Nikki Yoxall - regenerative farmer

Image by Clem Sandison

Nikki Yoxall is a regenerative farmer living in North East Scotland. She runs her farm utilising agroforestry and holistic planned grazing; restoring soils, wildlife and plants with her herd, via Grampian Graziers (#theweemob). She works with the Landworkers’ Alliance, Pasture for Life and the UK Nature Friendly Farming Network, and runs a network called Regenerative Women on the Land. Before moving to Scotland, Nikki worked in Sussex in landbased education.

Rosanna: How did you become interested in sustainability and sustainable food production, and can you tell me a bit about your journey to where you are today?

 Nikki Yoxall: Yes, so I come from being a foodie; as a child, I was always encouraged to try different foods and I developed a taste for interesting food. I love cooking and come from a family where cooking and food was a central part of our family life. I grew up having access to good food and having the skills to cook and prepare food. I also grew up in rural Shropshire so I was connected with farming and food production, it was just a part of growing up. As I moved into adulthood, even when I was a student and didn’t have very much money, I would still have really good cheese to eat, and I would like going to the local deli and getting amazing peppers and beautiful organic olive oil. That kind of food and quality was really important to me even then. I always shopped organic and was very conscious about where food came from. So, it was always an interest, kind of alongside my working life, but it was always there.

 Then, about 13 years ago I moved to the border of Hampshire and West Sussex and started spending a lot more time in the countryside around there. I actually started beating and I realised that while I didn’t like driven shooting, I did like the idea of getting out with my dog and being able to shoot wild game. I liked to just have enough for the pot – to make a stew that night, for example. And I liked the idea of being more connected to nature, so I started doing quite a bit of foraging and things like that. I got to the point where my interests and my career joined together, as I was appointed head of landbased  studies at a college in West Sussex. I lived on site and there was a 500 acre farm with a forage based dairy. It wasn’t an organic farm but it was a low input forage based system.

 I got the opportunity to run short weekend courses for people on chutney making and things like that, and we had a heritage orchard, and could take people foraging. We got to engage with students and local people on these sorts of things. At the time I was also spending quite a bit of time in the mountains and climbing and had this real awareness that all these things kind of merged together. How we interact with the land and our place in that. I was aware our ability to go out and enjoy landscapes was being threatened, because of climate change. I was going up mountains in the winter, but there wasn’t any snow and it was easy to make the connection to the choices people were making in their lives and the changing climate.

 We moved to Scotland just over three years ago. I was offered a post in a college here, so I’d moved away from land based education, but we knew that we wanted to have land and get into farming in some way. We didn't do anything for a year, we just observed – and I am the most impatient person in the world, so that was so hard for me! I think my husband thought it was a great way to torture me for a year, and as soon as the year was up I was ready to buy my chickens and put them on the land and have eggs again and grow vegetables. But, it was a really interesting learning experience to understand what happened on the land here.

 When we moved up, we made a decision that my husband wouldn't work. He would do work on the house and the land here, and he would spend his time at home. He went on a course that was run by the Soil Association in Scotland that was highlighting the role of cattle in ecological functioning and holistic management (similar to Allan Savory). He met Rob Havard and we got to know Lynn and Sandra from Lynbreck Croft and it was good to get to know folks who were doing holistic management. Then we made contact with Clem Sandison, who ran a group called the Mob Grazing Field Lab that was funded through the Soil Association. It brought together a whole pile of farmers who are involved and interested in grazing and holistic management. So, we bought some cattle (we've got rare breed native Shetlands) and we just started mob grazing with two little heifers that were just out there every day in their little paddocks. We were just completely blown away by what that did to the ground and how it created these edges. So, when you've got all your tall grass grazing (our grass here gets to over five foot tall), the cows get swamped by it. They go through the grass, grazing, and smashing the grass down and eating it, and then they move on, but then you've got areas that hadn't yet been grazed and areas that had. So, you get these edge places that just become a hive of activity for insects and small mammals and birds and then you get birds of prey coming in. It's just amazing how abundant and alive everything becomes and, and we really need this.

