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

This year, as recognised by the FAO, marks the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. Nowadays pastoralism is associated by many with idyllic ‘country life’. Here, Olivia Boothman uncovers its true meaning and origin, and what we could learn from pastoralist practices to transform our farming systems and to rebuild a sense of connection between people and the environment that supports us.

The BBC’s ‘Race Across the World’ recently featured an episode where the contestants traversed Kyrgyzstan as quickly as possible to make it to their next checkpoint. This contrasts with the intentional and considered journeys that are made across the plains and mountain ranges of Kyrgyzstan every year as pastoralists herd their animals to pastures new. What was portrayed well, however, were the idylls of rural life in this country, sustained by land-based activities. Two young men from Liverpool paid their dues for their overnight stay by helping with the walnut harvest, another team rode on horses to enjoy the vast scenery.

Pastoralism, etymologically, originates from the word pastor, meaning ‘shepherd’. But it has also come to be associated with idyllic ‘country life’. These days though, ‘country life’, in many people’s minds (at least here in the UK), is Hunter wellies, Land Rovers, black and white cows, endless horizons of knee-high golden crops and lambs frolicking in fields demarcated by barbed wire fencing – a far cry away from ‘true’ pastoralism.

Pastoralists are people whose livelihoods depend primarily on herding domesticated or semi-domesticated animals, which feed mainly on natural rangelands, often involving seasonal or regular movement between grazing areas, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

Since, it is no surprise that the FAO is urgently trying to protect them. This is absolutely essential, but more than this, should we be using this ‘International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists’ to think about what we can learn from pastoralism to inspire our own farming future?

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.