Having recently spent some time in Egypt, our Global Farm Metric Trials Manager, May Wheeler reflects on what she learnt about the country’s agricultural practices and sustainability efforts, and how companies like SEKEM are working to ‘regreen’ the desert.

Driving through the outskirts of Cairo, the Egypt I had imagined since childhood – an ancient land of mystery, mummies and desert civilisations – flickered past the open taxi window. Warm air, glimpses of the Nile and the hazy glow of the city began feeding the kind of curiosity that often borders on romanticism.

Yet after an hour bumping along potholed roads through dusty midnight streets, surrounded by concrete tower blocks, stray dogs and clusters of young men smoking shisha, I began quietly preparing myself for the inevitable disappointment that sometimes follows the collision between childhood imagination and reality – an Egyptian version of Paris Syndrome, perhaps.

Eventually, after a few wrong turns and late-night pit stops for black tea brewed with fresh mint and sugar, the roads widened and the concrete began to thin and palm trees interrupted the sand. We had arrived at a gate welcomed by two men with the warmth and familiarity that I would later learn characterises so much of Egyptian hospitality.

Inside was another world entirely. Corridors of hibiscus bushes and trees frame softly curved buildings and fields of green. The air felt cleaner. We had arrived at SEKEM, a project founded in 1977 by Ibrahim Abouleish with the seemingly impossible ambition of regreening the desert and creating fertile farmland from sand.

I had travelled there through a volunteer scheme at the Sustainable Food Trust, where I’ve spent the last five years working on the Global Farm Metric; a framework to capture the social, economic and environmental factors important to farm sustainability across the world. Driven by a constant fascination with how other parts of the world live, work and eat, I wanted to understand what farming looks like in the desert. How can food possibly be grown on such sandy soils? How much has industrial agriculture transformed Egypt? What can Egypt teach us about sustainability, culture and farming systems? And, of course, I wanted to see the pyramids.

Now, I should say from the outset that I am far from an expert in Egypt or Egyptian agriculture. What follows is drawn from conversations, observations, reading and a short time spent at SEKEM. If anything here is incorrect or incomplete, I would genuinely welcome corrections and reflections.

Egypt’s agricultural inheritance

As with the pyramids themselves, Ancient Egyptian agriculture holds an element of mysticism.

Agriculture was not peripheral to civilisation: it was deeply embedded within culture, religion and everyday life. The annual flooding of the Nile deposited nutrient rich black silt across the landscape, transforming the surrounding desert into one of the most fertile agricultural regions on Earth. Bread and beer fuelled daily life and were the backbone of the Egyptian economy. Wheat and barley were grown and stored in communal silos, with harvests meticulously measured by scribes and protected by guards. Bread was so central to Egyptian life that loaf shapes became embedded within the written language itself, symbolising sustenance, offerings and survival.

Livestock provided milk, cheese, meat and labour, while cows were sacred to goddesses including Hathor, associated with joy, fertility and love. How do we know all this? Miniatures and hieroglyphs discovered in tombs depict idealised rural scenes of ploughing, harvesting and food preparation. Food was not simply fuel or commodity, but spiritual continuity, with grain, animals and produce buried with the dead to sustain them in the afterlife.

Ultra-processed foods are everywhere – and now some of the world’s biggest food companies are being called to account. Victoria Halliday, the Sustainable Food Trust’s Communications Manager, looks at the evidence behind the health risks, cultural impacts and rising scrutiny of these products.

Recently, the city of San Francisco sued 10 leading food makers over their ultra-processed products. The accusation is that these companies are knowingly selling foods that have been linked to a rise in serious diseases, with comparisons being made to the tobacco industry. These ultra-processed foods (UPFs) make up an ever-increasing proportion of our diets – now accounting for over half of the food we’re eating in the UK and 60% in the US. Given that the latest research shows UPFs are associated with rising ill-health across the globe – from heart disease to depression – this raises urgent questions.

While our appetite for highly processed products is seemingly growing, it’s encouraging that the subject of better food and farming is breaking into both mainstream and fringe cultural discourse, from prime-time TV to post-punk poetry. Confrontational ‘no-wave’ poet and musician, Lydia Lunch (pictured), speaks of how heavily processed foods mean “we end up consuming so much poison”, while Happy Mondays’ lead singer, Bez, talks about replacing processed juices with fresh oranges, “preferably organic so there’s no pesticide sh*t in them”. And the issue is being covered through more mainstream channels too – from Joe Wicks’ Licensed to Kill on Channel 4, to Tim Spector’s popular science work on gut health and diet.