 Just going back a bit, my husband and I have been, for 10 years, almost vegetarian, we don't eat meat unless we know exactly where it comes from. I wouldn’t even buy organic meat from the supermarket, I have to know the farm and I have to know how it has been produced. We are really, really picky about where our food comes from. We knew that we wanted to produce the sort of meat that we would give to our friends and family. So, we ended up with these cows and then deciding we just loved it and that's what we wanted to do. We’ve kind of become beef farmers by accident really, but it's just because cows are amazing ecological engineers and just do so much good for the land. We also have a few hens and ducks for ourselves, but we trialled pastured turkeys over the winter for Christmas and they were brilliant, so we're hoping to expand on that this summer ready for next Christmas. We’re also moving to a new farm in a couple of months’ time. We will be doing pastured poultry and we will be setting up a small micro dairy with the Shetlands as well as the beef - so yeah it's all happening, and it’s a bit crazy at the moment.

Rosanna: What do you think some of the biggest misconceptions around sustainable food production and sustainable diets?

 Nikki: I think there's a real divide at the moment where folks are being told that the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is not eat meat, which is not true. I think it's because it ties into that idea of consumption, people don't want to be told to give up something. But, if they can replace it or buy in a different way or make different purchasing choices, but still be really active consumers, then it ties into that too. I get really frustrated by that - there's this misconception that you can just replace meat with a meat alternative and it’s automatically better. People are just so focused on greenhouse gas emissions, talking about carbon as if it's a bad thing. Number 1, its carbon dioxide not carbon and number 2, carbon is the basis of all life so we don’t want to get rid of it, we kind of need it. Sorry, I will be getting on my soapbox here, but Brew Dog in a recent marketing about a forest they bought had a placard that said ‘Kill Carbon’. So are we all just going to die? They need to understand what they are campaigning about. This misconception that carbon is a bad thing when it isn't, and a complete misunderstanding of the impact of any sort of agriculture on wider environmental issues. The environmental issues that we're facing, the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, we have to view them through the same lens, we have to look at them as a joined up issue - we can't separate them.

 If we separate them, we then move towards this efficiencies focus where we only think about climate change as greenhouse gas emissions. Only thinking about greenhouse gas or carbon per litre of milk produced or carbon per livestock unit, rather than thinking about the additional impact of intensification, because that will lead to intensification. Then we will have massive amounts of polluted run-off and wildlife loss beyond what we've experienced already, so we have to think more holistically about these things. When I speak to people who say, ‘I've gone vegan because it's the best thing for the planet’ and I ask them, well, talk to me about degraded arable soils then. How are you managing the fact that the food that you're eating comes from a completely degraded system, that is totally reliant on inputs and is polluting watercourses and is entirely reliant on diesel powered technology to enable it. They just can't answer, they just say, yeah but there's no cows. There's this misconception that cows are bad, but driving around in a huge tractor and spraying your potatoes twice a month every month for six months of the year with God knows what - that's appropriate but me having my cows in the wood is bad. It's an incredible feat of very clever marketing that somebody has managed to weave into the public consciousness, and that it terrifies me really.

 It’s about buying with intention or consuming with intention or eating with awareness. In one of my Master's lectures, we were asked to think about life cycle analysis, and I was in a group with a guy who's a vegan activist, another person who's vegetarian, and then a couple of us who, like me, are farmers and someone else who was pro-meat. We did a life cycle assessment comparing organic milk from Yeo Valley and Oatly, or another plant based milk. We were talking about ingredients and we weren't able to undertake a full life cycle assessment, because we didn't know what some of the ingredients were in the plant based milk. I was saying to the others, you can drink what you like, I don't care, it makes no difference to me what your dietary preferences are. But, I can hand on heart say that I know exactly what I'm putting into my mouth and I'm eating, do you?  And they just couldn't, and that was more shocking to me than somebody making a decision about whether they were going to eat meat or not. People can eat what they want, it’s entirely up to them. The willingness of people to just consume super ultra-processed food without really understanding what it is, where it's come from, how it's got to their plate, the additional associated processes to get it into a state that they can consume. That lack of awareness really, really shocks me. It was interesting that I probably take for granted that almost all of the food that we eat, I can see it as an ingredient. That's a potato, that's butter, and I know that's made from cream. There are things like butter or yoghurt that have gone through a process to change their form, but I know where they've come from. We don't really have packets with ingredients on them because we make most of our food from scratch. I was thinking about what a privilege that is, having the skills to be able to do that. But if you want to eat a vegan diet and you don't have the skills to cook, then actually it's easier to go and buy something from the plant-based chiller cabinet in the supermarket and kind of be oblivious to what you're eating.

