The SFT team have picked out some of their personal recommendations for the year ahead – find out what films and TV series need to be on your radar and where you can find them.

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

 

The Grab

Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite

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

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

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

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

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

 

One Last Farm

Directed by Nikki Dodd

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Heal the Land

Directed by Tom Francome and Hayley Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Wilding

Directed by David Allen

Where to watch: Available to stream on BFI Player.

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

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

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

 

Hope in the Water

Directed by Brian Peter Falk

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

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

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

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

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

 

Featured image courtesy of Rob Carmier.

Avoid the never-ending scroll on streaming platforms. Our list of recommended food and farming films and TV series is especially selected, watched and reviewed by the SFT team for your viewing pleasure.

 

Six Inches of Soil

Director: Colin Ramsay

Where to watch: See current screening dates here

There have been so many films – and more to come – on farming, its practices and how to make our food and farming sustainable in the longer term. Six Inches of Soil is one incarnation of this narrative, but what it brings to the table will be more immediate and relevant to a British audience than many previous films of this ilk, which tend to be focused on the US. It follows the stories of three young farmers in the UK: Anna, who left a career as a photographer to come back to the family farm and work with her father; Adrienne, a new entrant farmer looking to grow veg; and Ben, who grew up on a dairy farm, and now raises a herd of Belted Galloways on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, using regenerative practices.

This is really a story of the next generation and it’s a heartening one. These farmers are working a ‘back to the future’ line – drawing on traditional practices along with new ones like mob grazing. For all three of them, it is all about soil and the importance of its microbiology which is the starting point of fertility and true abundance. The film intersperses explanations of regenerative practices and includes commentary from a range of speakers including Satish Kumar, Tim Lang, Vicky Hird, John Pawsey, Dee Williams and others.

The journeys of these young people are distinct and different. As a new entrant grower with no family background in food production, it is Adrienne who has perhaps the hardest path. Like most farmers, she puts in long hours, working two jobs and making difficult decisions, especially on what to do during the drought of 2022 as her soil loses its vitality. The climate is changing, and this will impact all three farmers over the coming years; what will help them all to thrive is revitalising their land through the conscience and care that they provide it.

 

Feeding Tomorrow

Co-directors: Oliver English and Simon English

Where to watch: Apple TV/Prime video/Google Play

With the world approaching 10 billion people by 2050, there is an imperative need to change how we feed the world. Feeding Tomorrow looks deeply at what we need to do to transform the way we eat and produce food in ways that will protect the planet and make people healthier.

The film maps the profound problems of industrial farming and its history, but it primarily focuses on change – what do we need to do to improve health and the environment, while increasing food access and security? Farming is in a dire state with a third of farmable land lost across the globe, and industrial food production providing just three things, as grower Rishi Kumar comments, “processed food, junk food and animal food”. Large scale agriculture’s decimation of healthy soil in favour of chemically based nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides, herbicides and fungicides has not been good for us, instead generating only “degeneration and disease”.

The film joins up the dots for a holistic approach to regenerating our food system and at its roots are some simple principles: that there is a relationship between soil health, plant care and human health which should all be essentially interconnected; that diversity is key and variety in what you eat is the essence of a healthy diet; that small-scale farming and localised food production is the way forward in changing our food system.

As farmer Mark Shepherd says, “We need to begin to investigate every aspect of our lives and let’s start with what’s on our plate.”

 

Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food

Director: Stephanie Soechtig

Where to watch: Netflix

America is often touted as having the safest food system in the world, but it also has a long history of increasingly dangerous food poisoning events, reaching back several decades. It’s a disturbing side effect of the industrialised food system. Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food explores the origins and impacts of US outbreaks that continue to this day, despite significant reforms – why does it keep happening?

You can find part of the answer in the bigger picture – the way that food is produced on an industrial scale. Global food systems ship food all over the world – greens grown in California’s Central Valley can be sent to Japan, Taiwan or even Kuwait, which is uncompromisingly crazy. It’s practices like this that may breed the next pandemic.

