"We're trying to grow a rainforest within 20 years"
An exchange with Higher Farm's Matteo Grasso on trees, ducks, and the grisly truths of a more resilient food system
Trees are the enemy of the farmer – they’re an annoyance to tractors and combines, they create unnecessary barriers between fields, and they take up land that could otherwise produce food.
At least, that’s how the story usually goes. For the minority of farms, like Higher Farm in Castle Cary, trees are an essential part of the whole operation: helping retain water in the ground, providing forage and shelter for animals, improving soil quality and biodiversity, and sequestering carbon. All under the banner of what is called ‘agroforestry’.
Continuing the list of antitheses to conventional farmers and farming are brothers Giacomo and Matteo Grasso. Both in their mid-twenties, they moved from London to an old dairy farm just outside Castle Cary a couple years ago, with some private capital behind them to regenerate the land while producing food from it.
On paper, that would trigger one or two alarm bells. But the brothers quickly showed they’re not remotely shy of dirt and, as the below conversation would suggest, the grisly and gory bits of running a farm – even one set up from scratch. Plus, the relatively new on-site Farm Caff has become one of the best places to eat in Somerset.
Both brothers are fervent – quite captivatingly so – which is part of what made me want to experiment with a script-like format. As opposed to traditional running copy journalism, wherein most of the characterisation is edited out (albeit to tell a specific story), here the story is the character. Not exclusively, but to a much larger degree than what you’d usually get.
On the basis of talking about ‘whatever comes to mind’ (related to food and farming, of course), and seeing where the conversation leads – in this case, from ducks to morality to semantics – the following exchange with Matteo is pretty close to verbatim, but edited for clarity and brevity.
Matteo: We’ve got like 200 ducks arriving, and in two weeks we’re getting another 100. The geese we’ve got will help protect the ducks from the foxes. But what I think is crucial is the way they live. We've got 50 acres, but for now they're going to go into five or six acres. The standard for pasture-raised is 500 ducks per acre. So I can have 2,500 ducks. There isn't even a better standard that I can pick up off the shelf. So if I'm going out as a consumer who doesn't fucking know anything about this, I'm going off what society, the government, whoever it is [decides the] standards. And I just looked in my field, I was like, “2,500 ducks in here? That’s fucked up.”
Hugh: That’s insane.
Matteo: And that's the best standard we have of eating duck. With chickens, the best standard is 2,000 per acre or something.1 So we're now like, “right, how are we going to talk about this duck in a way that tells people it's special?” The Italians and the French are rockstars of this – Poulet de Bresse, or the Spanish with the jamon iberico. All that is just branding work for them to figure out how to say “my meat is special”, but obviously you taste it too. So we're just trying to figure that out. We're going to have 300 ducks on five acres.
Hugh: That gives them a lot of space.
Matteo: They’ll also have access to the forest garden, with perennials and lots of perpetual spinach around, lots of trees, grasses, and there'll be bugs and insects and whatever – they're going to forage most of their diet. You know, ‘pasture’ could just mean a field. But how do you communicate all that to a customer? Me and you can sit here and have this conversation, but if I want to somehow change the way people eat, the details [make the] culture and that’s what I'm really interested in.
Hugh: You mentioned something there on the way ducks and geese will fit into the forest garden and the general ecosystem. Am I right in thinking there's a bit of pest control involved there too?
Matteo: They will chomp up the slugs in the winter, which will be good. But the way we're farming with planting all these trees and trying to mimic the forest means if we get a pig or a cow or a goat in, they'll just destroy them.
Hugh: I imagine sheep and cows are good for [grazing in] more mature woodland.
Matteo: Exactly. We've got a good, I dunno, five years till we're ready for that. And that's why a lot of people struggle to do these kinds of farming methods, because if you've got a thousand acres of pasture and someone's like, “okay, it'd be awesome if you planted trees.” And you were thinking that’s just a fucking nightmare. I've got to Cactus Guard2 them all, or I have to put some fields aside for years. We're doing a bit of work on the language here as well. The farming I researched and was obsessed with was called syntropic farming. And that's essentially like agroforestry, but with lots of diversity and looking to constantly evolve your farming ecosystem to be a forest. We are trying to get to a rainforest in 20 years. From what I've learned, that is the most abundant ecosystem on land you could possibly have. Therefore the most productive, and the most beneficial to our environment, to biodiversity, to carbon, etcetera. Each season, you have to introduce what a natural habitat at that point would need. So at this point we can have any sort of poultry and that's why we've gone for geese and ducks. I wasn't really interested in doing chickens – I think there's enough chicken around. That's another thing – diversity in the ecosystem. The more the consumer starts to eat more diversity of meat, the more we promote and support farmers to diversity into their farm.
