Definition, the interview

Interview with thrutopian poet, Julie Leoni

What inspired your poem, Definition?

That’s a really interesting question because the answer goes quite a long way back into the history of my family. My mum and her siblings were brought up in Birkenhead and when the war came, some of them were evacuated to the North Wales coast onto a farm. My mum loved life outside and I think always wished she had been able to live on a farm. My uncle did exactly that. When the war finished, he moved to Wales and then to Shropshire where he met his wife who was a farmer’s daughter. They bought farms on the Welsh borders and my cousins all went into farming as well.

As a child, growing up in the south of England, visits to the farm were an extraordinary contrast from suburban living. There was so much space and freedom; I loved being with the animals and being outside. When I was old enough to drive myself, I would come up and visit my cousins and stay on their farms and the older I got, the more I listened round the dinner table to how hard life was for them. Supermarkets seemed to have them in a stranglehold, the Ministry of Agriculture, based in London, didn’t seem to have any real conception about what farming entailed. My family worked from dawn into the night, 365 days a year and taking a holiday seemed almost impossible.

And yet, it seemed to me that their life was more meaningful than so much of what I saw in the south-east and it was probably part of the reason why I eventually moved back to the family homeland where I spend my days walking around the lanes and fields of the Welsh borders.

During the pandemic I was lucky enough to attend a permaculture design course (PDC). It was something I had wanted to do for a long time, but because I work, was never able. Then of course, during the pandemic, everything changed. The course was held in a barn on a local regenerative agriculture farm that I had been aware of but never visited and during the course we visited another couple of local regenerative farms. The course was just amazing in its complexity and the permaculture system made so much sense in terms not only of agriculture and land use but in how to plan and live our lives. I’d spent time on the permaculture farm in my 20s down in France but hadn’t fully understood the principles so the course really gave me that depth.

Being on the regenerative farms and learning about permaculture gave me a new way of looking at my family farms. I really don’t want to insinuate that traditional farmers are somehow doing something wrong, I think they aren’t appreciated enough for the work they put into our food systems. In the UK we have much higher standards of animal welfare and food hygiene than if, for example, we start to import food from America or overseas and I just think we need to appreciate all of our farmers, no matter how they farm.

That said, the more I heard about soil health, river pollution, factory farming and the use of chemicals which were destroying habitats and natural life cycles, the more I began to be interested in different ways of food production and that is where the poem came from.

I wanted to start off with the historical definitions of farming, because our ancestors, having been hunter gatherers, eventually settled into an agrarian lifestyle. It was only with the land clearances and the enclosures that normal people were removed from the land and with the start of the Industrial Revolution there was the big movement from the countryside into the towns where our labour was commodified and timed. Up until that point, everyone would have been growing food for the family and surplus would have been shared in the community. I think the early definitions show some of that. I also wanted to give a sense of the fact that this is an old lifestyle rather than a job, that it has been something that has been passed down through generations.

It interested me that some of the definitions were very much about the products of farming and of course that is important; the milk, the eggs, the straw, the feed, but having seen my cousins and my uncle farm, it is also about the community and the lifestyle and the caring knowledge of the land which I didn’t think those definitions represented. My uncle was on his farm for over 60 years and would have been able to tell you about every tree, every brook and every animal that was on his farm, wild or farmed. To me, that knowledge is much more indigenous and not just to do with commercial enterprise and productising, which is why I had the middle line about farming being a way of life.

The two big chunks of text are in opposition to each other but I really want to make it clear that this is not about traditional farming being bad and regenerative farming being good. I think that binary is much too simplistic. It is practices that are helpful and unhelpful and that have therefore positive or negative outcomes. As with all complex problems such as food production, more thought is required for understanding solutions and options. For example, the local farms that I know that are regenerative and organic, have much smaller herds and probably struggle more financially. Furthermore, they obviously produce much less food and so if everybody farmed in that way it raises the question about whether there would be enough food to feed the population. I think we need to avoid demonising or revering different farming styles. Instead, I think it is about minimising harmful practices and maximising beneficial practices.

What I do like about some of the new farms I see locally are their creativity and their diversity which is very much at the heart of permaculture. One of our local apple tree growers has a number of businesses on the same small plot of land and then they rotate the planting so that the soil is benefiting. Another farm sells its produce to its own pie making enterprise which then also generates income alongside a community interest company and glamping. Of course, it takes a lot of energy to run such a complex system, just as it does with more traditional farming, but I think the new technologies such as social media mean that the younger farmers are able to reach a more diverse audience for the various offers they make.

One of the other differences I notice between my own family farm and the newer farms is how my own family farms are very much centred around family; children and parents whereas the regenerative farms run by younger people are drawing in community support such as volunteers and woofers and engaging with schools and community groups much more.

