, if you need to be doing much, much more, then it's fine. This is about we want every, you know, we want to be including as many people as possible into this idea of connecting ourselves to our landscape. And the thing, the thing that kind of gets me is is that for between now or between the day, the year of my birth, 1964, and the year farming basically started 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The only thing that has made us human, apart from God and love, in terms of our culture, was our relationship with our landscape. That was the only thing that really drove human culture and human development, was our relationship with our landscape. And that relationship was driven by food because our food was produced from our landscape. That's how we survived. And so that ongoing relationship was the most important thing. And literally, since about the 20 years after the Second World War, um that link between humans and their landscape in an industrialized Western world has been cut. It was been cut during my lifetime. And from that stem, shitloads of problems, absolutely shitloads of problems. And so one of the first things we need to do if we're going to have a better, more humane, uh, freer, and more satisfying society, is to build that link first with our environment and our landscape. We're not going to solve the climate crisis without having a proper and healthy relationship with our landscape. And we do that through our food. That's how that's what we've always done. And so, given that's what we're trying to do, that's what I'm trying to do anyway, um, then anyone who feels that connection from making their own homemade wine or bottling plums or do you know what I mean? Anything like that that provides that connection. No one, we're not no one has to make their own homemade bread. This is not about um providing everything for yourself. This is about belonging as humans, uh, initially belonging, incrucially belonging with our environment and our landscape and the earth, where we came from, and um and then frankly, with each other.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Well, so many different directions. The the environmental impact of mass-produced foods, climate change, these are things that well, there's two there's two different things, and I'd love to talk about both of them. The farming thing that's going on, you know, where the cows are getting the blame, um, but also like importing food stuff from other countries and how that impacts us, and just sort of bringing our attention to those two different things. Where do you stand with that? Can you talk on either both of those things?

SPEAKER_01:

And so the cow thing and the yeah, so um, I mean, we do have uh we do have to uh uh look, I I don't I can't can't speak for Australia. Let's we might for that we might merge Australia and Great Britain together culturally for an hour together. We'll rip them apart when we finish, but let's just let's just stick them together very controversially. Uh let's just stick them together um for a moment. Um industrialization has meant that we farm in a way that is exploiting nature. We are we are suppressing nature to get the food out of nature that we think we want. Uh, we haven't been doing it for very long, 50 years. Uh it's an incredibly bad way of farming, and uh we have we absolutely have to stop doing that. And we've got to kind of rush to find out how we stop doing that at the moment. Um, how do we solve this great big drama that's going on? Clearly, we need to stop repressing nature. Our food needs to come as a byproduct out of a healthy ecology, and so and so that's what we've got to create. And we will, we will. I mean, I don't know any farmers anywhere in the world who are actually not quite true, but I don't know any farmers in Britain or Australia who are who are splurging um pesticides on uh our land for fun. You know, I don't know anyone who's who's um spreading Russian inorganic fertilizer on anywhere in New South Wales for fun. They're not no one's doing that. And and no one actually in the Western world is farming as they want to be able to farm. So so quite soon we are getting there, we are getting there. Urban areas making an enormous uh uh difference because that's where concentrations of consumers are when they're saying, no, I don't want to eat this stuff. I want to eat much more healthy food produced out of a healthy ecology. And so we're going to get there. Um as we're getting there, controversially, we're going to find that some of the things uh that we think are bad for us are actually good for us. Um, and you mentioned cows. Anything that eats something we can't eat but provides us with food is good. And so we can't eat grass, cows and sheep can eat grass, we can eat the things that or use the things that cows and sheep produce, that is, wool, milk, cheese, etc. And that is a very, very beautiful, very important symbiotic relationship, which is which is obviously very good for the environment. Um there uh uh there are things that we think are good for us, which is manufactured uh protein for vegetarians, um, which goes has to go through all sorts of processes and and can have all sorts of different ingredients from all over the world to be able to make this veggie burger or or whatever it is. And that, you know, if you are a liberal-minded person, you think, oh, that's much more important for me to be eating that, uh, you're probably wrong. That's probably much more environmentally damaging for us to do that. So the so the dust's got to settle, and I'm and I'm sure I'm sure it will. We need to stop eating a lot of pigs that we eat and a lot of hens that we eat. Um, Britain currently kills 2.8 million chickens a day. Whoa. Um it's absolutely obscene. And uh, we are feeding them food we could be eating. And I'm not a vegan or vegetarian. I mean, I I love meat, do you know what I mean? But that's obscene. Um, and all the time we're blaming the cows for burping and fasting and closing climate change. This is nonsense, just me. This is just nonsense. So um what I do find is when I'm eating and providing all my own food, I eat very little meat and I eat lots and lots and lots of uh of um herbivore food. Um just because it's the way that that's how the cookie crumbles at different times of the year, but in the big growing season, uh, from the early spring all the way through to um the late autumn, uh it's it's very easy to eat um uh to eat vegetables and fruit and stuff without having to eat loads of meat. And in the winter time, yeah, eat loads of meat, really, really great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