Hugh: You are also in the unique position in that it'll be on the menu. So to a degree it's like, “You will eat what you're given.” I really like that approach. I dunno if that would be intentional.
Matteo: No that’s definitely true. Big struggle though because if you ate what I would give you, we wouldn't have a successful restaurant. At the same time, I have hearts and tongues and all sorts of things on the menu, which I'm trying to get George [Barson, chef director] to do more of. It's quite tricky because it's not particularly his type of cooking, which I also respect, but if you actually did kill one animal a week, the menu, or any restaurant menu, would look completely different. A lot of chefs talk about whole animal butchery. Unfortunately it's nonsense. You'd have to say, “okay, we've had our, I dunno, ten portions of pork belly being served. Now someone's got to eat a heart and then another person's gotta eat the brain.”
Hugh: And the chicken feet. All that good stuff.
Matteo: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I hope people will eat goose at Christmas. I think George thinks people eat duck. I think duck's quite ‘in’, to be honest.
Hugh: I feel like most people would eat duck. It's a nice go-between between chicken and goose, isn't it? And maybe it's a way of introducing people to more interesting poultry, because I imagine a lot of people probably haven't had goose.
Matteo: You go into this whole different realm of flavour with goose, where these birds are eating grasses. If it's done properly, geese after six months on grass get a really beefy flavour, which is just insane. This is all about the difference in how it's raised.
Hugh: That's it, isn't it? There's that phrase that goes around that basically goes, ‘you are what you eat eats’ as much as you are what you eat.
Matteo: Was that Michael Pollan? A bit of an awkward way to phrase it, but there's lots of truth in it. Anyway, meat has been a conversation topic a lot recently because we're trying to introduce these animals onto the farm, and seeing people's relationship with that is just fascinating – they’re absolutely up for eating meat three times a day but find it quite controversial.
Hugh: How do you mean?
Matteo: Well, we're disconnected from our food. That's obvious, but it really is so vivid when you talk about meat because you will bring someone to the farm and you'll show them your ducklings and you'll say, “well, this is what we're eating essentially,” or, “these are the pigs that we've got and they’re our food.” And they're like, “oh God, that's so horrible.” The fact we eat animals every day, but are afraid [that we have] to kill them, it's just really sad. I would say it's almost cowardly. Just to be in your comfortable little world when [killing animals is] happening in the background is just scary.
Hugh: Are you saying that’s common across the public generally or is that common across people who visit?
Matteo: It's definitely everyone. I mean I'd imagine if you take any ten people across the country and you ask them to kill an animal, maybe one maximum would be okay with it. Anyone would struggle to kill it. I would struggle. That's an intense thing to talk about.
Hugh: I mean there's that moral argument, isn't there. But there's also that question of ability. If someone asked you to fix their car, you'd be like, “What? I don't know how to fix your car.” It’s similar I think if you asked them to kill a pig.
Matteo: I hear what you're saying, but bear in mind there are cultures, especially peasant cultures, where whenever an animal is eaten, it's slaughtered in community and celebrated. We're not talking cavemen here – even my nonna would fucking get a chicken or a rabbit and cut its head off and eat and cook it. And then obviously that [common practice] changed very, very quickly, and the convenience and the disconnect has made that.
Hugh: I've discussed similar on the WFJ before in the sense that there's this Disneyfication of animals, especially if you live in the city and you've never really interacted that much with animals. So your idea of what animal is is a cartoon caricature, which really behaves in a human way and therefore you associate those human behaviours with human thought and feeling, which isn't really applicable to animals.
Matteo: Yeah, interesting way to look at it.
