In July 2024, the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) launched the Beacon Farms Network, bringing together sustainable and regenerative farms acting as educational platforms to inform and inspire young people and adults about the story behind their food.

At present, many of us are disconnected from where our food comes from and how it is produced. In response, the aim of the Beacon Farms Network is to harness the power of ‘seeing is believing’ experiences on farms and increase public understanding of the connections between farming, climate, nature and health with an emphasis on how food can be produced in harmony with nature.

One year on, the network has grown to over 40 farms across the UK, representing a diversity of farm types and locations, with farms hosting events for a wide range of audiences. A particular area of focus for the SFT this past year has been working with The Harmony Project to support farms in delivering school visits using our Beacon Farms resources. From April to October this year, 10 Beacon Farms have delivered 75 school visits for primary aged pupils, engaging more than 1,800 children, many of whom had never visited a farm before.

At the Sustainable Food Trust, we are always inspired by stories that show how farming can regenerate soils, strengthen communities and offer viable alternatives to industrial agriculture. Sri Lovely Organic Farm in Malaysia embodies these principles, demonstrating how sustainable approaches can transform abandoned land into thriving farming systems.

Sri Lovely Organic Farm was set up in 2009 by retired army major Zakariah Kamantasha – who goes primarily by the nickname ‘Captain’. Having been stationed in this remote jungle region during his military days, Captain saw the adverse effects that rural depopulation and increased reliance on conventional, chemical-heavy food production were having on local communities.

He wanted to help give young people, in particular, a reason to stay. Working with others and local authorities, he also wanted to help in addressing a local health crisis that was seeing rapidly increasing rates of diet-related illnesses (such as diabetes) and health conditions associated with exposure to chemical sprays (including cancer and lung disease).

The result, after months and years of working with local families and landowners to clear and consolidate a 10-hectare parcel of land that had been overtaken by the jungle, was the establishment of Sri Lovely Farm. A few years later, it became Malaysia’s first certified organic rice farm. And today, it has become an important education and knowledge-sharing centre, helping to encourage a new generation of Malaysian farmers wanting to create a more sustainable future.

Guest writer, Anna Zuurmond, shares what her experience as a sales rep for organic veg box producer and supplier, Riverford, has taught her about our relationship to food and what people value most when deciding what to eat and where they source it from.

At first, I thought that being a veg box seller might be a little samey, with your daily spiel revolving around nothing but leeks and courgettes. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong about my job, which essentially involves touring around the west of England and encouraging people on the street, in shopping centres and at food festivals to try a Riverford seasonal organic veg box (as well as fruit, dairy, meat and other items).

The wonderful thing about exploring people’s relationships with food is that it quickly leads into conversations around lifestyles – and therefore life.

From new parents to grandparents, to students, full-time workers and retirees, from young couples to widowers to single mothers and fathers, what drives people to stop in the street and say yes (or no!) to trying a box?

The answer, I have found in my many chats, lies somewhere between ‘fear of’ and ‘desire to’.

Fear and desire in food choices

There is a fear of what pesticides and herbicides are doing to our bodies and to nature, a fear of losing local farmers, and a fear of letting big supermarkets win.

Then there is desire: a desire to know how our food is grown and to explore new ways of cooking and eating, a desire to support farmers, a desire to nourish our bodies and to restore nature.

Easily first and foremost in my daily conversations, is the topic of health.

“I didn’t care about me but now I’ve got kids, I feel like I’m poisoning them when I read about some of the chemicals used in food growing,” said a mother of two in Blackwood, Wales, in reference to the many pesticides used in conventional farming. Another professed: “We believe my one-year-old’s eczema is linked to pesticides.”

If it’s not children, it’s often a health scare. “We’re diabetic and have been told to eat more veg,” said an older couple in a Bristol shopping centre, variations of which I’ve heard countless times since starting this job.  Meanwhile, a 24-year-old woman in Birmingham told me how she’s changing her diet to see if it helps her chronic fatigue, having tried everything else. Straight after, a new mum shared how she was weening her baby off breastmilk but would only move to organic unhomogenised milk.

