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James Bailey, the executive director of Waitrose, says he is determined the supermarket should lead the way in regenerative agriculture - Paul Grover for The Telegraph© Provided by The Telegraph
Talk to anybody in the food and farming industry these days and it won’t be long before someone brings up regenerative agriculture. Farming in a more nature-friendly way, reminiscent of pre-war practices, for a long time “regen” has been bracketed as a niche, hippy pursuit.
But with our crops under water, olive oil at the price of a decent bottle of wine and chocolate supply under threat from a virus wiping out cacao plants in West Africa, the corporate world is starting to wake up to the risks to our future food supply.
Globally, agriculture is responsible for around 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. We all need to eat, but with climate change undermining our ability to produce food, is there a better way?
James Bailey, the affable executive director of Waitrose, thinks so. “I don’t think it’s widely understood the impact that the food system has on climate,” he tells me. “On a big, philosophical level, it affects everyone.”
I meet Bailey at John Lewis HQ in Victoria, central London. Dressed down in a pair of chinos and a blue Tommy Hilfiger shirt, Bailey is friendly and engaging, with none of the stiffness of many corporate executives. It is a few days before the supermarket is due to announce a new initiative to support its British farmers – of which there are around 2,000 – in switching to regenerative agriculture.
While other supermarkets have made commitments on net zero, and Tesco offers financing to its suppliers wanting to switch to greener energy sources, Waitrose is the first to make such a clear commitment across its aisles, including meat and dairy products.
Unlike organic, which has a strict set of standards that includes no genetically modified ingredients and limits on pesticide and antibiotic use, regenerative agriculture is more of a philosophy of farming, centred around protecting the soil to improve its biodiversity and ability to store carbon. Ways this can be achieved include avoiding ploughing, reducing fertiliser use, and using cover crops during the winter months to protect the soil.
Bailey will unveil the 'Farming for Nature' scheme at Leckford, the Waitrose farm in Hampshire - Paul Grover for the Telegraph© Provided by The Telegraph
Bailey says the farmers he has spoken to about the shift liken it to a return to farming “how their dad used to farm 50 years ago. There’s almost no fertilisers or inputs, we don’t till the soil, the cows are left out to their own devices,” he says.
Waitrose will first offer its farmers an assessment of how well nature is doing on their land, help them to access affordable financing, and create land management plans, informed by research from the University of Reading and Leaf (Linking Environment & Farming), a sustainable farming organisation. Waitrose and Leaf are setting up eight satellite farms on a three-year programme to test out the best regenerative methods for a variety of products, including meat, dairy, soft fruit and root vegetables.
Bailey will unveil the “Farming for Nature” scheme at Leckford, the Waitrose farm in Hampshire where it has been farming regeneratively since 2020. The supermarket wants to source “as much as possible” of its UK meat, milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables from farms that use regenerative practices, such as reducing pesticide use and ploughing and turning over field margins to pollinators. The aim is that by 2035, all of its UK supply chain for these items will be from regenerative farms. It is aware it will be a huge learning curve for Waitrose farmers and can’t predict how many will sign up, but Bailey is determined that the supermarket should lead the way.
“I think there was a point at which we realised we had to do something,” he says. It sounds very noble, but some would say supermarkets have a major part to play in getting where we are now, having engaged in a systematic price war that has pushed farmers into intensification. Does Bailey, who worked for Sainsbury’s for 18 years – starting in the fresh food department and working his way to become its grocery buying director, before he joined Waitrose in 2020 – feel guilty?
He laughs awkwardly. “I feel responsible,” he says. “I’m part of a generation of people who are in the right place at the right time to make a change. And I feel that burden.”
“I think we’re seeing the end of the era of cheap food, because of the impact of that cheap food – not just on people’s health but the external impact, the environmental impact, the societal impact of that cheap food. We need to witness the end of cheap food and a reversal of the value of the food people are eating.”
'If food production becomes much less stable, you're going to see prices going up anyway, but for the wrong reasons,' says Bailey - Reuters© Provided by The Telegraph
Waitrose is hoping to appeal to its existing shoppers, who have both the time and money to choose a more expensive product that has a lower climate impact. In surveys conducted by the supermarket, it has found that nearly half of customers proactively say they care about the impact of food on the environment and nature.
