John Meadley - a life in agriculture and overseas development.

John Meadley has spent a lifetime working in agriculture and overseas development. He lives in the Stroud area and has spearheaded many local green projects. He is the co-founder of Pasture for Life, an organisation focussed on pasture fed livestock for the sake of the animal, the soil and biodiversity. 

In 2012 John was voted an Environmental Hero by the Heart of Gloucestershire Community Awards. 

An important part of the Green Pledge Project is collecting oral history or life story interviews. The aim of the collection is to make sure we have an archive which tells the story of what is happening in our area today. The interviews explore the work of people dedicated to bringing change, or protecting the environment, but also digs a little deeper and asks what their influences were.  These longer-form interviews will be available to listen to at the archives. We've edited extracts for these podcasts. 

If you know someone who's story you think we should record for the project  - please let us know and get in contact with christina.wheeler@gloucestershire.gov.uk

Transcript

John Meadley 

Green Pledge Podcast Episode 3

Transcript

Christina: Welcome to the Green Pledge podcast from Gloucestershire Archives. Travel with us through time to discover stories of local people who've protected nature and addressed climate change. We'll dive into the historic archive, bringing to light our environmental past.

To reflect on the present and imagine what our future could be.

00:00:46

John: I became increasingly uneasy to see the large amounts of cereals and pulses, which are essentially human foods, which are being fed to livestock, particularly to ruminant animals for whom this is not their natural diet. And in November 2009, I was at a Transition farming conference in Exeter, and I met a couple of farmers who, in conversation, I learnt were raising their animals wholly on pasture and we just decided to do something about it.

00:01:31

Christina: The Green Pledge project isn't only about sharing stories from the past. We want to make sure we reflect what's going on in our area right now. This includes creating a collection of oral history or life story interviews. And over the course of the project, we'll be talking to farmers, conservationists, campaigners and passionate volunteers, and we'll share extracts from those recordings in these podcasts.

In this episode, I talk to John Meadley, who in 2012 was voted Environmental hero by the Heart of Gloucestershire Community Awards. John has spent a lifetime working in agriculture and overseas development. He lives in the Stroud area and has spearheaded numerous local green projects. He's a co-founder of Pasture for Life, an organisation focussed on pasture fed livestock for the health of the animal, the soil and for biodiversity.

He's also closely involved in the organisation, Farming on Crutches in Sierra Leone. I recorded John at his home near Stroud in April 2024, and I began the interview asking him about his family background and influences. 

John: I was born on the 4th of June, 1942, in New Found Cotton in Northampton. My father was a Methodist minister. The son of a Methodist minister. I was the middle child. older sister, younger brother. We stayed there for three years and then we moved to Hull for five years, which I remember was very flat. And then when I was seven, we moved to Bristol for three years. My father was the minister at the church there. And then when I was ten, we moved to Leeds and he became the minister of the Oxford Place Chapel, which is the big chapel in central Leeds, with a capacity of about two and a half thousand, hard to believe in these days. And he was a wonderful, orator, a very loving man. And he used to go out on the steps of the town hall next door on a on a Monday at about 1 O’clock, and just talk, and a hundred people would come round and he would engage with them. 

When I was ten, my parents, with the best of intentions because they were moving around, sent me away to boarding school.

00:03:57

And, I was a fairly introverted child and it was not a happy time. of course, in those days, you know, you couldn't telephone call your parents. It was just the weekly, the weekly letter. So for the next eight years, I was away at school. And not not a happy child. And I found myself really in music and piano and clarinet, particularly, but also when we were at, when we were in Leeds, when I was home, I used to go down with my father in the evening, and it was quite a long way from where we lived down to the church. And there, outside of his office would be sitting, what in those days we used to call ‘down and outs’ it’s an awful phrase, but these were people who were living on the streets, desperate for all sorts of reasons. And, he would interview them. And then if he felt they justified the support, he would give them a chit, which they would then take across to the Anglican church across the road where they had a crypt, a warm crypt, and the people would sleep in the crypt.

And then the next day the chit would come back to my father, who would then pay the money over. And there were two lessons to me there. One was to be exposed to this dimension of life at that early age. and the fact that something could be done about it. And the other was about the fungibility of money that that they had this relationship with, with the Anglican Church, where no money changed hands with the people and concerned.

And I had this, this sort of recognition that, there are times when it's, it's good to give money because money can be used for whatever need is there. And other times it's not good to give money because that money can be abused for, for whatever reason. 

Christina : Can you tell me a little bit about your mum as well?

Joan Mary Dye was was a wonderful lady. I mean, she she, in fact, her father was Arthur Dye. Arthur Dye was Mayor of Cheltenham on at least two occasions. People say that he was either the person or the leader of the group that saved the Pump Room. from from being destroyed after the after the war, when GIs had been staying there and there was the usual development, you know, move to knock down and modernise and he was very much involved in that.