The other issue here is the production of meat and the growing of vegetables sitting side by side. CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) are often situated next to or near where huge fields of leafy greens are grown and the possibility of run-off into irrigation canals is common. Produce is often watered with that run-off and increasingly the food poisoning scares are carried by the leafy greens – salad, spinach, lettuces and the like.

The answers are pretty straightforward, but clearly difficult to implement. The relationship between the FDA and the USDA is complicated and opaque – who’s responsible for what? It appears at times that neither really knows. And are these overseers really acting on the behalf of the general public, or are they too much embedded in Big Ag to see the damage or care about it? There’s little here to think that things will change.

 

Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones

Director: Clay Jeter

Where to watch: Netflix

This four-part series featuring Dan Buettner, a long-distance cyclist who has written extensively on longevity, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zone explores the select few communities across the world that have a high number of centenarians – people who live to 100 or past it.

Starting in Okinawa in Japan, Buettner looks at the diets of Okinawan elders. It is a culture that values food for health and the foods that they eat are full of medicinal properties – purple sweet potatoes, squid ink, particular seaweeds and, of course, tofu, which can lower cholesterol and the risk of heart disease. Another aspect of their diets is how much they eat – just 2000 calories per day as opposed to the 4000 calories that many Americans consume each day. One secret of these elders is that they have gardens where they grow food and, most importantly, because of this, they move and so have retained their core musculature, preserving strength and flexibility.

As Buettner travels the globe to understand what it is that generates longevity, he finds a diverse array of characteristics that go beyond the food that you eat – though a healthy diet remains a constant in the series. In the mountains of Sardinia, steepness has a role to play: in the small villages, people walk up and down all day, and shepherds, often ancient, move constantly as they tend their flocks – this is bound to keep you fit, no matter your age. But also very important, is community. Strong supportive communities like the Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, a surprising Blue Zone in the US, foster friendship and happiness, along with their religion, which extends lifetimes.

The secret to longevity isn’t a mystery in the end: eat well, largely plant-based – and don’t forget the wine; quite simply, move – every day and as much as possible; know your purpose; and connect with family and friends.

 

A New Day Is Possible

Director: Jonathan Pearson

Where to watch: ifad.org

Ifad’s new short film, A New Day Is Possible, is a quick uplifting fix on the joys of farming – something not often celebrated in the face of how tough farming can be. It starts at dawn as farmers start their day, with the powerful voice of Nina Simone singing ‘Feeling Good’ and a series of stunningly beautiful scenes of small-scale farmers in Tunisia.

Two short messages preface the film, so important to remember: “Small scale farmers produce a third of the world’s food” and “They are also on the frontline of climate change” – their importance in the world cannot be diminished and without them food production would falter.

 

Featured image ©IFAD showing one of the farmers featured in A New Day is Possible.

Are you in search of some new reading material? Wind down for the summer with a few recommended reads from the SFT team.

 

The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables, by Adam Alexander

Reviewed by Alicia Miller

Adam Alexander is a seed detective – he’s travelled the world looking for seeds of myriad varietals that have been hidden away in distant places across the world. These are the seeds that could save us as we move through the next century with climate change wreaking havoc across the globe.

What is so engaging in The Seed Detective is the infectious drive that Alexander has to uncover the histories of vegetables that most of us don’t think twice about. It’s a reminder of how vital it is to know and understand the evolution of our vegetables and what’s at stake as myriad local varietals disappear.

Alexander starts with the pea which developed widely across the globe beginning in the Fertile Crescent, where it dates back 8500 years to Neolithic settlements. From there it slowly ‘globalised’ itself, moving eastward towards India and China and westward through Europe, appearing in Britain in the 16^th century as the Carlin Pea, a pea once again being celebrated by select growers in the UK. However, the pea’s vast diversity has inevitably declined, as with most contemporary varietals.

The tales of these seeds speak to the immense knowledge that Alexander holds and his stories are full of energy and excitement as well as everything you might want to know about, say, a tomato. Don’t, for minute, assume you know where the tomato first appeared – Peru, not Italy, and possibly via the shores of Asia. Its wild ancestor can still be found in Peru’s coastal regions. The tomato’s heartland is Mexico, from where it transformed from a small fruit to larger one, and it wasn’t until the 19^th century that varietals outside of Mexico began to proliferate. Most people know that it is a nightshade, and it is related to vegetables and plants that might surprise you – aubergines, peppers and chillies, potatoes, tobacco, gooseberries, and surprisingly, petunias, to name a few.

