Nick Viney farms on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon — a valley so wet it floods from both rain and its neighbours’ runoff. Thirty years ago she ran the place like everyone else: shedges clipped at sharp right angles, livestock on the land year-round, tidiness the measure of a good farmer. Then, with three kids under a year old, she was forced to de-stock. Three months later she walked into a field and found a stand of early purple orchids she had never seen in her lifetime. That moment changed everything.
What followed was a decades-long dive into holistic management, permaculture design, and what Nick calls “adaptive multi-paddock grazing” — moving animals the way predators once did, giving land long rest periods, reading soil through her feet rather than data sheets. She now shares cattle with her neighbour, runs part-time pigs as living bulldozers, and uses sheep hooves to burnish pond liners into waterproof clay. Her metric for success? The number of anthills she can keep alive each year.
Nick is also a founding farmer of EARA, the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture, and a live-painting storyteller whose show is called “Only Art and Beaver Will Save Us.” Her vision for scaling is not through 100-shectare efficiency but through what she calls cellular reproduction — small, mixed farms replicating like healthy cells across the landscape. Her argument: we don’t need to feed the world, we need to feed our valley, and trust that someone over the hill is doing the same.
3 bullet points
Ø Nick discovered regenerative farming by accident — forced to de-stock her farm, she returned three months later to find orchids she had never seen in 30 years, triggering a complete rethink of how she managed land.
Ø Her approach uses animals as precision tools: cattle for soil impact, pigs to dig natural ponds, sheep hooves to waterproof them with clay — all mimicking the role predators and wild sherds once played on British landscapes.
Ø She argues that “scaling” regenerative agriculture means cellular replication — many small, mixed farms feeding their own communities — not chasing industrial efficiency on larger plots.
3 Call-to-Actions
Ø Listen to the full episode and hear Nick describe the moment she walked into a field and saw orchids growing for the first time in her lifetime — and why that single walk changed 30 years of farming practice overnight.
Ø Share this with a friend who buys food but has never thought about where the water in that food came from — Nick’s answer to “how do we feed the world” will genuinely surprise them.
Ø Subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode — we keep finding people quietly rebuilding the relationship between land, water, and food, one valley at a time.
Curiosity question
If the land you walk on every day could speak — what would it say it needs from you, right now?
Photo - Groundswell
Artist in Residence/ Keynote speaker offer- Live painted journey towards regeneration.www.nickviney.co.ukReimagining your land. Fresh eyes and ideas to help you step onto your regenerative journey. www.nickviney.co.ukInsta @nickvineyartistGlamping www.rewildingfutures.co.ukwww.LeewoodStudios.co.uk2025 Film ‘Farming The Flood’
Nature connection creativity courses through Art & Beaver #onlyartandbeaverwillsaveus
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Besides the podcast, you’ll soon find — Q2 2026 — an educational program on how to build a regenerative business or create a sustainably functioning company.
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