The following extract is His Royal Highness King Charles III’s (Patron of the SFT) foreword from The Harmony Debates: Exploring a Practical Philosophy for a Sustainable Future – also delivered by HRH as a speech at the Sustainable Food Trust’s ‘Harmony in Food and Farming’ conference at Llandovery College in July 2017.

 

 

I feel tremendously humbled by your creating an entire conference out of a desire to understand what I have been trying to point out for so long. For what has seemed rather an eternity, I found people have tended to think – or have been encouraged to think – that I was just concerned to pursue some sort of pet, ‘New Age’, niche farming project for food fads in this country, or just concerned about efforts to preserve the heritage of the past for some sort of ridiculous nostalgic reason, or that I wanted to see a kind of housing development that harked back to some long lost, golden age of building with everything covered in classical columns. What never seemed to be reported was that my concern has always been focused not on the past, but on the future and how best to address the critical environmental, economic and social issues of our day. In the end, I felt I simply had to produce a book that explained my proposition in a bit more detail, and that book was of course Harmony. [1] And it was my attempt to set out how we might approach the way we do things by looking at how nature herself operates, and it endeavoured to explain the simple tenets of the ancient philosophical standpoint that lay behind all of my efforts to put its tireless, perennial wisdom into action, not least when it comes to food and farming.

Now I must say it is particularly appropriate that here in Wales (which, of course, is renowned as the land of song), you should be exploring why I chose that important word as the title of my book. What you may not know is that the concept of harmony also lies at the very heart of traditional Welsh poetry. Some years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the poet and former Archdruid of Wales, Dic Jones, who, as well as being a farmer in Ceredigion, was a master of cynghanedd, which is the ancient system of poetic meters in Welsh poetry. Dic’s poetry followed the same system – with its meters, precise syllable counts and rhymes – so brilliantly that his work was compared with that of Dafydd ap Gwilym who was a contemporary of Chaucer and one of the chief glories of Welsh literature. The system is actually far older than Chaucer’s day. It goes back over a thousand years and, thankfully, is still thriving today.

Crucially, the word cynghanedd may be translated as ‘harmony’ and embodies an approach that seeks to embody the principles of symmetry, proportion and beauty, not just in every poem, but, literally, within every line. Dic Jones actually wrote one of his englyns about cynghanedd itself:

 

Yn enaid yr awenydd – ei geiriau

Fel dau gariad newydd

Drwy ei sain a’u hystyr sydd

Yn galw ar ei gilydd.

 

In the soul of the author – harmony’s words, [2]

like lover and lover,

through music and meaning are

calling to one another.

 

As I say, Dic was a farmer as well as a poet, and that is a rare combination, so I am very pleased to see that the arts also have a place at your conference. It is more commonly the view that things like beauty and harmony, a reverence for the sacred, putting nature at the heart of our thinking and so on, have no place at all in agricultural matters, in the design process, the way we do business, our approach to engineering and, certainly, to the way we might gear our entire economy. It is argued that in a world where resources are scarce, where populations are ballooning, where all that matters is the bottom line and where computers and digital technology can supposedly do the job much more efficiently and dispassionately, to consider a notion like beauty or harmony is to divert attention away from what matters most. Well, I would just say, be very careful. It is worth taking a step back and considering the consequences; what happens when we separate what we are from what we do.

That is what I believe has happened. We are struggling with the deep-rooted consequences of an immense separation. As I try to explain in the book, it has a long history that goes back beyond the dawning of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century.

The first hint of a shift occurs during the course of the twelfth century when the very notion of the divine started to change. For all sorts of reasons, ‘God’ began to be seen as a separate entity – ‘out there,’ beyond creation, separate from nature. And with that came the idea that nature was an unpredictable force without inherent order. Humanity was seen as the instrument of the will of God, rather than a ‘participant’ in creation. And so, as God became separate from His Creation, so humanity became separate from nature, and thus, what I might call ‘the organic unity of reality’ began to fragment. It put paid to thousands of years of understanding of our place in the world and so put the teachings of all the great sacred traditions at odds with the way Western thinking was starting to go.

Now it is important to note that the ancient, but perennial philosophical principles lay at the root of every one of the world’s great traditions, including the Western tradition founded by the ancient Greeks. To put Plato very simply – it was the philosophy of wholeness. It was a perception of the world that lasted right up to the thirteenth century in Christian philosophy too, and it taught that everything is interconnected and therefore interdependent, so that we inhabit a world where no one part of the whole can grow well or true without it serving the well being of the whole. What is more, there is an underlying geometry at work, a constantly moving pattern of life that is proportioned and remarkably balanced.

Sadly, as I charted in the book, that idea of humanity existing within ‘a living whole’ was abandoned by those who led the mechanistic revolution that found its feet in the seventeenth century. We kept the words but tended to forget their meaning. What has happened is that the sense of an animate nature in which we live and move and have our being, has been replaced more or less wholesale by a rather more artificial idea that nature is some kind of autonomous machine with no purpose and no self-organising principles. And for me, that is a very damaging consequence of separating what we are from what we do. You only have to look at the precise and detailed scientific observations we now have to realise how uncomfortably close to the brink it has taken us, particularly when it comes to the appalling risks we are running with climate change.

Nowhere is this separation more starkly apparent than in agriculture. Food production in its rich variety of forms effectively covers some seventy per cent of the land in the United Kingdom, yet in my lifetime I have watched the industrialisation of food production turn the living organism of an individual farm into little more than a factory, where finite raw materials are fed in at one end, and food of varying quality comes out the other.

My great hope is that your conference might strengthen the common understanding of why this approach has to change – why we have to find ways of bringing about a widespread transition to farming, where farms become more balanced and harmonious entities – within nature, within their communities, and certainly within the capacity of the planet.

If you think about it, there is no technical reason why farms cannot become more diverse, nor why they cannot care more for the soil they depend upon; nor why farm animals can’t be treated more humanely. Restoring harmony to farming means having to put back as much as you take out and thus working with the grain of nature – there is no reason why food cannot be produced in ways that enhance biodiversity rather than destroy it, and why, ultimately, the vital connection between the food producer and the food consumer can’t also be restored. Re-forging that critical relationship would, I suspect, improve the chances of us making progress in all these other areas I’ve just mentioned.

What is encouraging, though, is that attitudes do seem to be changing. When once there would have been a discordant chorus of outraged abuse for talking about there being a comprehensive systemic relationship between all things, now eminent bodies in science and learning acknowledge there is truth in this. In many scientific fields, for instance, there is a growing realisation that we are, indeed, utterly embedded within nature’s self-organising living web. To the extent that we are not simply a part of that web; we are the web ourselves. We are nature – her patterns are our patterns. We live and move and have our being within Nature’s benevolent complexity and it is this living system that makes us – and which, incidentally, we are doing our utmost to test to destruction.

This is why, ladies and gentlemen, I find it so unbelievable when people ask why should we bother with the conservation and protection of the Earth’s dwindling biodiversity, or why we should strive to make the terrifying environmental issues we now face such a priority. It is, of course, the diversity of life on Earth which actually enables us ‘to have our being’. Deplete it, reduce it, erode and destroy it and we will succeed in causing such disorder that we risk de-railing humanity’s place on Earth for good.