If you really want to get to know your food, spend some time with The Seed Detective and you’ll be more literate and informed about the wonder of your vegetables.

 

Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat Is Fuelling Our Mental Health Crisis, by Kimberly Wilson

Reviewed by Imogen Crossland

Unprocessed builds a convincing and captivating case for paying close attention to the links between nutrition, brain function and mental health. Western medicine tends to separate the physical from the mental side of healthcare, disconnecting mind from body. In this book, Kimberly Wilson proves that this needs to change.

As a society, our mental health is deteriorating. Whether you look at rates of mental illness in children, neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, memory and concentration levels, or even average IQ, the picture is pretty bleak. At the same time, diets are becoming increasingly ultra-processed at the expense of nutritious whole foods. The result is a widespread deficiency in many essential nutrients, some of which are already known to be vital for brain development and cognitive function, others we are only beginning to understand the importance of.

In a rigorous yet highly accessible way, Wilson breaks down the scientific evidence behind some of the key nutrients which tend to be lacking in modern diets. It may be surprising to find out that the brain is, besides fat tissue itself, the fattiest organ in the human body. This is because building and running a brain requires a lot of energy. One of the key building blocks of brain tissue is an omega-3 called DHA, something which, shockingly, 92% of pregnant women are deficient in. The facts and figures are brought to life through two fictional case studies woven throughout the book, following the lives of Yasmin and Zoe and their children, to show how diet, while not the only factor at play, can influence mental health across the average lifespan, and especially at critical stages of development.

While much of what Wilson has to say is quite alarming, the intention of the book is not to scaremonger. Instead, she aims to empower the reader by sharing her knowledge, not only to help people make informed choices about their own diets, but to instigate a movement demanding action from the UK government. For this, she provides useful ‘action points’ for the reader, as well as a list of her own calls to government. High on the list is the need to address social inequality, because “poor nutrition is both a cause and a consequence of poverty”. Improving access to foods which nourish the mind and body is not the only solution to our mental health crisis, but it will certainly “strengthen the foundations”, especially among the most vulnerable groups in society.

 

Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape, by Henry Dimbleby with Jemima Lewis

Reviewed by Bonnie Welch

“The food system is no longer simply a means of sustenance. It is one of the most successful, most innovative and most destructive industries on earth,” writes author of the National Food Strategy, Henry Dimbleby, in the opening chapter of Ravenous.

Over the past seventy years, farming practices in the UK (and across much of the world) have intensified and industrialised, with devastating impacts on climate, nature and biodiversity. It is no coincidence that at the same time, the population has become increasingly unhealthy, with high rates of obesity and diet-related disease. In the UK, 60% of adults are either overweight or obese, a figure expected to rise to 80% by 2060, with huge costs to society in terms of lost workforce productivity, shortened lives and NHS treatments.

The ‘Junk Food Cycle’ is one of Dimbleby’s main concerns. Our predilection for calorie-dense foods, means that companies invest more time and money creating them, which makes us eat more of them and ultimately expands the market (along with our waistlines!) Ultra-processed foods currently make up 57% of our diets. Considering just how unwell this cycle makes so many of us, “Why isn’t there public uproar?” Dimbleby asks.

“Right now, we are trying to fight two fires at once: diet-related disease and environmental destruction.” The latter is where Dimbleby focuses the second half of the book, unpacking the land-sharing versus land-sparing debate, as well as the conflicting positions on natural capital, carbon sequestration and crucially, the role of livestock. Dimbleby also recognises the need for change to be underpinned by harmonised metrics that assess the impacts of farming on climate, biodiversity and health outcomes.

In Dimbleby’s vision for a sustainable and resilient food future, a diversity of approaches will be needed: “Organic farms will live alongside solar-powered, high-rise greenhouses growing fruit and veg in cities. There will be more space for wild landscapes, as well as nature-rich upland farms. This will be made possible by a completely new kind of food production – precision fermentation – which will take some of the pressure off the land.” Practically speaking, governments will need to invest in biodiversity restoration, carbon sequestration and agricultural innovation, and a wide range of public health policies will be needed to ensure everyone has access to healthy food.