Many people, when asked in the street, “Do you like veg?”, answer with a little laugh or a sigh and go “We really should do more”. Often people are trying to break habits or slip healthy options into busy lifestyles whilst navigating fussy children (or themselves).

You then have the pretty serious health fans – including those within the ever-expanding gym and dieting scene – who want to tap into the benefits of fresh organic veg (and usually some milk and meat too).

Next come those with a desire to forget the supermarkets and say I stand with you to UK growers. People I speak with, are making a link between terrible farmer welfare, precarity and pay, and the food supply chain being orchestrated by multinational supermarkets. These people are also realising that much of what they buy from the supermarket is lacking when it comes to both taste and nutrition. They want out.

The environment, you might (or might not) be surprised to hear, tends to feature lower in people’s priorities. There is certainly frustration at supermarkets’ omni-present plastic packaging, and there is an understanding that intense monocultures sprayed with chemicals are wrecking nature and contributing to climate change. However, often fear of bad health is far more tangible to people than a decline in bees or soil degradation. What does that say about how we educate and campaign? That we must better teach the overlap: health and nature benefits are inseparable.

For most people, it’s not some great aggrandising idea of ethical, sustainable food that motivates them to switch to an organic veg box, but the appetite for something healthy and convenient that makes them feel good. Is that combination too much to ask?

Unfortunately, with the way our system currently stands, it can be.

The affordability question

So, let’s look at what stops people from switching to better veg. And I don’t just mean what stops people buying, but also what stops them even coming over and looking at a farm veg stand.

“I would love to, but I’ve got a family of five; I couldn’t afford to feed them this,” or “It’s just fancy veg, I go to Lidl”, are things I unsurprisingly hear on a regular basis. Comments along the lines of “That’s the expensive veg, isn’t it?” are frequently the first reaction before you even begin a conversation.

This response is entirely understandable – whatever way you look at it, and despite variations across products, fresh organic produce is often considerably more expensive than non-organic supermarket veg.

“Why is it cheaper for me to buy a crap ultra-processed meal than it is to buy this good quality fruit and veg?” exasperatedly asked a woman at the Cardiff Foodies festival. Her indignation at this imbalanced pricing is something we should all share.

As Patrick Holden, founder and CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, has said, “We need to put right the price gap between quality and cheap food. We have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind it include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, negative effects on river pollution, reduced biodiversity and damage to public health.”

“Money is the only metric they accept, never mind the costs to our environment, wildlife, health and wider society,” says Riverford founder Guy Watson, in reference to supermarkets during the #GetFairAboutFarming campaign. These costs are not factored into price. Meanwhile, the benefits that healthy food delivers, are not renumerated.

Whilst this distorted pricing continues, for many people, the difference in cost remains prohibitive. Even for those that can afford organic veg, they don’t necessarily feel inclined to pay the extra money.

Bridging the knowledge gap

Last week, I had a previously homeless woman who had just been housed and set up with a bank card, who emphatically came over and wanted to try a small box every two weeks, telling me this was her first step in getting her life back on track.

These are the dreamy stories you want to be hearing, but they are often few and far between – and, to be quite frank, would take a great stretch of desire and finances for a lot of people.

For it’s not as simple as being literally unable to afford a £15, £18 or £25 seasonal organic veg box, but it’s a) thinking it’s worth it, and b) having the time, knowledge and skill base to know what to do with what’s inside it – which can include veg that’s less commonly seen on supermarket shelves.

“My kids just wouldn’t eat any of that, I’d end up chucking it,” families say to me daily, perfectly illustrating that scary possibility for many of throwing veg – and so money – away. Meanwhile, “How would you cook that?” is not uncommon when looking at a celeriac or a cardoon, or even things like broad beans or kale.