Hugh: I think it might not be obvious to us or them, but I feel like animals kind of know their place in the food chain. I do wonder if the people who think it's cruel to eat the ducks on your farm, if it's cruel for a fox to eat the ducks on your farm. Where do you draw the moral boundary? I don't know.
Matteo: Once you do decide to engage with that process about the health of an animal, it's just so important. I'm learning about what the animals are fed, how much space they should have, at what age they're killed – most ducks are killed at six weeks. When you lean into where your food comes from, which requires you to think about some things that some people wouldn't want to, you are really doing yourself a really good service on improving the way you eat as well.
Hugh: Good point.
Matteo: I did the ‘no meat’ thing for a long time.
Hugh: You did?
Matteo: I saw the documentaries, and this and that. I was like, “this is insane.” And then I learned how animals are really important for a healthy ecosystem. How biologically – depending on where you are from in the world – meat, hunting, all of this stuff is a very important part of ourselves. As you said, it's kind of unemotional – if I run down a wild boar and kill the animal, it's just a whole different spiritual relationship with the land and the ecosystem than murder or warfare, which is probably what most people would see it as.
Hugh: How long were you meat free then?
Matteo: I didn't eat meat for a couple years of my life. I think it was from the beginning of lockdown.
Hugh: So that would've been before you started the farm.
Matteo: Before the farm. Whilst I was still running Sugo, the Italian street food brand. And yeah, this is what most of the time is happening in food – these huge knee-jerk diet decisions based on aggressive marketing of some kind. “Look at this clip of factory farmed pigs – it's the most disgusting, horrible thing you'll see in your life.” Okay, fine, and then you're not going to eat meat again. [At the time,] I'm living in London, I don't have the chance to go and see a bunch of pigs running in a woodland, living the greatest life, being killed, understanding spiritual connection to food. So I'm just being fed what I'm seeing. Obviously it's somewhat dangerous, which is what's quite sad about it.
Hugh: As you're saying, life is full of too many binaries and I don't think we should have any binaries. What that brought to mind actually was that Hannah at Meadowsweet sometimes has vegans visiting her farm and some are completely turned around by the whole idea of [farming animals in a responsible, regenerative way] and they end up eating her beef.
Matteo: Woah, that’s great.
[Beat]
Hugh: Quick question – I’ve seen you mention ‘table-to-farm’ on the website. What do you mean by it exactly?
Matteo: It's basically that ‘farm-to-table’ is a phrase in the first place. I think it's just insane we have to make that clear. But I get why it's being used, because people have forgotten their food comes from a farm. So we were like, fuck, we're trying to connect people to the soil. We're trying to change the relationship with food. I just don't want to call myself farm-to-table because there's that guy down the road from my mum's house in London who calls himself farm-to-table and I don't even know what he's doing. He's just making food. So I was like, hold up, what we're really doing is bringing your table to the farm. Why don't we try that? I've got to be honest, it's not flying the way that I thought. People think I make a mistake most of the time, and then I have to explain it, which is fair enough.
Hugh: I think it's a really nice idea. Quite subversive. You might just need one more word in there. Like you said, ‘bringing table to farm’ or something.
Matteo: Yeah, exactly. That's the biggest problem of the whole food system right now, is that the table couldn't be further from the farm.
Hugh: I really believe that. Generally the guidelines I give people when they ask where to eat in Somerset are to go to a farm that has a restaurant on it or is in some other way very closely intertwined with farming and the land. Generally that's a good bet.
Matteo: And you see it and experience it, and then you equip yourself with your own personal knowledge and relationship that can't then be thwarted by some documentary or billboard or something. The problem is the ignorance.
Hugh: Yeah – that's why we're doing this sort of thing [having a conversation about ducks and trees and publishing it], isn't it, really?
Feel like adding to the conversation? Drop a comment below
I couldn’t find a number for stocking densities from Pasture for Life (the UK’s foremost or only proper accreditation of its kind), but HFAC – another accreditor elsewhere in the world – does stipulate a maximum of 1,000 birds per 2.5 acres
A brand of galvanised steel tree protectors
This is a fascinating article and I shall seek out the farm and tables in their caff soon.
They are not remotely shy of dirt, nor hard work from the sounds of it! A great article. Thank you!