While some of Dimbleby’s recommendations – like precision fermentation – remain controversial in terms of their potential role within a sustainable food system, his approach is diverse and inclusive of those on both sides of the ideological spectrum. However, almost all of his recommendations depend on government intervention. The fact that his National Food Strategy was largely ignored doesn’t bode well, but at present it’s perhaps the only comprehensive vision for change that government has.

 

What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé

Reviewed by Victoria Halliday

Does an apple a day still keep the doctor away? According to the authors of What Your Food Ate, the declining health of our soil means that the old proverb may hold less truth than ever.

This latest book, by geology professor David R. Montgomery and biologist Anne Biklé, unravels the threads that connect soil, crops, animals and people. In doing so, it demonstrates how, instead of being diverted by commonly held notions of what constitutes ‘healthy’ food, we should be concentrating our attention on the health of the soil in which those foods are grown; it is this, the authors argue, that truly underpins the nutritional value and health-giving properties of what we eat.

Early warnings of the potentially damaging effects of industrial agriculture and food processing technologies upon planetary and human health provoked a vehement backlash. The authors tell the stories of soil scientist, Sir Albert Howard and organic pioneer, Lady Eve Balfour, both of whom were rebuffed by the scientific consensus of their day. This wasn’t owing to lack of evidence – both were rigorous in their research and observations – but because their findings were in opposition to the chemically based agriculture that was, and all too often still is, lauded as the hallmark of progress. It is the impact of this supposed progress that the authors go on to examine, describing how intensive agriculture has degraded the life of soils and the health of people.

With a strong scientific bent, Montgomery and Biklé dissect each of their focus topics – soil, plants, animals and people. From mycorrhizal networks to worm counts, compost to phytochemicals, and ruminant health to ultra-processed foods, What Your Food Ate explains the ripple effects emanating from our lack of regard for soil health. At times, the points being made can begin to feel laboured and there are occasions when the metaphors err on the heavy-handed (for example, comparing synthetically fertilised crops to “a deer with a broken leg trying to flee a pack of predators”), but this is countered by the book’s generous helpings of insight, rigour and originality.

For those already well versed in these topics, What Your Food Ate offers a clear and engaging synthesis of research, both recent and historical. For readers with less familiarity, it is an eye-opening revelation of just how intricately the health of the Earth’s matter and its beings are connected and the mesmerising symbiosis that exists between lifeforms.

 

Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well, by Tim Spector

Reviewed by Alice Frost

Professor Tim Spector merges lived experience, scientific knowledge and a genuine love of food in his latest book, Food for Life. Spector offers a comprehensive overview of the foods that contribute towards a healthy lifestyle, while debunking some longstanding food myths.

Totalling just over 500 pages, it’s a lengthy read but made more digestible by its categorisation into three parts and handy bullet point tips at the end of each chapter. The first part of the book jumps straight into the science, dissecting the complex nature of the gut microbiome, poetically comparing it to “a beautiful garden which has all of the necessary elements to blossom into a diverse and colourful oasis”.

Spector explains how our diets vary, affecting our individual gut microbiomes, and goes on to explore what constitutes healthy and unhealthy food, separating the food fact from the fiction.

The second part dedicates chapters to specific foods like pasta, meat and cheese, each discussed in finer detail, providing us with the information to better understand our food and to learn where it comes from, how it’s produced and its environmental impact, enabling us to make healthier, as well as tastier, choices. The book concludes with a detailed and practical food table intended to guide your weekly shop and meals.

Food for Life also provides fascinating insight into the psychology behind our food, for example, the connection our brain makes between colour and taste: the redder and shinier an apple looks, the more delicious it must taste (or so we think). Spector explains how food producers and advertisers take advantage of this psychology, by chemically spraying apples to make them appear shinier and brighter in colour, thus boosting revenue.

