Elizabeth Oldfield speaks barrister gone farmer Sarah Langford. 12/10/2022
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about the deep values that drive us. It is about how cultivating curiosity about those values in others might help us live together, even with our very, very deep differences. Every episode I speak to someone who has a public voice or public platform, and I try and understand why they’ve reached the conclusions they have; fundamentally how they see the world, what they think a good life is, and what they’ve learned about navigating disagreement and conflict. I’m motivated by a sense that our information and technological environment is making it harder and harder to have empathy for, or even just tolerate people not like us. It is easy, we are in fact encouraged to stay in our ‘filter bubbles’, a term coined by former guest, Eli Pariser, and just see other tribes and groups from far off in the distance being annoying. We are in a situation where our fears or prejudices about each other are being continually reinforced. I want to listen deeply to people from right across the many different spectra that divide us: whether religious or political, whether about identity issues or Brexit. And hopefully in so doing, rebel a little bit, resist a little bit the forces which are driving us apart. In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Sarah Langford, Sarah has had a career as a criminal barrister and wrote about it in the best–selling book ‘In Your Defence’. We spoke about that, and also her more recent book ‘Rooted’, which describes how she made a major career turn towards practising, learning and also reporting on the regenerative farming movement in the UK. We covered a lot of ground: we spoke about the world of criminal defence lawyers, the intensity of being close to people at a pivotal moment in their lives in the courtroom. How on earth she made the shift from barrister to farmer and our joint conviction that no one changes their mind through being lectured. As usual, there are some further reflections from me at the end, and I hope you enjoy listening. Sarah Langford, I am going to kick off with the opposite of small talk, which is to ask you a question which you probably don’t know the answer to and that is okay. I don’t think any of us really know this sort of semi–conscious set of values that drive us in life. And we probably only come up against them really strongly when we feel like they’re transgressed somehow, where we feel compromised, or like something that’s being asked of us or something in the world is just deeply wrong on a moral level. But there are also things that we just try and have as kind of guiding principles or values. So, there’s lots of leeway to take this question wherever you like. And maybe as a warm–up, I will ask you, before I ask what is sacred to you, I will ask how does the word land to you? How does it feel? What’s its kind of synesthesiac properties? Is it off–putting? Does it feel warm?
Sarah Langford
No, I like the word very much. And I think it’s something that for lots of people is loaded and comes with baggage. And I think maybe I would have had a different response to it 20 years ago. But I’ve worked through that baggage, particularly, I guess, in the work and journeys that I’ve been on over the last kind of decade… it’s a profound word that seeps and bleeds into every area of life, actually. And I think it is whatever people want it to be. But I also think it’s sort of the stuff of life, I think it’s sort of the fabric of what makes us live and live well. And I think that most people, even if they wouldn’t use the word ‘sacred’, will think of something, or hold something that is sacred to them, even if the word is not appetising to them.
Elizabeth
So, what bubbled up for you in a small amount of time to ponder on that question?
Sarah Langford
I know, I did sort of find it hard to think about what the most sacred thing is, to me.
Elizabeth
You can have a few, that’s fine.
Sarah Langford
I didn’t expect to have this, actually. But when I started kind of eliminating and doing the kind of ‘What would you not give up? What would be hard to rip away from you?’, unexpectedly, I think, is work. And I don’t mean work in a sort of high–powered salary, where you’re feeling like you’ve got your stilettos on and your power suit, and you’re at the top of your game. I mean work as in a kind of purpose and meaning to your day. And I have worked, I guess, since I was 14, I’ve had all sorts of jobs, some of them extremely odd. But every single one of them has changed me, and formed my formed my life, given me a literal reason to get up in the morning. And I think that I have seen so many times across the spectrum of humanity, when people aren’t able to have the privilege of work, how it impacts them, their sense of self, how they feel about their life. And so, work is really sacred to me, it’s something that I feel extremely lucky to have. And I think that sometimes we think we shouldn’t think about work like that. But I really do.
Elizabeth
I’m gonna do something a bit unconventional, if you don’t mind. Yeah, because what you’ve just said, has made complete sense of the Mary Oliver quote, right at the start of your book, which in some ways doesn’t look that is tangentially connected to the themes in the book. And I just love poetry and want to insert it in all situations. Would you read it for me?
Sarah Langford
Yes, it’s a beautiful poem. “I go down to the shore in the morning/and depending on the hour, the waves are rolling in or moving out, /and I say, oh, I am miserable. What shall–/ what should I do? And the sea says/ in its lovely voice:/ Excuse me I have work to do.”
Do you know I never connected it either. But I mean, I put that poem at the beginning of ‘Rooted’. I mean, she’s a prophet [Mary Oliver] in so many ways, obviously, but there were many I could have chosen. It was a lesson in inversion, I suppose, in constantly looking at ourselves and what we want and how our own problems, and how looking outwards at how you can help and serve others almost always solves your own issues.
Elizabeth
Yes, we are definitely going to come back to that. So, it sounds like work’s been a key thread. When you did have children and you were forced…and maybe we could talk about this now, you know, we’ll talk about you being a criminal barrister… but it’s one of the least conducive professions to caring responsibilities.
Sarah Langford
It is kind of, yeah.