That's um that's basically how we we're designed to eat as well, right? We're we're designed to eat seasonally and we're designed to eat when the food is in abundance in the summer, when the days are longer and there's more fruit, and when you when you have a kill and you have a feast because the because the food's there, and then but it doesn't last because how can you store it, you know, for long periods of time, pre you know, prior to having facilities like we have now. That and that's basically how we're designed to eat. And that sometimes there's not as much, and sometimes there's an abundance.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I mean, I wonder, I wonder what would have happened if we had been able to give hunter-gatherers a deep freeze. Because you know, wouldn't it have never been invented? Because these guys could like, oh my god, look at these blackberries in season, just hoover them all up, chuck them in the freezer. Um, you know, we've killed a woolly mammoth. Let's join it all up sensibly and put it in the freezer. And farming may never have been invented.

SPEAKER_00:

True. Uh what do you think about the the the um so I'm friends with some regenerative farmers and they have cattle, um, organic beef cattle. And so I've kind of learned along the way, as I think that you have with some of the farmers that you uh you know in your area, about how the quality of the soil actually helps to absorb the the methane or the carbon back in it into the ground. Um, uh but it's because we've basically destroyed the soil through using pesticides as fertilizers and that mass production of food, the the pressure to keep producing. Uh and so that is one of the big problems that's happening with carbon and um or methane from cows is that it's not getting absorbed back into the the land properly.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. So um in my in my videos, uh you've seen a guy called uh Chris Jones, he's uh he's a great guy. He's um uh he's an organic farmer who produces lots and lots of food from a layered system. So there's grass and trees and bushes and different things going on. Cattle's part of that landscape. And in the last 15 years, uh he has doubled the organic matter in his soil. Uh analysis shows that he's doubled the organic matter, which is like saying he's doubled the amount of carbon stored in the soil. And that's taking a system that didn't involve any livestock, but was just arable farming, you know, uh just doing the same crop monoculture over and over and over again, having a much more layered and organic, much more diverse approach in 15 years, double the soil's organic matter. So absolutely it makes it makes a huge difference. And you can create farming systems um with cows, uh, which are so which are sequestering greenhouse gases across the board. So um so you've got a herd of cows, um uh they'll be extensive rather than intensive, but depending on the environment, the landscape, which trees and how the pasture's growing, how it's grazed and everything, they can be because they're there, they can be sequestering huge amounts of um of carbon. So all this stuff we get about, oh, you've got to uh stop dairy and oh you've got to stop eating beef and all the rest of it is absolute baloney. And one of the problems is both of us suffer. We we've got in Britain and Australia together, yeah. Both of us suffer from uh from this, is all of the stats come from America. You know, all of the stats come from America. So all that stuff where you see it takes a hundred gallons of water to make a hundred grams of beef and all you know, all of those things is absolute nonsense because how you farm makes an enormous amount of difference. And if you've got one million cattle on a Kansas beef lot who are only eating food that's brought in and only drinking water that's brought in, um that kind of beef production is absolutely terrible for the environment, and you've got to stop eating beef from something like that. But if you've got one family with a house cow on a Hebridean island, you know, or somewhere in very, very remote where there's 50,000 acres of um of wilderness and this one little cow just got, you know, jumping away a few things. Of course, eating meat from that cow or drinking milk from that cow isn't damaging the environment. On the contrary, and so nothing, nothing, no one takes into account the farming system. And so uh and say, oh, you've got to stop eating dairy, stop eating milk is nonsense. Where the milk comes from, how the beef is produced is absolutely crucial. And with that, that's great because it means we can we can make decisions about what we want to eat.

