Overview

In times of increasing volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity (VUCA) the Calmer Farmer project aims to support UK food producers to not just cope with the difficulties they face, but to actively flourish as they grow food on our behalf in rapidly changing social, economic, and even physical landscapes.

Facilitating UK farmers to bring greater balance between outer and inner worlds, we will support them to feel more deeply connected to themselves, others and their environment. Drawing on the best of whole-person psychology and contemporary practices in contemplation, stress regulation, and nature-connection, we’ll guide farmers through an innovative and highly effective inner wellbeing programme.

Calmer Farmer will support participants to be more resourced, resilient, healthy and connected in the important work they do for us all.

Context for project

Food producers in the UK are working at the edge: They face degradation of ecosystems, climate instability and breakdown in rural communities, while also trying to create ecological food systems to feed their localities and the UK as a whole as we move into an uncertain future.

Farmers already engaged in agroecological / regenerative approaches often work at a frantic pace to bring about change in land-based practices supporting ecological health whilst simultaneously trying to make the economics work for themselves and their families. But this is often at the expense of individual and collective human wellbeing. These uncertainties and stressors bring with them a heavy psychological and emotional burden. Consequently, many food producers end up overwhelmed, burnt out and suffering from stress-related illness or worse.

Most have been raised and educated within the current industrial-growth worldview that teaches us that we are separate from each other and from nature. Even if we know intellectually this isn’t true, we often operate unconsciously from this feeling. This exacerbates a sense of isolation and a “me against the world” mentality often reported among producers struggling to make farming work. This disconnecting belief needs to shift for a deep holistic transformation of our food systems to occur.

While many farmers in the UK are turning towards agroecological and regenerative outer methodologies, few approaches to growing food involve an equal weighting between the cultivation of our inner and outer landscapes and this is an obstacle to the radical transformation so needed.

“Creating regenerative systems is not simply a technical, economic, ecological or social shift: it has to go hand-in-hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with each other and with life as a whole”
– Daniel Christian Wahl, Author of Designing Regenerative Cultures (2016)

The need for this integrated approach to change is becoming ever more widely acknowledged as not just a “nice addition” but a central leverage point for systems transformation. The fact that the United Nations have created the Conscious Food Systems Alliance to explore this need globally points to a tangible paradigm shift which needs to be supported by a holistic menu of wellbeing practices delivered on the ground by skilled facilitators. It is this comprehensive wellbeing offer that our project seeks to implement and evolve.

Project Aims
1. Enhancingwellbeing

The proposed project acts as a pilot to investigate the impact of inner wellbeing practices on farmers’ mental health and resilience, their identity and role as farmers, their relationship to the land, the food system, their community and society at large.

The project also aims to explore what kind of inner work supports UK farmers and growers most effectively by engaging a co-creative focus group after an initial introduction to a suite of wellbeing methodologies and practices.

This pilot project will create a foundation for a wider reaching peer-informed offer of wellbeing practices for the UK farming community. We envisage a robust online package of support that will emerge from this pilot and that will have the potential to positively impact thousands of farmers and food producers across the whole of the UK and beyond.

2. Transforming mindsets and values

For true transformation towards a more generative, interconnected culture that supports rather than destroys nature and wildlife it is becoming increasingly clear that a radical evolution of our mindsets and values is essential.

While we recognise that supporting one element (i.e., food producers in the UK) is by default a partial response to larger cultural and socio-economic issues that intersect with global concerns around climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, we believe that UK farmers and growers occupy a potent leverage point in our society, as food is so central to our communal existence and vital to public health and flourishing. This makes the opportunity to foster greater wellbeing and embodied presence within food producers an exciting opportunity to affect wider culture and revitalise relationships both up- and downstream in the UK food systems.

And as Deb Dana, world-renowned polyvagal nervous system health researcher and therapist has said, “The world is going to become a safer place for all humans, one nervous system at a time.”

To facilitate this transformation, we will support farmers to connect to themselves, to others and the world not just by working with nature but by beginning to work as nature. This is a facilitated process of learning to read, navigate and cultivate their inner landscapes with the same skill they already bring to their outer landscapes.

We will support this process through an innovative and powerfully transformative blend of whole-person psychology, holistic coaching, and a range of embodiment practices, all framed by biophilic principles, i.e. letting nature’s intelligence guide the work. This holistic embodiment process supports the wellbeing of food producers, helping them recover, resource, and reconnect to themselves and the work they love.