Elizabeth
How was the decision to leave? Because you were known for writing a book about being a criminal barrister. And then had to…
Sarah Langford
Well, I only wrote the book because I was on maternity leave. There’s no way I could have done it whilst being in court every day. No way. And also, I think, actually, I had to step back from it mentally, to properly hover above it and look at it from the top and really see the elements that when you’re doing it, and it’s a really hand to mouth job. Not many people know I think that often, particularly at the junior end, you don’t necessarily know what case you’re doing the next day. Because often it all depends on what’s happening in the courthouse. If a case collapses, because somebody pleads guilty, or a witness doesn’t turn up, and it doesn’t happen, they will try and fill the courtroom as quickly as possible, and they will do that by listing a case that’s waiting in the wings, one of many. And so, you’ll suddenly get a call at three, four o’clock in the afternoon going, ‘You’re starting your GBH trial tomorrow’, or whatever it is. And it could be in Slough or the Isle of Wight or Bristol because I was on circuit. So, it was really fine when you just had yourself to worry about, and I work quite well on that hand–to–mouth system. The adrenaline of having to perform then and there and doing as much as you can in the time that you can. And you get really weirdly good at reading a massive amount of documents and remembering where everything is. Anyway, it’s impossible to do that with a small baby. And so, I took maternity leave, and when my baby was about eight months old, I thought about how to go back in between. And I sat down, I remember doing it really clearly in my garden with a bit of paper and a pen, and I kind of wrote the accounts of it. And you don’t earn a massive amount as a criminal defence barrister, because you’re paid by the state. And as well as that, you’re self–employed. So, you lose a significant amount on your expenses on your travel to court, on the books that you have to buy, the courses you have to do, and your chambers fees, all of that. And as well as that, because you’re self–employed, there is a gap between work and payment, sometimes months, often years where you just don’t get paid for the work that you’ve done. Sometimes, because the case hasn’t finished yet, because it’s going on for years. Other times, because solicitors can be a bit crap about paying you. And I would get cheques and my pigeonhole which shows you how antiquated the thing still was, then, for trials I did years before with no interest. And so, I had to work out how you go back. You work essentially for free, whilst paying for full time flexible childcare, knowing that you don’t necessarily know when that money is going to come in again. And I knew that I wanted to try and have another baby. And I thought, I’m going to put loads of effort and not see my kid, put loads of effort into re–establishing this, I won’t necessarily get any money for it for a while, and then I might get pregnant and have to go off again. All those cases that I’ve just asked people to give me, I’ll then have to say, ‘Sorry, I’m having another baby’. So, I didn’t, rightly or wrongly, I didn’t go back in between the two, there’s exactly two years in between the two. But when I was six months pregnant with my second son, I met the woman who’s now my literary agent, introduced by a friend because I had been doing some blogging, and she had read it, and we went for a long walk, one of those long walks, where you think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ And she introduced me to Nelle and Nelle said, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant! This is great! Having a baby is so creative…
Sarah Langford
…Writing a book when you have a baby!’
Elizabeth
Lovely when someone says that to you…
Sarah Langford
Exactly. She hadn’t had a kid. She then had one and would text me at two in the morning going ‘I’m so sorry…’
Elizabeth
‘Why did I think you could do this?’
Sarah Langford
So, I signed the book deal with Transworld–Penguin to write ‘In Your Defence’ when my youngest son was 10 days old, and then wrote it during the first year of his life. And I don’t really know how I did that now, looking back.
Elizabeth
I’m so glad to hear you say that.
Sarah Langford
I honestly have vague memory loss about it. Because I had a two–year–old as well. So, they’re both in nappies and preverbal. And I did find a diary the other day. I’ll be partly expletive in it, but it said, and I remember really, really writing it because I was just like massive amounts of laundry in every single room, and the whole place was upside down, and probably hadn’t showered in two days. And I wrote, “I must never, never, ever forget how f*****g awful this is.” And…
Elizabeth
Your past self really wanted you to hear that.
Sarah Langford
She did. She did, but it was an exercise in learning how, particularly with writing, you write in the time that you have, it was an incredible exercise in writing efficiently. I mean, I did have help in the morning with my small one. My small one was at nursery, went to nursery kind of three mornings a week. And then I’d go and get them in the double buggy, wheel them back. They’d both fall asleep in the lunchtime nap. I park them in the corridor of our two up two down house that we were living in. Like, run upstairs, type and I’m like ‘Don’t wake up, don’t wake up!’ And then towards the end of writing that book, my husband lost his job in 2017. We moved out of London and moved to the Suffolk countryside, and he was unemployed, so he could look after his children. While I finished the book, which was just excellent timing.
Elizabeth
I have let myself get extremely ahead of myself, poor discipline, because where I usually want to start with people is both what is sacred to them, but then just getting a sense of their childhood, the big ideas that were formative because obviously I think these two things are connected, what is sacred to us and ideas that formed us. And this can be philosophical, political, religious, or agricultural… You know, what was in the air when Sarah Langford was growing up that you think has shaped the woman you are today?
Sarah Langford
I think my mum who…I think of women of that generation, in the 70s, she had limited options. She was a farmer’s daughter; she was desperate to get off the farm, really. She wanted to go to Arts School, her dad didn’t let her, and she said, really there were kind of three options, then: you became a secretary, a cook, or a nurse, or a teacher, which is what she did.
Elizabeth
It’s not that long ago.