So my mother grew up in that kind of household. she went to study at Bedford College in London, where she was also, sculling and was was a competitively sculling and came back and, went on shoots. They were Methodist. She went on a walk, up Leckhampton Hill, where my father, for some reason, was on this same walk.

He'd come and they met and that was it. And he's written the most wonderful letter about how he met her and the flash of her skirt and all this. And they they then got married and as is often the case, you know, in those days, you got somebody, you know, he's the man, he's the minister and she's the minister's wife and has to do all the cakes and fundraising and has a sort of frustration about not being able to develop her own interests in her own career. Anyway, she was a wonderful, minister's wife did all the things she was supposed to do. 

And there was an expectation because of who he was that I would follow in his footsteps. And in fact, I did for time. I became a local local preacher, but I really struggled and still struggle with, the, the belief that that holds that there's only one way for one to relate to the divine or what whatever you believe, the life force, might be.

and so and there was this expectation that I might even become a Methodist minister myself. and so latterly as well here I went to, to work in Africa, and this allowed me to, to escape from, in the best sense of the word, from that that world and to, find my own feet, my own belief. One is conscious that what people believe is very much determined by their culture.

So if I'd been born in in Thailand, I would have been a Buddhist. If I'd been born in India, I'd be an Hindu, probably, in Oman, I'd be a Muslim. And in Bolivia, I'd be a Catholic. So that was an important transition for me to do that. 

When I was fifteen, we moved to a place called Cliff College, which was, a training centre in the Peak District associated with the farm with the college were two small hill farms, about one hundred and fifty acres each.

And I went down the road early on and went to one of these farms and walked in and introduced myself to a guy, wonderful guy called Mr. Dalton, who was, himself, an orphan, a relatively little, education, but a wonderful farmer, a man of few words. as honest as the day is long. And they welcomed me onto the farm, and I started working with the cows and what I found was what I loved about the cows was that they were non-judgmental, that unlike at school, where I was the butt of all sorts of, things, here one could relate to the cow.

00:01:43

So I fell in love with, farming and the land. and at the same time, maybe I was about sixteen or seventeen. I came home one day smelling, as always, of cow manure to my parents horror, and we watched Harold Macmillan's Winds of Change speech and in which he talked about the, the inevitability, really, of the colonies, as they then were called, becoming independent and the need that there would be for people to work with.

This is rather arrogant of him, really, but never mind the to work with the people in the colonies to help them to develop themselves economically and all the rest of it. And this was my Paul on the road to Damascus moment in that, I suddenly had this feeling that I wanted to study farming, and I wanted to apply that knowledge to, quote, the developing world.

Christina : So this new change of direction, how did that work with your boarding school? 

John: When I started at school, aged ten, I was asked by the headmaster what I wanted to be when I grew up, to which I said I wanted to be an engine driver and was told that this was not the kind of thing one had as an aspiration.

So I said, well, I'd like to be a minister like my dad. And the effect of that was to say, well, then that you go up the classical stream. So I went up to classical stream, studied Greek and Latin, ancient history, right through to O-level as it was in those days. And then after O-level, I carried on with Arts. So by the time I had this vision and all this, determination to change track, I had no science at all. So then I had to turn round the oil tanker, and stay on at school. after I'd finished my arts A-levels to do an A-level in biology. I was also going to do geology. But I wanted to play Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.  That's my final, contribution to the school, be the soloist. So I gave up geology to play the clarinet concerto. And when I then when I left, I, I applied for study agriculture, and nobody wanted me, understandably, because I had virtually no science and I wasn't a farmer. But somehow Newcastle University, how it was Durham in those days, King's College said that they would be interested to have me.

00:13:43

So I went to the headmaster, who was called Mr. Sackett. Bless him, I had to get his approval and he, I went in to see him and he said to me, ‘hmmm boy, you want to study agriculture, right?’ And I said, ‘yes, sir.’ He said, ‘you realise you're only the second boy in the history of the school who studied agriculture? What? Why? Why would you want to let the school down in this way? Why? Why can't you? Why can't you study real subjects like medicine and or whatever? History.’ So anyway, I persisted, and eventually. ‘Well, okay, boy, I I'll I'll sign this. Providing that you promise me that you will study the poetry of the land.’ And ironically, I've only realised this recently. But when we come to the Soil Never Sleeps. In fact, I've. I've done exactly that, unbeknowingly. And then when I left, I had to do a year on a farm. So I did a year on the, on the farm in South Derbyshire. We, we had a, we had a tractor, a little grey foggy tractor, but that was it. And we had a binder which was a thing which produced sheaves, just they produce sheaves in, in biblical times. And we also would in the corners, we would harvest the, the corn with a scythe and make our own handmade made sheaves. So when we came to harvest the hay in the early days, before we got a baler, we would, Mr. Dalton and I would go out with a flatbed trailer, and you got loose hay and a pitchfork. So he would fork the hay up to me, and I would build a wall of hay around the outside of the flatbed trailer. And having built that wall, I would then fill in the middle of the trailer with hay, which would extend out to cover the wall. And in this way you were you were binding the hay together.

