What does SFT CEO Patrick get up to? It’s been a busy month…

The last month has involved several countries, a multitude of events and some incredibly interesting conversations.

It all started a few weeks ago with a boat across the Irish Sea to Ballymaloe. Darina Allen asked me to come and speak to the 18 students who’d taken part in the school’s inaugural six-week Food and Farming course. The students were young people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, all motivated by a desire to become directly involved in food production. There is already a lengthy waiting list for this course, perhaps a sign of the degree to which young people are becoming increasingly interested in getting back to the land.

Next stop Scotland where The King’s Foundation had invited the SFT and Circular Bioeconomy Alliance (CBA) to co-host an event on Harmony in Food and Farming. Many influential people were there, including Angela Eagle, the Defra Secretary of State, and Chris van Tulleken, whose book Ultra-Processed People has transformed public attitudes towards processed food.

Crucially, there was also senior representation from various food companies and retailers of note. From them, I gleaned that such organisations are increasingly aware of a need, or demand, that they switch to more nature-friendly production. They are even waking up to regenerative farming, although what ‘regenerative’ actually means, remains hazy. It’s perhaps not surprising: many UK farms now claim to be regenerative, but are still using fertilisers and pesticides, including an annual spray of glyphosate (or Round Up). Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is beside the point; what matters, is that the people who buy their products have a right to know exactly what they’re paying for.

“Partnering with organisations who believe as passionately as we do about re-connecting people with the food they eat and the land it comes from, we are now working on extending this initiative into the US.”

From Scotland, I headed across the Atlantic to upstate New York and the Real Organic conference. Joining a panel alongside Eliot Coleman, one of the elders of the US organic horticultural movement, the discussion came back to the same issues: whether regenerative farming should be seen as a threat or a complement to the organic movement, and crucially, how to ensure that it doesn’t descend into greenwash. The answer for me comes back to measurement: if all regenerative initiatives could agree to measure their outcomes on climate, nature and people using a common framework, then not only could we in the industry all communicate on this matter in the same language, but we could pass that transparency onto the public. This is the very foundation of the work the SFT has done in the Global Farm Metric (GFM).

A new era for US health? The Trump administration promised better food, better farming and better health. So where has the administration got on delivering that promise and what’s it got to do with MAGA? Halfway through President Trump’s term, author Honor May Eldridge takes stock.

Few people would have expected pesticides to hit the headlines during a US presidential election. Yet, during the 2024 campaign, herbicides, ultra-processed foods and environmental toxins moved from the fringes of public debate to the centre of American politics. As part of his independent bid for the presidency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr launched Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), a deliberate echoing of President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) – a move that firmly pushed American health and diet onto the stage during the world’s biggest political race. MAHA announced both to the nation and the world that America’s diet (and associated cardiovascular crisis) couldn’t be improved without taking a long hard look at the food system that underpinned it. The link between ultra-processed foods, agricultural chemicals and non-communicable diseases was suddenly very much in the spotlight. When Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump in August 2024, many of those ideas (and voters) were transported over to the President’s campaign. Almost overnight, concerns about pesticides, herbicides and the way food is produced became part of mainstream political debate. Many hoped that when Kennedy joined President Trump’s cabinet that he would bring attention and, perhaps more importantly, action to the issue. But governing is frequently more complicated than campaigning and ‘single-issues’, however compelling, and it often gets mired in the complexity of administration.

And then we add to this MAGA. Alongside MAHA, sat another powerful political narrative: that America needs to reduce dependence on imports and strengthen its national resilience. Thus, over the last two years, high-output industrial agriculture – heavily reliant on agrichemicals – has increasingly been presented as a matter of national security. The result? A series of decisions by the Administration that have worked steadily against the vision of farming that the MAHA movement once advocated for.

Regenerative agriculture is not defined by a single set of practices, but by the outcomes it delivers. The new Regen10 Outcomes Framework is the first globally co-developed attempt to define what those outcomes should be – across farms and the wider food system. Here, the Global Farm Metric’s Olivia Boothman reflects on why focussing on outcomes is key to unlocking regen’s potential.

In 2020, I had never heard of regenerative agriculture — despite working as a farm vet.

That changed during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. While headlines focused on empty supermarket shelves, I saw something different unfolding on the ground here in Cornwall, and across the UK: local farmers stepping up to feed their communities with fresh, seasonal, locally produced food.

It sparked a curiosity that quickly became a much deeper exploration (and career change!) — offering a glimpse of what our food systems could and should deliver. That was my introduction to regenerative agriculture.

Over that winter, I distracted myself from the anticipation of the dreaded pager ringing by spending many an on-call night learning. The more I explored, the more I realised that farming ‘well’ isn’t just about producing food.

I learned about the relationship between soil organic matter and climate resilience through the 4per1000 initiative. I discovered farming systems designed to support biodiversity, and community-supported agriculture models that reconnect farmers and citizens through shared risk and shared reward. Reading books like English Pastoral, I began to understand farming not only as food production, but as stewardship of culture, ecology and place.

Without realising it, I was piecing together all of the ‘outcomes’ of farming in a way that regenerates climate, nature and people.

Attending Groundswell Festival as a Masters’ student and keen to enter the world of food and farming, perhaps a little more nerdily than I’d like to admit, I frantically scribbled down notes in one of the main sessions as the speaker flashed up a slide on the five principles of regenerative agriculture.

These principles are immediately understandable. They provide practical guidance, they demonstrate what it would mean to move away from extractive and intensive systems. Ultimately though, the point of regenerative agriculture is not the adoption of specific practices in itself, but the regeneration of ecological and human systems. Therefore, regeneration cannot be defined by whether a practice is used, but by whether ecological, social and human health are improving.

In my few years of working on regenerative agriculture, one of the things that has stood out to me the most is the importance of the farm’s context. A farm is not a blank canvas that can follow a set protocol. Farms are evolving, living systems, shaped by the centuries of land-use that have preceded them. They are affected by external policies, how their neighbour farms, the climate and the weather, the economic situation.

By and large, the principles are universal enough that they can be applied anywhere. But it is also possible that two farms could follow the same principles and produce different outcomes because the landscape, culture and ecologies they are situated within differ. We need to ensure the promise of regenerative agriculture is being delivered, and to do that, we cannot rely on the principles alone.

An outcome-based approach gives farmers freedom to adapt. A mixed farm in a drought-prone region may decide that maintaining permanent ground cover is less beneficial than reducing competition for limited water availability. Another may integrate livestock to improve nutrient cycling, while elsewhere livestock numbers may need to reduce to restore degraded habitats. It enables them to have a vision of where they want to get to, and trusts that they hold the knowledge to know what will work best in their unique farm context.

But if regenerative agriculture is best understood through the outcomes it delivers, how do we create a shared language for understanding, assessing and supporting these outcomes across different contexts?

This is where the Regen10 Outcomes Framework comes in. By setting the outcomes that can and should be delivered by regenerative agriculture, Regen10’s framework aims to provide a shared vision to enable collaboration for stakeholders across the agrifood system. One of the biggest challenges in food and farming is aligning perspectives — farmers, businesses, policymakers and NGOs often come at things from completely different angles. Frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and more recently the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), have shown how powerful it can be to anchor conversations in agreed outcomes: they don’t prescribe how to act, but they do create a common language for what success looks like. That shared direction makes collaboration, accountability and investment decisions much more tangible.

When I started out in this area of work, it was a real challenge for people to consider anything beyond climate change mitigation, improving biodiversity and water quality and availability as core outcomes of regenerative management. However, after extensive consultations, farm trials, and discussions among Regen10 partners, we all agreed that true regeneration was wider than these ecological outcomes. The Regen10 outcomes framework defines these outcomes, taking the Global Farm Metric framework as its foundation, and building these out, through collaboration and dialogue to a set of outcomes recognised by those who are implementing change.

Perhaps one of the most important things about understanding regenerative agriculture through outcomes is that it prevents us from treating regeneration as a fixed state to be achieved. If regeneration is continuous, no farm can ever be ‘fully regenerative’. Instead, an outcome-based approach asks harder, but ultimately more useful questions. Is soil health improving? Is biodiversity thriving? Are farming livelihoods becoming more prosperous? Are communities healthier?

What drew many of us to regenerative agriculture was never simply a set of principles, but the idea that farming could not only produce food, but also restore nature, improve health, and reinvigorate communities. Now we need to continue the work to make sure this becomes a reality.