Sarah Langford
It’s not that long ago, really. And, then you kind of mostly gave that up if you have kids. You were allowed to do it until you got married. So, she got married, like everybody did quite young, and young for us, not young for them. She had done her teacher training college, gone to teach in college, and then she had us: my two sisters and me in quite quick succession. And then she went back to teaching when my youngest sister was, I think about five, and she taught at the school that we went to. And she has always had an extraordinary work ethic, which is she wanted all three of us to have our financial independence, she wanted all three of us to be able, I mean, my parents are still married, so, I don’t know why she said this, but to be able to leave. She wanted us all to have the choices that money can buy, and to be able to earn our own money. My dad had the same job for the whole of his life. So, he got his first job when he had left Agricultural College. And he left as a partner, which I think is just people don’t do anymore. And he loved his work. He really loved it. He now has equivocal feelings about what he did, but because he was part of the generation that were paid to, as he puts it, ‘wreck the countryside’. And he now is trying to make reparations about that. But he loved his work, it was very meaningful to him. And so, I think I grew up with this kind of framework of leading a life of purpose. And, and I don’t know necessarily what other messages were around, but there must have been something because I became a criminal and family barrister, mostly defending people, and representing parents whose children were removed by the state, my middle sister has worked for charities for the whole of her life. And my younger sister is a child psychotherapist. So, we’ve all kind of gone into jobs that are sort of about service a bit. And I think that sort of message from my mum was very much, you know, be useful, you know, spend the life that you have been useful doing something of value. She doesn’t sort of really approve of rich people. Entitled privilege is something that really winds her up. Any kind of, ‘It’s fine, like you can live in a really big house if you’ve you earned it’. That’s her sort of her way… she has very little respect for anyone with titles. Anyway, so I wonder if that kind of sorts it. And I think the other hugely strong influence were my grandparents, who we spent a huge amount of time with. We were there almost every weekend; we were there for a lot of the holidays. We lived at my grandparents’ farm for six months. And farming in the 50s and 60s, which is when they started to become farmers had a real purpose, which is feeding a nation made hungry by war. They had a very clear sense of what their job was. And it was about other people. It was about feeding other people, which is like the most elemental kind of purpose you can have. And I wonder if they had that sort of ethos as well, and that sort of seeped in a bit.
Elizabeth
Yeah. So, your granddad was a farmer, your mom was a farmer’s daughter, your dad was a land agent, your uncle Charlie became a farmer, and I should say tenant farmers who leased their land, not owned it. But you went off to the bright light, big city, and were roundly mocked for it by the sound of it, by Charlie. What was it about the Law that drew you? Were you finding meaning and purpose there, do you think?
Sarah Langford
I mean, I think that two parts of it are different, like moving to the city was definitely about growing up in the 80s. If you grew up in the 80s all the messages you saw, all the films you’ve all watched, like, you know, ‘Working girl’, ‘Baby boom’…
Elizabeth
‘Nine to Five…’
Sarah Langford
…Yeah! All of that was about just walking extremely fast, down in a very busy street, with a briefcase in your hand being very important. And the message definitely that I absorbed, I mean, it was like, you know, era of Thatcher…It was all about pull yourself up by your bootstraps, do your best, all that kind of money, money, money, big money …was you can’t do this somewhere where people’s voices aren’t listened to, you got to go to the city. And that was my destination, my goal was to go to London. The Law was sort of an accident, in some ways, because I didn’t think that it was on the cards in any way. I thought that you had to have a godfather who was a high court judge, and you had to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, and you had to be extremely well connected. And know, really… were in that world anyway, and I definitely was not. After my A–Levels, I went to read English, which is all I wanted to do, really at university, but at a not very good university, because it’s the only one who let me in. And it was only at the end of that, that a friend of mine said, I think you should be a barrister, I think you’d be really good at it. I think you should try it. Like it’s basically got all the stuff in life that you like, it’s all about words, dressing up and showing off, all of those things which you love.
Elizabeth
It doesn’t sound like a great vocational call to apply justice in the world.
Sarah Langford
It wasn’t that. I suppose I’ve been glib about it. There was a sense that I wanted to do something that felt kind of meaningful. And I did look at I looked at journalism, obviously. And I was worried about how much your own thoughts and views in journalism are edited by your editor or stifled. How voices are stifled in journalism. And I mean, there are lots of important voices in journalism that are not. And I think that the progress of the Internet has enabled that a huge amount. But at that time, I felt like it would be something that was quite controlled. And I liked the idea of dealing with people’s stories, because that’s the same in journalism, dealing people’s stories all the time. And I liked the idea of doing something which was kind of useful and important in that way. And I did kind of look at other stuff, which was fluffier, but it again was the same thing. I was like, ‘Why would I want really to do this? I’ve been given so many advantages in life, and so many chances that other people don’t get, I feel like I should use them properly’. But I didn’t know how to do it. So, I moved home said to my parents who were a little surprised, ‘I think I want to try to be a barrister’. So, they’re like, ‘All right…’ I sat them off at the table that time and I said, ‘It might take quite a long time’. Because I didn’t have on paper all of the things that you needed. But I got a job as a legal secretary. And my mum made all of us do a secretarial course when we were 16, so that we could work throughout our summers which was very useful. And so, I got a job in a solicitor’s firm in Winchester, which is where I grew up. And I got a job in the evening in a pub that I had worked in, on and off since I was 16, which was called ‘The Watering Hole of the Western Circuit. It’s called the Wickham Arms. And it’s where all the judges who were in court up the road would stay and come and drink afterwards, as for the barristers, and I kind of co–opted the manager and I said, ‘I don’t know that many barristers, would you please introduce me to some?’ And she’s like, ‘Yes, yes’. And, and so I did that, before realising that you don’t necessarily need to have all the things I thought you needed to have. I met loads of barristers who were women: amazing, and who had not gone down the route. And they were yeah, like there were definitely a large number who did look and sound like Rumpole, there were definitely a lot, who did who still do, but there were as many who did not. And I realised then, that firstly, this might be something that if I worked hard enough at it, I could do. And also, I was going to court quite regularly on behalf of solicitors. So, then I was completely in love, like then, I was like, ‘This is awesome!’ I mean, this is the best free theatre in the land, it’s important, you are able to take somebody at one of the most important points in their life and kind of lead them through a crisis. And whilst plate spinning all these other kinds of points, because there’s definitely a thrill of it. I mean, let’s not get too worthy about it. There is a kick, that is from advocacy, from making an argument well. And I don’t know if you’ve seen Jodie Comer has just done a brilliant … the actress Jodie Comer has just been in a play called ‘Prima Facie’.