The book also touches on ultra-processed foods, which have become an increasingly prominent topic in recent years, as well as the rise of plant-based alternatives to dairy and meat in an ever-changing world where the impact on climate and nature have risen to the top of many people’s agenda when making food choices. Spector reveals how even these seemingly more ‘climate friendly’ foods aren’t exempt from their own negative environmental impact.

Food for Life successfully provides us with the tools and knowledge for making better food choices for people and planet, reminding us that, essentially, “the immense power of food is in your hands.”

If you would like to hear more from Professor Tim Spector, you can listen to him speaking with SFT CEO Patrick Holden on this episode of our podcast.

 

Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of Our Favorite Fish, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

Reviewed by Alicia Miller

Salmon Wars tells a deeply sad tale of the degradation of a vital species that, for millennia, has been an important source of sustenance and nutrition for many coastal communities. Salmon populate both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and in the 1970s, salmon farming began along these coasts; in a relatively short space of time, a wild food source that was full of omega-three and micronutrients, making it richly nutritious, became a cheap commodity produced from sickly salmon. Industrially farmed salmon are laden with pesticides that are often used illegally, pumped with antibiotics, sometimes genetically modified, rife with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls – highly carcinogenic chemicals), and tortured by predatory sea lice. So, despite salmon’s enduring popularity, it is not what it once was. What’s more, the practices commonly used in salmon farming are threatening surviving wild salmon, numbers of which are declining rapidly.

The book tracks a well-known playbook of disinformation, bad practice and denial by large-scale corporations, one that often includes cover-ups and corporate malfeasance. Salmon farming has spread across the world, decimating the lives of small-scale fisherfolk, especially off the coasts of West Africa and Chile. This is because the smaller fish, upon which many fishing communities depend, are caught and used as feed for farmed salmon (which are carnivorous). In some places, the salmon farms’ huge demand for these smaller fish has pushed the food security of local communities to the brink. As Frantz and Collins explain, “When industrial-scale trawlers sweep up millions of tons of native fish, they are not only taking nutritious food off peoples’ tables but also robbing them of jobs. In Africa, the risk of food insecurity is particularly high because the continent is one of the few places where population growth is expected to increase in the coming decades.” The major players in salmon farming clearly care little for the impact that they have on these places.

Whether it’s safe to eat farmed salmon is a significant point of debate – though the evidence of its nutritional deficits and potential health risks is now more widely recognised. Unsurprisingly, the companies involved in large-scale salmon farming do their best to greenwash their product and there have been numerous legal suits questioning the veracity of the language they use: ‘all natural’, ‘sustainably sourced’, ‘eco-friendly’ are far from truthful. The question that hangs in the air, Frantz and Collins point out, is: “What role does government play in ensuring the safety of this increasingly popular food, one that is often recommended for children and pregnant women? The answer is: Not much. So, whom can you trust when you’re browsing for salmon at your local store? Right now, nobody.”

 

And don’t miss…

Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution, by Sarah Langford

Reviewed by Isabel Eaton

When circumstance leads Sarah Langford and her young family away from the city and out to a small arable farm in the depths of Suffolk, they embark upon a journey into the world of regenerative farming which will profoundly deepen their connection with nature, the seasons and the land for which they are now responsible.

As Sarah and her husband work to undo the impacts of intensive agricultural practices on their land – replanting hedgerows, introducing grazing sheep and cattle and experimenting with direct drilling and cover crops – the family see skylarks return to feed amongst the unsprayed stubble, butterflies swarm to the thistles of their field margins and the farm comes alive with nature and produce.

Langford is greatly influenced by the experiences of the farmers she meets along the way. These ‘rebels’ have ignored the critical gaze of neighbours and the pessimistic predictions of land agents, to walk their own path. By moving away from the intensive livestock systems and chemical-sprayed monocrops which have brought many of them close to financial and mental ruin, they have each found a renewed passion for farming and greater financial security.

Offering an insight into the past, present and future of English farming, Rooted is a highly readable and personal insight into regenerative agriculture and its potential to heal the rift between farming and nature.

Avoid the never-ending scroll on streaming platforms and instead refer to our list of recommended food and farming films, especially selected, watched and reviewed by the SFT team for your viewing pleasure.

 

A Shepherd’s Life Lessons / Heart Valley

Director: Christian Cargill

Where to watch: The New Yorker’s YouTube channel.

