UK musician swaps the pop charts for farm tech

• Published date: 07 December 2022
• Publication title: Central Rural Life

Groove Armada’s Andy Cato has had good reason many times to regret selling his music rights to buy a farm

He is one half of the British electronic dance duo with Tom Findlay that had three UK Top 10 albums and put out the big hits Superstylin’, My Friend and At the River.

Mr Cato admitted to a large farmer audience at Foundation for Arable Research’s (FAR) CROPS 2022 field day in Mid-Canterbury’s Chertsey that he had sold some of the band’s back catalogue to finance the farm in France’s Gascony.

‘‘I took, with hindsight, a madly naive decision to sell my publishing rights to songs that I’d written ... to finance the purchase of a farm and try to do [growing] on a bigger scale.

‘‘That was a moment of absolute madness, obviously now I don’t regret it, but I did regret it for several years after that.’’

The tall, multi-talented musician was in Christchurch to perform with Groove Armada in a farewell tour and agreed to give his time to walk growers through his own unconventional start to farming.

Today he is nearly as well known as a regenerative mixed arable and livestock farmer and co-founder of Wildfarmed, as for his prowess in the music studio.

Trial and error — including GPS horse-driven tilling — pushed him to the brink of winding farming up, but he has stuck to his bid to change thinking on farming and food production.

Farming here is much different than the UK, he says, with pasture in almost all of its arable rotations and he wished he could say the same in his home country, but cannot.

Mr Cato’s foray into farming started about 15 years ago when he was coming back from a gig. Reading an article about conventional industrial food production and its consequences for health, the environment and soils struck a chord with him.

‘‘I was quite shocked by what I read and at the end of the article he said ‘if you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it’, which is a phrase I really took to heart.’’

That put him on a quest for self-sufficiency.

He went from never planting a seed to growing vegetables ‘‘not very well’’ and tilling and rotivating the soils like his neighbours, but refusing to use herbicides.

Then his vegetable garden became a weed jungle.

‘‘I started going down a rabbit hole learning about soil health, companion planting, no tilling and so on and eventually ended up with a vegetable patch that was a little bit better.’’

In Gascony he set up a market garden, selling vegetables at the local market.

Before long he became convinced that he wanted...