SPEAKER_00:

So I think one of the main things that you're saying, like you're you're sort of saying, is the eating locally and um eating seasonally so that we're actually working with nature, with the environment is really important. And one of the things that is happening, as well as all of that stuff, where there's that mass production of cattle, um hopefully it's not happening everywhere. I don't think it happens really here, but the feedlot system that they have in the um in the US um and the the impact that those things can have um could be changed if we're eating locally and and more ethically. And then there's the um I I'm just I'm kind of like, what about all of the aeroplanes that are being used to import and export foods all over the world? I mean, we live in Australia in a small country town, and sometimes we have grapefruits that are from America on our supermarket shelf, on a local supermarket shelf. It's not even a big chain. I don't like we I I've kind of worded my kids up. We know if it's not Australian, we don't buy it. Um, because you we talk with our dollars, right? We um but it's not something that people go, oh well, you know, you shouldn't be buying all of these things, these foods from the supermarket if they're imported. But that to me is like probably over the like you said, the last 50 years, these things have been really changing. And one of the things that's really changed is international travel and and the amount of aeroplanes in the sky at any one time. And no one talks about that as a as an environmental impact when it comes, you know, it's give up your meat.

SPEAKER_01:

We um I mean that I can play, I can do a tiny bit of devil. I I love I love your your your thing because actually, if you can't grow it in Australia, then you shouldn't be jolly well eating it anyway, because you you you know the the climate for growing um for growing grapefruit in Queensland is absolutely there. Do you know what's mean? You don't you know you don't need to have uh citrus fruit imported from any other continent in Australasia, it's fine. So I'm in a way I'm slightly envious because you've got this whole continent and and you can have a rule which is not from Australia, we don't eat it. Whereas I've got to struggle making decisions about something that's produced 550, 600 miles away, because you know, northern Spain, southern, northern Spain's only 500 miles away from me. Morocco's only a thousand miles away from me. Um the world in the global north is really small. Do you know what I mean? The the closest town, the closest country to the state of Maine on the other side of the Atlantic is Morocco. So that's the closest Africa and America are really, really close. Do you know what I mean? Much closer than across the whole of Australia. So so um, yeah, uh it's a it's a real struggle, the the whole uh where things come from. Um I think that we've got to I mean I could rubbish people who fly all the time. I don't fly, I don't go on holidays abroad. If I want to go abroad, I go on the train or I row a boat. I do not I do not fly. Um and um and my children do, and I'll give them a thick ear about it, and and I'll, you know, why give them such a hard time, Dad? You know, well, because it's shit, you know, that's why. Um if we are going to solve our climate tri climate crisis, it isn't just going to be one thing. We need to uh we need to use technology. I mean, much as I can't stand the idea of more technological solutions, AI makes me want to slip my wrists, you know. I mean, I haven't got over industrialization in the 19th century yet, rather than, you know, the next tronche of computer-driven technological changes. So, you know, I hate it, but I'm sure there are really important things in AI in the next generation of industrialization, really important to us as people. I'm sure there are. Um, we need to um so we need to embrace those things and look at the different things that we need to do. So uh engineering is going to have lots and lots of solutions to our climate crisis. Absolutely. The bit that I feel is my bailiwick, the bit that's my thing, is living simpler, you know, um, having shorter supply. Finding joy in having less rather than having more. Or rather, not having less, but consuming less rather than consuming more. That's my area of speciality. I'm not a you know astrophysicist. I don't know anything about uh hydrogen engine engineering. Someone else can deal with all that stuff. Uh my thing is um enjoying myself without having to ask someone else's permission. And um and we will be grouped together and solve the climate crisis, all of us together, with our little bits of expertise and minds absolutely simpler living, shorter supply chains, consuming less, because that's going to be as every bit as important as very clever hydrogen engineering and you know, and very, very clever AI computer technology.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. It's like two two ends of a massive spectrum, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So I'm not a machine breaker, I'm not a blood eye, I'm not someone who, you know, who who thinks it's all appalling and everything. I um there are there are lots of solutions here, and we're all going to be playing our part.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. There's definitely, I feel, uh well, maybe it's just the circles I move in, and and because my husband and I have done it ourselves, but there there seems to be, especially since all the lockdowns, uh, a real much more interest in people learning ways of taking care of themselves and like growing their own or becoming more self-sufficient in in some of the ways that you've already mentioned. It in it and like you said, it it feels like um I actually I've just peered across my office and there's a book that says self-sufficiency, and that is random. That it's not my book, it's my husband's. Um and it I just spotted it. It's obviously calling my name, right? Um yeah, I feel like there's there are a lot more people very similarly to you who are like, I don't want to have I don't want to be dependent on a system that we kind of saw, we kind of saw signs that it could be broken, right? W when we were in lockdowns and we weren't able to go to the supermarket, for example, or you know, and things started running out on the shelves. So, like, how do we do some of these things on our own so that we, you know, can make bread or grow some vegetables or make cheese? Um, yeah, I think that this is something that is potentially becoming more um front of mind for people.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

