Why are we doing this?

Our land and soil can’t cope with extended periods of intensive farming. Farming systems become more sustainable when you mix produce, for example one of our farmers – Joe Howard – has reintroduced livestock to boost his soil fertility, which is essential to his sustainable vegetable farming. 

Tom, one of our founders, ended up at a conference in London where he heard a farmer from Grassroots Farming talk about how a small group of like-minded people were completely changing the way they farmed. 

They were swapping intensive, industrialised farming, which put quantity before anything else, for a different way of doing things. That meant following nature’s lead, respecting the land and the animals on it, and going back to old ways of farming, which put the farmers in the centre – not at the bottom – of the food chain. 

They called it ‘regenerative farming’. And Honest wanted in. 

We want to enable farmers to farm regeneratively, and we can reward them in doing so by paying them this premium for their beef. Grassroots will help founding farmers run on a Mass Balance supply chain. 

 This approach borrows from similar initiatives in categories like Energy, Cotton and Coffee. Mass Balancing aims to rebalance the output to make more of it sustainable. The more businesses that are prepared to pay a little more for their product the more producers are encouraged to farm more sustainably. It’s a Win-Win-Win: good for the farmers, tastier for customers, and better for the planet 

 Through Honest Farming and supporting Grassroots, we know the beef we purchase is directly growing the volume of Certified beef and driving positive change across the farmed landscape. 

When farming follows nature’s lead, the amount of carbon used to produce food naturally drops. We know plants take in CO2 and convert it to oxygen. We know microbes in healthy soil use – and store – carbon. And we know regenerative farms don’t need as much carbon-guzzling machinery, fertilisers and animal feeds. All this means our carbon footprint shrinks from the get-go. 

But what does it mean in cold, hard numbers? We’re working on it. The regenerative farms we support produce over 50% less carbon per kg of beef than standard UK beef. We know we’re tackling our carbon footprint head-on, right the way back to the fields. This isn’t a PR stunt and it’s not for social media ‘likes’. Everything we’re doing is about actively reducing carbon rather than offsetting it and shifting the problem elsewhere. 

Yes, we’re a burger restaurant but we know eating less meat is the right thing to do for the planet (and for us). We’re not taking beef off the menu, but we are doing our bit to make sure that we’re supporting regenerative farming practices that can help to make a positive difference to our environment, as well as ultimately making for better quality beef. 

That means knowing the cows have been bred and raised thoughtfully, with care; that we’re not wasting any part of the animal; and that we’re paying the farmers properly and fairly. Every burger you buy at Honest puts more regenerative beef back in our fields. It’s that simple.