These voices can be incredibly powerful in helping to shape opinions and behaviours – most of us are much more likely to pay attention to a cultural figure whose work or opinions resonate with us, than to the earnest words of NGOs, politicians or policy experts. But whoever might be delivering the message, the facts on UPFs are becoming hard to ignore. As San Francisco’s case makes its way through the courts, it highlights three core claims that sit at the heart of the growing challenge to ultra-processed foods.

1. They’re engineered to be addictive

UPFs are designed to reel us in and keep us hooked. Food companies pour vast sums into engineering foods – or “food-like substances” as author Michael Pollan refers to them – that light up our brains’ reward centres due to their ‘hyper-palatability’. Combinations of high levels of sugar, salt and fat, as well as softer textures and artificially intense flavours, lead to cravings and a desire to eat more – so we end up eating too many calories but not enough nutrients.

The corporations behind these ‘foods’ are using increasingly aggressive tactics to drive consumption, influence research and prevent regulation. Although these companies put a lot of resources into advertising, seeking to persuade us that we have endless choice and novelty, the proliferation of UPFs means that we are, in fact, finding ourselves with fewer and fewer real options – just picture a supermarket shelf stocked with 20 different brands of ultra-processed, plastic-wrapped bread.

While addiction and craving are baked into the UPF business model, we’re encouraged to push blame onto each other (and ourselves) for not making better food choices as individuals. Our personal choices are powerful, and we can advocate for the type of food system we want by directing our spending accordingly – but the reality is that ultra-processed foods make up an ever-increasing proportion of what is available to buy in many supermarkets, especially in lower-income areas. The finger-pointing narrative serves as a smokescreen, diverting our frustration away from those making vast profits at the expense of public health and wellbeing.

2. They’re harming our bodies – and more

UPFs have been linked to harm in all our major body organs. The Lancet recently published major new research showing that the more UPFs we eat, the more likely that we will suffer from obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, Crohn’s disease, kidney disease, depression and many more conditions that result in ill-health and mortality. Professor Carlos Monteiro, one of the Lancet series authors, says this latest evidence “strongly suggests that humans are not biologically adapted to consume [UPFs]”.

Of key importance is the impact that UPFs have upon our gut microbiome – an intricate community of around 100 trillion microbes that live in our intestines. This microbiome is a major modifiable factor in our health and wellbeing, as explained by Tim Spector on the SFT Podcast: “A lot of the chemicals in your brain that transmit mood – and other states like fullness and hunger – are produced as chemicals, as your microbes digest plants. [These chemicals] go up into the bloodstream, into your brain, into the vagus nerve and can make the difference between you feeling happy or sad.” As well as mood, our gut microbiome influences many other aspects of health, including immunity, metabolic health and disease prevention.

While consumption of gut-damaging UPFs is on the up, the amount of fresh produce we consume is falling – a big problem for the health of our gut microbiome which depends upon a wide diversity of fresh foods. Fresh foods that have been grown in healthy soils and without agrichemicals provide us with unique fibres, polyphenols, and nutrients that feed different beneficial gut microbes. Which leads us to…

3. They’re crowding real foods off our plates

UPFs are pushing whole foods off our plates. This is a pattern being repeated across the globe – with the UK and US leading the charge. The impact on our health alone should be reason enough to resist this trend, yet the effects extend beyond this.

Food processing used to be mainly concerned with preservation of whole foods, as well as making them easier to use in the kitchen. Processing techniques varied from place to place – from fermenting cabbage to produce kimchi in Korea, to jellying eels in London’s East End. Now, industrial food processing is increasingly aimed at creating food-derived substances that take the place of whole foods entirely.

Long-established methods like freezing, drying, canning, pasteurisation and salting, largely preserve the natural composition of foods, whereas UPF technologies significantly alter them, mixing in industrial additives like plant protein isolates, mechanically separated meat, modified starches and oils, artificial colours, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers.

As UPFs become ever more ubiquitous, they flatten regional food cultures, replacing distinctive local cuisines with the same globally standardised products. Food that once reflected place, season and tradition is reduced to a uniform commodity – weakening local food economies, eroding cooking skills and severing the connection between people and the land that feeds them.

Will 2026 dish up a moment of reckoning for UPFs?

So, as the evidence mounts against UPFs, what comes next? Putting limits on the influence and reach of UPF manufacturers through regulation and taxation is essential; the ban on pre-9pm junk food adverts, which came into effect this week, is a small but significant step forward.