Elizabeth
I didn’t get to see it. But I read the reviews.
Sarah Langford
It was so good. And what she got across in it well is that whether barristers pretend or not that they don’t like this bit… I mean, I don’t think you’re a very good barrister, if you don’t like it, is there is a performance element to it which is really electric. And there is an atmosphere in a courtroom, which is kind of unlike many other many other, and you can cut the tension with a knife sometimes. And especially when a jury kind of walks in to deliver a verdict. It’s quite addictive.
Elizabeth
Yeah, you’re reminding me a lot, which is no surprise, of Christie Watson who you know was on the last series and talks in very similar terms about nursing, that if you love stories, and you love meaning, being up close in those moments of most intense meaning in people’s lives is both a privilege and a calling and a bit of a drug. And those things are all true. At the same time.
Sarah Langford
It is, it is, and it would be dishonest not to say that you’re allowed, you have access to people’s extraordinary lives, and I tend to think that everyone kind of has that if you dig deep enough. Everyone has a story; you have access to them, and you’re able to help them at this extraordinary time, a pivotal time, which is definitely a sliding doors day for them. And, you know, I mean, no one knows, when you leave and get on the train, and you’re just the person in the suit, no one knows that, but it feels in that moment like you are doing something important.
Elizabeth
And you’ve talked a bit about the public perception of barristers is primarily Rumpole of the Bailey, very ‘Rump…opp…opp..’, very male, posh, very self–assured, you know, and we have a lot of stories of barristers, right? They’re very, courtroom dramas. Everyone loves them. But when you were out of that very frantic life to have these two children, beginning to think about writing about it… you didn’t actually want to write about barristers, did you? You wanted to write about the people in the court whose stories don’t get told so often? Tell me a bit about why that was driving you.
Sarah Langford
I just felt there was such an arrogance about centring yourself and putting the attention entirely on yourself. And so often, in some of the stories I saw, and or read the clients that we represented were flattened and often the butt of the joke, actually, and there was an exploitation to it that made me deeply uncomfortable, that you would tell a story about how great you were showing off at the front. And even if it was a sort of like faux self–deprecating, great. And the very reason you were there, your client, was an anecdote, was a gag, was like someone climbing out of a window, or somebody said something stupid, or whatever it would be. And I wanted to try and get across the fact that they were just a bit more complicated than that. And lots of the people I represented had done very bad things. And I think also, I wanted to explain the question that you get asked all the time, if you are a criminal barrister, which is ‘How can you defend, fill in the blank…? And the reason you can defend whoever it is, is partly because of you believe in the system as a whole. So even if the part that you’re working in is not, if justice isn’t done on your case, you hope that by continuing to uphold the values of it, the whole system works. But also, that the people I represented was so much more than just the Daily Mail headline that they were reduced to, or some of the anecdotes and some of the other books and TV situations, TV series I watched. And I felt like it was important to try and get that across in the stories that these are three–dimensional people. And yes, they had done bad things, but there was a reason. Because while you can’t change the facts, of course you can’t, but how you look at the facts changes how you feel about them, so that was really my motive for doing that.
Elizabeth
Reading parts of that book made me think about how I do, and this podcast makes me do this again and again, come up against my unlovely prejudices and assumptions about people.
Sarah Langford
We all have them.
Elizabeth
Yeah, that basically the people who end up in court in need of a criminal barrister or a family law barrister, kind of outside of divorce situations are somehow wholly other to me in my, ‘Oh, this is embarrassing confession of like smug middle–class privilege in this’, but that is something that happens over there and it’s completely unrelated to my life. And I hope I’m someone who is not in a tight bubble, and through church and various other things, has people in my life, more different backgrounds and walks of life. But as it happens, I have had no one in my life who has ended up in court who, you know, life has taken such a swerve that they have needed to be defended in court. So, I have no access to those stories. And they become a type. And it feels to me, both what you’re trying to do is say these are not a ‘type’, there’s a myriad world of meaning, often who have suffered and have suffered deeply to land where they are. But also, this whole system is not as far removed from your life as you think it is. Could you say a bit more why you think it’s really important that we are aware of the world that you were in as a criminal barrister?
Sarah Langford
There were lots of times that one of my best friends who I lived with when I was at the junior end, she’s also a criminal barrister, and we will come home and say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. We knew that had we been born in the circumstances in which our clients had been born, which is just luck, an accident, that our paths would have been very different. And we would also have been in the situation or not would have, but we’re likely to have been in the situation they found themselves in. And that was a very humbling realisation. And once you unpick the picture that you’re given, because stereotypes come around for a reason; it was very easy to walk into a courtroom or read the papers beforehand and walk into a courtroom and find your client and immediately put them in the stereotype that you felt like they belonged to. Once you start to unpack the fabric of that, and you realise how their lives are sort of predestined before they’d even begun because of the circumstances in which they were born often, you realise that it’s just luck. It’s just luck. And I think there were so many double standards about how the law protects the people who are born into privilege and doesn’t necessarily protect the people who are not. And I would see it in my family cases with parenting, you know, where I would spend the weekend or have friends of friends who were kind of, I guess the term is ‘affluently negligent’ with their kids. But then you spend the time Friday beforehand, cross examining a social worker on whether ginger beer would put my client in breach of her non–alcohol rule, for example. And it felt a lot like there was a two–tier system being applied to people. And I realise how much people’s privilege protects them from that. And I suppose that’s the bubble that I think needs bursting about the law.
