Learning to Grow

Walker didn’t grow up in a family that grew food, but began to shift her lifestyle as she became more involved in climate and nature movements. “There was such a disconnect between how I lived and how I wanted to live and what I believed in.”

From studying fashion journalism with a focus on sustainability, she found herself questioning the entire industry. “I don’t think you can [make it sustainable]. Ultimately, we need to buy a lot less.” Her experience working with major fashion brands – and later in marketing – brought her face-to-face with the depth of greenwashing embedded in global supply systems. “My job was branded as having this focus of sustainability… and then I’m trying to sell people clothes that are very expensive, with a very fancy label, and tell them it’s sustainable.” At another point in her early career, she was asked to market a poultry agri-food business renowned for its intensive practices: “They had the most horrendous pollution stories. So it sat really uncomfortably with me. That moment put the final nail in the coffin of me working in FMCG marketing.”

That reckoning led her to food. “Growing my food started as a small act of self-sufficiency,” she explains, but it quickly became a deeper interrogation of the food system itself. The act of planting, tending, and harvesting sharpened her awareness of the systems that govern how food is grown and distributed. “There was a moment of reckoning where I just thought about the utter insanity of it all in terms of how our food is grown,” she says. Her experience in marketing and journalism had already exposed her to the structural issues, but growing food made them personal. “Even just understanding the rhythms of nature and the seasons… is quite empowering.” She adds, “It’s taught me ‘enoughness’ – how to be in relationship with the land rather than divorced from it.”

The Power of Local

Walker is a member of the Land Workers Alliance and previously worked as Head of Communications for the Nature Friendly Farming Network. She’s seen firsthand the challenges and resilience of small-scale food systems.

“Food is too cheap… it’s punishing work,” she says of small growers. “There’s a lot more that communities need to do to support local growers in being able to sustain their businesses.” She recalls a local example: “There was a really great walled garden grower that I bought from when I lived down in Helen’s Bay. And they said they struggled because the labor they were putting into growing the vegetables wasn’t proportionate to the cost of what they were selling as veg boxes because they were working around the clock.” For Walker, the collapse of that kind of grassroots effort reveals just how fragile and undervalued sustainable food systems remain. It’s a call not just for admiration of growers, but material support and structural change.

She speaks passionately about the Oxford Real Farming Conference, a grassroots counterpart to the mainstream Oxford Farming Conference. “I find it really inspiring to see just actually what can be done on the ground.” Unlike its larger, industry-focused sibling, the Real Farming Conference brings together small-scale growers, campaigners, and land-based communities who are exploring regenerative and alternative systems of food production. For Walker, it’s a space where “words like ‘regenerative’ take on real meaning.” It’s not just a concept – it’s about composting beds, feeding the soil, and asking how plants interact with biodiversity. “I kept hearing the word ‘regenerative’ when I worked in the Nature Friendly Farming Network, but I actually didn’t really understand much of what it meant until you actually grow food yourself, and attended these events,” she says.