The costs of the harm caused by these foods – or, at least, a significant proportion of those costs – needs to be borne by those who profit from them, not by the public, an approach that the SFT advocates through its True Cost Accounting work. We as citizens also need to be educated, encouraged and supported to make healthier food choices – and those healthy choices must become the easier, more affordable option.

While the outcome is yet to be decided, the San Francisco lawsuit marks a significant escalation in how local governments are challenging food industry practices on public health grounds and could be the beginning of serious change. With mounting evidence, stronger regulation and growing public awareness, UPF manufacturers may finally be facing a crunch point.

Interested to learn more about what’s in our food? We recommend this episode of the SFT Podcast where Patrick Holden and Stuart Oates discuss UPFs, chemicals in food and what we can do about it.

Image credits: Image 1 (Lydia Lunch): Creative Commons; Image 3 (serving food at market): Mike Swigunski

Over the past two years, more than 240 farms across 23 countries have been part of a collaborative effort to help reshape how we understand, measure and value sustainability on farms. 

We’re delighted to now share the results. The Global Farm Metric (GFM) has released a new report capturing insights from farms of all types and sizes, spanning six continents. Together, these farms have helped refine a framework that offers something the food and farming sector has long been searching for – a shared language for sustainability that moves beyond carbon tunnel vision and encompasses the wide range of outcomes that farming delivers. Read more about the GFM mission here. 

The GFM framework enables farmers to capture a complete picture of their farm’s health – environmental, social and economic – in one place. Whether it’s a family farm in Kentucky, a mixed farm in the UK or a regenerative producer in South Africa, farmers used the GFM to understand what’s working, where there’s room for improvement, and how to tell that story to others – be it buyers, policymakers or their own communities. 

Many found that the process not only provided clarity, but renewed confidence in their farming decisions. 

“Participating in this programme improved my confidence as a solo operator, because I got data and validation. It’s motivated me to do things I’d been wanting to do but wasn’t sure whether it would be worthwhile.” – Farmer, Kentucky 

“The detailed nature of the assessment revealed areas of my farming practices that I hadn’t previously considered, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive approach to sustainability.” – Farmer, South Africa  

Of course, gathering this kind of whole-farm data isn’t always easy – particularly when time and resources are stretched. But the trials showed that with the right support, from advisors or digital tools, it is possible, and more importantly, it’s worthwhile. 

Why now? 

This comes at a pivotal time. Farmers everywhere are facing huge challenges, from climate change and biodiversity loss to volatile markets and new trade pressures. At the same time, the demand for transparency and trust in how food is produced has never been greater. 

The Global Farm Metric offers a way forward – a common framework that’s flexible enough to work anywhere, but consistent enough to drive meaningful change. Already, the data from these trials is being used to shape new policies, inform procurement decisions and support more outcome-focused approaches to rewarding sustainable farming. 

“What we grow and how we grow it has never mattered more,” says Fabia Bromovsky, Director of the Global Farm Metric. “These trials show that it’s possible to gather meaningful data at farm level, and that this data can become a powerful tool for farmers and decision-makers alike. The GFM offers a shared set of goals that can guide action from farm gates to government desks.” 

What’s next? 

The release of this report marks the launch of  GFM 2.0, a refined version of the framework shaped by the experiences of farmers, retailers, policymakers and assessment providers around the world. 

The report also lays out a clear call to action for everyone involved in the food system: 

• For farmers: Use the GFM to take a holistic look at your farm, identify opportunities and connect with markets and support networks. 

• For policymakers and finance providers: Design policies and funding that reward outcomes and support the transition to truly sustainable farming. 

• For retailers and supply chains: Align sustainability reporting, reduce duplication and invest in long-term resilience. 

• For assessment providers: Collaborate to harmonise tools and reduce the burden on farmers while capturing data that truly matters. 

• For everyone: Embrace a whole-farm, outcomes-based approach as the foundation for a more sustainable future.

Find resources and reports, and sign up to the GFM newsletter to hear quarterly updates and future trial opportunities: globalfarmmetric.org/get-involved/. You can also get in touch with the team at info@globalfarmmetric.org. 

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.

Australia’s wildlife is regarded by many as some of the world’s most unique and deadly. But it’s in trouble. Here, Brodie Crouch, a PhD student at The University of Queensland, unpacks how biodiversity and production ‘win-wins’ can help livestock graziers to be part of the solution in tackling Australia’s extinction crisis whilst continuing to produce important nutrition.

Platypus duck-diving in a creek, an endangered parrot returning to its termite-mound nest, bilbies scurrying across a Channel Country paddock – these are all scenes that may greet you on a biodiverse livestock grazing operation in Australia. However, Australia (one of 17 mega-diverse countries) has, concerningly, one of the worst contemporary extinction rates in the world.