Building on the foundations of the Global Farm Metric, the Regen10 Outcomes Framework has been co-developed with farmers’ organisations, conservation groups, businesses, Indigenous Peoples, civil society, and landscape initiatives worldwide. It offers a shared global reference point for aligning efforts across sectors, scales, and geographies. Click here to find out more.

Reporting from Spain’s ancient droving routes, farmer Julie Baber shows how transhumance offers a different way of thinking about food production: one shaped by place, seasons and ecological limits. As climate change intensifies drought, wildfire and other pressures on farming, these age-old systems have much to teach us in the face of rising food security concerns.

“She carries a gun to fight snakes and hyenas”.

I was heading to the airport for a flight to Madrid and my Somali taxi driver was telling me about his 90-year-old pastoralist grandmother.

“She has 2,000 camels, goats, sheep and cows and she walks 45km to find new grass.”

It seemed a serendipitous meeting, given that I was on my way to Spain to learn about transhumant pastoralism and to take part in the annual shearing festival of the Los Apisquillos Collective in La Sierra del Rincón, which sits in the north-east area of the Madrid mountains. The collective was formed 26 years ago in the mountain village of Puebla de la Sierra, its aim to reinstate traditional rural practices and preserve the continuity of knowledge. The collective runs a flock of around 500 sheep and goats, mainly Rubia de El Molar and Negra Castellana, both rare breeds of sheep native to the region. Along with providing meat and dairy products, the flock is used for the sustainable management of mountain pasture and forest.

Lawrence Sudlow is an Englishman with a passion for the ancient droving routes of Spain and an environmental consultant and media advisor for Trashumancia y Naturaleza, an organisation dedicated to the “conservation of drovers roads as ecological highways that connect, from north to south, the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula.” He attends the shearing festival each year.

Despite the challenges, Lawrence is in no way despondent and does not see transhumance as a thing of the past. He explains how transhumant pastoralism is making not only a major contribution to high value ecosystems, but deserves to be recognised as a cultural right. As for the argument that it makes better modern economic sense to transport livestock in trucks, he is dismissive, asserting that shepherds should continue to move their flocks on foot because: “it’s the right thing to do”.

Juan García is on his knees beside the stream with an assortment of other people, felting the back of a Rubia fleece. His enthusiasm for Spain’s transhumance traditions is contagious. Working with Ecologists in Action and a key player in the transhumance campaign, he defends “both the extensive ancestral culture of transhumant livestock farming and the sustainable use of the 125,000km of livestock trails.” He points out that the ancient drove routes were given official recognition in 1273 by King Alfonso X “The Wise”, and that at this time the “Royal and Honoured Council of the Mesta,” was founded, an association of transhumant livestock farmers, with considerable de facto power.

Juan García and Lawrence make a formidable team; along with the charismatic Álvaro, one of the founders of the collective and whose quiet authority guides its work.

The shearing festival is a joyous occasion, with music and dancing and the sharing of food. Exactly when the sheep get sheared seems to be fairly random, but the slow start gives us time to have breakfast and spend time with other members of the collective – learning how to use Sergio’s French carding machine and improvising drop spindles with bits of doweling rod and Marta’s onions.

It also gives me time to consider Lawrence’s words on the purpose of transhumant pastoralism and it being the right thing to do. For hundreds of years shepherds have exercised their right to move livestock on foot along the extensive network of drove roads or ‘cañadas’ throughout Spain. The seasonal movement of thousands of grazing animals has shaped the landscapes and contributed considerably to the high-value ecosystems of those routes, much as the migration of wild herds do in other parts of the world. In modern times the continuation of this age-old practice has become more challenging, not just for reasons such as lack of investment, rural depopulation and foreign imports, but also because of physical obstructions on the traditional routes.

Today, most shepherds use lorries to transport livestock to and from their summer and winter grazing grounds. This has led to a loss of biodiversity and a significant increase in the risk of uncontrollable wildfires due to the scrubbing up of the cañadas that formerly acted as fire breaks. Manuel Bahíllo, secretary for Trashumancia y Naturaleza, explains: “Transhumance controls the overgrowth of scrubland”. If it ceases, “all that biomass that the livestock neither eat nor trample remains in the landscape” acting as “fuel that only needs a spark to ignite”. Other transhumant farmers agree. “Fires can be stopped, that’s been proved time and again”, says Javier, a farmer from Sanabria. “The fire attacked, more or less, depending on the amount of forest fuel it encountered”.

Juan García also points to depopulation of the rural areas facilitating the “spectacular growth of forest and scrubland throughout Spain”. People like Lawrence and Juan García work hard, through their respective organisations, to keep the drove roads open, for the shepherds and for the rural population as a whole. But economics, biodiversity and fire management are only part of the picture. “The right thing to do”, encompasses all these elements but there is something else, less tangible, more instinctive and primitive, that drives it. Maybe it is an ancestral pull or just that our souls need a slower, more connected way to move across country. “Solvitur ambulando”, as the saying goes: “It is solved by walking”.

Every autumn, Álvaro, Sergio, Marta and other members of Los Apisquillos, leave Puebla de la Sierra with their dogs and several hundred sheep. Over a couple of weeks, they walk the 240kms to Casa de Campo – the largest public park in Madrid. The sheep manage the park through the winter months and take advantage of the grazing at a lower altitude, leaving the mountain pastures to rest.

At a time when drought and wildfires are affecting Spain, and many other countries as never before,  it is essential that the old transhumance routes stay open. Livestock needs the cooler mountain pastures through the hot dry summers; tinderbox lowland pastures need the scrub cleared by grazing livestock. The country as a whole meanwhile, needs the protection of the cañadas that cut through forests and plains.

In May, after lambing in the shelter of the park, the flock of Los Apisquillos will head home to Puebla de la Sierra, where they will be shorn and the annual cycle of extensive livestock farming continues. From the Somali grandmother to the shepherds of Spain, there are lessons here for all of us in the resilience of food systems that are shaped by place, that adapt to seasonal cycles and that support the long-term health of the land.

Learn more about transhumance and its role in wildfire management in this article by Juan García. For more about sustainable grazing livestock in a UK context, you can read our Grazing Livestock report here.

Once a thriving UK industry, leather production in the UK had all but disappeared. So why are global luxury brands suddenly so interested in it again and what does it mean for fashion (and farmers)? Brodie Crouch investigates.

Not that long ago, leather was a fairly ubiquitous part of our lives and wardrobes, used for everything from sofas to shoes. The rise of cheaper synthetic materials and overseas textile manufacturing however, quietly changed that, wiping out demand and with it, the tannery businesses that converted raw hides into leather.

The result? Many hides in the UK are now either shredded, fed into biodigesters, or dumped in landfill. There’s a tragedy here in the waste itself, but also in the loss of jobs and a once vibrant British industry. There is also the sizeable knock-on impact on the UK’s local abattoir sector – a vital part of a secure UK food chain already in steep decline. Lose the abattoirs and you lose access to local meat, protected provenance and more local jobs – not to mention the impact on animal welfare when livestock are forced to travel miles to slaughter. Read more about the importance of why local abattoirs matter here.

Be all that as it may, industries and technologies change with the passage of time, and with it, the jobs we do and how we live – societies have never been static. We only need to look to AI to know that. Which brings us to the question of whether and why we should care about the decline of British leather at all? Is it an industry that has run its natural course and if so, why are luxury brands such as Mulberry suddenly fanning the flames of a revival? What would a revival even look like?

What we do know, is that British leather in 2026 still faces the same economic headwinds that first drove its decline. It also faces sustainability criticisms, not to mention its links to meat consumption. There are broader concerns too around leather in any context, with global supply chains linked to deforestation, poor animal welfare, toxic working conditions and climate impacts. A recent academic journal article published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering highlights that the global average emissions attributable to one kilogram of finished bovine leather product is more than twelve times higher than vegan alternatives.

But before you reach for that pair of pleather trainers, there is a more nuanced story to tell. What if we could create leather products in Britain made from hides that would otherwise go to landfill, with complete farm-to-product traceability, and where supplying farms maintained the highest standards of animal welfare? What if the cattle grazed species-rich pastures that supported biodiverse landscapes, and the resultant hides were tanned using traditional vegetable-based methods instead of conventional (damaging) chromium approaches? What if using those hides were to support a reduction in the climate impact of our food system, create jobs and support a devolved food and farming system that would underpin increased food resilience for all of us? Is it all an impossible dream?