This beautiful and poignant short film is a reminder to all of us who rush about in the world, of what it means to be in a place, to know it, to be a part of it, to commune with it and all it bears.

Wilf is 73 and still tending his sheep alone on the land where he lives. His life is contained within ‘Heart Valley’, except for the weekly trip to the supermarket. He eats the same dinner – “fish, onions, baked beans and egg” – and takes a walk every evening, and in between he looks after the sheep. He has been born and grown in the Valley and his wish from when he was a small boy, is that he wanted his own farm.

He says, “My sheep enjoy having plenty of land underneath their feet; they don’t want to be locked in a paddock,” a sentiment that clearly pertains to him as much as to his sheep.

He sees the place is changing, with the rich coming to buy up farms and the small community that used to be there falling away – the pub, the post office and the price of wool are all in decline.

“I like to be present, polite and always helping somebody,” says Wilf. It’s a life of solitude but also of grace and happiness. Wilf is thankful for what it provides for him, but he knows the world is changing before his eyes.

 

 

Reinventing Farming and Food Post-globalisation

Director: Rana Foroohar

Where to watch: Financial Times’ YouTube channel.

Foroohar explores the impacts of globalisation and what it has done to the food system. The damage is never more apparent than in the United States. Foroohar grew up in the Midwest heartland of Indiana where the industrial food system was born. She explores the transformation of farming, especially in this region which is dominated by corn, soy and wheat production, and how smaller-scale farmers have been pushed out as large corporations take increasing control over the land.

Efficiency is key to globalisation, but it is arguable whether this has been a good thing. It’s certainly of value to those at the top benefitting financially but this hasn’t really served the people struggling at the bottom, especially farmers in this case. As one farmer says, “The way these large corporations, they control what you plant, when you plant, and what you get paid. Basically, that puts them in charge of everything.”

The film digs deep into what is so wrong about globalisation which is doing almost everyone no help at all. Foroohar argues, “…you’ve got this system, where these globalised, very highly ‘efficient’ supply chains are enriching Wall Street but starving Main Street and driving small farmers out of business.” As President Joe Biden comments in the film, “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation.”

It is the rise of neo-liberalism that is now breaking the farmer’s back. So, the question that lingers in all of this is: can we turn the ship around and what would that look like?

 

Cornwall Climate Stories: Food for Thought

Director: Bryony Stokes; commissioned by Cornwall Climate Care

Where to watch: Cornwall Climate Care’s website.

Cornwall Climate Stories is a thoughtful series of short documentaries made by Cornwall Climate Care that looks at the issues Cornwall faces in the future of climate change. Food for Thought focuses, as you might expect, on food and farming and its impact on climate. The film carefully considers how damaging food production can be, but also recognises the ways in which farming can help to mitigate climate change and be a force for good in the food system.

The film takes a grounded perspective on ruminants and the important role that they have in sequestering carbon in the soil, but it also acknowledges that there has been much practice that has not been sound, from the outbreak of BSE to poor manure management leading to the pollution of waterways and the greenhouse gas emissions of cows kept indoors alongside the global production of soya to feed livestock which has led to immense global deforestation.

Taking care of our soils and understanding good soil health is the most critical step towards transforming food production from something damaging to something that truly nourishes. In Cornwall, the Farm Carbon Toolkit has become a valuable resource for farmers in developing a better understanding of their soils – out of this understanding more sustainable farming results. The recognition that soil health is critical in the transition to a sustainable food system is spreading among a wide swathe of farmers. Creating a diversity of plants and techniques like mob grazing, along with other methods that fall under the umbrella of ‘regenerative’ farming, is transforming practice on many Cornish farms.

The film unravels some of the issues that have driven our present-day problems, and points to a way forward that draws on the time-honoured practices of mixed rotational farming, eschewing extractive industrial food production for a more hopeful, sustainable future.

 

To Which We Belong

Director: Pamela Tanner Boll

Where to watch: Rent from £1.49 on Amazon Prime/Apple TV/iTunes.