And then it goes hand in hand with sorry, it goes hand in hand with like the health, our own health, um, you know, reducing that consumption, eating stuff and we know where it's come from, so we're in control of of our bodies as well. And it helps to it it it has a positive impact on environmental as well. So there's like these all these parts that are sort of coming together.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's great. I think that I think the fact that you can access your your route into this stuff is really important. Look, we all agree humans' relationship with the environment and their landscape, the earth is underbeat, you know, incredibly fundamental. And and and we do that with food. And so, and and if we say that that central idea is really, really important, the fact there are loads of different ways into it, I think is really encouraging. You the you mentioned health, John, someone who can spend about their health and exercise and fitness and can get access into this debate in into this area through that, or it might be aesthetically, it might be something to do with art or culture that gets you into it. Artisan cheese making is very, very similar to painting watercolours, you know, and so and so there's all sorts of different ways into it. And I think that makes it, you know, that makes it great. I mean, I am the least healthy person it's possible to be, because just because you produce your own wine and you make your own food doesn't mean that you're not going to eat too much of it or drink too much of it. Just because you're capable of digging for three or four hours doesn't mean you're gonna go and dig for fun for another four hours, just to lose a bit of a few inches from your tummy, you know. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's uh yeah, that it's there's a lot of work that went into. Let's start talking about some of the things that you you did in your in your project. Because I I know that people have a whole bunch of questions, and I encourage everyone to to watch the series. It's very cool. Um, but it was a lot of hard work, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was. I mean, uh, how much food does someone need for a whole year was the question I asked myself for the very, very beginning. And I worked out how much food I was going to need, and then I kind of quadrupled it because I don't want to just eat cabbages or I don't want to just eat corn or whatever for a whole year. I want to, and something might fail. Do you know what I mean? So so I um uh I did some front engineering working out how much I was going to uh going to need. Um, and then I tried to sort of roll back from it because uh you can grow an incredible amount of food in a tiny, tiny space if you're really, really intensive about it. If you go, oh well, I've got plenty of space here, I'm gonna plow all of this up, you can often wind up producing less food than you could do there in your garden. Um, because you're not you're not really, really using the space and using your energy um as much as you could possibly. So if anyone's interested in producing food themselves, I'd say start off with a really, really tiny area and just see how much you can uh you can get out of that.

SPEAKER_00:

Like a raised garden bed or something like that.

SPEAKER_01:

Like a Yeah, look, I mean a suburban garden can practically keep a family. It really can. You know, a big suburban garden can pr can keep a family. And if you've got a little tiny veg patch that's 20 feet by 10 feet, and a little tiny kind of two-meter greenhouse, um uh then you're really on your way to producing all your own fruit and vegetables in the season. And if you don't eat out of seeds and vegetables, then you and you buy in your flour, say, from a beautiful source, or you your beans or whatever from another beautiful source, you're pretty much self-sufficient, you know. Um all our dairy comes from dairy farms around us because milk's so hard to move around the place. Um, and so that's the only other kind of crucial thing. And so you can budget for that separately. So I'd say I'd say start off, you know, really, really tiny and see what you can do before you rush off and buy yourself a four-acre small holding or whatever.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Start small and and get get the hang of it, I think, is like get used to like that. Find out what you like and the yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

How far how much had you been doing before you started, like before you before September 2022? Had you obviously had the farm running I've done a whole year before then.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, you're kind of like you're eating last year's food.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

So um, and so at the farm I bought 25, 30 years ago, uh, the small holding. Um, I've lived here, I've done all sorts of different enterprises here. It's four or five acres. Um so um, yeah, the the food you saw me grow, you see me growing in the seasons next year's food. The food you see me eating in the seasons last year's food, because um, because it's a whole group, you're a whole growing season. Um, you if you start uh in the early autumn, which is when the farming year traditionally starts. If you start in the early autumn, you go quite quickly into, say, the winter, um, with your cow, and that's the cow is gonna be eating hay and stuff that was grown the year before. So, yeah, you need a whole year running running up to a um a food thing. You can't just turn up and say, oh great, I'm gonna eat all of the everything's gonna be home produced. You'll have nothing to eat for six months.