Then you would build another wall around the outside and fill it in. And so on, so you could build this thing. It could be, a couple of metres high and you just put a rope on it. And amazingly, you could then take it back and it would it would hold it would stay together with no external physical support. But when you come to, unload it, you have to do everything in the reverse direction. You have to, unwind each of the walls in the reverse direction. And I can remember to this moment standing, on on the the trailer with Mr. Dalton up in the eaves of, of the barn. And I'm there with the pitchfork and I'm, I can't get the hay to move. And I look at him and I say, ‘I can't get the hay to move.’ And he looks down to me and he says, ‘John, lad, it's the bit they're standing on.’

So I was standing on the next bit of the unwinding process, and that was has been a huge lesson in life to me, that if something's not working, it may not be you, but it may be you.

‘It's the bit that standing on the lad,’ and that was the wonderful kind of knowledge you used to get from him. 

Christina: It seems to me that you find your lessons in life wherever you were, John. But you went to university. Tell me a little bit about those years. Where did you go? 

John: It was King's College, Newcastle, which in those days was actually part of Durham University. I studied very hard, but, it was very it was very parochial. And in, for example, when I wanted to study peas in my final year, I had to get the approval of the senior tutor because peas grew south of the Humber. when I wanted to study hops, which only grow south of the Trent, I had to get the dean's approval so that the whole of the education was, was, was focussed on the north of England.

00:18:37

Things have changed now. So when I and then I, when I went to Wye I did very narrow research. So when I went to a teacher in Africa, I suddenly arrived to find I'm teaching all of these maize and citrus and pineapples, about which I knew absolutely nothing about that very parochial education. So, yeah, so, so when I was there, I studied, I worked very hard because I was passionate about wanting to, yeah, passionate about wanting to learn so that I could use that knowledge, to the benefit of whatever later on. And even though I'd come with virtually no science, I, I got a first class honours degree.

Christina: We're talking about the sixties here? 

John: This was sixty-one, sixty-five.

Christina: In terms of the environment and looking at things holistically. What what was the education like?

John:  It wasn't on the agenda. you know, we just I mean, we come out of the war obviously sixteen years previously, but, I mean, I'm a war baby and went through rationing. and we were, we were in the, in the sort of following on from, as you know, at the end of the war, ICI and the companies making explosives, were producing ammonium nitrate, and they had no, you know, nobody needed bombs anymore. So they lobbied the government to use this as a chemical fertiliser, which Sir George Stapleton in the farming industry said, actually, we don't need, you know, we've got nitrogen from clover and all of this kind of stuff. But of course, the corporate world as usual won. So this was pushed by the government. I was taught very much the agriculture of chemical farming. We weren't taught any, soil biology, concept of the environment. I think Rachel Carson's book was coming out about that time, but no, it was a very much, production oriented, marketing economics and, pretty conventional. Yeah. 

Christina: How did that sit with you? Did it did it strike you even at that point that there was more to it? Or did at that point, were you kind of accepting this is what agriculture is?

John: I think, you know, when you go up and particularly from me with no science background, you know, sort of lapping up this knowledge and you, you kind of trust you go to college and you kind of trust the people to be telling you what's what's, you know, what's real. and so, no, I don't think at that stage particularly, we were, we were questioning off of what we were doing.

I was very conscious in Newcastle. you know, it's a coal mining, but, not steel making, but obviously, The Tyne in and all of this, a great deal of poverty. and if you ever went into a pub that would be sawdust on the floor, it was quite, a quite, quite rough.

00:22:08

So I was aware that, there were people, older people in the poorer parts of Newcastle, along the Scotswood Road and other areas who were, struggling. They had no coal and I don't quite know what, how it happened, but I talked with a couple of other members, one of whom was doing agriculture. I contacted the Coal Board and said, if if we can get to the pit head on a Saturday, bring some people, can we have some coal? And they said, you can have it at cost, but you have to bag it up yourself. I then went to a couple of trucking companies and said, look, we we're going to get coal. Can we, can you let us have a couple of lorries on Saturday morning? we haven't got any money to pay you, but we just want your trucks and your driver.