The poem ends by looking at the grammar of the present continuous because whilst most of us pay no attention to where our food comes from, we would be nothing without farmers. I would also argue that if we want to be sure of the value and health of our food that we ourselves need to learn some of those skills again whether it is just having strawberries in a window box or rhubarb in your garden. We can all have a small compost heap that we then use to fertilise anything we are growing rather than buying in peat-based compost. Even if we grow a tiny proportion of the food that we eat it gives a sense of the endeavour and effort that goes into growing something, which then means it’s much less likely that we will be wasting food. In addition, of course there is the well-being that comes with having your hands in the soil dealing the sun or wind on your back and being away from screens.

Tim Laing’s Just In Time report makes concerning reading. Having interviewed experts in the food industry he concludes that our food supply chains are weak. We don’t have stores of food and should there be shocks to the system, our resilience in the food sector would be horribly low. Just recently we have seen the impact of a power outage on Heathrow. The little food that we do store is kept in giant warehouses on two spines up the country and when you consider the impact that having a power outage has on your own fridge or freezer you can imagine the impact of that on some of the storehouses.

Sweden stores three months of food currently per every head of population and is considering raising this to a year’s worth of food so that they could feed every individual for up to a year. They are also encouraging people to grow their own and store their own food and the UK has nothing like this which is another argument that we should all be supporting our local farms so should the infrastructure and logistical supply chains go down because of some technical or cyber attack, then we could buy local food from producers that we have pre-existing relationships with. Or even better, have grown our own and shared our produce with our neighbours

You launched your new poetry collection, Farmotherlands, on April 2nd. How did it go?

We have a fabulous independent bookshop locally who get in some amazing speakers even though we are a small market town. I launched my previous book with them in a more traditional way where it was just me speaking. This time, because I am not a farmer but some of my poems are about farming, I didn’t feel like I could legitimately sit on the stage and talk about farming as I am simply a voyeur. I also wanted the launch event to have a community feel, to make it into more of a party in a celebration of the local area, our local farmers and indeed the local community, so I invited along three of our local producers and some local musicians and we had a really pleasing turnout of over 120 people.

Part of my intention with the event was that people would reconnect with people they hadn’t seen for a while but also establish some new connections either with the farms or just with some of the people in the audience and I think the event was really successful for that. I think having local musicians playing fiddles gave it a sense of party and the farms had stands out with some of their produce and flyers for courses so for them it was an opportunity to show what it was that they do to people who might not have known.

I also had a photographer present, someone who I used to work with and I invited people to approach her to take photos of the people they were with so that they have something to remember the event by. It was my gift to the producers the musicians but also the audience. I wanted people to have something to remember the event by so they would remember the messages I tried to get across in the poetry and that the farmers talked about, so they would have a visual hook after the event.

I talked about poetry and then my mum and then my link to farming and then the farms talked about how they farmed before I carried on to talk about the importance of the land to me. The farms then talked about how they connect with the community and then I explained what I’d wanted from the community event. Again, unusually for a book launch I did put together a PowerPoint which meant that the farms could have images to explain what their farms look like and how they work, but it also meant that I again was trying to create visual hooks for some of the words that were spoken.

My final slide was one with Mary Oliver’s line about what is it we should do with our one precious life and I had a photo of my son when he was young looking at a praying mantis and my final argument was that if we can connect to nature and each other with curiosity and gratitude then we would all feel life to be richer. I ended the main talk with the request for a moment’s silence to just reflect on what everybody was grateful for and I was really pleased everyone went with that.

The questions afterwards were mainly about farming but there was a really fortuitous final question about the ethics that we are espoused too and it was me that took that question. My main message was that we have enough. Certainly everyone in the audience had enough whether it’s food or clothes or cars and that we ought to get better at recognising when enough was enough.

I also suggested that once we knew that we had enough and were enough we would need to buy a lot less and eat a lot less and consume a lot less and that instead we could become creative and spend our energy on building connection, buying locally and getting to know our local community, which isn’t just human but are the more than human world.

I had really tried to bring out in some of the poems how important it is to get to know our natural community; the birds and the flowers that maybe we take for granted most of the time but with whom we share space and without whom we couldn’t live. I talked about interbeing, using the example of how when we breathe in, trees breathe out. I problematised the notion of the pyramid which has humans, usually man at the top of it, with worms at the bottom and spoke about the more indigenous web of life approach. For some people in the audience this would have all been old news but there are definitely some people in the audience who wouldn’t have heard these kind of ideas before. For me, it is about reinforcing what people already knew and planting seeds for people who haven’t come across these ideas before.