This ties into time. People get home late, work hectic jobs, some do shift work, and many have a busy home and family life when they get through the front door. Feeling confident and/or organised in your cooking, so that you can whip up something quick and healthy with what you’ve got, is not something everybody feels able to do. To tackle this, remember that you do have a lot of choice in what box you want, and in your first order with Riverford, you get a book full of simple seasonal recipes – and sometimes that’s enough to take a leap.

But the answers to making this widespread is of course a deeper-rooted education. Many I speak with are really keen to learn about how produce is farmed. They’re trying to dabble in a bit of growing, and kids will excitedly tell me how they’ve got some tomatoes or beans on the go in their back garden or at school. There are many working to bridge this knowledge gap, including the Sustainable Food Trust through its Beacon Farms programme, the Harmony Project through its work in schools, and Riverford through things like free recipes and newsletters.

If knowledge of growing and cooking can be expanded, alongside closing the price gap between low- and high-quality food, healthy organic produce could reach far more people while providing better returns for growers.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy the many anecdotes that the day job delivers. “Are artichokes anti-choke?” No, please don’t use it medically! “Is lamb’s lettuce vegan?” Yes…no lamb’s ears included! Keep them coming.

In a recent article for Speciality Food Magazine, our CEO and organic farmer, Patrick Holden, discusses the inaccessibility of ‘good’ food – often organic or sustainably produced – compared to so-called ‘normal’ food which is often cheaper to pay for at the checkout, but costly in other hidden ways.

Why is it that speciality foods are confined to people who have privileges, who maybe have more income, who have more knowledge, and out of those privileges, want to source food with a better story behind it? This kind of food should be accessible to all and be more normalised. Why hasn’t that happened?

I think value is associated with paying the true cost of something, paying for something which is delivering benefits. And I think that speciality foods would deliver benefits to you and to society as a whole. And at the moment, we’re having to pay a lot more for them. Which begs the question, why do we pay so little for so-called normal food which doesn’t deliver those benefits?

I think the answer is that we have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind that so-called cheap food include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, having negative effects on river pollution, reducing biodiversity, and also causing social harm including damage to public health. Also reduced cultural cohesion – for example, fewer jobs on the land – and none of those costs are attributed to the normal food that most people buy. So this idea of cheap food, which is what most people buy and it’s mostly available in supermarkets, is a delusion.

Most of us buy food according to its price and shop at speciality retailers as a treat rather than normal practice, and we need to change that. The first step is to make sure these hidden costs of food are attributed to their creator. In other words, we make the polluter pay. If your farming system or your food system is causing damage, then you should be financially accountable for that damage. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the polluter doesn’t pay, so that’s the first thing we need to put right.

The second thing we need to put right is the price gap between quality and cheap food. Our Hafod Cheddar is quite highly priced, which makes it out of reach of a lot of people. If we were to be paid for the social benefits we’re delivering such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving biodiversity, employing local people and making a nutritionally dense food, then the price of it would come down and the price of normal food, which is dishonestly priced, would go up, and that would close the gap.

Our current food systems are causing damage for future generations. And, interestingly enough, a few years ago a law was passed in the Welsh Government, the Senedd, around the health and well-being of future generations – the idea that every law that’s passed in the Welsh Government should take that into account. That is not what we’re doing with our current food system.

“…we have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind that so-called cheap food include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, having negative effects on river pollution, reducing biodiversity, and also causing social harm including damage to public health.”

Educate without preaching

The key to unlocking the barrier of dishonest pricing and the wrong kind of food – which is what most of us are eating – is a better-informed public, and the best way to achieve that is to get people onto farms. We’ve recently launched the Beacon Farms network, positioning farms as educational platforms with an aim to get every child at an impressionable age – and adults at perhaps a less impressionable age – to have seeing-is-believing experiences.

Our aim is to get millions of people to visit the farms where their food comes from so they recognise the story of its origin. I believe that if we could scale that, it would deliver the change that’s needed because too few of us know the story behind our food – in fact, very few of us do.