“What if we could create leather products in Britain made from hides that would otherwise go to landfill, with complete farm-to-product traceability, and where supplying farms maintained the highest standards of animal welfare?”

Utilising a network of pasture-based cattle properties, a local abattoir, and a traditional tannery, British Pasture Leather (BPL) has demonstrated that this is in fact, already very much a reality. In a unique partnership with Mulberry, the leather is already being expertly crafted into high-end products in Mulberry’s Somerset factories.

BPL is not alone. Through their Service for Farms, any UK farm can have leather from their own hides, and Wiltshire farmer Andy Rumming is using leather from his beef cattle too, even offering on-farm workshops for people to make their own shoes.

The production systems from which these hides come are not new; rather they follow a style of cattle farming that has been practiced for generations in Britain: species-rich grasslands grazed by native breeds, interspersed with hay meadows, hedgerows and woodlands. The farms produce high-welfare, high-quality, grass-fed beef and premium value hides.

And the tanning process? Famously rich in toxic chemicals that pose a threat to people and planet, are heavy on the water usage and create plenty of difficult to deal with waste, the industrial leather process faces significant and justifiable criticisms that haven’t gone away.

In small UK tanneries such as Thomas Ware and Sons in Bristol (used by BPL) and Great Cotmarsh Farm in Wiltshire, however, things look rather different. Here hides are transformed by highly skilled craftspeople into premium leather using centuries-old methods. In stark comparison to the conventional chromium-based tanning approach that takes days or weeks, naturally occurring tannins from vegetable matter (like the bark stripped off branches) tan hides over a period of months. These traditional approaches also remove chromium from the equation, decoupling production from the problematic mining of raw chromium ores.

Separating supply chains – industrial from craft –and then communicating what that difference is and why it matters, is the next crucial step in this story if it is to be a successful one. Upon this narrative, rests the foundation for demand and justification for an inevitably higher price-tag.

Robust proof is equally crucial, and this is perhaps where the Global Farm Metric can really make a difference: a measurement framework that allows us to look more accurately at the environmental and social sustainability of different farming practices. In the context of a re-emergent leather industry, this would help brands to source traceable leather from farms demonstrating positive outcomes for biodiversity, animal welfare and climate. The proof not only justifies the price tag, but will only become more important as scrutiny over sustainable sourcing increases, both in fashion and beyond. It is only with such evidence that that this British leather will be able to show its true value, and convince the buying public that this is a product that they can both invest and trust in.

Find out more about British Pasture Leather here. And for more about local abattoirs and why we need to protect their future, click here.  

Artisan cheese supplier, Neal’s Yard Dairy and the Sustainable Food Trust, have been working together for a number of years to assess the sustainability of the farming systems of the cheesemakers who supply produce for NYD. The SFT’s Global Farm Metric (GFM) framework takes a holistic approach to measuring on-farm sustainability, taking into consideration the environmental, economic and social elements of the farm and how these are all interconnected. The Global Farm Metric Cheese Selection is now available to purchase at Neal’s Yard Dairy – this selection celebrates just some of the farmhouse cheesemakers who participated in our GFM farm trial.

When we choose to work with a given cheese at Neal’s Yard Dairy, flavour has always come first, but flavour has never been the only thing that matters. For nearly fifty years we’ve worked closely with independent cheesemakers, many of whom also farm the animals that produce the milk for their cheese. We visit their farms, spend time in their dairies, taste with them, and build relationships that often span decades. Our decisions about the cheeses we represent have always been shaped by a holistic understanding of the businesses behind them.

At the same time, we recognise that the questions people ask about food are changing. More and more of our customers want to understand not only how a cheese tastes, but how it was produced. What impact does a farm have on wildlife? How are animals managed? How resilient is the business? What contribution does it make to its local community? These are important questions, but they aren’t easy ones to answer.

Why the Global Farm Metric?

For several years we’ve been interested in finding better ways to understand and communicate the environmental and social dimensions of the farming systems behind the cheeses we sell.

Through our longstanding relationship with Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust, and the many conversations we’ve shared around his kitchen table during visits to his farm in Wales to select Hafod Cheddar, we became aware of the work underway to develop the Global Farm Metric (GFM).

Rather than focusing on a single measure of sustainability, such as greenhouse gas emissions or soil carbon, the Global Farm Metric was designed to look at farming as a whole system. It assesses farms across twelve interconnected areas covering environmental, social and economic dimensions, recognising that none of these can really be understood in isolation.

That philosophy immediately appealed to us: farming is complex, and we felt any meaningful conversation about sustainability needs to reflect that complexity rather than reduce it to a single number.

So, in 2025, we invited every farmhouse cheesemaker who supplies Neal’s Yard Dairy—that is, every cheesemaker who farms their own animals—to take part in a trial of the Global Farm Metric.

Twelve producers chose to participate. Over the following months, each invested many hours gathering information about their businesses, working through the assessment with support from the GFM team and, importantly, providing feedback that helped shape the next iteration of the Global Farm Metric assessment itself.

Alongside the trial, we also worked closely with Sara Hall, a farmer, former cheesemonger and PhD researcher at the University of Bristol, whose own research into dairy farming systems uses the Global Farm Metric framework. Her expertise proved invaluable, both in supporting participating farms and in helping us go into more detail and achieve a more nuanced interpretation of the data.

What were we hoping to learn?

Like many people, we began the project wondering whether a holistic metric might help us compare the farms that supply our cheeses and communicate those differences more clearly to customers. Could we benchmark our suppliers against other dairy farms? Could we identify particular strengths across our supply base? Could this become part of the way we tell the stories behind our cheeses?

As the project progressed, we discovered that these questions were both more interesting, and much harder to answer, than we’d imagined.

Complexity isn’t a problem: it’s the point

One of the biggest lessons from the trial was just how different farming systems can be, even when they are producing essentially the same thing: milk for cheese.

Some farms operate on marginal upland pasture; others on richer lowland grassland. Some are highly extensive, while others are more intensive. They differ in their soils, climate, biodiversity, infrastructure, labour, markets and long-term goals. The more closely we looked at the data, the more we realised that comparing one farm directly with another could sometimes feel like comparing apples with oranges.

Initially, we imagined the project might produce a clear set of scores that would allow straightforward comparisons between farms. Instead, it became apparent that reducing highly diverse farming systems to a league table would risk obscuring as much as it revealed.

That wasn’t necessarily a failure of the metric. If anything, it reinforced one of the central ideas behind the Global Farm Metric: sustainability cannot be captured by any single measurement.

We also came to appreciate another important point. Any assessment represents a snapshot in time. Equally important is the direction in which a farm is travelling. A business actively investing in improving biodiversity, water management, animal welfare or economic resilience may deserve just as much recognition as one that already performs strongly in those areas.

What did the data show?

Although we don’t believe these results should be used to rank farms against one another, the benchmarking exercise did reveal some encouraging patterns.

The GFM team compared our twelve participating farms against a broader group of seventy-one farms using the same version of the assessment across multiple farming systems (livestock, dairy, and mixed) as well as Sara Hall’s University of Bristol research cohort of twenty-two dairy farms.

Across several categories (including Nature, Livestock, Community, Governance, Resources and Public Goods Delivery) our participating farms generally achieved higher average scores than the comparison groups.

These comparisons provide useful context, but perhaps more importantly they reinforce something we’ve long believed: many of the independent cheesemakers we work with have spent years investing in the health of their farms, their animals and their local communities.

Learning how to communicate sustainability honestly

Alongside the farm assessments, we also surveyed our own colleagues and customers to understand what kinds of information people find most valuable when buying cheese.

Taste remains the primary reason people choose a cheese, but many customers also told us that how that cheese was produced and the values of the businesses behind it are also very important to them when making buying decisions.

At the same time, the project reminded us just how difficult it is to translate complex data into something that is both meaningful and honest. It would have been easy to reduce the results to a handful of headline figures or declare category “winners”. But the more we explored the data, the less comfortable we became with oversimplifying it. By and large, the results clustered closely together, and small numerical differences often didn’t reflect meaningful differences in farming practice.

Instead, we came away with a renewed appreciation that communicating sustainability responsibly requires as much judgement as it does data.