00:23:15

And amazingly, they agreed, then went to social services or whatever it's called in those days and said to them, look, we've got a truck, we've got coal. can you give us a list of people who are destitute and this is all before the years of data protection, GDPR. They said, yes. So then, having got all of that, went out to the newspaper and we wrote to all the churches in Newcastle, went out in the newspaper and say, you know, we're going to raise money and blah, blah, blah, and I think we raised about £800,000. I can't remember a lot of money in those days. I think maybe we've done it for two years, during the winter for several weekends, we would we would go up to the pit head, with the lorries, three or four of us fill the bags, go round and just drop, go knock on people's doors and say ‘a bag of coal.’ 

 People were tearful and that this had never happened before. And sometimes you say,’ where do I put it?’ And you put it in the bath. This was another one of the things that really influenced me. Two things that, it doesn't have to be like this. It's a phrase that keeps coming back in coming back to me now, ‘it doesn't have to be like this’ and it was the first time, I think, that I've realised that actually you can do something and that if you ask people, respectfully, then they will help. And also the concept of bite sized chunks, you know, you don't try and solve the world's problems, but if you focus on something, it's quite extraordinary how you can. We brought a bit of joy to, a lot of people. 

Christina: That’s amazing and it did. I I'm thinking about the continuation of things. I'm thinking about how, in a way, there's a reflection to what your dad was doing and with what you termed as the down and outs of giving them’ the chits’

John: Absolutely. One of the things I'm conscious I was conscious of with of the old was, of course, you know, when, when when we left it, so it wasn't embedded. And that was another lesson, you know, that that, how does one get things embedded so that they become to have a life of their own, which is not dependent upon, upon upon you? But yeah, it was a powerful, powerful experience. 

Christina: Can I just pick up on one thing when you said some of them would put it in the bath, what, literally because they had no room to put it anywhere?

John: Yeah. 

Christina: So what happened after your time at university in Newcastle? What did you do next? 

John: I'd finished at Newcastle and I was twenty-three. And you're told, well, the next thing you do is, is you going to do a PhD. So, I applied to Wye college and was accepted and went down to college, where I worked with Graham Melbourne. Wonderful man. So I remember we sat down and he said, ‘Well, John, you're going to do a PhD. What should we do?’ So I said, ‘Well, what's the choice?’ He says, ‘Well, the choice is maize or peas,’ because he was working on maize and another one of his students of working on peas. So, I said, ‘Well, which has got the shortest grain season,’ he said peas’.   So I said, ‘Well, we'll do peas.’ Because I think even then I got plans to do music as well as everything else. So I studied peas. and on the vining pea crop, and I looked at the effect of density on the growth of the vining pea crop. I was studying what's called crop physiology, which is I described to people as the social life of plants. It's how plant physiology is the internal, the medicine. It's the internal, relationships of plants within a plant. Whereas, crop physiology is how plants relate to each other. So that's that's what I studied. And I got my, yeah, I got my, my PhD at the end of that time. It's interesting in the work, it was a lot of mechanical work, a lot of the things you could do today, sort of electronically, we couldn't do in those in those days.

00:28:10

For example, when you got your results, you had to you had to put them onto a piece, onto, punch tape, and then you had to put the punch tape in a box and send it off to Rothamsted Research Station through the post, who would then analyse it and send it back three weeks later and it would come back, say, an error in third line. So you had to do the whole thing. So the whole pace was slower, things that we could do. but yes, the work that it's interesting that the work that we did on the effects of density, on the growth of I won't bore you with all the, the, the details, but, it's still being quoted. I'm still getting, references to it, to the work. 

And I think one of the things that worries me now about a lot of the modern research is because the debates are so polarised, whether we're talking about meat or whatever it is, a lot of research, well, when I did research, we had a null hypothesis, which you basically are saying you're assuming that that nothing will change and then, wow, I'm surprised this is what I found. And quite a lot of research now seems to be about proving a point that's quite a different approach, because then you can structure your the way you do your research to demonstrate, what, what you're interested in. 

Christina: Once you've finished at Wye College in Kent and this close study of peas, what does that lead you to do next?

John: My first job then was teaching crop production at Rice Land Agricultural College in Southern Africa. and it was a time when you would arrange a whole trip across Africa by airmail. Letter. You know, there was no no other means really, of communicating. So I, travel down and I at that time I was very left wing and, inevitably,  having been a student all that time. And I arrived, in my house. And one of the things I decided was that I was not going to employ servants. And the first morning I opened the door and there's a line of twelve people saying, ‘Please, boss, give me a job.’ So I did. I employed someone to cook and garden, although I didn't, I didn't need them, but there was obviously a need. But then I became, I began thinking about, why do these people need jobs? They've got farms round here. What are the jobs? Where do they come from? And people need jobs in order to be able to pay the bills and for school fees, for health, for transport, for whatever, food. And where do those jobs come from?