This is why I have been trying to say for so long that we have to look urgently at what will restore nature’s balance before it is finally too late – and that moment, I hate to say, is upon us. We have to restore that perception of the world as a joined up, integrated unity. We have to reconcile the voices of both sides of our being, the intuitive and the rational; between, if you like, the East and the West in our consciousness.

So I am immensely encouraged by what is going on here in Wales, particularly at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. And I cannot thank enough the Venerable Master Chin Kung for his decision to invest so much of his time and resources in supporting the university’s Harmony Programme which is striving to teach the importance and process of interfaith dialogue and peace, but moreover – and this, for me, is immensely significant – to explore ways in which Harmony itself can be developed as a proper discipline; one which takes a much more integrative view of things, in that farming is as related to the way we build things, as are the ways we approach, say, healthcare or business.

Work is already being done, on the ground, in education, and I gather you will be hearing in a little while how this all works from a head teacher, Richard Dunne who, for some unaccountable reason, as he’s explained, was seemingly inspired by my explanation of the principles of harmony and went on to apply them in the classrooms of his own state primary school in Surrey. Now, as you will hear, enquiries of learning are carried out across the entire curriculum from the viewpoint of the principles of harmony. Which is to say that, rather than separating out the different subjects, as others have preferred, individually studying maths or chemistry, geography or economics, a subject like climate change becomes the subject of an enquiry of learning, which involves the application of all of those key disciplines, and others too.

This then is one very good example of how we might change our view of the world. And perhaps it might be a good start to this conference as you take a look at what can be gained from a study of the systemic web of life we call nature and how so many processes and patterns work so coherently to keep the whole of nature going. If we can apply ourselves to this, my hope is that we might begin to mimic that approach in so many fields of our endeavour. This leads me to my final point, which is to put this question to you – how might these patterns of behaviour, this ‘grammar of harmony’, better serve a more sustainable approach to food production and farming? And to that end, what can we learn from things like traditional architecture, traditional crafts, music, education and engineering, that might enable us to establish a much more sure-footed response to the enormous problems we face by forging a more circular form of economy, as Dame Ellen MacArthur has articulated so brilliantly.

Ladies and gentlemen, I began my own efforts to understand such questions with self-doubt. Now I have no doubt. We simply cannot solve the problems we have caused by responding with a ‘business as usual’ approach, trying to bounce back from every knock we take using the conventional approach, which only compounds the problem. What we have to do is bounce forward by learning from the past. We have to look again very seriously at the philosophy of wholeness that held sway for so long in all of the world’s great sacred traditions. The clues are to be found in the arts of the past, in the music of the past, in the methods and approach of the traditional crafts, in the way we once revered the Earth and spoke openly of our inherent sense of the sacred, but above all in the inherent genius of nature herself. There lie the seeds of the answers, I promise you. This is not backward-looking and anti-science; it is reinstating the discarded baby that was rashly removed with the bathwater. So, the fact that you are about to do just that over these next two very full days is more encouraging to me than you can ever imagine and I much look forward to hearing if you can resuscitate the baby – harmoniously!

 

Notes

1. HRH The Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at our World (London: Harper Collins, 2010).

2. Literally ‘its words’.

 

Special thanks to Nicholas Campion for allowing us to reshare this extract from The Harmony Debates: Exploring a Practical Philosophy for a Sustainable Future – available to buy here.

With water an ongoing issue in California’s San Joaquin Valley, ranchers have stepped in to rethink how to restore the land, in valuable and creative ways. At the centre of this are cattle who play a key role in reviving native and non-native grasses, along with innovative farmers exploring diverse opportunities – from firebreaks to solar farm management.

The San Joaquin Valley stretches some 400 kilometres from California’s capital Sacramento to Bakersfield in the south. With its mild climate and fertile soils, the Valley is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions; some 250 crops can be grown here, from lettuce to carrots, garlic, onions, melons and peppers and, most important of all, almonds. However, nothing grows without irrigation – the climate is semi-arid. California’s highly complex water system consists of hundreds of dams and reservoirs to catch rainwater and snow melt: a network of canals that measures roughly 6,500 kilometres distributes water to farms and cities like Los Angeles and San Diego.

In the past decades, California has seen long periods of drought. Farmers who could afford it paid for additional wells, some as deep as 400 meters. Thousands of these wells reach into the aquifer like straws, sucking it dry very quickly. Over-pumping has led to subsidence, causing roads to buckle and buildings to crack. To preserve what’s left of the groundwater, California has passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). From 2040, well owners can only pump as much water from the ground as can be recharged during the rainy winter months.

The consequences for agriculture in the Valley are stark: at least 20% of agricultural land will have to be fallowed for lack of water, and some estimates are even higher. But according to a recent study by the University of California Merced, the frequency of dust storms has already increased. Leaving ground bare on up to 900,000 acres, would be catastrophic.

Cows to the rescue

Before European settlers arrived in the 19th century, the San Joaquin Valley used to be a sea of grass, grazed not by bison, but Pronghorns and Tule elks. The native grasses were well adapted, and in winter, cold season grasses flourished, while in summer, heat tolerant warm season varieties dominated, and some grasses even tolerated highly saline soils on the west side of the valley. Could these grasses be reintroduced and could ranching make a comeback?

Diane Bohna is a fifth-generation rancher. In 2021, she rented 7,600 acres of land from UC Merced; the land was over grazed, showing more bare patches than remnants of grass. Bohna was an early adopter of Allan Savory’s principles of holistic management, and now, just three years later, 320 cow-calf pairs and a few bulls munch their way through a sea of knee-high grasses. “In the first year, we were lucky and got a wet winter,” says Bohna. There was still a seedbank of native grasses in the soil, and having the cattle graze them right – ‘bunched’ as a tight group and for a short period of time – helped re-establish those grasses. The animals will stay over winter, and during the summer months Bohna and her crew drive them to high altitude pastures in the Sierras on horseback, like the cowboys of old.

Earlier this month, the EAT-Lancet Commission launched its much-anticipated second report at the EAT Forum in Stockholm, accompanied by significant publicity and widespread social media attention. Here, our CEO, Patrick Holden, responds to the report.

Earlier this month, the EAT-Lancet Commission launched its much-anticipated second report at the EAT Forum in Stockholm, accompanied by impressive publicity and widespread social media attention.

Many of my friends hold influential roles within the EAT Forum, and I was invited to contribute to their Farmers and Fishers Consultation. Yet despite this engagement, I don’t believe the final report sufficiently reflects the perspectives and lived experiences of farmers on the ground.

So, what do I think of the report?

Firstly, there are some important and welcome conclusions:

• It rightly critiques the current food system, which is operating beyond several planetary boundaries.
• It calls for a shift to food systems that are environmentally and ethically sound and recognises the critical importance of a socially just transition.
• It highlights the need for financial support for sustainable agriculture.
• It makes clear the need for dietary shifts in line with ecological limits.

These are significant and commendable. However, I believe the approach the report takes is fundamentally flawed, with significant implications for our understanding of what represents a truly sustainable approach to food production.

1. A top-down, diet-first framework

The cornerstone of the EAT-Lancet report is the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, a universal dietary template based on an analysis of the health effects of different foods. I have two overarching problems with this approach. First, while the report’s recommendations do provide some flexibility in food choices, I take real issue with the inference that diets that exist outside the framework EAT-Lancet propose are unhealthy. Humans are, after all, a remarkably flexible species, able to thrive on a hugely diverse range of different diets. There are also all sorts of things we don’t know about the health impacts of different dietary choices, including evidently relevant factors like production and cooking method that are often not even considered in diet health studies.

