Harry Winslet

Growing up in Central London, my childhood couldn’t have been spent in an environment more geographically or societally distant from the Cambridgeshire farm that I have spent the last five years getting to know. A surgeons son, the increasingly loud voice in my ear told me I’d be the next in the dynasty to put on the scrubs and get into the operating theatre. However, my biological and chemical education led me elsewhere, and through my undergraduate and masters degrees, I found myself increasingly fascinated by how our changing climate is going to change the way we live our lives and, most notably, how we are going to continue to feed ourselves.

To put these lessons into practice, I was going to have to up sticks, buy some wellies, and find a farm! What better place, then, to continue to learn than to join G’s, Europe’s largest fresh produce supplier. Over the next 5 years, I would spend my time understanding and designing a strategy for how we can reduce the environmental impact of producing the 5-a-day that we are told our daily diets must contain. Now with half a decade of lettuce production behind me, I have begun to believe that the fine balance between healthy soils and a healthy diet may lie in our peatlands, and how we manage them…