00:31:13

And in those days, half the jobs in Swaziland had come from the Commonwealth Development Corporation, their big investment in sugar and citrus and cattle and rice, and most of the of the jobs that come from entrepreneurs, trucking companies, farmers. And over the four years that I was there, I wearied of teaching, you know, teaching the ground nut for the eighth time, and, and hankered to be involved in what I'd gone out for, which was development, economic development, creating opportunity for people. And so I got interested in how does one nurture the private sector, not the corporate sector, the entrepreneurial sector so that they can thrive and create jobs and opportunities for people? And that's been really the driving force ever since. So yeah. So I, I left Swaziland, I came back to the UK and I joined a small consulting company doing international consulting. I was thirty then. I fairly quickly, became its technical director, extraordinary, and then it got taken over. But I wearied of writing reports for other people, and I hankered to to do things where I could get involve myself in. Making things happen and continuing, you know, not just write the report, but actually delivering

00:32:51

So I had this idea about wanting to work with entrepreneurs. And also I felt that in a lot of the countries that I've been working like Tanzania, there was very little foreign investment because of the uncertainty. The economy was was very weak. and the currency had very little value and investors had very little confidence. And if you did want to invest, the infrastructure was so poor that the private sector had to invest in the infrastructure as well as the enterprise. So I had this idea about blending public and private money, which now, I mean, it's it's commonplace, but it wasn't in those days. So I spent a year travelling around the world at my own expense, bumming around the world, as cheaply as I could, talking to people on four continents, all of whom said ‘It’s a crazy idea.’ Anyway, I did it. We started the company.

The name of the company was Rural Investment Overseas Limited, and it came to me when I was walking round the block, it just came to me. Rural Investment Overseas, RIO and Rio in Spanish is a river and river is water, and water is life. So that was it just came to me like that. Then I spent the next, sixteen years running that company.

00:34:22

We, we, we inevitably we had to do quite a lot of consulting work just to earn fees. But we also give you one example. I went to the Philippines and I met the, the the director of the land bank, and which is the agricultural bank for the whole country. And whilst I was there, I met a guy who had developed, at the University of Los Banos. He developed a way of collecting the spores of ecto-mycorrhiza, which growing the soil and pelleting them. And this was important because at that time there was a lot of tree planting going on in the Philippines because of mudslides and when you when you plant the pines, replant the pines in eucalyptus, you have to take infected soil, which, you know, truckloads of this stuff. Well, now with this, you could just take a pill and put one in a pot for each one. So we, got together the in landbank and we each put in £10,000 to commercialise this, to take this to scale, it worked. And and it went fine until I was in the Philippines the night when Marcos was flown out, that the people power the land, the revolution, the nurses putting flowers in the guns, the soldiers and all of that, I was on the front, I mean, right in the hotel when that was happening. And then gradually the whole thing fall apart. But, I mean, that was that was the kind of innovative thing that we did. Sometimes it works, sometimes it didn't. It's very scary, very hairy. but, a lot of fun. 

00:36:07 

Christina: So let's, let's talk about meeting Fiona. 

John: Fiona had just graduated in law and be qualified as a barrister. but wanted to work in, environmental journalism . And she'd come from Malaysia when she was seventeen to study her A-levels. So she came on board and and eventually we got married and, and Tom came along and she was very much involved in the running the company. In fact, the day after we got married and we got married in Marylebone registry office, and then the next day we flew to Ghana to work, and we stayed in a hotel where I think we paid $5 a night, no running water.

So that was how we started off. 

Christina: So you then carried on working together? 

John: Yeah, we worked together and and in fact, when, Tom was born in 1996, we were very small company. We brought Tom in with us. We have one of those kind of little rocking things, which we used to strap to the top of a filing cabinet. By 1999, we felt that we'd, you know, we'd done we'd done some interesting things. Much of what we wanted to achieve, we had and we wound up the company as a going concern. 

00:37:31

Christina: Where did you then base yourselves? 

John: Well, we were then in Stroud. We moved to Stroud in 1990 when my father died so we could be near my mother. We had an office in Stroud. So when we wound up the company, we stayed in Stroud. We worked from home. By that time we'd moved here. Inevitably, I knew a lot of people, both of us got work. 

Christina: What happens next? And so you've now stopped RIO, You’re in Stroud, you’re parents.

John: We started the Ryeford Partnership.

Christina: So, explain a bit more about what the Ryeford... 

John: Right. Well, I mean there were various things that I've been I've been managing from 1993 to 1999, I managed DFID Ghana,  an enterprise program in Ghana. It was a huge program. We brought out one hundred and twenty-five retired executives to come in to work with entrepreneurs. I mean, we could talk all day about that project alone.