Second, because EAT-Lancet’s dietary guidelines are based entirely on a top-down reading of health impacts, they have not been informed by any analysis of what different regions can sustainably produce. This, in my opinion, is a major flaw that risks missing practical, on-the-ground farming considerations that are obviously fundamental to the question of what we can and should eat. Future diets should instead reflect the food output from truly sustainable farming systems – which will vary by region. In other words, diets must emerge from farming systems that work with nature, not be imposed upon them.

2. Lack of clarity on how we should farm

This brings me to my next concern, which is that the report is inconsistent in spelling out what changes to farming systems will be needed in the future. On the one hand, the report speaks to the benefits of adopting more ecological farming practices and produces some useful figures around the potential of these to reduce the global food system’s environmental impacts. It also contains some important criticisms of industrial systems. At the same time, however, the report’s top-line modelling appears to assume further increases in agricultural yields in regions where these are already high (e.g. Europe), and this can only mean a continuation of a predominantly industrial approach – the opposite of the ecological systems the report claims to be supporting. All this does in my opinion is contribute to the ongoing confusion around which farming practices and systems we need to support – those based on ecological principles – and the ones which we need to move away from, that are heavily reliant on fossil fuel and energy-intensive inputs.

Future diets should instead reflect the food output from truly sustainable farming systems – which will vary by region. In other words, diets must emerge from farming systems that work with nature, not be imposed upon them.

3. Meat reduction without nuance

All of this is relevant to the question of meat and dairy. EAT-Lancet advocates for a major reduction in meat consumption globally. Our own modelling in Feeding Britain also acknowledges a need to reduce overall meat consumption, as do other studies that have modelled the outcomes of a wholesale shift to more nature-based farming systems. There are, however, some important differences in how we reach our conclusions.

Our starting point was looking at how much meat and dairy the UK could sustainably produce, were there to be a nationwide transition to farming systems based entirely on agroecological principles. We found there would be a very significant decrease in pork and chicken production, due to their heavy reliance on grain and feed imports. When it came to beef and dairy, however, we modelled more modest reductions, and this reflects the key benefits grazing animals provide in a food system based on biological principles. For instance, cattle and sheep play a central role in supporting regenerative cropping systems that don’t rely on agrichemicals, help manage cherished landscapes rich in carbon and nature, and produce nutrient-dense meat and dairy from our extensive grassland area otherwise unsuited for producing food.

This is a pattern that other agroecological modelling studies have broadly found. The EAT-Lancet report, on the other hand, argues that red meat and ruminants should constitute a considerably smaller part of our diets and farming systems than poultry. This simply doesn’t tally with what a transition towards a more ecological food system would in reality support. All of this is frustrating, given the report does acknowledge some of the benefits that livestock can provide – it just doesn’t go far enough in linking our diets to them.

Of course, none of this should detract from the need to produce and consume a more diverse range of plant foods – something that we too modelled in Feeding Britain. But if those crops are grown in chemically intensive monocultures or hydroponic systems, they may be nutrient-poor, lacking flavour, and environmentally damaging. This isn’t the future we need.

There are always going to be differences of opinion when it comes to the future of food. That’s healthy. But given the EAT-Lancet Commission’s growing influence, it’s vital that these differing perspectives are heard and brought together.

To that end, I’ve made repeated efforts to engage with the EAT-Lancet community – even inviting them to my farm. When I challenged the top-down nature of their dietary recommendations during the farmer consultations, there was widespread agreement among fellow participants. Yet I don’t see enough of that reflected in the final report.

Let’s be clear: we all want a food system that is fair, sustainable and healthy. But to get there, we must bridge the gap between global frameworks and local, grounded farming realities.

I hope this intervention encourages more genuine dialogue, because if we don’t work together, we risk building solutions that sound good on paper but fail in practice.

In Cyprus, the Kot-Kot project shows how animals, food waste and farming can be reconnected to restore soils and reduce reliance on chemicals. But as writer and researcher David McKenzie explores, the challenges it faces highlight a broader dilemma: will food systems reward regenerative, mixed models like this – or continue to favour industrial approaches that externalise their costs?

There is no single solution to building sustainable food futures. Nor is there a silver bullet for establishing resilient food systems that can best respond to the unpredictable impacts and challenges of climate change. It will take a concerted effort, with myriad approaches and solutions working together.

Still, some solutions have more of a ‘feel-good’ factor than others. And this might be one of them.

An olive grove in Cyprus has been taking an innovative (yet incredibly simple) approach to enhancing the organic matter of their soil, while also helping combat the island’s serious food waste problem and providing a means of reducing chemical fertiliser and pesticide use. It’s doing this by taking retired hens from the egg industry and having them roam free on the grove, fed by unwanted food-waste collected from local schools, restaurants, hotels and businesses.

The project, called Kot-Kot, has been running since early 2024 at Akaki Grove, 30 kilometers west of the capital Nicosia. It was instigated by farmer Elena Christoforos, who inherited the semi-abandoned olive grove from her grandfather, and Nicolas Netien, an environmental engineer and soil biologist who Christoforos brought on board in 2021 to help revive the olive and citrus trees.

“My focus is always on growing soil,” says Netien, who has been designing agro-ecological systems in line with a permaculture framework for 20 years. “I grow soil and let the trees grow themselves.”

Within that framework, Netien looks for any and every technique to increase organic matter in the soil, he says, focusing on maintaining a healthy microbiome for the trees’ root systems. In line with this, a diverse ground cover of plants was first established at Akaki Grove to enrich and protect the soil. But Netien wanted to “speed up” these natural processes and carbon cycles by having animals grazing the ground cover.

Christoforos agreed, but as a vegan, she has a zero-kill policy at the grove, instead favouring the maintenance of balanced, diverse ecosystems in which pests kill each other. She insisted that they could only do it if the animals were not to be killed or used for egg, meat or milk production.

That’s where the “happy hens” come in. Animals are expensive to keep and to feed, and if they weren’t going to have them for meat, egg or dairy production then it made sense, as Netien puts it, to find animals that nobody wants. Chickens, in particular, are “great workers” for the olive trees, since they not only clear the ground cover and unwanted weeds, reverting nutrients back into the soil via their fertile droppings but also provide excellent pest control by pecking at the larvae of insects like the infamous olive fly, traditional adversary of Mediterranean olive growers.

And so, with the help of free-range egg farmer and olive grower Nicholas Schizas, Kot-Kot managed to adopt a few hundred two-year-old hens coming out of the egg industry, who have finished their productive laying years and otherwise would’ve been slaughtered (yet still with plenty of ‘retirement’ years ahead, having a life expectancy of eight years or more).

From there, the next issue was sourcing food for the hens. Again, without any income that would usually come from egg or meat production, this needed to be cheap (if not free).

Coincidentally, however, Cyprus has a terrible food waste problem.

Cyprus generates by far the most food waste per capita of any country in Europe at around 300 kg per year, more than double the EU average of 132 kg/inhabitant. To make matters worse, the island nation’s waste management system has been mired in scandal and mismanagement for years, leading to hefty fines from the EU for continuously failing to meet waste management targets and failing to establish adequate facilities for processing mixed municipal waste (including organic waste), despite heavy EU funding specifically for such projects since at least 2015.