Farms and very often the farmers themselves are powerless because they don’t know the customers – there’s very little direct relationship – so retailers are absolutely in a pivotal position, and I would say that supermarkets have not really honoured this fact. Indeed, they have done worse than that. This means that independent fine food retailers are more vital than ever, because they are the interface between the producer and the public. They could shout about the connection between the locally-produced food they’re selling and the farm it was grown on – they even could ask if the farmer would be open to having customers visit his farm. It’s a question of show, don’t tell. We can educate, but we mustn’t preach.

My farm was part of the ‘great cheese heist’ a few months ago, and I did 20 interviews over 36 hours with media from all over the world – the New York Times as well as publications in Australia and Dubai. It caught the public’s imagination. If you ask yourself why, you’ll find it’s because more and more people are interested in the story behind their food and this rather was cheese with a story. We can be encouraged by that in a way; we can recognise that there’s an underlying interest in where our food comes from.

Power to the people

The public has the power to change and improve the food system we’re currently working and living within. We hold the key for change. It’s no longer a case of ‘them’ fixing this, it’s ‘us’. This is an empowering message and suggests that we don’t need to preach at people about what to buy and how to eat, but make eating well easier and engaging.

The large-scale food industry has pulled a veil over the reality of what they do, because in the words of Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, “If their customers knew the story, they probably wouldn’t want to eat the food”. Don’t forget that an individual person is more powerful than the big companies because once you scale those individuals up, that’s the market. If enough of us buy food with a better story, then those that don’t supply these products will not survive – even the biggest supermarkets. Both consumers and speciality food retailers should feel empowered by this.

Featured image courtesy of Goals House.

This article was originally published on the Speciality Food website on 19th March 2025.

SFT’s Head of Policy and Campaigns – and lead on our small abattoirs work – Megan Perry, explores the decline in people opting to work in skilled labour roles in the food sector, including slaughtering and butchery. From systemic shocks like Brexit and COVID-19 which have affected labour supply and demand, to a lack of funding for training, Megan takes a deeper look at the reasons behind this decline and what can be done to protect the future of the UK’s small abattoirs and butchers.

While many organisations are working to reconnect people with where their food comes from, educating children through farm visits and reviving an interest in food production as a viable career, there is an important part of the food chain that often gets overlooked. For sustainable livestock farming and local meat production to be viable, we need a network of abattoirs and butchers. However, the decline in people opting to work in the local meat sector and the loss of heritage and artisan skills such as butchery, has widespread implications for food security, sustainability and rural economies. This was the focus of a recent paper by the Sustainable Food Trust and the Abattoir Sector Group presented to Defra’s Small Abattoir Task and Finish Group.

The UK’s food supply chain contributes over £128 billion to the UK economy every year and provides employment for over four million people. The meat processing sector employs around 97,000 people and directly supports 50,000 farmers, with skilled butchers making up 40% of the workforce, according to the British Meat Processors Association.

However, according to the Food Standards Agency (FSA), systemic shocks such as Brexit and COVID-19 have affected labour supply and demand. The number of workers going into voluntary redundancy and early retirement doubled in recent years. In 2021, the impact of COVID was clear – there were 953,000 job vacancies in the UK, over half of them in the food and drink sector.

Estimates suggest that one in four food and drink industry workers are due to retire within the next 10 years, which amounts to over one million people leaving the industry. The BMPA has highlighted that the rise in worker losses has mainly affected skilled worker roles such as veterinarians and butchers. These roles are also some of the hardest to recruit and training is extensive and takes a long time.

Staff shortages have been a concern for some abattoirs, disrupting operational capacity and contributing to closures. National Craft Butchers’ (NCB) 2023 survey found that 20% of respondents had changed their business hours in the previous 12 months, with 22% pointing to staffing issues. For those looking to set up new abattoirs, the availability of staff can be a concern.