 Then, on the other hand, I think people would quite happily eat what I would consider a poor welfare chicken or poor welfare pork, that’s indoor bred. And, if you challenge them on it they're like ‘I don't want to know, I don’t like hearing about it’ – well don't eat it then. I can't understand the psychology of that – I am so appalled that someone would eat something knowing it came from a system that makes them feel sick, but that they can always pull down this shutter to it. I think it's maybe because when we're little we’re given all these lovely books of Old McDonald's farm and there's this mixed farming, so we just revert to that, because we were conditioned to think farming is like that.

 Rosanna: How do you feel being a woman in what is traditionally thought of as being a male sector?

 Nikki: I’ve never experienced sexism like I have since moving into farming. There’s a shocking amount of mansplaining. I've struggled to call myself a farmer, but I've got over that hurdle now. I remember being interviewed maybe 10 years ago for the first International Women's Day, and they asked what my experience was as a young woman working in education and if I had experienced sexism. I said that actually, my age was more of an issue, my gender isn’t an issue. The average age in further education colleges is 52 or something; so that was that was a big challenge. The college that I worked at had a very diverse staff and student mix, as we were in Sussex so we had people coming from Brighton to Chichester. It was a really diverse population with really interesting people. Although it was right of centre, Conservative area, there were always influences coming from a more diverse population.

 Then moving to North East Scotland, there are so many events and meetings where I am the only woman in the room. I remember doing some training during the period of lockdown easing and it was just me and men. I had never been that conscious of being a woman before. I go climbing and that world is quite male dominated, so I’m kind of used to it, but it definitely felt like people can be quite condescending towards women in farming. Especially when you’re a new entrant English woman in northeast Scotland. But in the same breath, it’s the most welcome we'd been made to feel in any community, so there's a bizarre paradox there. I feel so at home here, and we are about to move to a new farm because it’s a great opportunity, but it is a bit heart wrenching to leave behind this community. There is an incredible community spirit and it does feel like a family with everyone looking out for each other. But then, at the same time people can be quite negative and say you don’t know what you’re talking about or that won’t work here, so it’s odd but it’s great.

Rosanna: If your Prime Minister or first minister for a day what would you do, and you can you can answer on anything.

 Nikki: First thing I would do is stop this weird split that we have in Scotland between the rural economy and the environment. Well, potentially the rural economy could be separate but farming and the environment should just be one thing. So, I think I’d do a cabinet reshuffle and just give Mairi Gougeon responsibility for farming and the environment.

Rosanna: Finally, do you have any books or resources you would recommend to people who are interested in the topics we have spoken about?

 Nikki: Yes, ‘For the Love of Soil’ by Nicole Masters, which I would recommend as an audiobook because it’s like having a chat with her. ‘Call of the Reed Warbler’ by Charles Massey is really interesting because there's so much around indigenous food ways and indigenous viewpoints of the land in Australia and what that means. I found that interesting because it's quite difficult to apply those principles in the UK, as there's less of a reference point for indigenous culture. If you’re on social media follow someone like Rob Havard because he's an ecologist but also a farmer, and he is very no nonsense and he's got an incredible knowledge of genetic potential in animals and how you manage animals. There’s this idea of epigenetics, there's all these genetic switches that you can you can flick by removing artificial crutches, for example, rather than always giving wormer or always giving minerals, you put your animals in a state where they're not having to rely on those things. So, you breed more resilient animals as a result – I find him fascinating.

 I would really recommend looking at someone like Caroline Grindrod, who runs WilderCulture. She's very much about integrating ideas of holistic management and the role that ruminants play in that, alongside the idea of rewilding. She looks at how our landscapes can be supported to regenerate, particularly woodland regeneration, so we're not having to exclude livestock from that equation because they play a really important role.

 Follow Nikki on Twitter @howemill and Instagram @nikkiyoxall