Elizabeth
You didn’t think ‘I know being a barrister is not very helpful with young children, instead I’ll be a farmer!’
How did you end up with writing this book about learning to grow food on a farm in Suffolk.
Sarah Langford
Well, it just shows how you should never have a five–year plan. Never plan, just see where the wind blows you. Yes, I was writing ‘In Your Defence’ with two very small children in London. And we have bought our first family house with some help from Ben’s parents. And it was pretty much condemned, no one could really live on it. I mean, my father–in–law, when we looked around it literally fell through the stairs, which is boring. There were holes in every ceiling, and agents were kind of desperate to get rid of it because everybody walked in and though ‘I love it. I love a dual wrapper!’ And they walked in thought ‘This this is much more than I can handle’. We were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it!’ But then that was in October, like a week after my youngest son was born and then the following spring, Ben lost his job. And so, we thought, ‘Well, we’re unemployed, we’re living paying high rent in London, and we can’t live in the house that we own. So, let’s get out of the dodge. So, we moved to Suffolk which is where he grew up. We’d been going there regularly. He had worked there before so we were going there all the time. And so, they had kind of three fields of pasture, which had not really been ploughed or fertilised for 10 years, and then recently bought 200 acres of arable around the corner. And so, we were there living at the edge of it in this cottage that we rented and had no employment. And so said, ‘Well, can we take it on and run it for a bit?’ And we look, I’ll be clear, we thought we were going to be there for six months. We thought it would have been nice break from reality. Ben can find another job, I’ll finish my book, we can have a little sort of respite in the countryside and then move back to real life. And then all of these strange events, as they do, happened. So, we took very little with us, because we thought we would be there for six months. We put all the rest of our stuff in a warehouse in North London, which then burned down. So we lost all of our stuff.
Elizabeth
My stuff is all currently in storage because we have been homeless and reading that passage, it was weird. It both sent chills but also, I was like, ‘I can actually see why that would be weirdly liberating’ because you’d be months without it, and you can’t remember what’s in there.
Sarah Langford
There you are. It was awesome. It was a bit like fate just going, ‘I’m gonna take a massive blowtorch to your life, it’s time for you to change. And I gotta make sure there’s no way back!’ So that happened. And then the house took a lot longer to finish than we thought, like, no one got in there for a year anyway. And you know that kind of stuff just does. And we just fell in love with it in a way that I think was completely unexpected, and a lot of it now in hindsight, obviously, this stuff you can only really think about in hindsight, I think. We had just been taken out of everything that we knew: out of the home that we had our two kids in, and friends and family and all that stuff, and taken away from that. And I think we needed to feel really rooted, really grounded and actually replanting hedgerows and making plans for land and what’s going to happen to it. And we converted the pasture to organic very quickly, which is quite ea… I mean, it takes two years to convert to organic under the regulations. But we didn’t really need to change anything because nothing really happened. But introduced some grazing onto the pasture at the arable we had different matter, because that’s been farmed quite intensively for many decades. So, it was completely by accident. And it was then and I only really, I had no intention of becoming a farmer at all. But it was only when I found myself with this opportunity. And it felt, I think it did feel like an opportunity, actually. And I started to think ‘Hmm, so my grandfather was a hero feeding a nation, my uncle very much thinks he’s perceived as a villain for being a quite intensive chemical farmer. What happens now? If we’re going to find a future for this farm? What is it going to be? Should it even be a farm? Should it be rewilded? Should it be an ecological habitat, like what should happen to it?’ And so that journey led me off on an exploration talking to farmers, all over the countryside, reading loads of books, some of them quite old books, nearly 100 years old, and listening to podcasts going on YouTube, accessing this extraordinary resource, which had really come about in the last few years, which is the sort of tech allowing people to connect with one another, so that they don’t feel really like islands of change. So, farming is a very small community, and often you are judged by your neighbour. So, there’s a lot of looking over the hedge. And that can feel quite isolating if you’re the only one who’s wanting to do it differently. But tech, WhatsApp groups, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts have connected people together in a way that allows them to change faster. And so, I was able to tap in on that as well. And I just completely started to fall in love with it and fall in love with it not actually necessarily because it was about growing food. Although that is intellectually really interesting. I kind of can’t believe that I got to the end of my 30s without having any real idea about soil. Not really, or actually knowing how plants take up nutrients, or really knowing kind of what goes on inside an animal’s body, or just kind of like basic biology stuff. ‘Basic biology’…I wasn’t listening clearly when they taught me that, but I had no idea and that really satisfied the intellectual part of myself that I like learning about it, studying about it.
Elizabeth
Because you’ve got a diploma now… you’re doing a diploma…
Sarah Langford
I’m doing… so yeah, that was not the expected twist. That actually was a complete accident because I wanted to learn how to drive a tractor. And my mum was like, ‘I’ll teach you how to drive a tractor’. I’m like, ‘They’re really complicated now’ There’s about 3 screens, 46 different gears. It’s very hard. So, I…
Elizabeth
Not like when your mom was driving tractor in the 70s in a bikini.
Sarah Langford
I’ve got an amazing picture of her do that!
Elizabeth
That’s so great, that image of a bikini and wellies because it was 70s and you need to get as much sun– tan as possible.