The UK’s rivers and wetlands are under pressure from pollution, droughts and floods, with livestock farming both part of the problem and the solution. In this article, Robert Barbour, Senior Research Manager at the SFT, explores how agroecological livestock systems could help restore water quality and build resilience to climate extremes.

For all that the UK is famed for its reliably damp climate and lush green landscapes, the reality is that it faces a major water problem. This year, an exceptionally dry spring and summer is likely to result in the fifth worst harvest since 1984. Yet it was only last autumn that the south of the country witnessed record-breaking heavy rain that led to the third worst harvest on record. It’s been a bewildering, historic year of weather, but these are far from isolated aberrations. The climate crisis has already increased the likelihood of extreme weather events, and as the planet warms, these are only going to become more frequent and intense, both in the UK and globally.

At the same time, many of our rivers, lakes and wetlands are in a desperate state, choked by sewage and agricultural pollution. While some chemical indicators of water quality have, in fairness, improved over recent years, by most measures our freshwater environment continues to deteriorate – a damning indictment of decades of political and market failure.

These are serious issues, that pose some major challenges for the future of livestock farming in the UK. Intensive production systems, with their often-heavy use of fertiliser and high concentrations of animals – and therefore slurry – are a leading source of nitrogen and phosphate pollution in many catchments, the Wye and Lough Neagh being perhaps the two most infamous examples. Livestock farming is also hugely vulnerable to changes in climate, and the greater extremes in precipitation we are already seeing, pose a real threat to the way in which many farms operate. This is something the sector hasn’t fully come to terms with yet, but if the predictions are right, a much more unstable climate is a reality every farm is going to have to face up to.

How we confront these challenges is, like all things livestock, a contentious issue. Some would argue that livestock have no role to play at all in a food system that works for water. But while every farm and catchment is different, and no one solution will work everywhere, livestock can play a hugely positive role in restoring our aquatic environments and increasing our resilience to extreme wet and dry weather, by helping enable a nationwide transition towards a food system based on agroecological principles.

Realising this will require a shift from the largely production-focused systems which remain commonplace today, to a more multifunctional approach, where animals are rotationally grazed on diverse pastures for most or all of the year, with minimal use of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides or arable feed inputs. Such a transition would help alleviate the massive pollution problems associated with intensive livestock systems touched on above. It could also deliver more direct benefits for freshwater biodiversity, by supporting the sorts of low-intensity grazing practices which benefit a number of wetland plant species. Grazing livestock can even help reduce water pollution from conventional all-arable systems, through the re-integration of fertility-building grass and legume ‘leys’, grazed by livestock, into crop rotations. By naturally fixing nitrogen, increasing soil carbon levels and disrupting pest, weed and disease cycles, leys minimise the need for fossil fuel-intensive synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, both of which are major water pollutants in the east of the country.

These more nature-friendly, agroecological approaches to livestock production could also improve the resilience of our farming systems to drought and heavy rain, in various ways. Shifting from all-arable to ley-arable systems could, for example, help increase the genetic, landscape and enterprise diversity of farms, so spreading weather-related risks. Agroforestry expansion, meanwhile, would provide more shade and shelter for crops and livestock. But perhaps the biggest climate adaptation benefit of an agroecological approach to food production is that it tends to increase a farm’s soil water holding capacity, thanks, in particular, to the higher levels of soil organic matter generally found in biologically based systems.

This is something which grasslands are key to delivering. Stable organic matter can absorb several times its own weight in water, just one of the reasons why increasing soil organic matter levels is a crucial objective. Grassland soils contain much higher levels of organic matter than arable soils, and this means they soak up water much more effectively than arable land, reducing the speed of runoff and the risk of rivers bursting their banks. This is particularly true with semi-natural and extensively managed grasslands, which are far more effective at reducing the risk of flash flooding than those which are too heavily grazed. Culm grasslands in North Devon, for example, hold more than four times as much water as intensive grassland, and have much slower rates of water runoff, even when the soil is already waterlogged. But there is also considerable scope to improve water holding capacity of improved grasslands too, by encouraging more species-diverse, deep-rooting swards. The integration of trees into grassland can also dramatically improve water infiltration rates in pastures, significantly slowing the flow of water and helping reduce peak river flows during heavy rain, as the Pontbren Project in Wales has shown.

Grasslands can play an even more direct role in flood prevention, in the form of floodplain meadows. Clifton Ings and Rawcliffe Meadows, for example, are a crucial part of York’s flood defences, with their combined water-storage capacity of approximately 2.3 million cubic metres helping reduce the level of floods by up to 15 cm. The capacity of grasslands to store huge quantities of water can bring major benefits during periods of drought, too – including, again, in arable rotations that incorporate temporary leys.

Realising this sort of approach to livestock production at a national scale will obviously be difficult to achieve, requiring major changes in farming practice, and a shift to diets more closely aligned to what the land can sustainably support.

There are reasons for hope, though. The sorry state of our freshwater environment is now a headline issue that has energised a large swathe of society, and this has helped force government into action. There have, for instance, been some promising announcements around policy and regulation, two intensive poultry units have recently had their planning permission removed, and the massive problem of nitrogen pollution is now finally beginning to receive the attention it deserves, in no small part thanks to the work of the Sustainable Nitrogen Alliance (of which the SFT is a member) and others. However, this is only a start, and governments – and indeed every actor in the food system – need to go much further in helping farmers produce food in a way that delivers plentiful clean water.

You can read more about grazing livestock and their role in a sustainable food system in our report, Grazing Livestock: It’s not the cow but the how.

Featured image taken at Treehill Farm by Cath Shellswell.

Ahead of the publication of the Government’s forthcoming National Food Strategy (NFS), food systems expert, Honor May Eldridge, reviews the Consortium for Labelling for the Environment, Animal Welfare and Regenerative Farming’s (CLEAR) ambitious proposal for the NFS to call for ‘method of production’ labelling to become mandatory for all meat products in the UK.

More and more of us want to make informed, ethical choices about the food we buy, and these choices inevitably reflect our concerns about the environmental impacts of food production and animal welfare. The SFT’s recent report, Grazing Livestock: It’s not the cow, but the how, demonstrates how, in relation to meat and dairy, the method of production makes a huge difference when it comes to the environment, animal welfare and much beyond. Consequently, it is critical that farmers who invest in better production methods are rewarded for that investment by the marketplace. Seventy-five per cent of UK consumers say they want supermarkets to stock only sustainably and ethically sourced food, and they’ve consistently called for more transparency about how meat is produced.

That’s where CLEAR comes in. The Consortium for Labelling for the Environment, Animal Welfare and Regenerative Farming, of which the Sustainable Food Trust is a founding member, wants to see national legislation to deliver transparent, verifiable food labelling that clearly communicates how food is produced. It is pushing for this to be a commitment within the forthcoming National Food Strategy (NFS). Defra is scheduled to publish the NFS in the autumn, which will lay out the Government’s vision to reshape the country’s food system to be healthier, more sustainable and resilient. The Strategy will guide the future of the UK food system and will (hopefully) pave the way for a Food Bill for England. CLEAR is pushing for the NFS to call for ‘method of production’ labelling to become mandatory for all meat products in the UK.

This focus is a continuation of the excellent work that CLEAR has done since its founding in 2021 when it brought together leading NGOs in the food and farming space to lobby the Government for better labelling. In 2021, CLEAR launched its manifesto at Groundswell with the aim of empowering consumers with meaningful information, bringing real transparency to the food system. Clear, consistent labelling will help people understand what lies behind the products they buy. Many of us have stood in a supermarket, holding a carton of milk, only to be confronted by a sea of labels – organic, non-GMO, fairtrade, free range. But what do they all mean? And how do they compare? For most shoppers, it’s unclear.

