The Exchange: Xander Beks' Episode

By Sandy Glanfield

There's an old story about people in the dark, each with a hand on a different part of an elephant. One holds the trunk and thinks it's a snake. One holds a leg and thinks it's a tree. Usually it's told as a lesson about humility, none of us has the whole picture. But talking with Xander Beks this week, I found myself hearing it differently.

Because when it comes to food and farming right now, the generations really are holding different parts of the animal. And they're not wrong to.

Someone who has spent thirty years in agriculture has felt the weight of it in their hands. They've learned the ropes, tried something, watched it fail, tried again. They carry the seasons that went wrong, the harvests lost, the slow lessons that only come from having stood in the same field year after year. Their knowledge is real, and hard-won, and not the kind you can shortcut.

A young person coming into farming now is holding something else entirely. They haven't inherited the old certainties, because the ground has shifted, the climate has shifted, and the world they've been handed is already the new one. Where an older farmer might see a problem to be managed or a loss to be absorbed, they see openings. Possibility. A field that could be worked in a way no one has tried yet, precisely because they don't carry the memory of why it supposedly can't be done.

Here's the thing. Both are telling the truth about the elephant. Neither has the whole of it.

What Xander is building through Eye for Nature takes that seriously in a way I found genuinely exciting. He's not doing the usual thing of inviting young people in to be shaped by their elders and sent on their way. He's set up something more like a two-way apprenticeship, where people deep in the industry give their time to mentor young people with bigger ideas, and the young people, in turn, are treated as experts in their own right. Not experts-in-waiting. Experts now, in reading a changing world their mentors are still catching up with.

That reciprocity is the part that stays with me. Older hands offering their experience, their networks, their patience with the knowledge gaps. Younger ones offering a way of seeing that isn't weighed down by what used to be true. Each asking real questions of the other rather than one talking and one listening.

And this is where I keep landing on our golden rule, treat others as you'd wish to be treated. In practice, in a setting like this, it's quieter and more particular than a slogan. It looks like an experienced farmer saying to someone forty years younger, I'll take your idea as seriously as I'd want mine taken, even though it unsettles what I've built my working life on. And it looks like a young person saying back, I'll honour what you've learned the hard way, even where I think it needs to change. That's the golden rule doing actual work. Not politeness. A genuine willingness to be moved by someone whose view of the field isn't yours.

Because the truth is we do all see it from where we're standing. That was never the problem. The problem is only ever what we do next, whether we assume the other person is holding a different animal, or whether we say: tell me what you've got hold of, and I'll tell you what I have, and between us we might finally understand the whole strange, enormous, living thing.

That, to me, is what Xander is quietly getting right. Not smoothing over the difference between generations, but putting it to work.