Sarah Langford
I know and she used to read kind of books as well on the tractor. So, I remember she told me she used really D.H. Lawrence ‘Sons and Lovers’ once and ‘Ernie’. There was always like a farmhand called Ernie, just named Ernie anyway. He said, ‘Oh Helen, we don’t think you should be reading stuff like that… We don’t think you should be reading stuff like that!’
Elizabeth
Not worried about you are trying to read and steer at the same time.
Sarah Langford
I know. I know, because of course all the tractors are cab–less. So, you know, she’s a committed sun bather. And I think this kind of, you know two birds with one stone appealed to her.
Elizabeth
I’m distracting you again. So, you did a diploma because you wanted to drive a tractor, and then it accidentally escalated.
Sarah Langford
Yeah, well, I sort of went on tractor courses I was like ‘Oh, that’s interesting’. So that is a one–year farming course, and you get to drive, you get to do the tractor course as part of it, but also you get to learn about kind of other stuff. And also, there was definitely a large part of that decision, which was about having the authority, because women don’t really do this that often in farming, still. There are loads of women in farming, but I don’t think they’re taken as seriously, not really. You still are presented largely with panels of men in check shirts, a lot. In fact, I was literally on one yesterday. And I think there’s always that tension, when you’re a woman in agriculture, that whatever you say, kind of has to be backed up by someone else before anyone will really believe it. So, there was I thought, ‘Well, this will give me a badge as well’, because I will have studied it, and I will have had the approval of that. I started the one–year farming, I registered for it. The guy who runs it phoned me up was like, ‘I think you’re on the wrong course. You need to do the Graduate Diploma. It’s the same price. Yeah, like do that instead’. So that’s how I ended up on it. And you know, there just aren’t many times in your adult life, when you spend a lot of time with people from completely different backgrounds and different ages and you’ve got very little in common on paper. And you’re brought together by this kind of shared subject, it’s been a really rewarding experience.
Elizabeth
So, the book is beautiful: kind of part memoir, part the stories of farmers who are trying to change how farming is done for the good of the planet. And it would be very helpful, just very briefly, if you could define intensive farming, and then define regenerative farming for people like me, who know almost nothing about farming.
Sarah Langford
Maybe I can use the word chemical farming, because I think intensive farming you can go intensive– regenerative…I think what’s now called conventional farming, which I think is a misnomer, because it’s only been conventional for 70 years, is using artificial fertilisers and pesticides, which includes insecticides to kill insects, herbicides, to kill weeds, and fungicides to kill diseases on plants and growing a combinable crop or a commodity crop every year in your field. And that feeding into a huge global network. And horticulture comes into of course, like fruits and vegetables come into that as well. But I think most people think of it as a crop. Regenerative agriculture, which is largely what the farmers that I’ve got in the book are doing and which has become this huge swelling, extremely exciting change that a new generation are bringing up… It’s about putting more back into your land than you take out. So, it’s not sustainable farming, because you’re not wanting to sustain what is essentially a depleted system. You’re trying to replenish your soils, and the biodiversity and ecology on your farm. And also, and this is a kind of growing side of it, to regenerate the community around you and the land and how it relates to the people who live around you, as well. To regenerate the idea of a farm, really. So, it still hasn’t been defined, but most people would significantly remove or reduce their use of artificial fertilisers and all the pesticides. Reduce the use of mechanical ploughing, keeping the soil covered, keeping roots in the ground all year round, integrating livestock back into the system to ensure there’s natural fertility going back in. Using livestock instead of machines to cut both grasses and also to eat off disease on crops, early crops. And so, it hasn’t yet got a technical definition, but the idea behind it is just to replenish what has been depleted.
Elizabeth
So, I would love to ask you all about soil and all those beautiful interconnected systems. But you will be speaking about that and lots of other places. So, I’m gonna, as you said about the kind of tribalism and engagement across difference around some of these topics, because I think there was both like some public perceptions of farmers as sort of ‘rosy cheeked Old MacDonald’. Farms that haven’t really been able to exist for 70 years because they’ve gone under because they were too small and global agribusiness has gobbled up so much of the system and the pressure to produce more and more and more food, even though we are wasting most of it has just crushed most of those farms. Or, you know, and you offer this cautiously and carefully and lovingly, your uncle Charlie, who is a chemical farmer, or has been an intensive farmer, and basically thinks it’s bullshit. And you pick this lovely picture of all of the things that rile him and I’m just going to read the paragraph that you wrote back, like, it’s so helpful for me, because it is so much trying to empathise with why there is resistance and with why, actually there’s big feelings around identity and shame and guilt. That we need to understand if and when anyone’s going to change and you said, you know, you paint this hilarious picture of all the things that Uncle Charlie, hashtags in particular, “but behind all the anger is this. Oh, how it sticks in the crawl to be told he is destroying the world for doing what he has been asked to do. Oh, how galling it is when other industries that make products so much less necessary than food, escape the same condemnation or worse join in. Oh, how it rankles to be lectured by hypocrites to be told off of fossil fuel farming by those who take holidays on planes to places he never gets to go to, to be told he is killing insects and destroying wildflowers by people who live in houses built on top of farmland. To be thought cruel for sending animals to slaughter, when their life is no more or less valuable than the tiny creatures killed and a production of vegetables or cotton or bread. To be judged by city folk, so entirely uneducated about farming, that a group of walkers want to run away from a combine harvester in terror. He has a point.” And this is a lot. It feels like what your book is trying to do. It’s trying to ask us as a wider society who might not have contact with farmers to complicate our narratives of who they are and what they’re driven by. And rather than lecturing, or finger pointing, as we will get more and more and more anxious about the climate crisis, to try and start where they are, and help think what our choices mean. Tell me a bit about that journey, how you got to the point of actually, I don’t think if we paint all these people as demons, it’s actually going to help us get to net zero as quickly as we need to.