SPEAKER_00:

And you'd probably be you'd probably be clocking things along the way. How am I gonna do this? What else am I gonna need to plant? Or because you had a lot, you like you had so many bases covered.

SPEAKER_01:

Um you want to, you want to sorry, no, no, you go. No, no, no, no, I'm talking over you constantly. Ask your question.

SPEAKER_00:

And now we've been very English. No, you go, no, you, no. Uh you had so many things. I think people go, oh, well, what would you live off of? And I think that that was even something that was brought up in one of your videos. People were going, you're gonna get bored with what you eat. You had so many amazing things. You had like so many vegetables, you grew your own wheat and made your own flour, potatoes, milk, cheese, you even grew melons. You had a cow that you um slaughtered and butchered, eggs, honey. Well, you had a cow that you that you um got dairy that got milk from as well. You made yogurt. Sunflower oil. Did you end up making sunflower oil?

SPEAKER_01:

I didn't know. I mean, I I tried to make, I mean, the I hung all the sunflowers up nicely in my polyphone. And then the map the mice just discovered them and kind of ate them all and everything. So, but what I didn't do is I couldn't make a press that was hard enough to press sunflower oils, sunflowers. I I put them in a mooly to kind of make a paste and then tried to crush them in a homemade press, but I didn't I didn't get there. I was making I was using something I'd made out of two boards and a carjack. Um so uh if I had of if that had been really, really important to me, uh then I might have pursued it. But I had lots and lots and lots of animal fat, and so I didn't really need oil. So you had like tallow and yeah, and I I had I had loads of that, so so that was fine. Yeah, I mean the thing is is we want to eat a the varied diet, don't we? And um although I I am very, very good at doing without, and I'm incredibly bloody minded, and so someone says, you've got to live off beans for four weeks, I'll go, right, I'm gonna show you how to eat beans for four weeks then. Um so I'm very resilient in that way. Um, no, I wanted to, I wanted to this to be this project to be a celebration, to be a wonderful, this is what we can do. You can live this incredibly exciting, wonderful life with delicious things to eat and um, you know, making my own beer, making my own wine, you know, to uh to be able to celebrate, you know, in that way. Uh yeah, gosh, really, really important.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, amazing.

SPEAKER_01:

Living a real life.

SPEAKER_00:

I've got a whole bunch of sorry. I've got a whole bunch of questions um that we'll probably need to whiz through a little bit, um, just about your actual experience. But before we get on to that, I would love for you to talk just about um raising animals ethically and some of the things the the cow, calf, dairy farming that you did and and like um yeah, how you how you took care of your animals because you felt you actually grew the food for your animals as well, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So um for me personally, it's really, really important for you to think long and hard about what we're doing. So you are basically taking an animal and making it a prisoner, and it and it didn't ask you to do that, and uh and uh it doesn't know that you're gonna kill it after it's been a prisoner, but that's what you are going to do. And so, and so um there are great, big, really important ethical choices and decisions that need to be made where you need to create as natural an environment as possible for any animals that you have. And uh there were lots of animals I wasn't prepared to have because I didn't think I could satisfy their needs, and so I didn't have any, I didn't have any chicken to eat, so I could eat, have chicken meat to eat, um uh, because that's often very intensive, and the bird zone they're very horrible, horrible, horrible, didn't have anything to do with that. Whereas some things you can do really nicely, so ethical dairy on a small scale, you can do. So you have a the cow's obviously not producing milk unless it's had a calf. I don't know how well I'm assuming most people watching this are mammals and actually no I think goats, I think goats can though. Um no mammal produces milk. I thought that you could have goats that you could manage baby.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I don't think so. I don't think virgin goats lactate. I don't think so. Um gosh, what an interesting question. We'll have to yeah, I don't think so. Um I mean goats can produce milk for a very, very long time, like many years after they've kidded.

SPEAKER_00:

They don't maybe they don't have to keep having as can cows, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So there's an old boy in my village who had a Jersey cow that was still still producing two liters of milk a day, um, and it hadn't had a calf for eight years. So so um they can keep going for a really, really long time, but I think they've got to have a cow, they've got to have a calf for all the kids in the first place. Yeah. So, but what we can do is what happens in normal dairying is the cow has a calf, the calf's taken away from the cow, and then all the cows are milked together in one big herd, and then after nine or ten months, then they stop milking them, all the cow cows calve again to get them back into producing a maximum amount of milk, and all the cows, calves are taken off again. And um, it's really brutal taking a tiny baby away from its mother, and its mother doesn't like it, and neither does the tiny baby. It's not very good for our health. And so one of the things that we can do as smallholders is we can the cow can have a calf and and I can share the milk with the calf. And um, and I'm much cleverer than the calf. So I can manipulate the situation so the calf thinks it's getting what it wants, but it's not actually, because I'm cheating it, John. So um so yeah, you can have a wonderful relationship where you've got me and the calf, and we're sharing the milk from the cow, and um, and uh it's a it's a beautiful way of what way of existing, and no one's getting upset or or whatever.