Industrial agriculture may produce higher yields, but the quality and nutrition levels of our food, as well as nature, animals and the state of our planet, have suffered as a result of these intensive practices. To Which We Belong follows nine farms, from Montana to Maasai Mara, ranging in size from 1 to 30,000 acres and in what they each produce – from grass-fed beef and cheese to kelp. But what ties them altogether is how they farm: regeneratively.

Soil takes centre stage in this documentary, pinned as the solution right under our feet to many of the climate extremes we currently face: “if we optimize the life under the ground, we’ll optimize life above ground,” claims David Perry, one of the documentary’s Ag-Tech contributors.

Many of the farms we see in the documentary are family affairs, which makes for a wholesome watch. Husband and wife, Tarquin and Lippa Wood, started the Enonkishu Conservancy in Kenya in 2013, a conservation project whereby the local community are also heavily involved in its operation. Then there’s the James Ranch in Colorado, originally bought by Dave and Kay James, who dreamt of raising a large family in a rural setting. The ranch is now co-owned by each of their five children who manage different aspects of the farm, including cheesemaking, growing sugar snap peas – “the best in Colorado” – raising cattle, chickens and running the ranch’s restaurant.

Through a combination of beautiful, crisp drone shots, close-ups of their farm practices and interviews portraying the inspiring story of each farmer along with colourful animations which break down the microbiology of soil and carbon emission data, this documentary perfectly encapsulates how a regenerative farm system exists as a whole, each element working in harmony to provide for the climate, nature and people.

 

Alcarràs

Director: Carla Simón

Where to watch: Available to watch on Mubi.

Alcarràs is an emotional and empathetic portrayal of the challenges facing fruit-farming families in rural Spain.

The concept of the pueblo is well-known in many parts of Europe – the rural, ancestral family home to which children return during summer holidays to visit grandparents – and this idea is central to the film’s narrative. The Solé family have been harvesting peaches in the village of Alcarràs for decades, and for each of them, the land represents far more than simply a source of income – it’s intimately tied to their culture, identity and history, and their love of the land is evident from the outset of the film.

There are moments of happiness and laughter as the family enjoy meals together and a shared sense of comradery as the harvest gets into full swing. But the film doesn’t shy away from the reality of what it means to farm in such a harsh landscape, with dry, hot summers and delicate fruits that must be harvested quickly. The economic challenges are also front and centre, with the Solé family joining farmers from across the region to protest the unfair market prices. This sense of tension and urgency is compounded by the situation the family suddenly finds themselves in one summer.

“Peaches or panels, there’s no difference,” argues landowner Pinyol as he announces he is selling the land on which Quimet and his family have grown peaches for generations. Solar panels will replace the ancient fruit trees and Quimet is offered an ultimatum: eviction or a career-change. “I’m a farmer, not a solar panel operator,” exclaims Quimet. “I don’t want to learn a new skill at my age!” This explosive interaction between Pinyol and Quimet cuts right to the heart of the film’s tensions, highlighting how ‘modern’ ways of thinking and ‘progress’ can be pitted against traditional practice, culture and community.

Alcarràs forces us to think about the unintended consequences of our collective striving for greener, cleaner energy sources, and encourages us to have consideration and empathy for the individuals whose lives are impacted by such changes in land-use.

 

Featured image courtesy of Mystic Artists from the film To Which We Belong, of Alejandro Carillo, taken at Las Damas Ranch, Chihuahua, Mexico.

It’s easy to miss Food Co-op BCN when walking past. In Barcelona’s affluent Eixample district, home to a high concentration of psychedelic Gaudí buildings and glassy boutique facades, only those who know to look will catch the bumblebee-coloured sign tucked away down a quiet side alley. Beyond the threshold, lies a brand-new supermarket. There are gleaming dry goods dispensers, crates full of fruit and vegetables, and beautifully stacked shelves. A few shoppers wander the aisles, stopping frequently to chat with each other.

A community run supermarket

“In the supermarket I used to shop in, I would get my things and not speak with anyone,” says customer and co-op member Cristina Gil Gomez. “Here, it’s a totally different experience. It’s like coming into a family.” Everyone knows everyone, and for a simple reason: they all work together.