Where do we go from here?

Perhaps the most valuable outcome of the trial wasn’t identifying the “best” farms, but recognising the commitment shown by the producers who took part. Completing the Global Farm Metric requires a significant investment of time and reflection. Every participating cheesemaker chose to engage openly with the process, examine both the strengths and vulnerabilities of their farming system, and help improve the assessment for future users. We think that’s worth talking about and celebrating.

Over the coming months we’ll begin highlighting participating producers across our website and in our shops, using the Global Farm Metric logo as a signpost to help customers discover the cheeses whose makers took part in the trial and encouraging conversations about the farming systems behind them. We’ll also be launching a special Global Farm Metric cheese selection this summer, followed by a September Cheese of the Month selection featuring more participating producers. In addition, customers will be able to filter the cheeses on our website according to trial participation, to select efficiently for these cheeses if they so choose.

The trial has also changed how we think about collecting environmental information in the future. Rather than asking every producer to complete increasingly detailed assessments, we’re now exploring whether a smaller number of carefully chosen, genuinely meaningful indicators could provide valuable insights while placing less burden on busy farmers.

This project hasn’t given us all the answers, and we never expected it would. What it has given us is a deeper appreciation of the richness and diversity of the farming systems behind the cheeses we sell, and of how difficult, but worthwhile, it is to communicate that complexity honestly. We look forward to continuing the journey.

 

This article was originally published on Neal’s Yard Dairy’s website in July 2026 – find it here.

Solutions for Local Slaughter: Small Abattoirs in Local Meat Supply Chains – Groundswell 2026

The Sustainable Food Trust organised a session at Groundswell 2026 – ‘Solutions for Local Slaughter: Small Abattoirs in Local Meat Supply Chains’. Chaired by SFT Head of Policy and Campaigns, Megan Perry, the panel featured experts from across the sector:

• Eleanor O’Brien, Managing Director of National Craft Butchers
• Kevin Maher, Head of Operations, Food Standards Agency (FSA)
• Claire White, Senior Veterinary Advisor, NFU
• Phil Gordon-Jones, Manager, Fir Farm
• Tom Bowling, Owner, Edge and Sons Abattoir
• Andy Gray, small/mobile abattoir consultant

The well-attended session involved break out groups for in depth discussion and questions with the speakers. The following anonymised summary brings together the key questions and discussion points made during these breakouts.

Summary

Setting up an abattoir

• How hard is it to achieve? Key challenges include financial viability, staffing and managing by-products and wastewater (see below for more detail). The question of how to finance a new project must be looked at closely and with legal advice as there can be issues surrounding this. Drawing on the expertise of those in the industry, including trade associations, consultants and the FSA, is crucial. Establishing that there is a clear need for the abattoir is also a critical first step. Deciding on the size of the abattoir will depend on demand, species, number and availability of slaughtermen and their capability.
• Economic factors to consider: Speakers made clear that an abattoir must run efficiently and that comes at a cost – the farmers who will use the abattoir must be prepared to pay full market value for the service, otherwise the abattoir simply won’t be viable. Running an abattoir is different from a farm business with its own core product. You must be prepared to work extremely hard. There are busy periods (autumn through to December, for instance) and quiet periods, and you need to keep the business ticking over through both.

 

Finance and business structure

• What type of business structure works best? That depends on your business model. If you are focused on community benefit rather than profit, a CIC is probably the structure you’re thinking of — there’s a regulator you’d need to apply to. It works well for some businesses, including some farm-based ones. Equally, a limited company with shareholders can work. There’s also a co-operative/mutual ownership model. It really comes down to your objectives, and taking independent financial and business advice is recommended, because there isn’t one straightforward answer. The NFU is worth mentioning too — beyond membership, they provide services, and there are some small funds available to support early feasibility work, which can help you through the early stages if cash is tight. There are also finance specialists such as Tim Field at Oxbury Bank who can help advise. Strict rules also govern how businesses can solicit investment from the public.

 

Funding

• Are any grants available? While the Smaller Abattoir Fund has now ceased, this was extremely beneficial and de-risked investment significantly – Andy Gray and Fir Farm both made good use of it. The Abattoir Sector Group are pushing for more funding to be made available in the future. Other potential options include the Levelling Up Fund, Farming Equipment and Technology Fund and Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL), which some groups are currently exploring.

 

Recruitment and training

• What are the issues with skilled labour? Training a competent slaughterman takes a long time (months to become basically competent, a couple of years to be fully proficient), and the sector faces recruitment and retention challenges. Apprenticeship schemes are being developed with industry training bodies to help address this. They need a temporary Certificate of Competence and license to slaughter. The challenge is getting people through the door in the first place (i.e. attracting people into the industry), the second issue is retaining the people you have spent time and money training.

 

Official Veterinarians

• How does official veterinary (OV) provision work for a small abattoir? Every red meat abattoir must have an OV present at all times when slaughtering, to deliver Official Controls (an inspection carried out by the vet and meat hygiene inspector). It’s rarely done through the local vet, as they need to be officially designated by the FSA to carry out the role. Historically, some local providers charged relatively high rates for this work; over the years, contracting arrangements have been modernised and consolidated, and prices have generally come down. There’s no fixed rota as such, but contracts are structured to provide cover, essentially, around the clock, and there is provision for subcontracting — so if your usual provider can’t attend, someone else meeting the necessary qualifications can step in. Recognising the right level of experience for this kind of work in a rural area, where caseloads can be quite different to elsewhere, is part of the challenge.
• Is there a vet shortage? There is not currently a shortage in vets in the way that was experienced during Covid and post-Brexit.

 

Regulation

• Can you say more about charges for Official Controls? There was a recent court case that’s given the FSA an opportunity to look again at how regulation and cost recovery for Official Controls is delivered proportionately. The FSA say they take seriously the principle that official controls and what they charge for them, should be fair and reflect what’s actually needed. It is worth being clear about roles: the FSA is the enforcement authority — they don’t set the underlying legislation. If people want to see the regulatory burden itself reduced, that is a matter for Defra and Ministers rather than the FSA. The FSA are often asked to explain and justify their own efficiency to ministers, which they do regularly.
• What about the alignment with EU regulation and the ‘5% rule’? A key discussion point was the EU-derived “low-throughput abattoir” derogation, which allows abattoirs to operate with reduced regulatory requirements (e.g. not needing an official vet present at all times), provided the combined throughput of such abattoirs doesn’t exceed 5% of national throughput. The UK has not historically been able to take advantage of this flexibility, and the sector has been lobbying for the 5% rule to be implemented in the UK. It would make a real difference for small abattoirs’ ability to grow and would give smaller operations flexibility to kill a bit more some years and a bit less in others, without immediately triggering the higher regulatory tier. The EU itself has reportedly been looking at raising its own threshold towards 10%, partly because they want the small-abattoir sector to grow. As the sector has consolidated, the abattoirs that remain could in principle do more, but the regulatory burden constrains that. It also affects related services — for example, private-kill services for farmers tend to be the first thing an abattoir stops offering when under pressure, which particularly hurts smaller producers who rely on it.
• Is there any prospect of a specific small-scale, low-volume allowance to be processed without full regulation? There’s discussion of something along those lines — comparable to arrangements in some European countries — allowing a small, defined number of animals (for example, a modest number of sheep) to be processed locally under a lighter regime. It hasn’t been secured here yet, but it is part of the broader conversation. The rationale for the current system is that approved slaughterhouses guarantee proper checks — animal health and food safety — and there’s understandable caution about diluting that as more processing moves on-farm.
• What about the potential for remote inspection technology and AI in reducing the amount of official veterinary time required on-site? It’s an interesting area, and one that is being discussed. It is possible that if more abattoirs are built in remote areas, this will make camera-based inspection more appealing, so infrastructure and appetite may end up developing hand-in-hand. However it is, of course, important not to compromise on standards while developing these technologies.