So that was very innovative in in all sorts of ways. And we started one of the first Corporate Mutual Guarantee Schemes in Africa, because this was, the entrepreneurs couldn't get any money from the banks because they didn't have collateral. In mainland Europe, Japan and USA for a long time, thing called Mutual Guarantee Scheme, where a bunch of entrepreneurs get together with a bank, they form a company limited by guarantee, and every month they put in money fifteen hundred quid each of them. They build up a bond with the bank and when you want one, any one of them, one of them wants to borrow money. They apply to their peers who they all know and trust to, evaluate the loan. If their peers approve it, then it goes to the bank, and the bank is happy because the peers have approved it and the bond will be at risk.

If the loan that the bank gives doesn't work. I took that scheme into Ghana. and we developed it with the banks. Now the this was novel for the banks, but there was a time when I think we had oh five or six hundred small businesses all together in these Mutual Guarantee Schemes, able to borrow from the bank for the first time ever.

00:39:48

Christina: It is completely incredible the amount that you're achieving through your work overseas. But I know at this point now running Ryeford, you're based in Stroud and Tom's going to school and you're also getting involved with a lot of local projects. Can we talk a little bit about that?

John: King Stanley school here? I worked with them to develop the idea of having, eco council and I used to take them up to the centre of alternative technology. We were the first school, I think, to get Green Flag status in Gloucestershire. We were the first school to have a hot composter so we could put the plate waste in. When Maiden Hill didn't want their, their cycle sheds, I managed to arrange to to get them dismantled and brought over to the school here. We've put in the cycle sheds here, getting the kids to cycle to school, and then when Tom moved to Marling, we started ‘Changing Gear’, which was, working with the five secondary schools here, getting them to cycle to school, encouraging them, having prizes, having trick cyclists come, doing cycle training, getting the police come. I was talking to the to the school council at Archway and blithely said, ‘I assume every, you know, every every child's school has got a bike.’ And they said, ‘No, God no.’  They said, ‘We've got lots of kids who got problems. The librarian comes in an hour early, unpaid, half past seven to open the library. So the kids who've parents gone to work can come and have somewhere warm. Lots of kids don't have bikes.’  So we set up ‘Access Bike’, and I raised some money from the district council. There's a wonderful guy called Bonzo who, down at Dudbridge, whose hobbies, retired hobby, was repairing bikes that he got from Cytech ones that they no longer wanted.  We put the scheme together, and if the if the if the parents could put up £5 or £10, I can't remember, and they were recommended by the school, we take them down to Bonzo, and they get a bike and a helmet and a lock and some training. And it's extraordinary the first time these kids could then go off on their bikes. So to me, the joy is that something I started that that came from a chance conversation with the school council and my feeling was the usual, it should, it doesn't need to be like this. 

00:42:28

Christina : Before we finish talking, I know that there's two main projects that you're working on now. Again, they've kind of come from chance conversations, so you almost have come full circle in a way with your work, with ‘Pasture for Life’, because this is very much connected to livestock and agriculture. Can you tell me how did that come about? 

John: I suppose I spent all my life, nearly five decades really working with rural communities in Africa and Asia and the Caribbean, but mainly in agriculture, but then water and sanitation, health, malaria. These are people who are materially poor, often, but spiritually and culturally rich, that’s a very important caveat. So I became increasingly uneasy, to see the large amounts of cereals and pulses, which are essentially human foods which are being fed to livestock, particularly to ruminant animals for whom this is not their natural diet. And in November 2009, I was at a Transition farming conference in Exeter. Rob Hopkins was there. and I met a couple of farmers, John Turner and John Crisp, who in conversation I learnt were raising their animals wholly on pasture. And we just decided to do something about it, probably create a discussion group and trying to encourage other farmers to do the same. So, I organised a meeting at Cheltenham Quaker Meeting House in I think, January the 16th, 2010. About fourteen people came, farmers and others, local people, and we decided that we wanted to do two, four things. We wanted to define what we meant by wholly pasture fed or grass fed, but we chose pasture fed, which became in due course became the standards we wanted to ensure the integrity of those standards. 

