Meet the chart topping electro DJ who became a revolutionary organic farmer who is on a mission to transform the way we GROW FOOD
ANDY CATO was one half of 90s music sensation Groove Armada when he started a vegetable patch. Before long he was delivering bread to the French president and advising Jeremy Clarkson...
ON THE day that changed my life, I found myself sitting bedraggled in an eastern European airport. A few hours earlier, I had been DJ-ing atop a faux Greek temple whilst a mankini-clad microlight pilot dropped confetti on the dancing crowd.
Now, with a ten-hour trip home, I picked up the only magazine in English I could find and came across a disturbing article about the unforeseen health and environmental consequences of our industrial food system.
It was a call to action and contained the line: ‘If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it.’
At the time, life’s unpredictable path had taken me to rural south-western France, where we lived in one of the seven northsouth valleys that shape the Gers region.
True, our son Theo’s first word was ‘tracteur’, as he pointed to the farm traffic that passed the kitchen window. But I was completely divorced from the landscape, with no understanding of even the most basic seasonal flow of a farming calendar.
Now, inspired by the article, I decided to have a go at growing my own food. Armed with a 1976 Guide To Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour and with the help of our farming neighbours, a corner of the garden was prepared. I built a small greenhouse and, for the first time in my life, planted some seeds.
From the moment I saw seeds become plants and plants become food, I was hooked. Why wasn’t this miraculous process the first thing I had been taught at school?
This was the start of journey which would leave me convinced that solutions to our health and environmental problems begin with the way we grow food.
This conviction, and how to make it a mainstream reality, set me on a path from DJ to an unlikely French farmer and baker, and on to becoming a tenant of a historic, protected farm, discussing soil health with Jeremy Clarkson.
But all of this was unimaginable as I grew my first vegetables. At that point, music was my life: in 1997 my friend Tom and I formed a band called Groove Armada. Since then, we’d had the good fortune to make albums and perform all over the world. Festivals, nightclubs, after-parties — a DJ’s life is a parallel universe, and a world away from the quiet miracle of vegetable seedlings.
Happily, my new-found feeling of wonder about natural food production survived the difficulties of my early vegetable growing; the prototype mobile greenhouse that was blown on to the road, the sheep, ducks, rabbits and wild boar that relentlessly tested my attempts at fencing. Combined with beginners’ incompetence, it made for challenging moments.
But, eventually, that patch of land grew into a small market garden, productive enough to begin selling vegetables at the local market.
As a novice English grower, selling food to French people was nerve-racking. It got off to a terrible start when a sharp-eyed lady spotted that I’d undersold her and broadcast this to the whole market. It was news to me that brand-new scales need calibrating and was a tough reputational blow. But in time, a reliable supply of tasty vegetables built up loyal customers.
I’d head off for DJ gigs with John Seymour’s book still tucked in my record bag and amidst the sweat, noise, and lasers, find myself thinking about topsoil — in one teaspoonful of which there are a greater number of living things than there are humans on Earth.
As my understanding of soil grew, so did a sense of impending crisis. Great civilisations have fallen because they failed to prevent the degradation of the soils on which they depended. A post-war miracle has, for now, saved us from the same fate, but with dramatic, unforeseen consequences.
In 1939, Britain was importing 70 per cent of its food. As German U-boats began to sever these supply lines, the ensuing crisis unleashed an extraordinarily rapid increase in domestic food production; 66 per cent more wheat and barley in three years.
By the end of the war, a botanist from Iowa called Norman Borlaug had revolutionised farming.
Growing up during the Great Depression, he had seen hunger close up and set himself a lifelong mission to ensure people were fed. Breeding wheat varieties suited to newly available fertilisers and pesticides allowed him to bypass any deficiency in the soil, creating a system that massively increased production. Dubbed ‘the Green Revolution’, Borlaug’s miracle spread around the world.
Combined with the wartime emphasis on production, by 1986 the New York Times reported ‘Western Europe’s grain mountain . . . stands at close to 17 million tons, stockpiled in regiments of ugly concrete silos that disfigure the countryside’.
My musical career began with the Doncaster Youth Jazz Orchestra just when the grain mountain was hitting its peak. My parents came from families that had known genuine hardship. For them, the abundance of the modern supermarket must have been an extraordinary thing. For me, food was something I took for granted.
Until picking up that article in the airport, I’d never considered grain mountains, or that behind them lay farmers reduced to the tightest of margins, or a 68 per cent decline in wildlife during my lifetime — equivalent in human terms, to killing off everyone in North and South America, Africa, China, Australasia, and Europe. Or that agricultural run-off is a greater source of water pollution than sewage, and the health crisis is largely a crisis of poor nutrition.
These uncomfortable truths combined with my new-found love of growing food led to another
I sold my publishing rights and bought a farm in France