 

Mobile Abattoirs

• How mobile are they? Mobile units are, in reality, only as mobile as their hubs or licensed sites enable them to be. Mobile units still need to be licensed in the same way as a static abattoir, and each site the unit goes to also needs to be separately licensed and have the correct facilities, which can make being truly mobile a challenge. However, the new Orkney Tiny Trailer Abattoir (TTA) will likely be more mobile than previous models as it is smaller and primarily for sheep only.
• More about the hub concept: Orkney will be using hubs – sites that are licensed and have the correct lairage that the mobile unit will dock into. This can be simplified so that existing infrastructure such as sheds, toilets and offices (needed for vets) can be used. Water collection can be done with an IBC. Scottish government (Food Standards Scotland) have tended to be more relaxed than England.
• How long does it take to build? The time taken to establish a mobile abattoir varies depending on several factors including location, design, availability of parts and engineers, funding and project management. Fir Farm’s Mobile Slaughter Unit took 18 months for the initial unit to be built.
• How much does it cost? The Orkney TTA cost £100k, Isles of Scilly will cost around £200k and the Fir Farm unit cost £240k – but more was spent on lairage, chiller, etc. More funding for infrastructure is needed. Running costs vary but Fir Farm costs around £1,500 per kill day.
• What happens to waste and by-products? This is context specific and varies a lot. For example, Fir Farm waste is currently going as category 1 at 50p per kilo. Andy Gray is developing a fertiliser business that can utilise waste. On the Scilly Isles new sewage treatment works are being built which will be helpful for managing waste water from the abattoir unit being constructed there. At Fir Farm, underground pits are used to store the hides, which go to a local tannery. Hides and skins are a major challenge, but there are people working to revive small-scale traceable tanning in the UK, such as British Pasture Leather, which may provide more opportunities in the future.
• Do you need a vet? Yes, all red meat abattoirs, including mobiles, require an Official Veterinarian to deliver Official Controls.
• Can you get a return on capital when being run at capacity? This is unlikely but depends on throughput and hanging capacity.
• What are the regulatory issues of a mobile unit? Mobile units are regulated in the same way as static abattoirs. There is a difference between a fully mobile abattoir (like the TTA) and a mobile slaughter unit (like Fir Farm) – you will also need to think about regulation around butchery services, lairage, etc. Planning permission for lairage and a cutting room on-farm can be easier to achieve first, rather than an abattoir.

 

Casualty and emergency slaughter:

• What are the options for using meat from emergency or casualty slaughter? For casualty slaughter of fractious or dangerous animals — for example, difficult cattle or buffalo — there is a recognised route: the animal is shot in the field, then winched onto a trailer or into a box for transport to the abattoir within the required time window (two hours). Because the animal is shot and bled promptly, there is very little compromise to the carcase. Many slaughterhouses already have the facilities to receive casualty animals killed this way. It is important to note that this route is for acute injury or an accident — it can’t be used for a chronic condition such as long-standing arthritis; the animal must be genuinely unfit to travel due to an acute event.
• Is there any prospect of extending this to animals in the field with more general acute welfare needs? There is an ongoing conversation about broadening the ability to shoot animals in the field in a wider range of acute situations, since it is arguably a considerably better welfare outcome for the animal than transport followed by conventional slaughter — even accounting for how things look from the outside.

 

Poultry and game slaughter

• What are the regulations around on-farm poultry slaughter? Farmers can slaughter poultry on their own farm without a licence provided they stay within set thresholds (up to roughly 150,000 birds per year), and without needing veterinary supervision. Selling the meat, however, requires registration with the local authority, inspection of facilities, and evidence of appropriate training. Red meat does not currently benefit from an equivalent on-farm derogation. Game handling establishments operate under a different (somewhat more relaxed, but still regulated) set of rules to conventional abattoirs. Wild game such as shot squirrels or rabbits generally needs to go to an approved game-handling establishment rather than directly to a restaurant.
• How does the regulation work for game — for example, squirrels or rabbits shot on my own land? If you’re operating as an approved game-handling establishment, there are a fair number of derogations in place compared with standard abattoir rules — particularly around fur and feather game destined for local butchers. Local authorities generally have good, longstanding working relationships in this area, and the rules — while still rules — tend to be more relaxed, for example around inspection of shot game for signs of the shot itself.

 

North Cotswold Abattoir

• Will it serve only the local private kill market? No, North Cotswold Abattoir is aiming to do more than private kill. Their key challenge is ensuring market/slaughter prices work for farmers and supply chain.
• How are you setting up the structure for the Cotswold Abattoir? We have three directors and shareholders with equity shares.
• What financial advice can you give? There are two types of tax relief you can look into – 30% and 50%. It is illegal to solicit investment directly, so people looking to invest must come to them directly via the website. They’ve had 400 expressions of interest from a spectrum of people including local farmers and bigger investors.

 

For more information on setting up an abattoir, take a look at the ‘Playbook’ put together by Claire White which can be found on the Abattoir Sector Group’s website – ‘Small Abattoir Development Support’.

It’s that time of year again – we’ve compiled our favourite reads from the last 12 months, enough to keep you busy until next year!

 

 

Soil to Gut: How to regenerate your health with food  

Author: Lucy Williamson; Publisher: 5M Books Ltd 

Reviewed by Victoria Halliday

Working for 15 years as both a farm and small animal vet, before training as a public health nutritionist, Dr Lucy Williamson brings a unique perspective to the relationship between food and health. 

With Soil to Gut, her aim is to help readers move beyond heavily marketed food fads towards a more grounded and joyful approach to eating. Taking a ‘whole health’ approach, Dr Williamson focuses on the gut microbiome and how it influences many aspects of our wellbeing. By understanding how different foods nourish – or deplete – us, we can create a gut environment in which beneficial microbes are better able to outcompete those that may be harmful. 

Soil to Gut shows how this science translates into everyday cooking and eating, taking readers on a journey through the main food groups and explaining how different foods interact with our bodies. At the heart of Dr Williamson’s approach is the connection between the health of our soils and the health of people. A healthy soil ecosystem drives the nutrient cycle: “the natural loop that moves nutrients from soil, through plant roots, into pasture for grazing animals or into crops that feed us”. As soils have become depleted and increasingly reliant on chemical inputs, the nutrient density of many foods has declined. Dr Williamson argues that this is one of the factors contributing to the epidemic of ‘hidden hunger’, where we consume enough calories but insufficient nutrients. She suggests that, at an individual level, we can help counter this by choosing food with a better story behind it and, at a systems level, by supporting farming practices that prioritise soil health. 

Throughout the book, Dr Williamson combines accessible explanations with practical recipes and tips that make the science easy to apply in the kitchen. Rather than prescribing a rigid way of eating, she encourages readers to build a more diverse, nourishing and enjoyable diet while thinking more deeply about where their food comes from. For anyone interested in the links between farming, food and health, Soil to Gut is an engaging, evidence-informed guide that offers practical advice alongside a compelling case for reconnecting the health of people with the health of the land. 

 

Eat the Planet Well: How to fix our toxic food system – one meal at a time

Author: Dave Goulson; Publisher: Jonathan Cape 

Reviewed by Alicia Miller 

Noted environmentalist David Goulson has written widely about the wonder of insects and their importance to our survival as humans. But in this latest book, Eat the Planet Well, he steps into much broader territory, interrogating the monumental problems of our food system which, he comments, is ‘toxic to us and toxic to our planet’. 

Food has largely become a danger to us. The arrival of ultra-processed foods, especially in the UK and US – but increasingly across the world – has led us down a path to ill health and one that it is hard to escape from. We are not only suffering from non-communicable diseases, but we are also consuming an array of pesticides and forever chemicals among other dangers, when we sit down to eat. Further, and arguably more importantly, the intensive nature of our industrial food system is not just destroying our health, it is also rampantly working to destroy our nature – and without nature, we face a denuded and devastated planet that will feed us poorly. 

Goulson covers a lot of ground in Eat the Planet Well – understanding the problems of our industrialised food system is a good starting place for changing how we eat. Farming organically with an understanding of nature’s value is vitally important. There is an essential balance that is lost when the lives of animals are degraded, plants are sprayed heavily with pesticides and soil health declines. Goulson maps out the problems step by step, helping us to think again about how we eat and what we can do to eat better. Each chapter focuses on a specific issue – Carbon, Cows and Climate Change, Should I Buy Local Food, Limited Land and Water and onwards. It’s a comprehensive analysis of what is needed to create a kinder, gentler world that will truly feed us well.

 

Reaping What She Sows: How women are rebuilding our broken food system 

Author: Nancy Matsumoto; Publisher: Melville House Publishing 

Reviewed by Victoria Halliday

To say that our industrialised food system is broken has become a familiar refrain. We hear it so often, yet supermarket shelves remain full and life carries on much as normal. It’s easy to tune out the warnings and keep filling our trolleys. After all, what is it that we’re actually able to do? 