The average age of small abattoir operators is between 60-70. The NCB survey found that 56% of respondents do not have a succession plan, yet 50% were aged 56 or above and 26% plan to retire in the next five years.

Despite a clear need for workers in the sector, since 2019 only 22 abattoir apprentices completed their apprenticeship – that works out at about five per year, an all-time low. Only 33% of respondents to the NCB survey were currently employing an apprentice, although 82% said they would welcome one.

This problem is not helped by lack of funding, with Level 2 Butchery apprenticeships receiving £10k funding each, but only £6k available to the equivalent level in slaughtering apprenticeships. This makes it economically unviable for training providers, particularly if they must travel to remote rural abattoirs. Further, there is now only one training provider in the whole of the UK for smaller abattoirs.

“For sustainable livestock farming and local meat production to be viable, we need a network of abattoirs and butchers. However, the decline in people opting to work in the local meat sector and the loss of heritage and artisan skills such as butchery, has widespread implications for food security, sustainability and rural economies.”

There are many reasons why people are not choosing to go into a career in the slaughtering and butchery sector, not least because it can have a negative public image and gets little acknowledgement despite being an incredibly important and skilled role.

However, the decline of small abattoirs due to rising costs and a challenging regulatory environment means people are reluctant to begin a career in the sector, and family businesses are not being handed down. When we surveyed small abattoirs in Wales recently, one owner told us he had wanted to pass the business on to his son, but he felt it was not viable and his son had gone to work elsewhere.

There is also a disconnect between education, careers advice and staffing needs. With the Food Technology A-Level scrapped in 2016, there has been a lack of emphasis on food supply chain careers and training.

In our aforementioned paper on the skilled labour shortage, we reported recent conversations between the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) and a small group of young people under the age of 22 who are at the beginning of their further education and career paths. They highlighted how little the food sector is regarded as a viable ‘job for life’, despite living in an area dominated by food manufacturers, including two local butchers. They said the food industry was never presented as a possible career path at school. There was also an attitude that butchery was male-dominated.

However, some progress is being made. The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IFATE) are now looking to review the slaughtering apprenticeship and are positively engaging with the sector to get their ideas and input.

Some members of the Abattoir Sector Group are also holding conversations with educational institutions and experts to explore new ideas for connecting young people with the full range of career options. This could include better connections between agricultural colleges and the processing part of the supply chain, with livestock farmers also being able to train in butchery or slaughtering, if this was something they were interested in.

Ultimately, a resilient small abattoir network is essential for the future of local meat production. And it’s the unsung heroes who work in abattoirs that are providing the vital services that so many farmers, retailers, restaurants and countless other businesses benefit from.

For more information, please see our paper.

The Sustainable Food Trust is working to connect people with the story behind their food, including promoting careers in food and farming, through our newly launched Beacon Farms Network. We are also working as part of The Agroecology Learning Collective to signpost agroecological learning opportunities (including training and apprenticeships) and support the development of new courses which fill gaps in current training provision.

Kicking off our latest series of articles exploring the transformative power of on-farm education, the SFT’s Head of Projects, Bonnie Welch, examines how farm visits can help to reconnect young people with nature and the story behind their food.

Today, many of us spend most of our time indoors, often in front of a screen and disconnected from the natural world. And yet we know, intuitively, that spending time outdoors and in nature helps us to feel well.

If intuition isn’t enough, there’s also a growing body of evidence demonstrating the positive link between exposure to natural environments and positive mental and physical health outcomes. For instance, spending time in a woodland or garden, or having the opportunity to grow food, can improve mental wellbeing and reduce stress, anxiety and depression.

For young people today, connection with nature is particularly important, as according to research, in many countries young people are more likely to struggle with their mental health than previous generations. With children and young adults spending much of their time at school or college, taking learning out of the classroom offers an opportunity to increase exposure to and engagement with the natural world.