As managers of over half the continent’s land, Australian graziers are incredibly important stewards of the country’s biodiversity, along with numerous other public goods including carbon stores, flood mitigation services, soil fertility and water quality. Working to improve conservation outcomes on grazing land offers, perhaps, the biggest opportunity for increasing the abundance of species that are poorly represented in the protected area estate (National Parks, Conservation Areas and other conservation focused land tenures). This approach has been identified as a priority action by government, conservation NGOs and academia alike.

Our Global Farm Metric Project’s Officer, Olivia Boothman, recently took a visit to Somerset House where ‘Soil: The World at Our Feet’, is currently exhibiting in London. Reflecting on her visit, Olivia writes about the impact of overlooking the ground beneath our feet and the power of soil to better connect us to the Earth.

“ ‘Look up’ we are often told, an invitation to pause chaotic lives and cast our eyes skywards to appreciate the wonder of the world. But what if instead of looking up, we looked down?”

This was the question posed to me by the writing on the wall as I stood in the opening room of the exhibition Soil: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House.

As the curators encouraged me to imagine taking off my shoes and allowing my toes to sink into the soil, I stood there, disappointed in myself, thinking ‘when was the last time I felt the soil?’ The only memory that sprung to mind was a dramatic skid down a steep hill on a rainy day at Hampstead Heath… very Bridget Jones-esque.

I glanced around and wondered how many of my fellow gallery goers – who likely also rushed from their last meeting, hopped on the tube and navigated the mycelial network of Somerset House’s underground hallways to get to the exhibition on time – were asking themselves the same question?

I continued reading: “Is it crumbly and aerated? Does it clump together? Is it cool on your skin?” These were almost exactly the same questions I asked farmers as we carried out a VESS (visual examination of soil structure) test as part of our trials of the Global Farm Metric framework. I was astounded by the lack of knowledge some farmers had of the most basic and intuitive indicators of soil health.

With the advent of advanced laboratory soil testing, have farmers become reliant on technological tests and lost the skills of interpreting the look, feel, smell or even the sound of soil? I have sympathy with them – in my previous career as a farm vet, I would have been far more confident reaching for the ultrasound scanner to rapidly detect pregnancy than rely on physical examination and palpation alone.

“As the curators encouraged me to imagine taking off my shoes and allowing my toes to sink into the soil, I stood there, disappointed in myself, thinking ‘when was the last time I felt the soil?”

But what has been the impact of us all overlooking soil for so long?

The answer was highlighted in my favourite piece in the exhibition. In 1983, the artist David Nash cut a circular patch of turf from the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park and transplanted it in a field in North Wales and vice versa, taking turf from North Wales back to London. Botanists counted just three species in the field from Hyde Park, compared to 27 in the Welsh field. In 2024, artist Mike Perry decided to repeat the experiment, taking the patch of urban ground from Springfield Park, in my home borough of Hackney, and swapping it with a patch of farmland in Pembrokeshire National Park in West Wales. This time around, botanists counted 39 species in the urban turf, and only four in the Welsh turf. Of course, the amount of biodiversity is hugely dependent on what sort of farming has taken place. As the SFT recently showcased in a new film about a farm in Snowdonia, regenerative grazing practices can help to support a staggering abundance of wildlife.

I can attest to the biodiversity of Hackney’s parks. Every June, I watch – slightly bemused – selfies being taken against a backdrop of wildflowers. The photos make a splash on Instagram for sure, but I refuse to believe that the wildflowers feature for aesthetics only. I think these selfies represent people’s desire to be reconnected with nature. In the same way, I am sure that many visitors to the Soil exhibition are doing so to learn about the ‘the world at our feet’ – this matter which sustains us – and what they can do to better understand it, increasing a connection with it. The power of seeing-is-believing experiences can be transformative in engaging with the natural world, which is why the SFT is developing the Beacon Farms Network. The Network brings together sustainable and regenerative farms acting as educational platforms to inform and inspire young people and adults about the story behind their food and to get their hands back in the soil.

Although it can be easy to despair of our growing disconnect – between rural and urban, farmer and consumer, wild and cultivated, our needs and wants – the closing room of the exhibition offered a reminder that food can be the cure to all of these. We make decisions about what to eat three times a day, and our food choices matter.

Thanks to this exhibition, this weekend, you will find me in my tiny garden, getting my hands stuck in the soil!

Soil: The World at Our Feet is on at Somerset House until 13^th April.