CLEAR’s vision includes mandatory method of production labelling for all foods sold in the UK, including imports, underpinned by strong enforcement mechanisms. It calls for independent assessment processes that are based on verifiable benchmarks, ensuring the integrity of any claims made. Crucially, the labelling must be clear and accessible, appearing directly on packaging so that shoppers can make informed choices at a glance. It is also vital to build the enforcement capacity needed to support these measures and make the system effective.

At a recent event hosted by CLEAR and the SFT to launch CLEAR’s ecolabelling review report, the authors highlighted some of the challenges of capturing farm environmental impacts on food labels. One theme which kept cropping up was the need for data that truly reflects the farming system that it describes – this usually means holistic, primary, outcome-based data. This is the type of data that the Global Farm Metric (GFM) focusses on. This data provides the truest reflection of farm sustainability, although it does require time and it does have a financial cost. The GFM team continues to work with the food labelling sector to explore how this type of data can feed into more transparent labelling efforts.

While its proposal is ambitious, CLEAR acknowledges the complexities of the current context. The UK’s departure from the European Union has left the food and farming sector in a state of flux. The UK is in the process of negotiating its phytosanitary (plant health) standards with the EU, and that negotiation will also involve consideration of labelling. The outcome will be critical for the future of the UK food system. At the bare minimum, the UK needs mandatory animal welfare labelling for poultry and pork that focuses specifically on method-of-production, strengthening country of origin labelling requirements, and establishing a regulatory basis for sustainability terms to ensure they are used meaningfully and consistently.

As the UK redefines its food system, now is the moment to ensure that transparency and integrity are placed at its core. Mandatory method of production labelling isn’t just a technical fix – it’s a vital tool for empowering consumers to make informed choices, rewarding farmers who adopt higher animal welfare and sustainable practices, and driving meaningful change in how our food is produced. With the National Food Strategy on the horizon, it’s time to embed CLEAR labelling into the future of UK food policy.

Our recent Grazing Livestock report featured several farmers located around the UK who are taking a holistic approach to how they farm. Here, we take a more in-depth look at some of their farms and the benefits of a holistic approach to farming – including the integration of grazing livestock – for animal welfare, soil health and nature.

In our era of bitesize content, simple sells. Whether it’s a product or an idea, silver bullet solutions delivered with snappy straplines flood our social media and news feeds. The problem is that, when it comes to food and farming, these supposed solutions fail to reflect an infinitely complex reality, only serving to further distort the picture.

This is never more evident than during discussions about livestock. We often hear that animal agriculture is bad for the climate and for nature, yet the reality isn’t so straightforward. Recognising the difference between livestock farming that is part of the problem and that which is part of the solution, is a first step in moving towards a more holistic approach to our food system – one that grasps the interconnectedness of soil, plants, animals and people.

But what does this holistic approach look like in practice? Here, we share a snapshot of some of the farms featured in our recent Grazing Livestock report – farms where animals form part of a living system that operates within planetary boundaries while still producing the food that we need. Some of these farms are also part of the SFT’s Beacon Farms Network, which is working with farmers to harness the power of ‘seeing is believing’ experiences and, in doing so, build a body of informed public opinion on how our food is produced.

Hafod y Llyn | Teleri Fielden, Ned Feesey and Ianto Glyn

Teleri and Ned’s farming business is based upon producing and selling slow grown, pasture-fed red meat. The native breed cows are used for conservation grazing on various National Nature Reserves (NNR), Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Special Areas of Conservation (SAC), whilst the sheep mainly graze the home farm’s floodplain rush pasture and are on parkland in the winter. The animals live outdoors year-round, generally in one large family group or ‘mob’, which has benefits for animal welfare, soil health and nature. Surveys show around 70 different types of grasses and forbs (flowering plants) per field, and nearly 45 different types of birds, including rare species. Grazing by the livestock also helps to control Himalayan Balsam, an invasive, non-native plant species. A ‘closed loop system’ is in operation, with no artificial fertiliser or bought-in feed crops required as the livestock feed entirely off pasture, shrubs and trees. Insecticides and anti-parasite drugs are not used on the cattle, and by checking animal dung for eggs, the need for wormers is reduced, the intention being to feed the soil microbiology with the livestock’s dung, as opposed to damaging it. Teleri and Ned are very lucky to have a local, family-run abattoir and butchery 20 minutes away, and they generally sell their meat locally.

Yatesbury House Farm | Richard Gantlett

Richard Gantlett is an organic and biodynamic farmer, with a herd of around 350 Aberdeen Angus beef cattle incorporated into a rotational mixed farming system, along with crops, including wheat, barley, rye and oats. The cattle graze on diverse herbal leys, containing up to 29 species of plants. These provide nectar for wild pollinating insects as well as the bees that provide honey for the farm. Richard has also embraced a ‘forest farm’ approach, allowing his cattle to graze the trees and shrubs on 64 acres of native woodland, which provides shelter from sun and rain. In return, grazing by the cattle increases the plant variety under the trees. The whole farm supports an abundance of species, from bluebells and orchids to hares, tree sparrows, corn buntings, quail and short-eared owls. One of the most important goals for Richard is achieving a ‘zero fossil fuel farm’ and he continues to find ways to work with electric vehicles as well as generating and storing electricity on the farm. In 2019, a Farm Carbon Toolkit audit found that the farm was sequestering 10 times more carbon than it was emitting. While this carbon balance is extremely positive, it was not initially a farm goal. Increasing the life in the soil, by growing diverse leys and grazing cattle, has been the route to carbon storing, nutrient cycling and water absorption.

Home Farm | Sophie and Tom Gregory

Sophie and Tom Gregory are first-generation organic dairy farmers. Their focus is on producing nutrient-dense milk from grass – milking a herd of 400 Jersey, Friesian and Shorthorn cows. They have been farming organically for over 10 years, motivated by animal welfare as well as the economics of an organic approach, but more recently deciding to take a step further in improving soil health by moving towards regenerative principles, including mob grazing and the introduction of diverse herbal leys. Alongside the benefits to the soil and biodiversity that farming regeneratively has brought, Sophie and Tom are especially dedicated to maximising the social value of farming in this way, something which is much harder to measure (see the Global Farm Metric’s website for more on measuring social outcomes). Part of the SFT’s Beacon Farms Network, Home Farm serves as an educational platform, regularly hosting visitors, from school children to farming discussion groups, in order to inspire more people to become involved in regenerative farming, especially those from non-farming backgrounds.

Edinglassie | Malcolm Hay

The name Edinglassie is derived from the Gaelic ‘Eudanglasaich’ meaning ‘steep grazing’. It is an upland estate with sheep and native breed cattle. Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm’s farm system was heavily reliant on artificial fertiliser, producing large amounts of silage to see their heavy continental-breed cattle through the winter. These practices, along with a succession of wet winters, resulted in damage to the fields, which sparked their conversion to organic and the use of native breeds better suited to the steep, wet ground. Edinglassie is a good example of a Highland estate where grazing plays a crucial role in helping to maintain habitats, including grasslands and wetlands of high biodiversity value. Well-managed grazing has enabled a wide variety of small plant species to thrive, many of conservation interest, without being outcompeted by more dominant, common species. The quality and diversity of habitats on the estate support many other endangered species, including birds like black grouse, snipe and curlew. Crucially, the transition to organic has also brought financial savings through the elimination of expensive inputs and breeding their own replacement stock, along with the premium received for organic beef and lamb.