SPEAKER_00:

And there's more small small dairies that are starting to do that in the UK, is that right?

SPEAKER_01:

It's there are some. Um, I mean, you can produce an enormous amount of milk from four cows. And so one of the things that the micro dairies are starting to do in little places in Britain is they've got a little solid business where you've got four cows, they're maybe producing 15 litres of milk a day. Uh 415 to 60. Um, if you sell that 60 litres, do I mean 60 litres or am I mean 600? Uh 415s or 60. 60 litres a day, yeah. They're producing 60 litres a day. Now, if you sell that to your local dairy, uh, you're gonna get$15, uh whatever it is. I don't know what the parity is, say$15,£15 for your milk. If you sell those 60 litres to a passerby out on the street, you're making$60. Uh and$60 every single day, seven days a week, in addition to your other sources of income, that's worth having, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I well, I think that's worth having. I don't, you know, I think great. Someone wants to give me 60 bucks, you know, I'll say yes. Every day. So there are lots of people having little outlets, and they can people can help themselves with bottles, their own bottles, you know, buying local, ethically produced milk and everything. So there are those things, those things working. However, cow calf dairying on a huge scale is tough because it's chaos. As soon as you've got a hundred cows all looking for their calf after milking, or you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not, I don't wanna, yeah, I don't want to be prescriptive when I say under no circumstances should anyone produce milk like this. Under no circumstances should anyone produce um cereals like this. I think there are there are scales and we need everyone. Yeah, we need everyone.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. All right. I'm gonna get into some of the questions just around like the practicalities of your experience.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Um you want to give shorter answers, but you're not go up.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, just yeah, we'll just do like a a um I don't know. Yeah, just quick yes, quick five, that's it. So you've already kind of answered how much land you need, not very much. Is it expensive to get started?

SPEAKER_01:

Incredibly expensive because the cost of housing is nuts, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, join a peri-urban agricultural unit in a city or get together a group of people. Buying a farm, nightmare.

SPEAKER_00:

So, like an allotment would be uh an option for for someone. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Um were you feeding you just yourself or were you feeding your family as well? Because you've got quite a big family, haven't you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, there's loads of us. I was feeding, um, I was I was the only one having to only eat food produced from the farm, but I know everyone else was tucking into it. The second they saw something delicious, they thought, oh Dad, I might have a bit of that. Do you know what I mean? So yeah, so well, when all the steaks were being jointed up, everyone was very interested in eating. When you got knobbly potatoes in the middle of February, and everyone's going, I don't know about that, Dad.

SPEAKER_00:

Who's gonna peel them? Did you find did you find it hard not to be a consumer? Like when you had to go to the supermarket for load or whatever.

SPEAKER_01:

Was it not?

SPEAKER_00:

No.

SPEAKER_01:

Everyone says, Oh god, how do you deal without tea and coffee for a whole year? How do you why don't you really miss chocolate? No, this is a noble and splendid cause, and what I get out of it is so much more important than being able to eat chocolate and stuff. And I have got, I'm not setting myself up here as a hard ass here. I've got the breaking strain of a kick cat when it comes to uh, you know, denying myself things. I mean, I am really, really immorally flabby, and even I, even I thought, no, God, I wanna, I'm getting so much out of this by uh by looking after myself. I don't want to cheat or, you know, or or be tempted by anything. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_00:

Fair enough. Good. Um are you still how how much are you still doing when it comes to your self-sufficiency on your farm? Did you like pack it in or do you do a bit now?

SPEAKER_01:

I the second I finished, I threw down the spade, jumped into the car, drove straight to McDonald's, and had a big Mac and a chocolate milkshake, and was like, yes, I'm back.

SPEAKER_00:

Um so how did you how did it how did that feel? Like, did you notice the impact of did it feel fabulous? What about fabulous, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it was fabulous. Sugar. Oh my god, someone made me a um a uh a bakewell tart. Do you have those in Australia? Bakewell tart?