Nature-based learning, such as on school grounds and field trips, has been shown not only to improve social and psychological outcomes, but also educational attainment, attendance and motivation. According to WWF’s Schools for Nature report, “pupils who learn through and in nature, have an advantage over their peers whose learning is solely classroom based”. However, the research, involving 1,885 schools from across the UK, revealed that over a third of primary schools and half of secondary schools offer no outdoor learning opportunities at all. The report also points to what some are calling a “nature gap”, referring to the disparity in who participates in outdoor learning, with young people from low-income families and ethnic minorities less likely to have such opportunities.

In an attempt to tackle this issue, the Nature Premium Campaign, a specialist group led by the Institute for Outdoor Learning, are calling for Government to fund regular and ongoing nature experiences for all children and young people, with additional funding and support for those who need it most.

Alongside this, the Government’s National Educational Nature Park, launched in 2023 by the Department for Education, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Horticultural Society and partners, aims to offer children and young people the opportunity to take hands-on action to improve biodiversity and tackle climate change. The offer to educators includes access to resources, digital tools and activities, as well as a virtual nature park signposting green spaces across England. The ambition is to encourage more young people to take action to improve their local environment for people and nature.

Putting sustainability and nature at the heart of teaching and learning is the core mission of the educational charity, The Harmony Project, led by former primary school headteacher Richard Dunne. The Harmony Project offers an approach to education that promotes learning from nature, in addition to learning about nature and in nature. This is what they call the ‘Natural Curriculum’, which enables young people to develop a more connected, systemic way of seeing and understanding the world and their place in it.

What role can farms play?

The farming systems that produce our food have a considerable, and often damaging impact on the environment. However, they also have the potential to help restore biodiversity, regenerate local ecosystems and rebuild soil carbon. The food choices we make are therefore of great importance.

Increasing nature connectedness (the relationship between people and the rest of nature) has shown to also improve pro nature behaviour in young people. And so, reconnecting young people with the story behind their food, could serve as a critical tool in encouraging them to act in a way that protects and enhances nature, for instance, by opting for certain foods over others, or by taking an active interest in sustainable food and farming – perhaps considering it as a career.

During a recent Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) podcast, Alice Pawsey, an organic farmer from Suffolk and a member of the SFT’s newly launched Beacon Farms Network (which brings together sustainable and regenerative farms acting as educational platforms), spoke of why farms are the perfect stage for learning.

“The possibilities for farm visits are boundless. They are exciting, they are engaging, and they reinforce just about every single element of the curriculum – from English to music, to PSHE, to science and biology.

 

 The rewards are unbelievable for children, particularly for those children that don’t do very well in school. They seem always to thrive on a school visit! I had a child who jumped in the ice and thought it was glass. They’d never experienced jumping in a puddle…and continued to jump in every puddle they could find for the whole day.

 

 It’s a no-brainer for Government to support school visits [to farms]. The farms are there, and the schools are there. There’s an untapped educational resource just waiting to be joined up.”

As part of the Beacon Farms Network, the SFT has been working closely with The Harmony Project to develop templates and resources to support school visits to farms. Each of the resources will be linked to key subject areas such as science, geography, history and design technology (DT). The National Curriculum in England already requires DT teachers to look at how food has been grown, reared, caught or processed. Richard Dunne believes this presents an opportunity to bring nature into the classroom and indeed to take the learning beyond the classroom.

“One of our goals is to help teachers and educators learn more about the food and farming systems that produce our food. In design technology, the focus on cookery and nutrition is mainly around developing culinary skills. Whilst this is important, we are encouraging teachers to explore cookery and nutrition as a three-step process.

 

 Firstly, to research the story of where our food comes from, including its provenance, the farming system that grew or produced it, and the impact of that system on climate, nature and health.

 

 Secondly, to develop the practical skills of cooking, so that young people know how to cook healthy meals from scratch.

 

 And thirdly, to consider who they will share their food with, as the essence of a good meal is that it is shared with family, friends or others in the community.