Want to see sustainable farming in action? Join us for our Beacon Farms weekend event on 11^th – 13^th July at Holden Farm Dairy. The programme will include workshops, panel discussions and experiential farm walks, with locally sourced food and live music. For more information and to book your ticket, click here.

Ahead of its release on World Oceans Day this Sunday, the SFT’s Bonnie Welch reflects on David Attenborough’s powerful new documentary, Ocean, drawing parallels between land-based farming and the fishing industry.

David Attenborough’s new film Ocean is both captivatingly beautiful and harrowing – the kind of film you wish you’d never seen but could watch again immediately. I attribute this feeling to the incredible cinematography, capturing both the magnificence and delicate intricacies of marine life, as well as to the significance of its central message, that “the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea”.

The ocean absorbs over 90% of excess heat from global warming, generates more than half of the oxygen we breathe, and acts as a vital carbon sink. And yet the ocean, once considered wild and mysterious, has changed dramatically over the course of Attenborough’s lifetime – driven by the massive growth in industrial fishing fleets and the rise of aquaculture (i.e. fish farming). Overfishing, pollution and climate change are now driving marine ecosystems to collapse. So how did we get here? And what can we learn from the mistakes and progress made on land?

Agriculture: A cautionary tale

As populations have risen around the world, industrial scale fishing and aquaculture have exploded in the past few decades. Although land-based agriculture is thousands of years old, it has undergone a similar trajectory. From early hunter-gatherer societies (pre 10,000 BCE) who hunted wild animals and foraged for plants, nuts and berries; to the domestication of plants like wheat, barley and rice, and animals like sheep and cattle (10,000 BCE – 3,000 BCE); to the “Green Revolution” of the 20th century with the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, irrigation systems, intensive monocultures and the factory farming of livestock; and most recently in response to this, the rise of organic, agroecological and local food movements.

This journey has been long and fraught with tensions and challenges. Today, almost half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, contributing to biodiversity loss, soil degradation and climate change. And yet, we have at hand the systems that can help turn farming from being part of the problem, to being part of the solution – improving biodiversity, restoring soil health and drawing down carbon, whilst producing plenty of nutrient dense, healthy food. These regenerative approaches mirror traditional knowledge, embrace nature and prioritise long-term resilience over short-term yield.

We need to prioritise these systems and their ocean equivalents, if we are to stand a chance of preventing catastrophic and irreversible ecosystem collapse on land and at sea. But do we have all the answers when it comes to the oceans? 

Oceans: At a crossroads 

The way in which we have sourced food from the oceans has followed a similar pattern to agriculture on land, from early human societies who relied on fishing with simple tools like spears and hooks (100,000+ years ago); to commercial fishing with boats and nets in the Middle Ages (500 – 1500 CE), and the Industrial Era (1800 – 1950) which saw steam and diesel-powered boats, trawlers and refrigeration revolutionise the industry; and finally to the modern era (1950 – present), in which we’ve seen massive growth in industrial fishing, including deep-sea trawling, leading to overfishing and vast habitat destruction in seas. As Attenborough says, “We are now at a crossroads, with humanity draining life from the ocean.”

Bottom trawling is responsible for a quarter of global catch each year, more than any other marine fishing technique. On the hunt for species such as cod, hake, shrimp or octopus, the method involves large boats dragging vast weighted nets across the sea floor, catching anything and everything that gets in their way, which results in a huge amount of bycatch (discarded as waste) and destruction. 

As fish stocks have declined and demand has continued to rise, we have turned to the farming of fish to fill the gap. Unfortunately, the result has been just as extractive and damaging as industrial fishing. Take salmon farming in the UK as an example: Steph Wetherell writes, “salmon farming began at a small scale with crofters raising salmon in sea pens in the 1960s, but [it] has grown into a massive commercial sector with an estimated 75 million fish raised in over 200 farms across Scotland.” Now a staple in supermarkets around the world, it is regarded by some as the oceanic equivalent of battery chicken farming – high stocking densities, poor animal welfare and increased risk of disease.

The Soil Association, which has been certifying organic salmon since the early 2000s, recently carried out a review into the welfare needs and environmental impact of farmed salmon, highlighting critical issues including fish suffering mass mortality events, sea lice outbreaks affecting wild populations, and the release of harmful chemicals into the environment, even in organic systems. Sarah Compson, Director of Standards Innovation at Soil Association also points out that, “there is so much more known about what land-based farmed species need to live a good life than for aquatic species, despite a recognition that fish are sentient beings.”

One of the many problems of fish farming is what the fish are fed. In the case of salmon, it takes more than a kilo of wild fish to produce a kilo of farmed salmon. One of the most shocking moments in Ocean is footage of vast ships in the Antarctic using vacuum systems to harvest krill – a foundation food for whales, seals, penguins and many other species. I spoke to Toby Nowlan, Producer and Director of Ocean, who described that his role as filmmaker was not to “vilify individuals or fishers, but to show the processes exactly as they are for people to make up their own minds. Because of the nature of fishing – being beneath the waves – we rarely get to see how devastating and violent processes like bottom trawling truly are. The scale of the industry must be seen to be believed.”  

How do we turn the tide?

Despite the damaging consequences of industrial fishing and aquaculture, Ocean’s central message is one of hope – that the ocean can recover faster than we had ever imagined. Marine protected areas are known to protect species within their boundaries, but new research has shown that there is a ‘spillover’ of fish into adjacent areas open for fishing, delivering large scale benefits for fish catch rates – seen by many as a win for both conservation and local economies.

The film references several examples of the ocean’s ability to heal – including the global ban on commercial whaling in 1986, which allowed whale populations to recover from near extinction, and marine ecosystems bouncing back when left undisturbed, including off the Isle of Arran, Scotland and Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii – though even here there are challenges, including Donald Trump’s recent proclamation to reverse fishing regulations in the area.  

On World Oceans Day this June 8th, campaigners will be putting pressure on governments gathered at the UN Ocean Conference in France, to uphold commitments to protect at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 (currently less than 3% is protected). It’s an ambitious target, which involves creating a global network of Marine Protected Areas as well as other conservation measures. For governments to listen, we all need to get behind this. As well as supporting World Ocean Day, there are educational resources, explainers and petitions available via the 30×30 campaign website.

You can also act with your consumer power and support local and more sustainable options. Sole of Discretion is a collective of small-scale fishers in the UK who procure fish and shellfish that have been caught with as little damage to the environment as possible, whilst supporting local fishing communities. The Marine Conservation Society also has a seafood tracker which aims to help consumers make sense of labels and identify alternatives to fish species that are at risk.

With genuine effort, many believe it is possible to balance conservation and harvesting, but questions remain as to how measures to protect the oceans might affect livelihoods and diets, and how best to balance these things. What’s clear is the need to give nature an opportunity to bounce back – both at sea and on land. As Attenborough says, “the ocean’s power of regeneration is remarkable – if we just offer it the chance.”

In his Guardian column this week, George Monbiot raised a number of criticisms of our recently published Grazing Livestock report. Here, we respond briefly to some of them.

