Katja und Jay Wilde's Bradley Nook Farm in Ashbourne (UK), is being refarm'd to producing plant-based drinks.

We believe that by uniting together with farmers and providing them with the tools they need to move away from the animal trade, we are offering a viable new opportunity for their businesses to be part of the growing plant-based movement.

We assist the ex-dairy/cattle farms in sustainably and locally sourcing the ingredients to produce plant-based drinks on their farms. The farmers’ land is converted into an animal sanctuary for their cattle that are no longer being used.

By signing up for this subscription service, customers are helping the animal-farming industry transition to a plant-based livelihood that helps both the animals and our environment alike.

I was born into a farming family in the late 1950s. My father milked around 60 cows on Bradley Nook Farm at the time.

It was understood as a matter of course that I would work on the farm after leaving school and that I would eventually inherit. Our cows were housed in Victorian cow sheds which meant that all cleaning out and foddering was manual labour as machinery access was impossible.

When we had the dairy cows, we would fill the milk jug as soon as it was empty and eating meat was considered essential for a hard-working farmer. Not having meat available at all times was unthinkable in my family.

Like all farmer’s children, we were roped into the business as soon as was possible and in summer it was our job to douse the animals in insecticide each afternoon after driving them in from the pasture – a procedure that has left thousands of farmers with a legacy of poor health as Health and Safety barely featured in those days.

A much nicer job for us children was feeding the calves with calf milk and barley gruel.

Still, my family took the time to engage with the wildlife on the land and we learned a lot from our dad. He never engaged with business-like intensive farming and thus our land was spared most of the artificial fertilizers and herbicides then regarded as essential for efficient and productive farming which allowed a host of species to carry on growing on the farm.

In my late 20s I joined a transcendental meditation group for a while to alleviate the stress of 15-hour days. In that group, I met for the first time people who chose to be vegetarians for ethical reasons.

This very much chimed with my own feelings for the animals I cared for and I chose to go vegetarian myself.

Carrying on with the farm work was more difficult after acknowledging and acting upon my feelings, but circumstances and farming traditions prevented me from finding a way out.

Life became a bit less strenuous after changing to organic beef production in 1997 as the milking routine fell away and the animals were finally housed in a new, modern cattle shed. Nevertheless, the objective of the business was still to have the animals killed eventually and that became more obvious with the need of monitoring weight and condition for the sale. Loading them up for transport became ever more difficult to endure.

Also, the road was open to get into a stewardship scheme. Some of our fields are protected as organic hay meadows and other fields are protected to maintain the historic plough lines, called ‘ridge and furrow’, that show as undulations in the ground.

As my father grew older, I had the occasional chance to make minor changes, but he firmly held grip of the reins right until his death. This has been quite common in British farming families.

I have always had an interest in all things technical and ecological and I have been aware of pollution, climate change and their impact on the environment for a very long time. It pained me to be stuck in a situation where I was forced to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. After my father’s death I therefore invested all my savings into a largish solar PV array feeding electricity into the national grid to make up at least in part for the pollution we caused with keeping livestock.