Tim Barford

Photo © VegfestUK Ltd

Tim Barford runs VegfestUK events and Yaoh Hemp Products and has been a vegan activist spanning five decades. He was doing vegan outreach throughout the 80s and 90s and part of the free festival and free rave scene throughout that time. Since starting VegfestUK 20 years ago, he has hosted numerous conferences around veganism, animal activism and animal protection.

Tim told us that a typical day would be up at 7am, three black coffees a 30 minute chi kung set and then onto the work station. He eats at 12pm (protein drinks, snack bars, fruit all day) and a main meal at 8.30pm. He loves having music on all day and deals with a lot of emails. Twice a week he gets out for some moderate exercise, usually a 3km run and 500 upper body reps. He rests more at weekends, sleeping a lot and catching up with work. He finishes the day with a seated meditation. He advocates a wholefood plant-based diet, good attitude, moderate hard exercise, plentiful and daily soft exercise, abstinence, discipline and learning how to manage stress and mental health challenges without impacting on physical health. He also advises that older people work with people a third of their age whenever they can!

Tim loves what he does but cautions that, although veganism has grown, it hasn't grown as quickly as we'd all hoped ‘back in the day…’. He would like to see people coming together as a mass movement to win over the hearts and minds of millions of people. He sees that there is an animal liberation movement and a shift to plant-based food systems movement as well as the more traditional animal-loving vegans and says that it is important to honour, respect and promote all of these. Tim's vision is that collaboration between these separate movements will be a gamechanger in the future.