 

Dartmoor

Monbiot states: “Sheep, cattle and ponies … selectively browse out tree seedlings, preventing the return of temperate rainforest, which is extremely difficult to burn. In dry weather, the moor grass, bracken and heather covering the deforested landscape are tinder.”

Our response: Overgrazing has undoubtedly contributed to an increased risk of wildfire on moorlands, including through a rise in the dominance of Molinia – a flammable grass that now blankets large areas. But that doesn’t mean that moorland grazing is inherently bad. There is good evidence, including from SW England, to show that well-managed grazing can help reverse the dominance of Molinia, bringing benefits for wildfire risk and biodiversity. Grazing animals play a crucial role in supporting upland biodiversity more generally, with many protected habitats and species benefitting or even relying upon low intensity grazing. That’s not to say, of course, that all of our uplands need to be farmed with grazing livestock – we clearly need to make more space for trees, for example. Still, grazing animals have an important part to play in the more sustainable management of our uplands – a role that is under threat from the ongoing loss of livestock in certain areas.

Greenwashing

Monbiot states: “Celebrities, politicians, billionaires and far-right podcasts, seek to persuade us that cattle and sheep are good for the atmosphere and the living planet.”

Our response: Monbiot is right to highlight the risk of those with ulterior motives hijacking messaging from the regenerative or agroecological movements. But that doesn’t mean that influencers are always wrong on the question of livestock! Livestock can absolutely play a central role in a food system that is good for people and the planet, but we would agree with George that their intensive counterparts are causing a great deal of harm. So, the critical point is to differentiate between the livestock systems that are part of the problem and those which are part of the solution – which is what our report is all about.

We also believe it is a good thing that some of the major food companies and retailers have become interested in moving towards regenerative practices. Our job is to scrutinise any claims they make, and ensure they are not mis-representing the science to greenwash their actions.

Beef, lamb and their land use and greenhouse gas footprints

Monbiot says: “Beef and lamb are the most land-hungry and climate-damaging of all farm products. Their climate impacts range from the methane and nitrous oxide the animals produce to the huge areas they need for grazing, which could otherwise support wild ecosystems far richer in carbon, such as forests and wetlands.”

Our response: Are beef and lamb land hungry? It’s true that they require a lot of land to produce a given quantity of food. But this very narrow focus on land use footprint overlooks the crucial point, which is that grazing livestock can play a key role in a food system that makes a much more efficient use of agricultural land than today. To achieve this, we need to move from diets heavy in grain-fed livestock products, and instead base our consumption of meat and dairy off the output of animals reared largely or solely on pasture. By doing so, we could free up a lot of arable land currently used for growing feed crops (including for soya overseas), and instead use it to grow more fruit, vegetables and pulses – and, in a more sustainable manner than today. Such a scenario would involve an overall reduction in the amount of livestock products we consume, but it would still allow for a significant supply of nutrient-dense meat and dairy, produced from the 70% of the UK’s agricultural area only suited for growing grass, as well as from the fertility-building temporary pastures that would form a central part of biologically-based crop rotations.

What about the claim they are climate-damaging? Well, it’s true that beef and lamb have high emissions footprints, when measured in the conventional way (CO2-equivalent emissions per kg of food). Again, though, it is a massive oversimplification to claim on this basis that all beef and lamb is inherently climate-damaging. If we adopt a more holistic approach to measuring climate impact – one that accounts for emissions, carbon sequestration and a wide range of other key indicators of sustainability – it is clear that grazing livestock can play a central role in a food system that works for the climate, nature and human health. To realise this, though, we need a transformation in farming practice and diets – and that is what our report calls for.

Arable land use

Monbiot says: “[The Grazing Livestock report] urges us to stop eating pigs and chickens and eat cattle and sheep instead, while consuming far fewer arable crops, as its proposals would, it admits, greatly reduce output.”

Our response: Our report did not set out to model a prescribed pattern of production or a specific diet, and it certainly does not claim what is quoted above. What we actually say (mostly in our previously published Feeding Britain from the Ground Up report), is that in a sustainably farmed UK, we could produce a greater diversity of plant foods, including more pulses, fruit and vegetables, but that production of pork and poultry (which relies heavily on arable feeds) would reduce dramatically. This is due, in large part, to a 50% reduction in grain output – linked to a move away from chemical production to fertility building crop rotations. As a consequence, both chicken and pork would become more expensive and consumption would have to be reduced. On the other hand, beef, lamb and dairy would see less significant falls in production, and would continue to form an important part of the national diet. This, as mentioned above, is because of the importance of grasslands in a biologically-based farming system.

Monbiot says: “How much land would be needed under this system to produce the crops we eat? Would we become even more dependent on imports, taking grain from hungrier people overseas or commissioning the destruction of forests, savannahs and wetlands?

Our response: Once again, we covered these issues in our Feeding Britain from the Ground Up report, which concluded that if we reduce food waste by 50% and ate differently, as described above, we could maintain our current levels of national self-sufficiency in staple foods. Other studies which have modelled a large-scale transition to a more biologically-based approach to farming have come up with similar findings.

Monbiot says: “Given that cattle and sheep in almost all systems require supplementary feeding, and are far less efficient converters than chickens and pigs, would this proposal really ensure that less grain was needed?”

Our response:  It’s true that at present, many sheep and beef systems do include supplementary feeding, but there are a growing number of farmers who are committed to finishing animals exclusively on grass and pasture, now represented by the Pasture Fed Livestock association and their certification scheme. There is, then, no fundamental reason why the majority of beef and lamb could not be finished exclusively on grass. While there is a stronger case for supplementation with dairy cows, which we factor into our Feeding Britain report, we can and should, still move towards systems of dairy production that use much less in the way of arable feeds than today.

Affordability / “The price of food would soar”

Monbiot says: “When I spoke to Holden, he admitted that the price of food would soar.”

Our response: We acknowledge that the sort of the transition outlined in our report could come with challenges around food prices. However, as our report The Hidden Cost of UK Food demonstrated, the prices we currently pay for food are misleading and do not reflect the environmental and health costs of our existing food system. ‘Cheap food’ is in actual fact not all that cheap. In addition, it’s worth remembering that the UK has some of the cheapest food in the developed world, relatively speaking – and yet we still have a quarter of all households struggling in food poverty. Price, then, is far from the only issue at play here.

Still, ensuring everyone has access to healthy, sustainable produce, is of course a major challenge, particularly when it comes to meat and dairy. Rather than simply replacing chicken and pork with beef and lamb in the diet (as George describes) our report emphasises the need to reduce overall meat consumption, especially industrial livestock products. This reduction can help ‘make space’ for pasture-based meat, without increasing overall costs, including, for example, in the public sector. By connecting pasture-based livestock farmers with the public through short supply chains and local food initiatives, progress can be made to ensure these products are not limited to a privileged few.

 

Featured image courtesy of Christian Kay.

Our food & farming reviews of 2025 are here – what’s been cropping up this past year and worth watching?

 

The Grab

Directed by: Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Where to watch: Available to rent or buy via select streaming services. For anyone interested in hosting a screening of The Grab, please contact ROCO films to find out more, at contactus@rocofilms.com.

The Grab is a must-see film for anyone interested in the shape of things to come as we face climate change and all that it will bring. The future does not look friendly and across the globe a land grab is slowly and quietly mapping terrain that will benefit the rich and powerful and devastate the poor. “The priority is not the people,” says one commentator and this is played out around the world.