Reaping What She Sows by Nancy Matsumoto shows that there is in fact much we can and must do, if we’re going to revive our ailing food system. The book serves as a powerful antidote to apathy, telling the stories of women around the world who are rolling up their sleeves to rebuild food and farming for the better, bringing their remarkable ingenuity, tenacity and compassion to the task. 

Matsumoto shows how cooperative movements and creative solutions have been born out of systems of oppression, and how these might energise today’s efforts to build an alternative food system in the face of Big Food oligarchies and late-stage capitalism.  Women have historically been important leaders in food production and distribution, but in many modern societies, they have been relegated to the margins of male-dominated industrialised systems. Yet it is precisely because they have been excluded from the dominant system’s centres of power that women have emerged as early adopters of progressive food system change. 

The stories that Matsumoto shares are remarkable. She meets women who have dedicated their lives to pushing for racial justice in agriculture, who are working to rebuild local grain economies, who are coordinating vertically integrated cooperatives that protect smallholders, who are forging the way in building sustainable fisheries – and many more. By exploring the messy human realities alongside the broader systems at play, Matsumoto creates a fascinating read. Reaping What She Sows is recommended for anyone seeking inspiration in their own work or simply looking for a refreshing dose of optimism and agency about the future. 

Importantly, Matsumoto reminds us that change is not only the preserve of policymakers and producers. As consumers, we also have the power to catalyse the transformation of food and farming: “Sometimes a short, ethical supply chain product is hidden in plain sight in a [megastore]. The onus is on us, the consumer, to look for companies that we know are part of the alt system we want to support.”

 

Eat Your Garden: Edimentals as a beautiful, low-effort way to grow food 

Author: Harry Holding; Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing 

Reviewed by Isabel Eaton 

For those who grow their own food, this has not been an easy summer. High temperatures combined with little to no rainfall have made the watering of thirsty fruits and vegetables a seemingly endless task and, against the backdrop of drought and hosepipe bans, one tinged with a distinct sense of unease. In gardens and allotments across the country, many will be asking themselves whether the time has come to do things differently – Harry Holding’s new book, Eat Your Garden, may well hold a solution. 

Award-winning garden designer and life-long fan of growing-your-own, Harry Holding is a passionate advocate for ‘edimentals’ – plants that look good, taste good and do good for biodiversity and the soil. Doing away with the idea that edible and ornamental plants are distinct entities, with the former often confined to the allotment or functional beds hidden at the bottom of the garden, Eat Your Garden sets out the case for putting edible plants at the heart of garden design for reasons of both sustainability and beauty. 

The benefits of perennial edibles, Harry explains, are manifold. Because they have time to develop strong root systems, they are more resilient in the face of challenging weather conditions and pests, as well as being better for the soil, improving structure and reducing disturbance. Once established, they are also lower in effort and cost as there is no need to resow and plant them each year. And with such a wide variety of plants available, they can provide just as much aesthetic interest in the garden as their non-edible equivalents. 

In this accessible and practical guide, Harry shares the profiles of some of the plants he commonly uses in his designs (from familiar favourites such as fennel and chives to many you may not have known were edible, such has Hostas and Lamb’s Ear); he explores the principles of planting design in the edimental garden, and offers insights into some of the most exciting and experimental edimental gardens from around the world. Photos throughout the book help to bring the topic to life and make this a highly readable introduction to the world of edimentals, which may well get gardeners thinking differently about how to produce food in a changing climate.

 

Eating Behind Bars: Ending the hidden punishment of food in prison 

Authors: Leslie Soble, Alex Busansky & Aishatu R. Yusuf; Publisher: New Press  

Reviewed by Imogen Crossland 

Eating Behind Bars is an essential read for anyone who wants to better understand America’s broken prison system and how it might be fixed. Winner of a James Beard Foundation Media Award, the book follows a landmark 2020 investigation of the same title, exploring the woeful state of prison food in the US. Leslie Soble and the team at Impact Justice, a US-based non-profit working to reform the criminal justice system, shed light on an issue that has, until recently, received little public attention. What goes on behind prison doors is so often out of sight, out of mind. 

Grounded in the unflinchingly honest words of incarcerated people, their family members and prison staff, the first half describes rat-infested kitchens, rotten food and drinking taps running with brown water that “sparkles” with flecks of metal. The fact that many of the people subjected to these meals are also forced to work on one of America’s industrial-scale prison farms feels especially ironic – producing food for the mass market under horrific conditions, without ever tasting it themselves. 

What follows, however, is an uplifting collection of stories: of initiatives and individuals working tirelessly to bring about change. From San Quentin prison in California, where a movement led by residents has produced a ‘Scandi-style’ plan to transform the food environment, to the ‘Chefs in Prisons’ programme in Maine, where Michelin-starred chefs swap restaurants for prison kitchens, supporting staff with menu design, local sourcing and reducing waste, these examples show what meaningful reform can look like in practice, and leave you feeling optimistic that change is possible.

The idea that ‘food is medicine’ is a powerful core message, and incarcerated people understand better than anyone the impact poor nutrition has on physical and mental health, as well as the restorative potential of good food. It’s also made clear that reforming prison systems doesn’t just benefit those inside – the effects reverberate far across families, local communities and the natural environment. 

It’s a radical book on an important issue, one that ultimately affects all of us. The following quote really captures the heart of it: “We’re not making anyone safer by wielding food as a weapon of punishment. Safety comes when people’s fundamental needs for shelter, sustenance, connection, and purpose are met, and when we treat each other with care and respect.”

 

Cheese Trekking: How microbes, landscapes, livestock and human cultures shape terroir 

Author: Trevor Wamedahl; Publisher: Chelsea Green 

Reviewed by Anna Heinlein 

Last year, I made around 900 litres of cider and perry using only the wild yeasts naturally present on the fruit. For me, that’s what terroir is all about: the microorganisms that reflect the place where the apples and pears were grown, capturing the uniqueness of an orchard and the fruits it produces. I’d always thought about terroir in relation to cider, perry and wine, but I did have a real lightbulb moment when I read Trevor Wamedahl’s Cheese Trekking– the same living microbial communities shape cheese too.  

Cheese Trekking takes you on a journey through landscapes and cultures, introducing the people, animals and environments behind some rare and remarkable cheeses. Wamedahl brings each place vividly to life, whether it’s sheep grazing through Mediterranean scrub in Italy among the deep red flowers of sulla, or herders air-drying yak milk cheese on the roofs of their ‘gers’ (circular structures known to many as yurts) in the Mongolian steppe. Along the way, he explores the agroforestry and pastoral systems that have evolved alongside these native livestock breeds and traditional foods, showing how closely they are intertwined with the landscapes that sustain them. He describes this as ‘deep terroir…a direct aromatic correlation exists between a cheese and the place it is made’.  

Many of the cheeses Wamedahl explores are made without a starter culture – the cheeses are shaped by four factors (he calls them the ‘layers of terroir’): the livestock (breed, herd size and health); the location,which influences their feed, its mineral content, and the water and air they breathe; and a community of beneficial microbes living on the cheese.  This is, then, all brought together by human cultural practices. ‘To this day, the recipe lives on in a cultural body, the amassed multi–generational experiential knowledge passed down by doing the work and honing the senses to the standards set by tradition. It is this knowledge – combined with the tools, materials, and techniques that forms the layer of cultural terroir. The people are the recipe.’ 

Wamedahl also reflects on his own journey from conventional cheesemaking towards a much deeper appreciation of traditional methods, while questioning how packaged starters and standardised processes have shaped the cheeses we produce and eat today. It was fascinating to learn that, despite these pressures, pockets of truly natural cheesemaking continue to survive. The book has certainly encouraged me to seek out smaller producers, both at home and when travelling. 

The book can be a bit technical at times, but I appreciated the details and there’s a good glossary for your questions. The chapters are easily dipped into independently, so whether you’re curious about Sicilian Pecorino one day or yak’s milk cheese the next, this is a perfect summer read for anyone interested in food, farming and the ways that a place and its people shape what we eat.