The supermarket has yet to decide if it will specifically label its regenerative food, waiting instead to monitor take-up among farmers and the impact on the supply chain, also because at this stage it’s unclear whether regenerative practices mean more expensive food.
“Part of the solution might be if customers understand regenerative and are prepared to pay for that difference – a bit like organic food,” he tells me. I point out that the organic share of the market has plateaued at around 2 per cent, and while Bailey says the figure is higher among Waitrose customers, he acknowledges that most of us are not willing to pay a lot more for our food.
“I’m very keen to stress that we don’t have all the answers, but eventually regenerative farming should be as profitable as, or more than, intensive farming,” he says. But if regenerative is to have any impact on nature loss, soil health and greenhouse gas emissions, it will have to be more than a niche interest.
Bailey insists that other supermarket chief executives feel just as spooked about the future of food and agriculture’s impact on climate change, “but it’s fair to say that different people have different challenges they’re dealing with”.
So it falls to Waitrose, as an “industry disruptor”, and its middle-class, eco-conscious customers, to lead the way.
There are a lot of crucial unanswered questions about the viability of regenerative food, Bailey admits. For decades output in agriculture has largely been determined by the inputs of chemical fertilisers and intensive methods, plus relatively reliable weather.
But, he warns, price rises are coming, whether we like it or not, and it may be that we are forced to make better choices because of the impact on our wallets.
“If food production becomes much less stable, you’re going to see prices going up anyway, but for the wrong reasons,” he says. “There will be tipping points where if you want tomatoes or lettuces in certain seasons, they’re going to cost more even coming from the UK. Because the farmers who produce them are now dealing with energy costs up to here, or the uncertainty of flooding, or risks that didn’t exist five to 10 years ago.”
Climate change, he says, will impact “the quality of the food, the availability of the food, and the price of the food”.
He points to this winter’s floods, which have stopped some farmers drilling their crops yet this year and will “inevitably” push up prices and potentially cause shortages on supermarket shelves.
Bailey admits it would probably be almost impossible to sustain the whole country on a drastically less intensive farming system, because of yields as much as price.
“If the whole country were to switch to regenerative next week, and all the diets remain the same and all the land use remains the same, there will be less food being produced in the UK, no question,” he says. “At that point you will have to import more and it may cancel out the benefits.”
Inevitably, we arrive at the question of what we eat, and how that will have to change. Some 85 per cent of UK land is used for livestock to produce meat. And while some of that is grassland that may not be well suited for crops, 40 per cent of the country’s most productive agricultural land is used to grow food for feed, according to the WWF.
“It may be that there’s value in encouraging less but better meat,” says Bailey. “There’s almost no report on nutrition or climate or the food strategy that doesn’t include some version of that.”
This message might sound a bit rich coming from supermarkets that have pushed the £3 chicken, and the ready availability of ultra-processed, low-quality meat.
In their defence, Bailey says, “We can’t be a library, we’re a shop. We can’t spend all our time educating our customers and preaching to them and saying you must eat this or you must eat that. What we have to be part of is raising the consciousness, and offering informed choice.”
“I don’t think there’s any way in which a revolution in the way that food is produced can be pushed on customers; it has to be pulled by customers.”
I suggest that as a customer it can be nearly impossible to comprehend the array of labels, slogans and information around food when you’re doing a supermarket shop, in a way that can feel almost deliberately obfuscating at times.
“Yes, even in a normal supermarket, you’ve got 25,000 products, so you can get a little bit of cognitive overload, if you care, and you’re looking for good information,” he says. “Badges [such as Red Tractor or RSPCA welfare] tend to be the shortcut for most people. But there’s no badge that can give you all the certainty you need.”
Bailey himself says he only shops at Waitrose, except for trips to the farm shop local to his Essex village, where he lives with his wife, Emma, and their two children, Max and Holly, and the odd run to the Co-op for milk.
“Emma hates going food shopping with me, because as soon as we go in I’m off over there looking at labels and trying to adjust something,” he says. “I can’t see it as a customer anymore. I’m on the other side, the Wizard of Oz on the other side of the veil.”
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