00:44:59

In other words, if someone bought pasture fed, certified pasture fed, meat or milk, that it really was genuinely so. The third thing was to share the journey with everybody who shared the the broad vision, whether we call it regenerative or agroecological. And the fourth was not to be judgemental, and that fourth was probably the most important decision we made, because by not being judgemental, we can be welcoming, we can be sharing. and that's something which is now central to the ethos of the movement with with ‘Pasture for Life’. The, the, animals are raised wholly on pasture. That means that they are out on natural pastures as much as possible, in many cases all year round. But if they're not, if they have to come inside, then they get hay and and and silage. So there are, real benefits to, the health of the animal. One of the things one of the and we found a lot of resistance because if you if you have this system of farming basically you don't you don't buy anything. It's a closed loop system. Everything revolves within the farm. So of course, those people who are selling things, are not happy. and people were saying, well, of course it's lovely, but you can't make money. So we and it's very important to earn a living. You know that phrase, you can't be green if you're in the red. So we we were able to get the government's own economists to come onto our farms. And we produced a booklet with about fifteen vignettes, stories of the farms and also, the economics of wholly pasture fed system. Being done by independent economists. So this wasn't, you know, anybody got a vested interest and this showed that, you know, you can raise animals wholly on pasture and it can be as profitable, if not more profitable, which was a big surprise to, you know, the people, because it was benchmarked with across the country.

00:47:17

But one of the things that came out was that when the economists were looking, they said, ‘your vets bills are very low’. and their take was because you're not spending very much money on the vet, you're not concerned. You're not worried about the animal, the health of the animal. In other words there's an expectation that animals will get sick and that you pay the vet. But the reality was, we don't have the vet because the animals are not getting sick, because they're on the natural diet and they're out outside all the time. The animals being raised on their natural environment, all the manure is going directly back into the soil. it's bringing the, feeding the dung beetles and, and all the rest of it. 

February 2017, we brought together on a farm in the Cotswolds, fifty farmers and fifteen or twenty scientists. And I asked the question, if the soil is alive, how do we monitor, how do we monitor its pulse? As a general indicator, the way you would use the pulse or blood pressure ourselves? And so the scientists all put together suggested various ideas, from earthworm counts to infiltration rate to the penetrometer, and so on and so on. And then the farmers voted on it. And out of that, in time emerged the Soil Mental app, which is an app on your phone, which has all these has protocols for all of these indicators. is widely used by farmers and it's now in operation in twelve countries around the world. 

And then in February, I think 2020 just before Covid, I organised a meeting down in Devon, another fifty farmers and more boffins this time, ‘How do we monitor our biodiversity?’ And we were so confused by the options because, not surprisingly, biodiversity is the diversity of life that we decided simply to celebrate it. So we then did, I wrote down eight questions of structured questions about tell us about your farm, the biodiversity on your farm.

How do you how do you nurture it? How do you monitor it, how does it build the resilience of your farm? And so on and so on. we've now got thirty of those. They are stunning. The wise men of the past, Sir Robert Howard, who spent thirty years working with Indian farmers and brought organic farming to this country, he talks about the soil. Man, animal and plants are one and indivisible. So animals are, they're part of the system. And my, you know, for me, if you have animals on the farm and the benefits that they bring, they should be in their natural environment as much as possible all of their life as they can be. And if their manure becomes a problem to dispose of, rather than the most amazing natural, fertiliser, then you've got a problem.

00:50:42

So as long as as long as the manure that comes from the animals can go back on to the land where they are raised, that is a natural system of farming. Once you start industrialising and bringing food from outside, then obviously you've got more manure than you can handle. Then it becomes a problem. So it's grown. Now we have, twelve hundred members at the moment, but at the moment we have a thirty-six people, regional facilitators, project managers, which is eighteen full time equivalent. I'm sure that will go down and go up. What's more important to me is that, nearly all of these are farmers, they're nearly all under forty, and more than three quarters of them are women. So that is the movement that is going forward. And will, I'm sure, continue after after I've gone.

Christina: It's an amazing legacy, John, and you're still very active in overseas work, including ‘Farming on Crutches’ in Sierra Leone, which I've been lucky enough to visit. It's an incredible project. Can you tell me more about that work? 

John: Before doing so, perhaps I could just add that whatever I might have done over the years, I’ve rarely done alone. I may have played a catalytic role or helped to overcome the inertia that often frustrates change in order to generate some momentum, but almost always I’ve worked alongside others, and where activity has been taken to scale as with ‘Pasture for Life’ or with ‘Access Bike’ that’s almost always been done with or by other people to whom I’m very grateful.

‘Farming on crutches’, okay. Well, in, I first went to Sierra Leone in 1970s, but there was a civil war from, I think about 1996 to 2001 and as it was beginning to come to an end, DFID organised a mission to Sierra Leone to see how they could support the rebuilding of the rural areas which had been destroyed by the war. And they asked me to lead that. So I got involved in that whole area and I became aware of the, the, the children who had an arm or a leg, chopped off with a machete or lost it to a bullet and, some years later, 2012, I took my son Tom, who was then sixteen, just finished his GCSEs.