 

 Throughout this journey of learning, there are also opportunities to link learning to real life examples of where food comes from,  for example, through food growing projects in school and farm visits. This more holistic approach provides children with a much greater understanding of the story of their food, not just how to cook and eat what they buy.”

Whilst farm visits provide an excellent opportunity for young people to build greater connections with nature whilst learning about the systems that produce our food, at present, school trips in the UK are often irregular and optional. It is therefore essential that the Government works together with charities, organisations and businesses to increase the availability and diversity of outdoor learning opportunities, so that they are available to all young people, regardless of geography or socio-economic background.

Organisations like Farms for City Children, LEAF Education and The Country Trust, as well as the Beacon Farms Network, are among those already working with schools to offer experiential learning opportunities for young people on farms across the UK. Providing more memorable and meaningful nature experiences will, with any luck, improve educational outcomes, as well as being good for mental and physical health, and for nature.

We recently launched the Beacon Farms Network, which brings together sustainable and regenerative farms acting as educational platforms to inspire young people and adults about the story behind their food. Find out more about the Network here.

Featured image taken by Jason Taylor.

We are delighted to share an update from our Beacon Farms Network, which brings together sustainable farms acting as educational platforms to inform and inspire people about the story behind their food. Our CEO, Patrick Holden, explains the origins of the network and why on-farm ‘seeing is believing’ experiences can be so transformative.

In July 2024, the Sustainable Food Trust hosted an event at Bwlchwernen Fawr marking the launch of a network of Beacon Farms.

The aim of the Beacon Farms initiative is to harness the collective power of farms which combine sustainable farming practice, facilities to host visitors and storytelling skills to enable more people to understand the story behind their food.

The July farm event attracted around 180 participants, including representation from more than 20 farms, mainly from the UK, but also from Ireland and other countries further afield.

The idea of establishing a network of Beacon Farms had been incubating for some time. In 1999, when I was at the Soil Association, we put in a proposal called Millennium Farms to the Millennium Commission, a lottery-sponsored body offering substantial grants for projects that would have a significant and lasting impact after the year 2000.

Our idea was to launch a national network of farms acting as educational stages, offering visitors a chance to learn more about organic food production, using the existing network of certified organic holdings. Our bid was for around £10 million, but it was eclipsed by a bolder and more visionary proposition conceived and subsequently delivered by my now good friend, Sir Tim Smit, for the creation of the Eden Project – which secured £37.5 million.

Over the past decade or so, there has been a resurgence of interest in the improvement of school food – spearheaded in many ways by Jamie Oliver’s call to arms for better school dinners and Henry Dimbleby’s School Food Plan, published in 2013, mapping out a way forward for better meals in schools. Since then, however, some 60% of schools across the nation have fallen by the wayside in their pursuit of healthy school meals. But across Wales, there has been a sea of change and meaningful progress. The SFT’s CEO, Patrick Holden, discusses school food and his return to growing carrots.

If you had asked me a year ago whether it might come to pass that I would be growing organic carrots along with seven other growers to supply Carmarthenshire schools, supported by the Welsh Government and food wholesaler, Castell Howell, I would’ve said ‘that will never happen’. It turns out that I would have been wrong.

Our involvement with the Welsh Veg in Schools pilot, sponsored by Food Sense Wales, Farming Connect, Welsh Government and Castell Howell has tempted me back into carrot production after an 18-year break, which speaks volumes for the initiative and vision shown by the organising partners.

The pilot is grappling with a very serious challenge. Since I first started growing carrots in 1979, supplying bunches to the local Co-op in Lampeter, there was infrastructure in place to support and enable local food to be supplied to local people. This has disappeared, not to mention the specialised machinery which producing such food requires.

“… it seems UK farmers and growers are congenitally challenged when it comes to collaboration, and we should not let past experiences overshadow a potential new chapter in connecting people to good local food.”

The reason why we have been able to grow carrots successfully this year owes much to the friendship and partnership shown by other local growers, notably Nathan Richards of Troed y Rhiw Organics and Peter and Anne Segger from Blaencamel, both of whom have lent me the necessary equipment without which it would have been impossible to restart carrot production on our farm.