SFT Content Editor, Alicia Miller, provides an overview on this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference, including one of the SFT’s sessions, Grazing for Good, which took a closer look at the integral relationship between livestock and the biodiversity it supports.

Arriving into 2025 with the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC), it has been hard to ignore what this past year has delivered in terms of climate change – 24 hours of rain in Dubai, a terrifying hurricane season in the US, fatal flooding in Valencia, Spain, heatwaves here, there and everywhere across the globe, and as an intro to the new year, Los Angeles is burning like never before. Twenty-twenty four was the hottest year on record; what will 2025 be?

So, being at the ORFC felt almost blissful – a momentary haven to talk with like-minded people and think about the micro and the macro, how we move forward in a rapidly changing new world and, most pressing, what we can do to fix it, if fixing it is even possible at this point… But hope remains our friend and that’s good to keep in mind.

As always, there was much to explore at the Conference with an array of workshops and ‘deep dive’ sessions arguably dominating the more academic talks on topics like Trauma and the Land and The Interbeing of Agroecology– not to dismiss those deeper discussions which are important to have, but perhaps ‘practice’ is having a moment? What can we do on the ground, in the day-to-day, to make change happen? Are we in a place where action speaks louder than words? That’s definitely food for thought.

In a session on Improving Food Resilience, food policy veteran, Tim Lang, discussed the findings of his recent research for the UK Government, with the panel addressing the critical question: ‘Is the UK’s food system resilient?’ Unsurprisingly, the general consensus was a resounding ‘no.’ The panel explored what resilience truly means in the context of food systems – essentially, the ability to recover from shocks, whether acute (like pandemics) or chronic (such as prolonged political instability) – and how it can be strengthened. The ‘just-in-time’ logistics employed by supermarkets faced criticism, with broad agreement that transitioning to a more localised food system could be vital to ensuring access to healthy and sustainable food in an increasingly uncertain world. Sustain’s Sarah Williams shared insights from the Local Food Plan (which the SFT is involved in), while farmer and GP Tom Pearson emphasised the importance of more farmers engaging with their local communities. The panel agreed that the proof of concept exists, but robust policy frameworks and a stronger economic narrative are needed to turn theory into action.

Following in the vein of Tim Lang’s thinking was a lively panel organised by the Eating Better Alliance. Chaired brilliantly by the organisation’s Sarah Wakefield, the panellists tackled the complex issue of dietary shift and implications for farming – a topic often mired by polarisation, which Eating Better aims to overcome. Holly Purdy’s Exmoor farm exemplifies the concept of ‘better’ meat, with her pasture-fed beef and sheep, and ‘more plants,’ through the introduction of a market garden and silvopasture incorporating fruit trees. Jimmy Woodrow at Pasture for Life highlighted the need to better account for the ecological role of livestock in regenerative food systems, a contribution that isn’t always “captured in spreadsheets,” while Julia Kirby-Smith of Better Food Traders brought in the perspectives of consumers and retailers, emphasising the system’s reliance on cheap food. Could True Cost Accounting provide the solution to rebalancing the system and demonstrate the far-reaching benefits of ‘eating better’? The discussion around barriers ranged from the lack of local abattoirs to the role of the media, and, once again, the panel agreed that getting people – whether school children or MPs – onto farms will be essential to shifting mindsets and driving real long-term change.

Also very interesting and relevant, was a session on pesticide use and its future, organised around organic beef farmer Denise Walton and mixed arable farmer Patrick Barker and how they manage their land. It was an enlightening perspective, especially from Barker, who while working hard to conserve nature on his land (and doing it very well), still uses glyphosate widely. It’s a strange disconnect – for Barker, it’s a tool and he doesn’t worry about it overmuch. But for most, if not all, agroecological farmers at the ORFC, it’s anathema. You can’t do both and his admission is at best problematic.

The Sustainable Food Trust’s session on Grazing for Good? Livestock and Biodiversity in the UK, chaired by SFT CEO Patrick Holden, included the SFT’s Senior Researcher Robert Barbour and Farmer Teleri Fielden, along with Molly Biddell, Head of Natural Capital at the Knepp Estate and Jo Riggall at Plantlife. It was an engaging discussion on the integral relationship between livestock and the biodiversity it supports. Teleri Fielden made a strong case for the role that the mixed flock of cattle that she and her husband graze in Snowdonia National Park are essential in the wider preservation of the nature they support. Practices like rotational grazing and the inclusion of more diverse swards can help to mitigate the overuse of anti-parasitic medication which has significant impact on invertebrates. The reintegration of fertility building leys grazed by animals in crop rotations also offer significant benefits in reducing agri-chemical use. And there are many more sustainable practices that work to support nature and natural habitats in a variety of ways – it is possible to have a food system that works for “people, farm animals and the natural world”. Livestock, as Molly Biddell comments, is “totally critical for the health that their meat provides [and] critical for what they do for the landscape…” The session explored many of the themes that will be covered in the SFT’s next report, due out later this year.

