Food, Farming and thoughts for the future

Screenshot (50) Fifty-five years ago, when our grandad launched ‘Picfresh’ (as Darts Farm was known then), food was still something with a face and a story. Milk from a local herd, vegetables pulled from nearby fields, ingredients you could pronounce, and butter that was actually just butter. Food was the heart of the home and the foundation of community. Darts Farm was born into this world in our little corner of the Clyst Valley. Not a lot has changed.

All around us, however, the world of food and farming is unrecognisable. In recent decades, we have sprinted into an age of globalism and just-in-time everything.

Modern food production has delivered unsustainable abundance at the cost of soil health, biodiversity, animal welfare, and public health. We have treated our farms as factory floors, replacing diversity and resilience with scale and monoculture. Flavour and nutrients have become squeezed, replaced by intensive units serving distant supply chains rather than nearby tables.

This change, driven by the rise of supermarkets, has fundamentally changed our relationship with food. Convenience, endless choice, and prices that don't reflect the true value of production have turned food from something cherished into something commodified. If I told my grandparents they'd be eating strawberries in January and chicken would actually be cheaper than chips, they'd fall off their chairs. In reality, this endless choice is an illusion—the same brands containing the same ultra-processed ingredients line supermarket shelves from Land's End to John o'Groats.

Kale_Cutting_1000x600 At home, everyday cooking has quietly eroded. Ready meals, takeaways, and ultra-processed foods have stepped in where time, confidence, and skills have fallen away. Many households now heat rather than cook, assemble rather than create. The distance between field and fork has grown not just in miles, but in understanding.

Amid this change, there are still reasons to be cheerful. In fact, if you're still reading this, then you're part of the solution. People like you have started asking important questions: Why does my bread not go mouldy? What's causing the chronic disease epidemic? Where have the worms and birdsong gone? This curiosity is the catalyst of a movement—by combining ancient wisdom with modern knowledge, together we can restore our soils, regain our health, and rediscover our joy for good food.

As we step into our next fifty-five years, our invitation is simple but radical—let's make ‘normal’ normal again. Food that comes from nearby fields, not anonymous factories. Meals that begin with chopping, not tearing open plastic. Farms that grow soil and community, as well as crops and livestock. The path has never fully disappeared here; it has quietly been walked every day. All that's needed is for more of us to join it, one mindful basket and one honest meal at a time.

Darts Farm

Food, Farming and thoughts for the future

Posted in The Farm, News on 10 Jan 2026

by George Dart

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