SPEAKER_00:

I have had a bakewell tart.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so it's a it's a German sugary cake, and she made me one because you know I hadn't done anything like that for a whole year. I've made my teeth vibrate because there was so much sugar in it. I could literally feel them buzzing in my mouth. Amazing. But so yeah, I was straight back into all sorts of other things because it's just so nice to try, you know. A Big Mac is sorry, everyone uh out there, Big Mac's delicious, chance to mean it just is. Um, so um uh uh I've uh cow Brenda. My cow is currently being the cow on some a friend of mine's more holding. Okay. So I'm not milking a cow. Um I uh am not growing my own flour, but I do buy flour from a local mill grown organically. That's all local. Um I'd say 90% of the food I eat comes within five miles of where I live. So in comparison with most folks, I live an incredibly hick, hill, billy, you know, kind of uh hippie type lifestyle. But I haven't gone back to full-on food self-sufficiency. Mainly because I want to do one thing, I want to be broadcasting, I want to be writing, I want to be doing things with you, you know, like talking to you Nudine, John Speed. I've got other other stuff, and it's really making your own bread from your own wig is unbelievably time consuming.

SPEAKER_00:

Making your own bread full stop is pretty time consuming, but like I like I would do.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, I make my own bread every day.

SPEAKER_00:

Pretty I not every day. Well, yeah, I I would in my house, but it gets eaten as soon as it's baked. So it's like what's the point in that?

SPEAKER_02:

It's so delicious with butter.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, where where am I? What was the hardest thing about your project?

SPEAKER_01:

What's the hardest thing? Um yeah, like not the obvious things because you're so highly motivated. Um, what's the hardest thing? The hardest thing is there's so much that you want to do um and you that that you don't have time for. So I would desperately wanted to sort of uh make more bottles and preserves and do different jams and and uh go along all my hedgerows and collect elderflowers and make elderflower cordial and and um and make things out of bones, you know, that I'd got from I wanted to make a a spear or some sort of weapon out of a thigh bone or from an ox, you know, or all sorts of things that I'd like to be able to do. I had a beautiful crop of hops, uh and I was really looking forward to making them into beer, and I didn't make any beer. I did make a little bit of beer, but I didn't utilize my hops nearly well enough. So there was, yeah, it's uh it's just about time. Um, the economies of scale are ridiculous. One person producing all their own food for one person is just nonsense. But ten of us could have fed the village. There's a thousand people in this village, and ten of us doing the same thing on about 65 acres would have been able to feed the whole village, and it would all make sense then. Um yeah, so um yes, time, I guess, is the main thing.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that was um one thing I was gonna ask you about or or say actually was about community, and like that's it it makes you realize how much that whole system, like when you're doing it for yourself, um it's bringing people together as well, isn't it? Really?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, yeah. No, I mean how you can uh how you can find ways people produce different things so they can all sort of club together. I mean, what I would do instantly, if I wanted to produce a feed a thousand people sitting in your small town or whatever, if I was we were planning that, I'd have one person, two cows doing all the dairy, they didn't do anything else. I'd have one person growing all of the cereals, they didn't do anything else. I'd have several people growing veg, so some of they could so they could complement each other, and I'd have at least half the people in the project all cooking. Because a huge amount of the work of producing your own food is taking the food from being in a field to being on a being on a plate. And uh a lot of the food that we eat um is very nearly on your plate when you buy in the shop. Um, whereas there's an awful lot of processes if you're just using natural ingredients to get things in there. So yeah, working together is uh is hugely important.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Before we hit record, I'm just conscious that we're edging towards the end of our hour. And before we hit record, you mentioned that you're about to record a TV series, I believe. Um which is more about not necessarily living off your own land, but like um eating from from the UK. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so so I got such an amazing sense of agency and purpose and belonging and fulfillment from being food self-sufficient. I just I really wanted to share it with people, and not everyone can have a cow, you know, got sheds for milking cows or or a couple of acres to grow some corn. Not everyone has got a wife who works, who can pay the electricity bill while I'm pissing about, you know, you know, growing apples or whatever. Um only in Britain, tragically, in Britain, only seven percent of household income is spent on food.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

So um, I mean it's Britain is the worst. Um only Singapore and the United States of America spend less. Um it's France, double. I bet you Australia's probably double um what Australia's Australian family has been on food. Yeah, it's so crap. Britain, 7%. So if you might have to be growing your own food and all the rest of it, but a huge amount, 93% in our case, pathetically, uh, of your money going on something else. But anyway, I wanted someone for people to be able to join in if they didn't have you know all of those resources and stuff. And so, yes, I've been concentrating on doing a BBC TV series, uh radio series rather, um, about eating a UK only diet. And what's so great about it is it makes you feel slightly subversive. You go around the shops, go, oh, what's in that?