Sarah Langford
I don’t think it ever will. I felt like that with ‘In Your Defence’ as well, in terms of rehabilitation, why prison doesn’t work, same thing. Just telling people they’re bad and locking them away doesn’t stop them going to prison and there’s loads of stats that say that. It’s the same with this. If you vilify people who in fact have quite a lot of potential power, because they look after 70% of our land, and can change that, if you tell them that they’re bad and evil and doing it all wrong they just won’t listen. Why would they? Why should they?
Elizabeth
I wouldn’t.
Sarah Langford
Yeah. If you tell them there’s other ways of doing this and not only will it make you more money, but it will allow you to be a hero, because you will make food, but you will also sequester carbon, increase the biodiversity for all of us, then that is a much more appetising option. And what is important to remember for farming is that it’s an identity job. It’s not what people do, it’s who they are.
Elizabeth
Because you don’t make much money, right? Often the opposite.
Sarah Langford
No one’s… very few, not no one, but very few people have made a large amount of money for at least 20 years. And you could definitely earn money in farming back in the sort of heydays of the 80s.
Elizabeth
With subsidies and…
Sarah Langford
Yeah, when farmers were paid for the amount they produced. The more they produced, the more they were paid. The more sheep they had, the more they were paid. So, the system was set up to encourage them to produce as much as possible. And that has not been in place since the Millennium essentially.
Elizabeth
Because we had a food mountain, right? More than we needed.
Sarah Langford
Many food mountains, we had excess food weirdly fast after rationing was ending, I mean, it wasn’t even that big a gap between being worried about not having enough and having so much that the European Union were literally spending money on storage for butter mountains, wine lakes, grain mountains… Not that it necessarily always got to those it should, but that excess of production was built into the system and rewarded by it. And when your job is your identity if you’re telling people they’re doing it wrong, what you’re actually telling them is that they’re wrong: who they are, is wrong. How they have spent the whole of their adult life has been not just wrong but damaging. There are very few people, I have met some, but there are very few people really, that can say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I’m gonna do it differently now’. And I think when you understand that there’s a sort of mission statement with farming, which is to produce food, you have to, I think that a way of explaining it, as this way of farming is helpful, is useful, is really critical. I sat next to a farmer the other day, who’s probably in his, I guess, 70s. And he was very kind of open, and not antagonistic about this at all. But he said, I’m finding it really, really hard understanding what my son wants to do. I just think it’s morally wrong to put wildflowers where we should be growing wheat, and I cannot get over it. And we’re having massive rows about it. And I said to him, the wildflowers are not there to be pretty. They are there to attract predatory insects that are going to eat the aphids that are trying to eat your crop. If you grow them, they will also have a root system which holds the water that falls in the soil so that your crop can use it when there is a drought. They will improve the biology in the soil, which allows your crop to access nutrients better. If you use predatory insects that eat the aphids, you will remove the amount of sprays which will increase your bottom line. So, while you might be able to sell the wheat that you grow in that patch of land for a lot, over all your costs will dramatically reduce. And then he was in, completely converted. He was like ‘This is brilliant’. All he needed was a practical explanation of why it was purposeful. And that was it, that’s all he needed.
Elizabeth
And why it connected, in my language, with his sacred value, right?
Sarah Langford
Exactly that.
Elizabeth
He thought that his son was driven by something completely different, but actually their purposes, like, you know, a cuddly protection of nature for the sake of it without the hard–headed sense of people need to eat. Whereas if you start where people are, and don’t shame them, blame them and load them with guilt for doing what they were told to do by the government for decades, then you can bring people with you.
Sarah Langford
I agree.
Elizabeth
I want to ask about character and maybe even spirituality. You have said that farming has changed you and that it has changed you in some quite deep ways. And various of your farmers talked about kind of virtues. Ollie even talks about farming as a sort of spiritual task. I’d love you to unpack that for me.
Sarah Langford
There is something that happens when you realise that the world is connected to everything else that enables you to see a meaning to it that had been absent before. And the whole ethos behind regenerative farming and organic farming as well is that I think I’m going to misquote the John Muir quote, but the founder of the National Parks in America said something like, ‘If you pull something out of the universe, you will find it connected to something else’. That is the principle of this kind of farming, which is the predatory insects kind. We had aphids all over our beans. And it was a panicked point, to point where the stems were black. In any other farm, we would have sprayed them. A week later, it was full of ladybirds who’d eaten them all. And you realise how every single thing is connected. Once you start to see the world like that it’s profoundly spiritual actually, because you feel a deep sense of connection to not just your fellow human beings, but the whole of the natural cycle and you realise how it’s designed to work together. It has a balance to it, and you see it in farming all the time. I give an example of a farmer who had loads of docks, and he’s a dairy farmer, so he needs grass. Although we’re finding that cows now eat docks. But anyway, he pulled them up and pulled them up and pulled them up, and they just got on top of him and so he just let it go. And eventually, there are enough docks to attract a dock beetle that came along and ate all the docks, ate them down to skeletons, and was never a problem again. And nature found a balance when you let it find a balance. And I find that profoundly spiritual, actually. And I mean, there’s lots of science behind this. It’s quite well evidenced about what happens to us when we see green and feel connected to the earth and nature. We’re hardwired to feel it, I think. And I think a number of our problems in the city about purpose and meaning and depression and loneliness are potentially because we can’t have that, we can’t access it, can’t fill that deep need. And so many of the farmers I’ve met who are farming in this way, where you’re constantly looking at nature as a cycle thinking, not what kills it, but what eats it. And you’re seeing…
Elizabeth
Not ‘I need to control…I need to intervene’ but maybe there is something here already.
