Good news: the soil ate your undies. Here's why that's something to celebrate. It's a real method, farmers call it "Soil Your Undies," and here's how it goes. You take a pair of plain white cotton underpants, bury them in your field, and dig them up about two months later. If all that comes back is a sad little waistband, congratulations, your soil is alive and thriving. If the undies come out more or less intact, you've got a problem. The reason it works is actually beautiful. Healthy soil is absolutely teeming with life, billions of bacteria, fungi and microbes in a single handful, and their whole job is to break down organic matter. Cotton is pure organic matter. So in living soil, the microbes swarm the cotton and devour it within weeks. In dead, compacted, over tilled soil, there's almost nobody home to eat it, so it just sits there. The underwear is basically a report card written by the microbes themselves. (They can't digest the synthetic elastic, which is why you're always left with the waistband.) And the best part is you don't need a lab to read it! There are a handful of these wonderfully low tech field tests that tell you the truth about soil. Drop a clod into a jar of water and see if it holds together or collapses into mud. Dig a spadeful and count the earthworms. The soil just tells you. Which is the whole point, really. The word "sustainable" has become so vague it's being regulated out of existence. This is the opposite of vague. You cannot greenwash a pair of buried underpants. Either the soil ate them or it didn't. Healthy soil is something you can dig up and hold in your hands!

Hello everyone, I’m Alexandra, Harry’s partner. Farmers have been struggling more than ever in recent years, even here in the Netherlands, despite working incredibly hard to provide us with food and having barely any time for anything else. We are seeing more and more farms struggling to survive and disappearing, which really breaks my heart. Together with GROW, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the farmers and our food chain. As far as I’m concerned, the slogan ‘Make Producers the Hero of the story again’ should really come to life!