 

First Helpings: A history of children and food  

Authors: Deborah Albon and Amy Palmer; Publisher: Reaktion Books 

Reviewed by Amy Warner 

First Helpings is a rich and revealing history of a subject hiding in plain sight: how British children have been fed, taught to eat, put to work, and sometimes left to go hungry, from the medieval period to today. Albon and Palmer, both former lecturers in early childhood studies, bring genuine scholarly rigour to the project, but never at the expense of storytelling. The book opens with the testimony of a Victorian child street-seller, and that commitment to surfacing children’s own voices, so often missing from the historical record, runs through the book. 

The range of material is what makes the book sing. Court records of vagrant children sleeping under London market stalls sit alongside Roman physicians feeding advice, wartime rationing schemes, GCSE cookery statistics, and even a properly entertaining detour through breastfeeding anxiety in Game of Thrones. Contentious topics such as breast versus bottle, discipline at the table, and whether the state should feed the child, are addressed with real even-handedness, and gendered labour is a persistent, well-drawn thread in who learns to cook and why. 

The final chapter on hunger, bringing centuries of evidence right up to today’s UK food poverty statistics, gives the whole book its urgency. Neither author is a parent, and they say so plainly — this isn’t a parenting manual, but something more useful: a clear-eyed history of just how contested “the right way” to feed a child has always been.

 

How to Fall in Love with the Future: A time traveller’s guide to changing the world

Author: Rob Hopkins; Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing UK

Reviewed by Alice Frost

It seems increasingly difficult to find a solid non-fiction read about the climate, nature and environmentalism, that isn’t also incredibly unsettling and anxiety-inducing, so let me introduce you to How to Fall in Love with the Future: A time traveller’s guide to changing the world…

How to Fall in Love with the Future does touch on the devastating consequences that our reliance on fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and mass consumerism has caused, as well as the disproportionate damage capitalism, and most notably, the world’s richest have inflicted on the planet, but this is balanced out by offering a genuinely hopeful light at the end of the tunnel. That light? A time machine.

Hopkins is not talking about literal time travel of course – though how cool would that be – he’s talking instead about the power of our imagination and its untapped potential, envisioning a future where we’ve collectively put words into action and begun to make progress so that we can confidently look to the future and smile – rather than grimace.

How to Fall in Love with the Future shares a radical yet entirely credible lens on the future, reminding us of our agency to create a better future for ourselves and the next generation – totally opposite from the one we’re constantly being told is inevitable and that it’s too late to change the outcome now. It’s true: the future hasn’t been written yet, but we need change and we need it urgently.

However, Hopkins doesn’t inspire hope through purely positive sentiments and cautious optimism – he shares real world examples where transformative initiatives across the world are already creating real change: from a successful local food system in southeast France, where 80% of the food served in schools comes from a local market garden (and is 100% organic!), to the (almost) entirely car-free Vauban district in Germany, where for every 1,000 residents, there are only 172 cars.

By imagining time travel is possible, Hopkins dares us to imagine what we’d want 2030 to look like. Is it greener, cleaner, more colourful? What can you smell? Fewer fumes, home-cooked meals wafting from open kitchen windows, pollinating flowers of the city’s sprawling urban gardens? What can you hear? Bird song, children playing outside, no impatient beeping of car horns? Whatever it is you imagine, Hopkins urges us to question why this can’t be our reality. Think about the small adjustments we can all make to create change, and be cautiously optimistic and hopeful in the eye of very uncertain times.

If you’re looking for a read this summer that will lift your spirits amongst the intense despair and gloom, How to Fall in Love with the Future will do exactly that – this book will dare you to imagine ‘what if?’ and reignite your activism. I’m looking forward to Hopkins’ follow-up: Falling in Love with the Present in 2030…!

And don’t miss these other reads…

The Future of Food Policy in the UK: Recipe for Change

Author: Honor May Eldridge

“This book makes a compelling case for the urgent need to develop a new approach to food and farming—one that integrates the principles of food security and sovereignty. In the face of escalating challenges such as climate change and increasing political instability worldwide, it is essential to rethink food production and future-proof it by prioritising resilience.”

The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart

Author: Kathryn Wilder

“Told from the unique perspective of a woman, mother, environmentalist, cowboy, and rancher, this work of literary nonfiction conveys the joys, challenges, heartbreaks, and qualms of contemporary ranching in the American West.”

Gather: Black Food, Nourishment and the Art of Togetherness

Author: Ashanté M. Reese

“How can we create a world where everyone has enough? We can start by focusing less on lack and more on abundance. In Gather, anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a new vision of food justice that centres the resilience of Black communities and argues that community nourishment deserves as much consideration as individual health.”

After more food and farming inspiration? Read our 2026 film and TV reviews here.

 

 

At a time when governments are once again backing productivity, technology and intensification, are we overlooking the fact that intensive farming systems may be becoming less resilient, not more? The SFT’s Senior Research Manager, Robert Barbour, considers the question in light of the UK’s increasing number of mega dairies.

What kind of food system are we building?

That question has been brought into sharp focus by two recent developments in the British dairy sector. First came an investigation by Andrew Wasley for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, revealing that the number of so-called ‘mega dairies’ – where hundreds or even thousands of cows are kept permanently indoors – has doubled over the past decade. Then came the news that the number of dairy farms in Great Britain has fallen below 7,000 for the first time, less than half the number operating in the early 2000s.

Taken together, these stories tell a familiar tale. Faced with years of low milk prices and rising input costs, many dairy farmers have been pushed into a corner: either leave the industry or invest heavily to increase production. The result has been fewer farms, larger herds and a growing reliance on intensive systems that depend on imported feed, synthetic fertilisers and high levels of production to remain viable.

For some, this is simply the inevitable modernisation of agriculture. For others, including Sustainable Food Trust CEO and dairy farmer Patrick Holden, it points to a deeper problem. As we argued in our Grazing Livestock report, the long-term future of livestock farming should not be judged solely by how much it produces, but by whether it works within the ecological limits of the land while supporting food security, farmer livelihoods, animal welfare and environmental health.

Until recently, the argument for more agroecological forms of livestock farming was often dismissed as unrealistic. The assumption was that lower-input systems could not deliver the volumes needed to feed the population. But as climate change intensifies and global supply chains become more fragile, that assumption deserves much closer scrutiny.

The blockade of the Straits of Hormuz – through which a third of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser is transported – and extreme weather events like the June heatwave in Europe, show why transitioning to low input, pasture-based systems is more critical to food security than ever before. In part, this is because such systems have a much lower reliance on fossil fuel-intensive imports of energy, feed and fertiliser: animals can ‘upcycle’ human inedible plants into nutrient-dense foods and soil quality can be improved without synthetic fertilisers, for example with the dung of grazing animals and nitrogen-fixing plants like clover. The recent news that the Straits has, to some extent, reopened, must not serve as cause for complacency in the drive to transition to more resilient farming practices. Ongoing geopolitical instability means it is unlikely to be the last such instance, with sobering warnings that Europe’s food system is likely entering an era of permanent stress.

Climate change and environmental degradation are, of course, a massive driver of this stress. A significant proportion of our agrifood imports come from countries that are highly vulnerable to climate change, with a Government security assessment, published earlier this year, concluding that the UK would probably be unable “to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food”. But environmental and climate breakdown also pose major challenges for domestic production. In their most recent report, the Climate Change Committee predicted that, without adaptation, the amount of ‘high-quality farmland’ in England and Wales could shrink from 38% to 11% by 2050 under a 2°C warming scenario. Soil erosion is expected to increase by at least 15%, and arable crops will become increasingly threatened by drought, with the worst year in 20 causing 20% yield loss in wheat in the South East of England. Extreme weather is already negatively impacting yields, with England having experienced three of the worst five harvests on record over the past decade driving the five-year harvest average below the 20-year average – an unprecedented reversal.

In short, there are serious questions around whether we will be able to keep on producing food and feed in the same high input, high output manner as we do today. It feels even more difficult to argue that we will be able to use as much arable land to feed livestock – an inefficient use of a finite and increasingly pressurised resource, that will only get worse if livestock production continues to intensify.

Livestock production centred on grazing, on the other hand, could make a central contribution to a more efficient and resilient UK food system by converting grass and other inedible feeds into nutrient dense meat and milk. The total quantities produced would be lower than today; our Feeding Britain report, for instance, modelled a 20% reduction in dairy production alongside steep falls in pork and poultry, due, mainly, to the much lower quantities of arable crops available for feed.