The feedback that I’ve had on the launch is that people enjoyed it, were pleased to see other people and were inspired. The photographer had cards on sale, one of which was the book cover and one of the attendees bought a picture and sent me her photo of it on the mantelpiece because she said she wanted to remember that enough was enough. For me, even if that is the only change that happens as a result of the launch, I’m really happy with that. Of course, it isn’t the only change that is happening. The photographer was asked by one of the farmers to sell cards at his shop, already a few of us are talking about how we can expand and connect and offer week-long experiences on the different farms doing permaculture and combining yoga and nature awareness.

One friend told me how her daughter had been at the launch who works in a job that she doesn’t like who found the talk both inspirational and galling because it made her realise how she wasn’t doing what she really wanted to do which was working at producing small-scale food for local economies. Much as her daughter had found it painful to recognise that she wasn’t doing the right thing the farms provided inspiration for how she could make a difference.

I didn’t want the launch to be all about me. The idea of the single pained artists writing away on their own is just ridiculous. There would be no poems without my mum having read to me at bed time, without the creatures in my garden inspiring me, without my cousins on the farms, without the trees that made the paper for the book, and on and on. No book is created without a whole community of human and nonhumans contributing to it and I really wanted the launch to be an expression of that web. I think we pulled it off.

Farmotherlands is an intriguing title with multiple possible meanings. What are its main themes?

I love the title and couldn’t believe it when it finally came together, I’m so happy with it. The themes are as it says; farming, my mum, the land, some of the farms were far, and some of the farms were other in other places so literally every part of the title made the themes in the collection.

The second set of meanings in Definition is already running in parallel with the first. Shifting language can both lead and follow changes in behaviour. Do you see signs of thrutopia emerging in your own life and/or community?

I think I’ve already answered much of this question. For me, the poem represents options we’ve got, options to keep on polluting our rivers with too much slurry or using artificial chemicals on the land which then destroyed the land’s inherent house which means we might need more chemicals or we can choose to farm more regeneratively. It may be that we can’t do that all at once or indeed it may be impossible to feed the local population with just purely regenerative agriculture, so for me it is about making people aware that they have choices in how they spend their money and where they spend their money and that farmers have choices about how they produce the food and how they connect with the people they sell to.

Having spent much of my life in communities with my children, I do just think so many of our answers are much simpler than we think they are. I made the point at the launch that we have to control what we can control. I spend very little time paying attention to Trump or global politics because I have no control once my vote is cast. Where I put my attention is on where I can influence and change and for me that is locally. Imagine if increasingly people were buying from local farms that would encourage more local farms to spring up, it would mean that we wouldn’t be relying on the big supermarket chains, it would mean that we knew where our food came from. This might mean we wouldn’t have the same food that we’re used to having. One of the local farms only produces milk when the cows are lactating, she doesn’t artificially keep the cows in milk which means that milk production stops over the winter. Now obviously that would be a gap which the supermarkets may have to fill but most of the year round that means that you’d be getting milk from her, where the mothers and the calves have not been separated.

Another of the farms produces beef and pork and whilst I don’t eat a lot of meat my children do and I am really happy to provide their Christmas dinner from cattle that I’ve seen being happily cared for in a field. Someone in the audience was asking how her children could be more involved in farming and whilst that’s difficult because obviously they are working farms and not charities, all of them have some sort of family days and engagement with schools and so what a great way to connect the next generations with nature because we can’t care for what we don’t know.

Ultimately, I think it is connection that will save us. Connection to the natural world whether that’s just your garden or your garden box. Connecting mindfully to the air we breathe, really feeling that, experiencing that in our bodies. Caring for the people in your neighbourhood; smiling, saying hello. If I have too many apples I put a shout out to my neighbours. If they have too many beans I get things back from them. This is small-scale but the well-being in connection it builds is heartwarming and nutritious.

The less we have to depend on logistics and supply chains and the consumer market and the more we can be self-sufficient, whether that’s in solar panels on our houses or whether that’s on locally produced food or bread, the more we can support those small enterprises, the more they will support us. The more we understand we have enough, the less money we need, the less we need to stress ourselves doing work we don’t like. The more we create and grow, the more self-sufficient we are. The more we make friends with all the living beings we come across in our days, the ants, the grass, the air, the stones, the more we care, the less lonely we feel and the less likely we are to buy products that harm our more than human neighbours. And that all has to be good for our own health and well-being and that of the more the more than human world.

The regenerative farms I worked with are:

Barbara and Casha at

https://www.babbinswoodfarm.co.uk/

Ian and Stef at

https://treflachfarm.co.uk/

Tom Adams at:

https://tomtheappleman.co.uk/

The Bookshop is:

https://www.bookabookshop.co.uk/

And Hannah White took the photos:

https://www.hannahwhitephotography.co.uk/

You can buy Farmotherlands here: https://www.julieleoni.com/product/farmotherlands/

If you would be interested in finding out what emerges from the launch in terms of yoga/permaculture/regenerative agriculture weeks then drop me a line so I can let you know at: julieleoni.com@gmail.com