It would also be true to say that without Castell Howell’s willingness to go several extra miles, literally, in their vans to pick up our carrots directly from the farm and take them to a washer and processor, the project would be unviable. However, for the pilot to turn into a long-term solution to relocalising food systems, there is still a long way to go! On the grower and farmer side, we need to form local or regional collaborations to purchase expensive equipment and machinery which is necessary to grow diverse vegetables on a commercial scale. Not only that, but we also need to work together rather than compete with each other on getting the vegetables to the relevant market. This might sound straightforward, but from experience it seems UK farmers and growers are congenitally challenged when it comes to collaboration, and we should not let past experiences overshadow a potential new chapter in connecting people to good local food.

After the farm gate, a similar collaborative effort is required, not just between the wholesale and distribution companies but also small abattoirs, meat cutting plants and everyone who forms part of a food distribution system that is currently highly industrialised and centralised.

In the case of Castell Howell, it is immediately obvious that they are not making money from the pilot – quite the reverse. They have decided, probably for a number of reasons – partly personal conviction, partly investment in a more sustainable system – that it is good to be in at the beginning, even if the project is, in effect, funded by profits made elsewhere within their business. Good for them, I say!

I feel immensely proud to be part of this pilot. Recently, we hosted a school visit with the children from years 3 and 4 at Ysgol Y Dderi, our local primary school. They came into the carrot field where I and my sons, Harry, Will and Ben, were harvesting carrots, topping them and putting them into crates to go to local schools. It was an idyllic scene, amidst glorious sunshine, and we let the children have a go at helping us with the harvest. Afterwards, around half of them said they would like to come and work on the farm when they are older – which is an amazing outcome from just 15 minutes in the carrot field, an experience that will probably stay with them for life.

With the publication of the Sustainable Food Trust’s next major report due this summer, CEO, Patrick Holden, reflects on seven key challenges and successes of the SFT so far, and looks ahead to the release of what will be a pivotal work on the future of sustainable food.

In 2011, shortly after I left the Soil Association, a number of individuals suggested that I should capitalise on the network of influential contacts I’d accumulated and launch a new organisation. I did – and it became the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT).

The idea behind the SFT was to be ‘inclusive and catalytic’. I didn’t want to build a large organisation because I had ‘been there and done that’ during my time at the Soil Association. Instead, I wanted to work with a small but trusted team of individuals who were committed to accelerating a change in how we farm and eat, a change that was trying to happen but was being held back by some significant barriers.

A dozen years down the road, we understand what those barriers are, and we are beginning to unlock them.

 

1. Misdirected agricultural policy

From a post-war, 70-year perspective, I’ve witnessed how a succession of policy instruments, both in the UK and the EU – and mirrored in the US – have encouraged farmers to intensify and expand, using industrial systems which have been highly profitable, but only because of their extractive nature. As a direct consequence, the farming systems that we have today are in a major way responsible for climate change, catastrophic biodiversity loss and enormous social harm, especially in relation to growing public ill-health.

Ironically, these post-war policies were well meaning, catalysed by food insecurity during World War II, but the unfortunate consequences have been fairly disastrous. Reforming these policies has been rather like reversing a super tanker – first, there needs to be a collective will to act and then policies need to be redesigned and directed once again towards incentives that support food production working in harmony with nature.

The SFT’s advocacy of such policies has been consistent and of critical importance. I believe we can now claim that we are beginning to be a significant influence on policy reform. For instance, in the UK, Defra and the devolved nations are beginning to understand that rather than have separate support for biodiversity stewardship, they need to take a more integrated approach and back farming systems which deliver on nature as well as food.

Patrick Holden discusses how the centralisation of the food system has given rise to an atmosphere of paranoia about bacteria, which, in turn, is placing a disproportionate regulatory burden upon small producers and processors.