This means that transitioning to an agroecological farming system will go hand-in-hand with changes to our diets, but smaller amounts of high-quality meat and dairy would still represent a significant source of various key nutrients, and one that, crucially, would complement, rather than compete with, the food we get from croplands. This, in turn, could create more space for systems of crop production that may be lower yielding, but which, through greater diversity and better soil health, are more resilient to extreme weather. Research from Wageningen University, for instance, has shown that a global food system where livestock are fed entirely on human-inedible feeds would only require 75% of the arable land needed for a vegan diet, because of the additional supply of calories and nutrients made available through meat and dairy.

Add this to the major environmental issues associated with intensive livestock production, and we have a clear imperative for a shift to farming animals in a less resource-intensive way – and adapting our diets accordingly.  Doing so, will bolster food security and support us to be healthier, all while using millions of hectares of UK grassland otherwise largely unsuited for food production. Realising this vision isn’t easy. As tempting as it is to think that the recent surge in input costs might precipitate such a shift, this seems unlikely, so it cannot be left to the market alone – Government needs to up its game, in all sorts of ways. We also need to broaden our understanding of sustainability and efficiency, from a narrow focus on product-level footprints (which tend to favour intensive systems), to a more aggregated, system-wide measurement of impact – which is, of course, the scale which ultimately matters.

The rise of ‘Big Dairy’ in the UK is certainly an issue that needs focus right now – it is a situation that should make us question whether bigger and more intensive necessarily means better. Yet, ultimately, this is about much more than dairy farming. It is about deciding what kind of food system we want, and what we mean by efficiency, sustainability and food security. If we continue to judge success primarily by output, we risk accelerating the loss of farmers, wildlife and resilience at precisely the moment we need them most.

Read about our London Climate Week session on Big Dairy here.

As food systems took centre stage at London Climate Week 2026, the Sustainable Food Trust was there to listen, challenge and contribute to the debate. In this round-up, the SFT’s Bahareh Sarvi (SFT’s Trials Data Manager), Amy Warner (Head of Fundraising) and Jessica Gunn (Director of Advocacy and Communications) reflect on five of the most significant conversations – from affordability and investment to regenerative agriculture and the rise of ‘Big Dairy’ – and what they mean for the future of food and farming.

The irony wasn’t lost on anyone: as the Capital sweltered in temperatures of 35C, scientists, policymakers, executives and activists gathered in their thousands to discuss the climate crisis. Newspaper headlines screamed “London Climate event on coping with extreme heat cancelled due to extreme heat” and “London isn’t calling, it’s cooking!”; it all felt very real.

London Climate Week Action 2026 was bigger than ever – reportedly surpassing even New York Climate Week in the sheer number of events. There were panels, roundtables, big events and intimate gatherings across the gauntlet. The good news was that food systems as a topic was well represented from the Palace to Goals House. As ever, the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) was deep in the weeds of it all, so if you weren’t able to be there in person – these are the five main things you need to know from this year’s event.

1. The affordability trap

The Economist launched its Resilient Food System Index, a serious attempt by a serious institution to hold companies accountable for food system performance. The Index presents four pillars of measurement and success – availability, quality and safety, adaptability, and climate and affordability. This all sounds very sensible, until you get to that last, despot of an argument that, in reality, has driven decades of soil degradation, biodiversity collapse and public health crises – here now again enshrined as a measure of success.

A UNICEF representative offered the most single, devastating data point in response: obesity has now overtaken hunger as the world’s primary form of malnutrition. Both conditions disproportionately affect people in poverty. Both are driven, in large part, by cheap food.

The SFT view: The race to make food cheaper has not fed the world or made us healthier. It has malnourished us – differently, but no less completely. Whenever a proposal emerges that might raise food prices, industry players (and Government) reach for ‘affordability’ like a weapon – and it works every time. Price has become equated with public good at the expense of every other measure of a food system’s health. Finding new language for this – language that holds space for both access and quality – is one of the most urgent tasks in food policy today.

Find out more here: insights.economistenterprise.com/energy-environment/resilient-food-systems-index

2. The investment gap nobody wants to own

Harry Farnsworth from Rabobank said something that should have made the front page: the climate is still not priced into the market. The reality of agriculture’s risk model still failing to reflect the environmental reality it operates within – global conflict, climate change, degraded soil, dwindling biodiversity etc, and the fact the margins on farming are already too low, means a sustainable transition is simply not investable at scale – unless someone steps up to take the first loss.

Two new funds have been set up to address this: a DEFRA-backed nature bond and a Wildfarmed initiative, both relying on government or philanthropic capital to absorb risk that private markets refuse to touch.

The SFT view: These are promising experiments. But they are two drops in an ocean that requires a tide. The food industry’s lobbying budget runs to tens of billions annually – while philanthropic capital flowing into food system change is measured in the hundreds of thousands. We are bringing a trowel to an excavation that needs heavy machinery.

Find out more here: https://uknaturefund.com

3. Net zero: A useful framing or a dangerous one?

One of the sharpest critiques to emerge across multiple sessions was directed at net zero itself. The framing, various participants argued, has created tunnel vision – a single metric absorbing all available attention, investment and political will, while biodiversity, water quality, soil health and community resilience, are treated as afterthoughts.

The SFT view: Net zero has become too narrowly focused on carbon. Offsetting has overtaken genuine emissions reductions, and has inadvertently rewarded intensive production because it can appear carbon-efficient (see Big Dairy) while in reality still harming ecosystems. Measuring success primarily through CO₂ can obscure wider environmental and social outcomes. Instead, we need a whole-systems approach that integrates climate, food security, ecosystem health and long-term resilience.

4. Thinking in systems, not commodities

‘Regenerative’ might be a buzz word but how to define it? Discussions around the week confirmed the answer remains elusive. Regenerative agriculture however, many now agree, is not a destination, it is an approach to farming that by design is in constant motion. Regenerative wheat is classified as such, not simply because of how the crop itself is grown, but because of the barley, legumes and grass leys that preceded it – the label emerges from a community of plants (or commodities) working together. The whole farm system is the unit of analysis, and most of our financial and regulatory infrastructure is completely unequipped to handle that complexity.

The SFT view: A true understanding of regenerative agriculture (or lack of) has profound implications for how we finance, measure and incentivise farming. Supply chains that claim to support regenerative practice must begin investing in farmers to support the transition. This process must not simply be a matter of passing the cost to consumers, nor relying on government alone to bridge the gap. If a company’s share price was genuinely exposed to the climate risk embedded in its supply chain, that investment would follow quickly. The Regen10 Framework believes that ownership of the transition must not be a dictatorship; each farm and landscape is different and the challenge for each will reflect that. Our role is to define where we need to go, not necessarily how we get there.

Find out more here: True Cost Accounting report and https://regen10.org/outcomes-framework/ 

5. A big debate about Big Dairy

The SFT hosted its own panel on the rise of Big Dairy in the generously donated environment of Goals House. There was a diverse line-up of people in the room, with Patrick Holden at the helm. Against a landscape of the number of ‘mega dairies’ in the UK doubling over the last decade, while dairy farms overall have declined rapidly from 54,000 in 1974 to under 7,000 today, it leaves in no doubt the reality that the message to dairy farmers has felt like ‘go big or get out’.

Today 60% of the milk now consumed in the UK comes from Big Dairy, aka: ‘fully housed’ systems – and the public are only just waking up to this – helped by high profile campaigns from Project Sling Shot. High on the agenda was agreement that the dairy system is trapped in a commodity model that rewards low price above all else. Commodification has simultaneously dissolved dairy’s intrinsic value, and the sector’s control over its own narrative. Stronger storytelling around its stewardship, nutrition and security is vital.

The SFT view: we need a trusted, shared framework on measurement that rewards farmers for sustainable practices, higher welfare and ultimately, human health. The current system is optimised for a small number of actors – we need pricing mechanisms that serve farmers, the public, climate and food security. Bringing people together from all sides of the debate is the first step towards a shared vision.

In a nutshell
What we need now is not more agreement on the problem, but rather the leadership – political, financial and institutional – to act on it.

This makes it all the more striking that London Climate Week generated very little mainstream press coverage. Thousands of people, hundreds of events, some of the most consequential conversations happening anywhere in the world about food, land, water and climate – and the national newspapers were largely silent. When the public conversation isn’t happening, the urgency stays trapped in the room. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what needs to change.

Image credit: Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash