Farmer Focus – Andy Cato
Andy Cato reflects on Groundswell
Farmer Focus – Andy Cato
October 2025 Farwiza Farhan, the remarkable conservationist working in the Sumatran rainforest, spoke recently of the superpower of naivety. If she had fully understood the complexity of the problems she was wading into, it would have been impossible to begin. This touched a deep chord with me, remembering how little I knew when I sold …
Farmer Focus – Andy Cato
Mar 2025 On an April day 90 years ago, Hugh Bennett was testifying to the US congress, trying to instil a sense of urgency about the precarious state of American soils. As he spoke, soil blew in from the great plains 1500 miles away, blocking out the sun and giving the day the name by …
Farmer Focus – Andy Cato
September 2024 The deluge of the last few days, following the wettest winter since 1836 and the drought of the previous year, make it abundantly clear that we’re now farming in a fundamentally different water cycle. Improving the capacity of our soils to infiltrate and percolate heavy rainfall is going to be critical for a …
Farmer Focus – Andy Cato
During an unrelentingly wet February, the only ray of sunshine was the arrival of our Red Sussex calves. It’s always amazing to watch mother and baby choreograph an apparently impossible dance in which a sodden, half blind wobbly legged newborn finds the source of its milk. About a month before calving, we moved them up above the flood, onto one of our four sandier fields where the ground has remained relatively firm underfoot. On the lower clays that make up most of the farm, it’s a different story.Â
Featured Farmer – Andy Cato
July 2023 Colleymore is a National Trust farm that forms part of the Coleshill and Buscot estate. My family and I arrived here in 2021, having lived and farmed in France. Of the 295Ha, around ¼ is permanent grass. The rest is Grade 3 arable, predominantly clay. It shares the same characteristics as the clay …