The Center for Investigative Reporting has been tracking what’s been happening over the last decade or more – a growing contingent of companies and countries that are buying up land in places where there are ample and available resources, especially water.

China, in particular, is concerned with the future of their food and water having lived through the Great Chinese Famine – three devastating years between 1959 and 1961. The impact of the famine led to an ongoing concern for the food security of China that continues to this day. In response to these concerns, the Chinese government is exploiting Africa’s land and water, like many other countries with depleted or limited resources.

What results from these land grabs is the loss of land, water and valuable resources taken from small communities and countries around the world that have been pushed aside and pillaged by bigger corporate and governmental interests, slowly creating a world of have and have nots –  an imbalance that may generate future global wars. “It’s inequity. It’s seeding future conflict. It’s destabilising the world,” says lead reporter Nathan Halverson. The situation as portrayed in The Grab urges us to be wary of what lies ahead.

 

One Last Farm

Director: Nikki Dodd

Where to watch: Details of upcoming screenings will be available here. Alternatively, if you’d like to host a screening, you can contact Nikki to find out more.

One Last Farm is the story of Yew Tree Farm – the last working farm in Bristol, England. Over the past half century or more, farming has disappeared from the city. Catherine Withers has been fighting hard for 22 years now to keep the farm going, facing an array of threats to its existence during that time. The farm is small with a remarkably diverse array of landscapes – woodland, ancient meadows, a stream that runs through the farm drawing a broad range of creatures and birds. The farm is now a Site of Nature Conservation Interest and a testament to the value of farming with nature.

Withers does not own all of the land on the farm, and this has left her vulnerable. She’s already lost 13 acres to a private landowner and now the city of Bristol wants to take back 20 acres that have been leased to Yew Tree Farm since the 1960s. The potential impact on the farm’s wildlife could be devastating and concern for this is ongoing.

Catherine is in for the long fight and she’s got a growing band of supporters who share her concerns. There isn’t an end yet to her travails, but the film is a reminder of how easily things can be lost and that they are worth fighting for.

Sadly, while Catherine Withers has fought fiercely for years to keep Yew Tree Farm as it has been, she has agreed to reaching a settlement with other family members that means she will ultimately leave her residence on the farm.

The number of farms in urban fringes has decreased considerably over the last decade and it is unclear what will ultimately happen to Yew Tree Farm. The demands of growing cities are increasingly impinging on farmland. That Yew Tree Farm has survived as long as it has, is, in many ways, a testament of Catherine’s commitment to the land and its creatures.

 

Heal the Land

Directed by: Tom Francome and Hayley Smith

Where to watch: Heal the Land will be screening at TCN, Newark Works in Bath on Thursday 8^th May – click here for more information.

Within the first few minutes of Heal the Land, we’re told that England is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. England ranks in the bottom 3% of 240 countries and territories – a statistic that reveals the tragic plight of much of the country’s wildlife. But Heal the Land isn’t a story about despair and loss, rather, it’s one about optimism, determination and reasons to feel hopeful for the future of nature in England.

The film tells the story of Heal Rewilding’s journey to restore a 460-acre site in the Somerset countryside. Formerly a hunting forest in the 14^th century, the land is now a grasslands site, home to trees, hedges, rivers and an array of wildlife.

Dan, a young ranger at Heal Rewilding sets up camera traps along one of the rivers on the land in hopes there may be beavers, and reviewing the footage, finds indeed that not just one but two beavers are working away on a den. He shares the footage he’s captured with Ruby who oversees Heal Rewilding’s communications and social media work. Like Dan, when she sees the beaver, she’s ecstatic and the passion and excitement at seeing even a glimpse of the wildlife onsite is not only infectious but reassuring – there is a next generation enthusiastic, engaged and inspired about restoring nature.

Heal the Land serves as an exciting and accessible entryway for anyone hoping to find out more about rewilding and the small things we can all do to help support and restore nature. It evidences the potential of what can be realised, given care and commitment. With the US President’s attack on climate policy, the rollback of SFI payments in England and the steep decline in global wildlife, it can be difficult to stay hopeful, but what Heal Rewilding is doing to restore and revive nature on its Somerset land makes a difference.

Now what we need, is to see this sort of hope and enthusiasm applied to nature-friendly farming practices to ensure that nature is respected and supported as a vital, integral and valuable part of what farmers do.

 

Wilding

Director: David Allen

Where to watch: Available to stream on BFI Player.

The story of the Knepp estate, is a story of renewal and regeneration and one that is deeply inspiring. Coming from a background of industrial farming, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell tried for years to make the family farm viable, but it wasn’t until they completely turned away from how they were farming, that things began to change on the estate. Starting with the estate’s ancient Oak trees, they began to recognise how their industrial farming practices were damaging the land, damaging the wildlife and much more.

Early on in the film, Charlie comments, “What we were seeing in the early stages was absolutely no sign of anything – and that was a real ‘wow’. What had we been doing before? What were we thinking…that feeling of guilt…we have presided over a period of real destruction and we need to think again…” The realisation was transformative as Charlie and Isabella began a kind of rewilding of the land in a way that embraced both farming and nature, allowing both to thrive.

It takes some extraordinary bravery (not to mention quite a bit of cash) to realise the transformation of Knepp into such an extraordinary site. But there are real lessons to be learned from the project – the most important is that farming and nature can co-exist in ways that are beneficial to both, if the land is cared for organically and holistically. Charlie and Isabella sought to step outside of the proverbial box, in order to realise something far more meaningful – that we share this world with myriad other creatures without whom, we would instigate our own demise.

 

Hope in the Water

Director: Brian Peter Falk

Where to watch: Hope in the Water is currently unavailable to stream in the UK – for the latest updates, click here.

This PBS series which started running in 2024, tracks the potentiality of the sea to feed us more sustainably. It’s a big ask in this day and age, when seabeds are regularly dredged and most fish are in significant decline. It takes looking well outside of the box to see what might be possible – and this is exactly what Hope in Water is about. Can our oceans and waters offer us a greater range of foods, without us inflicting greater damage upon them? And what alternative foods can sustainable aquaculture offer?

The series starts with shrimp – one of the most popular seafoods, eaten widely across the globe – and tracks a broad range of issues affecting fishing and fisheries and how to move to more sustainable practices. In the US, the Gulf of Mexico has long been laced with hatcheries along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, but the devastating impact of run-off from the Mississippi delta has made this increasingly difficult. However, there are alternatives for shrimp production, to be found, remarkably, in Minnesota. Farmer Paul Danhof started producing salt water shrimp when his parents shut down their dairy business. It’s an unconventional transition, but one that has become successful.

The fishermen and fisherwomen in the series are looking for ways to preserve the bounty of what the sea offers without destroying it. And this is surprisingly easy to do in many cases – take the purple ‘zombie’ sea urchins that overrun the shallow seabed off the California coast to their detriment. These completely edible urchins have not the kudos of the larger red urchins, but they are phenomenally plentiful and harvesting them keeps the seabed in balance.

It’s imperative that if we want to save our fish stocks and seafood, we eat more diversely – kelp, for example, is a hugely nutritious food and it can be delicious, and dog fish are plentiful and tasty. But key here is that we must keep sustainability at front the of our minds if we are to avoid inflicting yet more damage upon the world’s oceans in our search for food.

 

Featured image courtesy of Rob Carmier.