Sarah Langford
Absolutely. And just learning to look, learning how to see in a completely different way, means you find yourself part of this kind of really profound connection. Because you do as Ollie said in that chapter, it’s not about sitting on top of the pyramid looking down, it’s about seeing yourself as inside a circle, all connected to everything else. And it gives the farmers that I’ve met a really profound sense of self. They find themselves… and I guess this ties into that Mary Oliver poem…as a very small link in an extremely long chain. So, you feel when you’re working on a land or changing land by replanting, or putting trees or hedgerows or whatever in, and you feel like you are immediately connected to all the people that worked on the land beforehand, and all the people that are going to work on the land afterwards. And that is a really profoundly important feeling, actually; because I think we’re taught a lot that we are the most important people that the only happiness we need to worry about is our own happiness. And the only purpose we need to worry about is what we’re doing and realising that you’re a tiny cog in this kind of wonderful long line is a really humbling but incredibly spiritual and profound feeling.
Elizabeth
There are many more things I would like to talk to you about, but for now, Sarah Langford, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Sarah Langford
Thank you very much for having me. It’s been really enjoyable.
Elizabeth
Well, work as a sacred value is a first for this podcast. We’ve had people say all kinds of things to that really difficult first question, but it kind of made sense as I went along that for Sarah, purposeful activities, doing something meaningful with your life was really, really important to her. And it was so clear how much that comes from her parents and the family that she grew up with. And various guests have said that actually, I remember Christina Patterson saying an ethic of public service was the formative idea in her childhood. It gets me thinking as a parent, how do I try and raise children that both thrive and are kind and brave and know themselves and find their way in the world but also seek to serve others and to be some use and do some good without that also becoming maybe something imposed or a heavy burden. I really loved how she described that… it sounds like a quite an addictive thing of the intensity of being a criminal barrister, that she used this phrase, you know, ‘No one knows when you get back on the train in your suit…’ and as if she has this feeling of almost being a kind of superhero in disguise that she’s been able to be there and change the course of someone’s life in this pivotal moment, the sliding doors moment where probably one of the most intense moments in someone’s life, and she’s been able to be alongside them and see into those stories, have that experience alongside them. I’m really sad that it’s a career that’s just not compatible with caring responsibilities, it sounds. And since we recorded the episode, there’s been a strike of legal aid barristers, of criminal barristers really pointing to this situation where the pay is so low, and the jobs are so unstable, that it’s impossible for barristers to sustain it. And that has a huge knock–on effect on the rest of the system and our ability to have a kind of just legal system. That’s already something that we just hugely depend on. Sarah talked about this accidental life shift, which was just… I can’t imagine how bizarre that experience would have been. But what we didn’t get a chance to talk about very much, but I would really recommend you go and listen to her elsewhere or read the book …about soil…and I came across Sarah at a festival where she was running a workshop and literally kind of, we went out into the fields and dug up roots from different types of soil. And I understood for the first time really, how roots work and how if you breed crops and seeds, with shallow roots that rely on lots of fertiliser, and lots of pesticides, they’re just less resilient. Whereas if you make this move towards older forms of crops that naturally had deep roots, they’re more drought resistant, they go looking for their own nutrition. And there’s actually a kind of communication that happens between the soil and the roots, and the other creatures living in the ground, all working together to make that plant flourish. I had a real ‘nerd out’ about it. And you might be also interested. I also, you know, I wouldn’t have imagined myself enjoying a book about farming quite so much, although I am now beginning to get into gardening, but there was something about the way she writes with was such an awareness of how whether law or farming relates to the broader project of how now shall we live really… of the kind of people we want to be. What’s the formation that’s happening? Whether as a criminal barrister in a courtroom, whether as someone who grew up in poverty and has limited choices, whether as a farmer being completely enslaved, really, to global agribusiness that these things shape us and I’m going to read a little bit from the book that I didn’t get a chance to read… this kind of illustrates that for me. And also, as someone who feels very committed to cities and has always wanted to route and build a community in a city it was challenging. She says, ‘” began to wonder whether our solipsistic cities have promised that we need not really be responsible for anything but our own wants and desires. Many of us have utter liberty to be who we want to be, which means that for a lot of time, we can behave how we want, dress how we want, party how we want, eat what we want, listen to what we want, read what we want, say what we want, or they’re mostly to people who agree with us, and this is behind a Twitter avatar. Maybe this is right, maybe this is progress. Maybe this is freedom. But still, the consequences of our choices are often kept hidden away from us as though we are children. God is dead. So is society. We are told that the only person we need to be true to is our own authentic self. But when we look within ourselves for answers to life’s biggest questions, we are shy to say we find emptiness instead of insight.’” The spiritual question about what all this means for how she lives, how we live, about how in an age of very serious climate crisis, how we grow our food, how we connect to the land, how we deal with death, how we clear up our own messes, couldn’t be more live. And then we ended on that sense that one of the reasons I think we’re being driven further apart, whether it’s on the right response to the climate crisis, whether it’s on you know, Brexit or gender or trans issues is tactically, I’m not sure that our tone is often helpful: that shaming people or lecturing people or attacking people… I just don’t know many people who it really changes them. And it often creates a stronger backlash. And Sarah writes about her uncle Charlie who just gets angrier and angrier with people telling him that he’s doing farming wrong and isn’t open to change. And it’s only when Sarah in this situation and us more generally, I think, start where people are with what matters to them, with what values drive them, then we can seek to connect with people, change minds and hearts where we think they need changing and really see each other. Thank you so much for listening.
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