00:53:22

I took him to Sierra Leone to see one of the countries I'd worked in and on the beach, Lumley Beach. We met these amputee footballers. Amazing, organised by a guy called Mahmud Samai, And so we kept in touch. And two years later they got into the, finals of the World Cup. for obviously football. And they asked him (Tom) to write his the theme song for them, which he did, and sadly, they were not able to go because of Ebola. But we kept in touch. I learned they got a three-acre farm, a three acre piece of land being given to them by Ban Ki-Moon, the then secretary general, but no money to develop it. So, to cut a long story short, we, together, we got in touch with the Lush Foundation and raised £25,000. And we developed a farm with solar panels and irrigation and training centre. And and so far we've had sixty amputees who've gone through more will when we can raise the money. and we've been working closely recently with Rory’s Well, through whom, we've been able to, introduce ‘Beekeeping on Crutches’. so that's ‘Farming on crutches. That's a big, a big part of my life at the moment.

00:54:53

It's sustaining that, that, initiative. And if we can raise the money, then we want to bring. There are eighteen countries that play amputee football, and we want to bring someone from each of those countries to Sierra Leone so they can go back and start their own farm on crutches. So it comes ‘Farming on Crutches’ across Africa. 

00:55:12

Christina: We talked earlier about the influence of the Methodist religion on your life and how you felt that it was a religion that you happened to be born into and if you'd been born elsewhere you may have followed the religion of that place or culture I wonder if through all your travels you've returned to any kind of spirituality?

John: I began to think, well, is there a spiritual dimension to life or not? Aand I came to the conclusion that there is. And if there is that's all I need to know I don't need any more rules because if we're all spiritual dimension people then that affects how we approach it. So, when I Fiona and I stopped are mad work round the world and we were sort of more based here we were looking for a spiritual home and I remembered the Quakers that I'd heard about when I was a student. And we went in the Yellow Pages and we found the Painswick Quakers and we've been there ever since. So, we are, we are, both of us are Quakers and there's no creed but you have basically the testament is peace, equality, simplicity, and truth.

Things that influenced me I say four of these are the first three are extracted from various Quaker sayings the first is live adventurously the second is ‘think it possible’, now actually the phrase is ‘think it possible that you might be mistaken’ so both of these have to me have value that like when I was standing on the hay standing on the bit that needed to be moved next think it possible that you might be mistaken but to me I like to stop and think it is possible believe it can happen the third is what does love require of you? So when you're making a decision, what's the loving, not the soft slushy but what's the loving thing to do? and the fourth is not a particularly Quaker thing but does it build community and if it doesn't don't do it because our broken economic system is not about building community it's about self-interest

Christina: I find the approach to everything that you do so inspiring, John, thank you so much for sharing your work and life with me. To finish with, I'd like to go back to what your old headmaster said about promising that you’d study the poetry of the land. You said you did that. 

John: In 2013, I approached Adam Horovitz, a poet in Stroud, to ask him if he would be willing to, go and live on four of our pastoral farms in each of the four seasons and then write whatever he wanted to write. And he went off very sceptical down to Cornwall, to a very sceptical farmer. But gradually he got into it and he produced eventually this amazing book called The Soul Never Sleeps. This is the title poem, it's right at the bac, it's called The Soil Never Sleeps.

The soil never sleeps.

In its voids, gas and waters gather,

waiting for thirsty roots to crawl down motorway tunnels dug by worms.

For the spade. The plough.

The massage-press of hooves.

For the rain to run through its seams

and seeds to push up to the light.

The soil never sleeps.

It banks lives

in its souffle stomach,

connects them to everything.

Even the dirt beneath fingernails,

the dirt caught in a mole's coat, sings

with a million microbes to the gram

of connections, growth.

The soil never sleeps.

Never slips into ideology or nostalgia.

It is place and purpose,

the perfection of decay.

A story that shifts

from mouth to mouth.

A crucible for rebirth.

A rooftop on another world. 

Christina: The inscription on ‘The Soil never Sleeps,  is ‘for John Meadley, expert herder of poets and many other things.’ 

So will you just tell me what you're about to play?

 00:59:43

John: Okay, I'm just going to play the first few bars of, Stranger on the Shore by Aker Bilk, I played it at my mother's funeral. 

Christina: Thank you so much to John for letting me record this interview with him. I found it absolutely fascinating. You'll be able to hear the unedited version at Gloucestershire Archives. In the next episode, I'll be talking to Hugo Grimes, whose father, Harry recorded the dawn chorus near Wotton Under Edge in the 1950s. I returned to the same spot to record the dawn chorus now. And  then we visit Ed Druitt, a bird expert in the Forest of Dean, to hear his reaction to the two recordings. 

The Green Pledge project at Gloucestershire Archives has been made possible by funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.