Catherine Broomfield
Non-Executive Director
Catherine does not come from farming stock, but was drawn to farming, working Saturday jobs on farms as a teenager and then full-time for a couple of years after leaving school. She ended up in the broadcast technology industry: started a company, sold a company, brought a farm in Devon in 2001, with a mission to sell “home-bred, grass-fed” beef and lamb. Since then, Catherine has learnt a lot about farming, native breeds, and producing high quality meat from grass.
Events kept pulling Catherine away from the farm; she ran the Devon cattle breed society for 7 years and advocates for native breeds and grass-based systems. In 2018, with post-Brexit changes afoot and a sense that livestock farming needed to do more to get ahead of climate debate, she decided to take herself out of farming to consider it from a working distance.
Catherine has an Msc in Food Policy and PhD at the Centre for Rural Policy Research, Exeter University, where she is now
Research Associate. Her thesis explores how we, as livestock farmers, can engage with the non-farming public in a way that is most likely to sustain our “social licence to farm”.