To round off the year, our Executive Director, Adele Jones, casts an eye back over 2024. Adele considers the progress that’s been made towards the food and farming transition over the last 12 months, with a summary of some SFT highlights.

As we approach the end of 2024, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on what has been another busy year for the SFT and a turbulent time for farming.

With the protests in London just a few days behind us and unrest across Europe earlier this year, there is clear disharmony in the farming community at present. As a sector, we have the potential to play a hugely significant role in solving climate change, restoring nature and promoting positive human health and social wellbeing. But with this comes pressure and weighty responsibility. We’re all expecting so much from farmers right now and yet the entire food system as it is currently designed continues to squeeze them, both financially and emotionally.

That’s why, for us, work on financing the agricultural transition remains at the core of our mission. The farming practices that deliver the most value for society must become the most financially viable. We need the government and private sector to work together to introduce a range of carefully tested ‘carrot and stick’ mechanisms that make regenerative farming the no-brainer business model. And to my mind, rather than pitching small farmers against big, we need to think about helping all farmers move in a regenerative direction.

This doesn’t mean to say that small farming businesses won’t need bespoke support in this transition. When it comes to the new farm support schemes, advice, guidance and assistance with data collection requirements will all be key. The same is true further up the supply chain – incentives and regulations must take scale into account to ensure that new rules and requirements don’t discriminate against businesses with fewer resources.

It seems to me that the best way to convince the Treasury to continue to support the food and farming sector constructively in the future, is to supply them with a clear and consistent dashboard that shows where and how taxpayers’ money is being spent on the delivery of public goods. To collect this information, mandatory reporting based on common metrics (integrated into existing schemes and tools so as not to burden farmers with yet another audit) will be crucial. We will continue to develop the Global Farm Metric (GFM) and scale up its usage through tools such as the Soil Association Exchange to help make this possible.

Going into 2025 and beyond, our focus for the GFM will be on its application and how measurement can be used to drive change. We will be using the framework to undertake on-farm true cost accounting studies, considering how common measurement should inform future eco-labelling, and looking at how common metrics can be used to aid the design of sustainable food products through our ongoing collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s ‘The Big Food Redesign’ project. But, as mentioned above, perhaps the most important use of common metrics is in informing new financing frameworks for regenerative agriculture, and we will be working within the Sustainable Markets Initiative to explore this, starting with a pilot in the east of England early next year.

Of course, all this work will only land if we can inspire and reach business leaders, government officials, school children and the wider public. Our new Beacon Farms Network will be key to this and has kick started our mission to get more people onto farms, providing farmers with the resources and support needed to enable them to host visits that will allow everyone to learn more about the story behind their food.

A few highlights of the SFT’s year:

• January – We gave Oxford Real Farming Conference attendees a taste of our upcoming report on grazing livestock, which will set the record straight on the issues and opportunities around grazing livestock when it comes to climate, biodiversity and human health.
• February – BASIS launched our co-created course on Farm Sustainability and the Global Farm Metric, a first step in our plans to develop educational materials to enhance understanding of the GFM and the importance of valuing and measuring sustainability.
• March – The Telegraph interviewed Patrick about the challenges facing the food and farming industry, following his well-received blog on the farmer protests.

Our CEO, Patrick Holden, and Executive Director, Adele Jones, reflect on their time at New York Climate Week, sharing some of the impactful conversations they had, what’s now needed to scale truly regenerative farming systems and why the SFT is uniquely placed to ‘speak truth to power’ in spaces like this.

Patrick

For the second time, I’m in New York for Climate Week, an annual event bringing together people from corporate, environmental and political worlds. It offers a unique opportunity to meet many in a short period, all in one place.

I’ve been to New York several times, the first being in December 1970 when I stayed with my cousin Joey, then a student at Barnard College. I remember eating BLT sandwiches for the first time and climbing the Empire State Building, then the tallest in the world. Walking through the city today still brings back memories of that trip, fresh even after 54 years.

A key reason for my visit is my involvement in the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), set up by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) in 2020. The SMI aims to unite CEOs across a wide number of sectors to address climate change, nature loss and food insecurity.

