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Katie Allen, a regenerative farmer, maker and educator who is creating healthy textiles, plant dyes and leathers and helping fashion students and others discover what soil health means for us, our food and our clothing.
Katie Allen farms organically at Great Cotmarsh, in the UK. The farm produces lamb and beef in a 100% pastoral system and is implementing projects to improve soil health, increase biodiversity and embrace agroforestry. Under the brand ‘Katie Cotmarsh’, she creates award-winning knitwear using the fleeces from the flock and cultivates colour by growing plant dyes.
Katie has developed a beautiful classroom space on the farm, to connect the future generation of designers with the story behind soil and give them a new perspective of what true circularity looks like, particularly in the face of an ever shifting climate and demand for new cradle-to-cradle models for fashion design.
Katie unpacks what happens on the farm tours and workshops, tells us how she was first inspired by the Fibershed movement, and what it means to create a local, regenerative clothing supply-chain.
Podcast host Catherine Weetman helps businesses use circular, regenerative and fair solutions to do better, with less.
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Read on for more on our guest and links to the people, organisations and other resources we mention.
Links for our guest:
- www.katiecotmarsh.co.uk
- www.greatcotmarshfarm.co.uk
- www.cotmarshtannery.co.uk
- https://www.instagram.com/katiecotmarsh/
- https://www.instagram.com/greatcotmarshfarm/
- https://www.instagram.com/cotmarshtannery/
Books, people and organisations we mentioned
- Katie mentioned being inspired by Rebecca Burgess’ book, Fibershed https://fibershed.org/community/fibershed-the-book/ and you can find out more about the Fibershed project here: https://fibershed.org/
- Here’s an open-access research paper looking at the toxins in clothing: Pinto, V.C.D.; Peleg Mizrachi, M. The Health Impact of Fast Fashion: Exploring Toxic Chemicals in Clothing and Textiles. Encyclopedia 2025, 5, 84. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia5020084
Guest bio
Katie Allen is an organic farmer at Great Cotmarsh. The farm produces lamb and beef in a 100% pastoral system and is implementing projects to improve soil health, increase biodiversity and embrace agroforestry.
Under the brand ‘Katie Cotmarsh’ she creates award-winning knitwear using the fleeces from the flock and cultivates colour by growing plant dyes.
Katie has developed a beautiful classroom space on the farm, to connect the future generation of designers with the story behind soil and give them a new perspective of what true circularity looks like, particularly in the face of an ever shifting climate and demand for new cradle-to-cradle models for fashion design.
If you’re new to the circular economy, you might like the ‘getting started’ playlist. There’s also an interactive podcast index, making it easy to find episodes on each of the key circular economy strategies or for a specific market sector. And to dig deeper, please check out Catherine’s award-winning A Circular Economy Handbook, published by Kogan Page.
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