Voices from the Fields

NFFN Scotland chair Denise Walton invites farmers to connect to their inner wisdom at ORFC 2025

United Kingdom
Scotland
ORFC
regenerative farming
Land connection

Denise Walton, an organic and Pasture-for-Life beef farmer from Peelham Farm in south-east Scotland and the chair of NFFN Scotland, was invited to speak at the prestigious opening plenary of the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) 2025. Tasked with exploring a key theme that captured the spirit of the conference, Denise inspired an audience eager for connection and knowledge.

When I was invited to contribute to this plenary on ‘wisdom’, I was very quickly challenged by putting wisdom into words to share with all of you, the most significant human collective of land and nature wisdom on the planet! It was like guddling for trout in a fast-running burn! Just as you think you have it in your grasp, you don’t at all – it's slipped away! Or even seeing the reflection of a star from the universe in a puddle at your feet: so close that you want to scoop it up in your hands and hold it; but of course, as you move towards it, it disappears.

I then realised what I knew anyway: that wisdom isn’t for grasping or catching or having. It's in all life. It's here. It's in us, it's with us, it's through us. 

It is the cascade of ‘knowingness’ from the source within the spark of sentience in every living cell within and between all living things … multitudes in multitudes in a collective, connective continuum with the universe. Knowingness before knowledge. Feel it! Feel the wisdom within you, around you … can you feel it? Are you letting the wisdom feel you? This ‘knowingness’ of wisdom is the treasure chest of imagination - the beginnings of envisioning.

We have this collective privilege of access to life other than human life!

As farmers and growers - you, me, us; we have this direct, hands-on connection with soil, plants, our farm animals, with nature. It's our living! We have this collective privilege of access to life other than human life. But, we humans as an animal species, are consciously destroying our own habitat. How crazy is that? No other animal species does this. 

Our particular human community - farmers, growers, food producers - is at the front line of this craziness; much of its cause and much of its consequence. It calls for nothing less than the extraordinary, the profound, to make good the harm.

I would like to share with you a story about one of us - a land worker, a farmer - which is pertinent in many ways to where we find ourselves today. This farmer, together with the rocks and soils of his farm that ‘told him’, envisioned the impossible, the extraordinary, the profound.

This farmer, James Hutton, actually introduced myself and Colin Tudge (co-Founder of the ORFC) to each other some years ago at a meal not that far from here. It sparked an enduring friendship. It is of no relevance whatsoever that James Hutton will be 300 years old next year. He was very present with us in our conversation at that meal. He farmed in the Eye Valley just over the hill from where we Waltons farm.

In the course of working his farm, he became increasingly puzzled by what he was seeing of the soil and rock, including the washing of soil by rain from his fields and into the burns which feed into the Eye Water and ultimately into the North Sea.

Following painstaking ‘reading of the rocks’ as he put it (“God’s hand … writ in the rocks”), he pieced together over some thirty years a theory with regeneration at its heart - but regeneration over a very, very long timescale: that the formation of rocks from soil and the age of Earth could not possibly have taken place within the timeframe dictated by biblical chronology (some 6,000 years); it must be much older.

And so in 1788, against the odds of the perceived truth of the time and a belief system which exacted retribution for contradiction considered heresy punishable by hanging, he presented his Theory of the Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. ‘Wisdom-knowingness’ gradually prevailed among his peers and his theory was eventually accepted, setting the pace for concepts of time and profoundly changing science.

The ultimate in regeneration, that of Earth itself through the recycling and uplift by its own processes of its own materials (with knowingness), was worked out by a farmer, who sensed the wisdom of this knowingness and followed his vision through, unfettered by the prevailing knowledge systems of the time.

We all of us have it, the ‘wisdom-knowingness’, which has immense collective power.

James Hutton envisioned the extraordinary from that spark of sentience. We all of us have it, the ‘wisdom-knowingness’, which has immense collective power to make the magnitude of change needed for repair, restoration, healing. 

I know from working on our farm for many years now, how easy it is to slip into mechanical responses to the relentless pressures of production, breeding cycles, weather, cash flow, and exhaustion. And when at that peak of exhaustion, of diminishing hope …. it filters through: the knowingness, carried on that moment of silence in a cry from the fields; a flutter of wings in a hedge; the first suckle of a calf, colostrum smeared over its nose, or that delicate scent of steaming new afterbirth; the first germination, the smell of earth. That shaft of clear knowingness. That clear call of rightful purpose.

Earth regeneration with wisdom-knowingness. Our collective strength to do the profound, to restore and regenerate as part of the multitudes in multitudes in us and between us, of which, to quote the farmer James Hutton “...we see no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” to the regeneration of our Earth of which we, this collective, are such an integral part. 

Remember, fellow farmers, growers, friends: The next time you calve a cow, lamb a ewe, have your hands deep into the soil as you plant; look up - even only briefly - and know that you are as much a part of the light as you are of the Earth.