Now four years on, the SMI has over 20 CEO-led Task Forces tackling diverse challenges. I lead the task force on measuring land use sustainability, predominantly using the Global Farm Metric, a harmonised framework for measuring the climate, nature and social impacts of farming systems.

Through the SMI, I’ve connected with a wide range of leaders from industries such as food, banking, energy and asset management. Five years ago, I couldn’t have imagined working alongside such influential figures, but thanks to the initiative, I have, and it’s remarkable.

What has struck me is the shared humanity of these CEOs. Like all of us, they face personal struggles – existential fears, the risk of losing their jobs, and uncertainty about how to solve the issues we’re all grappling with. They genuinely want to do good, but they are caught between shareholder demands for profit and the need for pre-competitive collaboration on sustainability.

“We’re in a unique position to speak truth to power – honestly, but with respect and understanding of the challenges businesses face in sourcing more sustainable products without losing market share.”

As Ken Wilson of The Christensen Fund once said, “It’s hard to keep the frogs in the wheelbarrow.” It’s incredibly difficult for companies – especially those built on competition – to act in a pre-competitive spirit that requires trust, love and openness. But progress is being made, driven by the realisation that we face existential threats.

At a panel I attended at Goals House during Climate Week, the moderator – a sustainability head at CNN – surprised the audience by mentioning that the fertility of the Great Plains was built by bison and could be restored by grazing cattle using holistic methods. He then asked representatives from Cargill and Nestlé what they thought.

It seemed that neither company had seriously considered reintegrating livestock into their farming rotations. During the discussion, I suggested they need to rethink this, not least because continuous commodity cropping won’t sequester enough carbon to meet their Scope 3 emission targets.

This is just one example of the type of intervention we, at the Sustainable Food Trust, can make at events like Climate Week. We bring deep practical knowledge to discussions about sustainable food systems, especially when many attendees, including those from NGOs, are disconnected from the realities of agriculture. We’re in a unique position to speak truth to power – honestly, but with respect and understanding of the challenges businesses face in sourcing more sustainable products without losing market share.

I am excited to see the potential of the SFT’s contribution when it comes to influencing others and creating the conditions for scaling truly regenerative farming systems. And I think being in New York for these few days does make a difference. I look forward to seeing what further opportunities arise during my time in this extraordinary city.

Adele

As I head home at the end of another New York Climate Week, I find myself reflecting on the value of weeks like this. Is it worth the time and carbon involved in traveling across the globe to discuss the same challenges and initiatives with many of the same people, year on year? The question often runs through my mind. Yet, despite those doubts, I know that I am very fortunate, and spending time in person with the people and organisations we’re working with on major projects, as well as providing the opportunity to learn from new initiatives, continues to be absolutely vital.

Although as an organisation our work is global in scope, we don’t have offices all over the world, instead choosing to work with ‘fellow travellers’ and likeminded partner organisations who can provide the important local knowledge and context. Moments like this, therefore, allow us to connect with those friends and partners, and ensures that everything we do is relevant, both to the broader global conversations and to the specific local contexts where we’re having an influence. At the moment our work is focused in the UK, the US and Australia, as well as regions where we’re testing the harmonised metrics framework through Regen10, which includes countries in Africa, South America and Asia.

“Climate Week, the COPs and other such events provide incredibly valuable moments in time to reassess what we’re contributing to the wider conversation on accelerating the transition to sustainable, regenerative food and farming.”

Perhaps the biggest theme this past week has been ‘financing the regenerative agricultural transition’. It’s been encouraging to see so many different perspectives contributing to this conversation, as solving it will require an entirely new way of thinking about what we perceive as the ‘value to society’ that farming for nature, climate and health can bring. At the moment, we’re working closely with the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) which is focusing a lot on bringing together a range of food companies, retailers and members of the finance community to co-evolve solutions to this challenge. However, I’ve learnt a lot this week about what’s happening within the ‘innovative’ impact investment world, which is extremely encouraging. Financial practices are emerging based on new models which can help drive the transition to regenerative farming in places like the US, Brazil and India. One of my follow-ups from Climate Week is to work on aligning new approaches to investment with corporate supply chains, ensuring they couple together for maximum impact.

This has reminded me that while it’s exciting and necessary to focus on future innovations and the next big project, we must ensure that the foundational work we’ve done is solid, authentic and rigorous. To take an example, the conversation around harmonised, holistic metrics has gained significant traction over recent years, with many people now assuming that the metrics are now agreed and being rolled out. While on the one hand this could be seen as a success, the reality is that we still have a fair way to go in getting final agreement on the high-level architecture of the metrics, and even more importantly, embedding this framework within the tools that all farmers, food companies and governments are using on a daily basis. With limited real-world application at this stage, our priority within the Global Farm Metric over the coming months, will be to turn this around.

