Farming For Our Futures

Over the past year, we have documented the Sandringham estate’s move to a fully organic enterprise. Here, The Prince of Wales tells Paula Lester why farming naturally and sustainably is so vital for the soil, wildlife and our own health

- Paula Lester

Since the beginning of the 1980s, when I first had responsibility for managing some land in my own right at Highgrove, I have wanted to focus on an approach to food production that avoids the impact of the predominant, conventional system of industrialised agriculture, which, it is increasingly clear to see, is having a disastrous effect on soil fertility, biodiversity and animal and human health,’ declares The Prince of Wales of his decision to run the inhand operations of The Queen’s Norfolk estate at Sandringham—the management of which he took over from the Duke of Edinburgh in 2017—in a fully organic way.

‘It has always seemed to me somewhat logical to embrace a farming system that works with Nature and not against her, thus restoring the lost fertility and carbon-sequestration capacity of the soil on which we rely for our very existence upon this planet,’ The Prince explains. ‘At a global scale, it is becoming ever clearer to me that the very future of humanity may depend to a large extent on a mainstream transition to more sustainable farming practices, based on what are known as regenerative, agro-ecological principles, as well as innovative methods of agroforestry—something we are also putting into practice at Sandringham.