To round off the year, our Executive Director, Adele Jones, casts an eye back over 2024. Adele considers the progress that’s been made towards the food and farming transition over the last 12 months, with a summary of some SFT highlights.
As we approach the end of 2024, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on what has been another busy year for the SFT and a turbulent time for farming.
With the protests in London just a few days behind us and unrest across Europe earlier this year, there is clear disharmony in the farming community at present. As a sector, we have the potential to play a hugely significant role in solving climate change, restoring nature and promoting positive human health and social wellbeing. But with this comes pressure and weighty responsibility. We’re all expecting so much from farmers right now and yet the entire food system as it is currently designed continues to squeeze them, both financially and emotionally.
That’s why, for us, work on financing the agricultural transition remains at the core of our mission. The farming practices that deliver the most value for society must become the most financially viable. We need the government and private sector to work together to introduce a range of carefully tested ‘carrot and stick’ mechanisms that make regenerative farming the no-brainer business model. And to my mind, rather than pitching small farmers against big, we need to think about helping all farmers move in a regenerative direction.
This doesn’t mean to say that small farming businesses won’t need bespoke support in this transition. When it comes to the new farm support schemes, advice, guidance and assistance with data collection requirements will all be key. The same is true further up the supply chain – incentives and regulations must take scale into account to ensure that new rules and requirements don’t discriminate against businesses with fewer resources.
It seems to me that the best way to convince the Treasury to continue to support the food and farming sector constructively in the future, is to supply them with a clear and consistent dashboard that shows where and how taxpayers’ money is being spent on the delivery of public goods. To collect this information, mandatory reporting based on common metrics (integrated into existing schemes and tools so as not to burden farmers with yet another audit) will be crucial. We will continue to develop the Global Farm Metric (GFM) and scale up its usage through tools such as the Soil Association Exchange to help make this possible.
Going into 2025 and beyond, our focus for the GFM will be on its application and how measurement can be used to drive change. We will be using the framework to undertake on-farm true cost accounting studies, considering how common measurement should inform future eco-labelling, and looking at how common metrics can be used to aid the design of sustainable food products through our ongoing collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s ‘The Big Food Redesign’ project. But, as mentioned above, perhaps the most important use of common metrics is in informing new financing frameworks for regenerative agriculture, and we will be working within the Sustainable Markets Initiative to explore this, starting with a pilot in the east of England early next year.
Of course, all this work will only land if we can inspire and reach business leaders, government officials, school children and the wider public. Our new Beacon Farms Network will be key to this and has kick started our mission to get more people onto farms, providing farmers with the resources and support needed to enable them to host visits that will allow everyone to learn more about the story behind their food.
A few highlights of the SFT’s year:
- January – We gave Oxford Real Farming Conference attendees a taste of our upcoming report on grazing livestock, which will set the record straight on the issues and opportunities around grazing livestock when it comes to climate, biodiversity and human health.
- February – BASIS launched our co-created course on Farm Sustainability and the Global Farm Metric, a first step in our plans to develop educational materials to enhance understanding of the GFM and the importance of valuing and measuring sustainability.
- March – The Telegraph interviewed Patrick about the challenges facing the food and farming industry, following his well-received blog on the farmer protests.