My final thought is that we need to become better at storytelling. At times, it can feel like we’re engaging in lofty ‘50,000ft’ discussions which never really land on the ground. If we’re working with farmers on projects, they should be ones standing on these panels telling us how it’s impacted them and what more they need next. This is definitely missing from Climate Week – I hope that the SFT could play a role next year in supporting some of our farmer partners to ensure their expertise is heard on the global stage.

Climate Week, the COPs and other such events provide incredibly valuable moments in time to reassess what we’re contributing to the wider conversation on accelerating the transition to sustainable, regenerative food and farming. Delivering on revolutionary big ideas is not always straightforward and requires us as a team to walk the fine line between sticking to our guns and adapting to the ever-fluid global conversation. But I’m pleased to report, we’re very much in thick of it and look forward to continued work with our close allies to keep the conversation and activity moving forwards.

 

Featured image courtesy of Climate Group multimedia hub.

Bronwen Percival is the Buyer and Technical Director at Neal’s Yard Dairy. She’s been engaged with artisan cheese since she started as a cheesemonger at the Dairy. Not a native to the UK, she grew up in San Diego, California, where her grandfather was a dairy producer. She works with over 40 cheese producers across the UK and Ireland and has co-authored ‘Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes and the Fight for Real Cheese’ with her husband Francis Percival.

 

SFT: Many people are aware of the leadership that Neal’s Yard Dairy (NYD) have shown not only in convening the artisan cheese making community of the UK but also in developing markets for named artisan cheeses based on the story behind their production – not just in the UK but throughout the world. What are the motivations that inspire you and your team to do this work?

Bronwen Percival: I think there are a number of different ways to answer this question, because we all have many, many motivations. The whole idea of connecting a name and a story to a cheese as it gets to the market, is quite transformative for British cheese. In some ways it’s antithetical to commodity production which is all about taking interchangeable raw materials and turning them into interchangeable non-differentiated cheese – along that path, a lot of those farmhouse cheeses lose the identity that is associated with the producer.

It’s not enough to just sell cheese; what’s really important is to sell that cheese connected to an individual identity that meets the market and where excellent quality is therefore rewarded because people will come back and ask not for Neal’s Yard Dairy cheddar but for Hafod cheddar or Montgomery’s cheddar. That was pretty radical in the late 1970s and early 80s when Neal’s Yard Dairy got started in Covent Garden. It’s less radical today, but I still feel it’s fundamental to what we do. We’re the bridge between the individual small producers and the market and we are tasting every batch and talking to customers about how each batch is different and trying to match the right cheese to the right customer. It’s that simple.

There’s also another way to answer that question, which is that diversity is an important thing. We talk about the importance of diversity in a field with different types of plants or the diversity of the genomes of the cows that [make our cheeses], but we live in a world of rapidly reducing diversity and the same applies to the market. Losing that diversity, as businesses scale up and we get fewer options, is a real risk to our food system and it’s a risk to taste and flavour as well.

So, the work that we do is really about protecting that diversity. Championing that within the market sometimes means selling tiny amounts of cheeses that are made in [small-scale] production. I don’t know how financially viable that is, because, at the end of the day, they’re only a minute fraction of what we do, but it’s still a really important part of our mission and it’s what will set us apart.

“We’re the bridge between the individual small producers and the market and we are tasting every batch and talking to customers about how each batch is different and trying to match the right cheese to the right customer. It’s that simple.”

SFT: We know that your operation includes retail, wholesale and export, but what is the ratio of sales in each area and which countries buy cheeses from NYD? 

BP: That’s a very good question! It’s split – about 25% of our sales are through our retail shops in London. We have three shops and another one possibly on its way and we have an ecommerce department, which is a form of retail as well. Fifty percent of our sales go through our domestic wholesale to shops and restaurants all over the UK, and the final 25% is on export. That’s as a percentage of the volume of the cheese.

Which countries buy cheese from NYD? We ship cheese all over the world. We sell cheese to the US, throughout Europe, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and some goes to Peru and Japan. It’s kind of an eclectic mixture.

But when people flippantly say, ‘oh, we’ll find other markets abroad’, I think they are forgetting that [continental] Europe is an incredibly sophisticated market when it comes to cheese consumption. People eat cheese seriously, more seriously than we do here in the UK.