SPEAKER_02:

Where'd that come from?

SPEAKER_01:

That's great fun. Just me, like, sorry, pal, I'm not having that. It's got so-and-so in it, you know. That that's really good fun. Um, and very, very quickly you find that only even seasonally and locally that gives you the agency, that gives you the feeling of belonging, that makes you feel that you're making a difference, that you're part of your community, that you're doing your the right thing by the environment. And so we don't need small farms and everyone gathered together in food cooperatives and stuff like that for us to be able to have a stake. And um, and I think that's hugely encouraging. Charles, I mean, I don't want everyone to have to be able to, you know, have to grow their own food. I want someone in a maisonette in Manchester with no garden to think that they can do something to belong to the land. Um, the reason why this is such an important thing is because we need to be part of our landscape. That's really, really crucial.

SPEAKER_00:

So, what just can you give us an example of what that might look like? So, for someone, the the example of the that person where did you say Manchester? Liverpool, Manchester. Um, who is gonna buy a steak and they want to have more connection to their food. And um uh would they go to they'd find out a local butcher, for example.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so so all that um uh I mean doing doing what everyone can do is actually really, really easy. What do you do? You buy a veg box every single week from one of them, loads and loads and loads of new veg boxy type places. I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in Britain they're everywhere and they're growing and growing and growing because a lot of the a lot of the initiative and the drive is coming from urban areas. And so, and so um so veg box, get a veg box, uh, buy in bulk flour and uh from a beautiful source, get that in. Buy all your cereals, beans, grains, seeds, buy them in bulk from a beautiful source. They're a click away on the internet, and then you've got two other things that you have to deal with because everything you can source on the internet locally is really, really easy. Two other things, you need to have a dairy budget, how you sort out all your dairy projects as local as possible, and how much you're gonna spend, because it's very easy to spend too much on that kind of stuff. And you need to decide how much meat you want and whether you can buy that from someone locally. And uh, you know, people can go and buy half a land from a local sheep farmer, stick it in the freezer, or they can so I don't need to buy eat beef, or I don't really want that, or whatever. So, so um, yeah, it's really easy to do. That that person, our our arbitrary person who we've created in a dean and lives in a maize net, doesn't have a garden and wants to join in. Um then um uh yeah, it's easy peasy peasy and cheap. I I um I did it uh for a really long time on 30 pounds a week. Really? Um yeah, which is enough. Yeah, cheap, cheap, cheap.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, wow. Amazing. Yeah, very inspirational. What's your hope for um for this uh this work that you're doing?

SPEAKER_01:

Everyone can praise the God of all, drink the wine and let the world be the world. Probably. Probably you know um we we have absolutely got to reconnect with what's important to be to be human. And what's so scary is if you just scratch beneath the surface of our literature, of our theology, of Western philosophy, uh, if you look for a moment at our art or our architecture and the history of those things, you see that a relationship with our landscape, uh, with our environment is the thing that has made us human, has been central to human development. And we have industrialization has meant we have abandoned that. And so my hope is that we can all start being human beings again, uh, rather than being, you know, the horrible prisoners we are. Um I uh we are not able to be human beings um because and we're losing resilience desperately. Oh my goodness, yeah. You know, desperately. Oh gosh, how do you do that? Oh no, um goodness me, uh let me let me look that up on the internet. Uh no. Um, you know, we are so much better than that. And you and you find out just how bad it's got out of the click of a button by looking at our art and our literature and our culture, and everywhere you see us being resilient in a landscape, looking after each other. Yeah, we're kicking eight bells of shit out of each other sometimes as well, but um, but being human outside in the environment, oh, it's so precious, and we are losing it, and when it's gone, blime.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Blimey. Yeah, praise the God of all, drink the wine and let the world be the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Very good. Love it. Thank you so much. I could have I could have kept going. Um, but we've we've drawn to the to the close of our conversation and I really appreciate your time. I know that you've got a lot going on, and um, yeah, I've loved every minute. Thank you so much. Hey there, Rebel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Midlife Rebel Podcast. If you'd like to support the show, you can buy me a coffee by going to buy me a coffee forward slash midlife rebel podcast. Thanks for listening to the