“We work three hours every four weeks on tasks for the supermarket,” explains Cristina. The supermarket, which opened its doors in February, employs no paid staff at all. The usual supermarket chores are divided up amongst the 518 members of the co-operative.

This model is different from a usual cooperative business. In simple terms, a co-operative is a business owned and democratically controlled by its members. The profits of the business are directed to the common good of the membership. The members are those closest to the business: usually either workers, producers or customers. Food Co-op BCN is a novel iteration of the co-operative economy, however. It elides the distinction between a consumer co-operative and a worker co-operative: as customers, members buy into the business with a €90 investment; but they are also active participants in the daily running of the supermarket, from unloading deliveries to stacking shelves to working the till.

Co-operative supermarkets around the world

The Barcelona shop is not alone in experimenting with the co-operative model in this way. It is part of a blossoming of participative and co-operative supermarkets across Europe. In recent years, independent initiatives have been established in Brussels and Liege; Paris, Montpellier and Bordeaux; Madrid, Valencia and across Catalonia. The longest standing supermarket in Europe is La Louve in Paris, which opened in 2016 and has so far demonstrated that such initiatives can be financially viable. But for all these projects, it’s an American beacon which has provided the blueprint: the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, which has been running on participative cooperative principles since it opened in 1973 as a way of pooling communal resources to get affordable food.

“We had basically no money,” says Joe Holtz, who helped open Park Slope back then. “We received deliveries on Thursday and Friday and sold the food on Saturday. We wrote checks on Thursday and Friday that we didn’t have enough money in the bank to cover, and then we made a deposit on Saturday night.” For five years, members were initiated based on ‘sweat equity’ – their commitment to help in the work of the co-operative – and no initial joining investment. It was only in 1978, when the coop signed its first lease for a ground floor retail space, that they began to ask for a $10 equity investment into the business. A couple of years later, Park Slope Food Co-op bought the building, later expanding into a second space, and it has managed to keep its hold in Brooklyn even as the demographic of the neighbourhood has changed radically over the years.

In its punkish, ad hoc way, the Park Slope Food Co-op created a novel form of the co-operative economy – riffing on an organisational model that has deep roots stretching back to 18^th century Scottish weavers and 19^th century English cotton mill workers.

The Park Slope Food Co-op was also born in a particular historical moment. In mid-1970s New York, the city government nearly declared bankruptcy and there was an inflated moral panic over ‘Fear City’ as a place of high crime rates, blackout riots and general lawlessness. It was in this context that the new co-operative found its informal beginnings. These days, the financial barriers to setting up a new supermarket are stark. “Could you secure a lease in New York City today? It would be tight,” says Holtz. The conditions would need to be right. It would probably take years of patient planning and momentum building to gather a few thousand people across a neighbourhood willing to make a small initial investment, as well as the backing of a progressive financial institution.

For Tom Boothe, an American in Paris and one of the founders of La Louve, the story is one of personal perseverance and institutional benevolence. The early development of the supermarket began in 2010, and it finally opened its doors in 2016. “We had two very big, helpful friends,” he explains. “One is the city of Paris [the local government], who got us access to our space.” The co-operative leases 1500 square metres of commercial space in the 18^th arrondissement, thanks to a social landlords scheme which the local government oversees. The second is the not-for-profit financial institution France Active, which invests in small businesses and social enterprises.

Boothe sees the social democratic values of France’s political and social life as key to securing early funding for the project. “We got about a million euros in loans,” explains Boothe. “In the States that’s not such an easy thing to do.” In France, he thinks things are different. “The idea of a co-operative supermarket that’s not there simply to make money for the people who own it, that’s extremely normal to people.”

The democratic principles of co-operativism run throughout the organisation: everything is decided by the co-op members, from organisational matters to the products on shelves. Both Park Slope and La Louve strive to serve the needs of their membership in a way that is inclusive and egalitarian. If they can source it, La Louve will stock any product a member requests. “We sell conventional products, we sell everything you can find in a regular supermarket, but we sell a lot of organic products and luxury products too,” explains Boothe. But, he adds, “we’ve never had a request for Coca Cola.”

At Park Slope, where membership has peaked at around 17,000 members, the ethos is the same. For many products, such as carrots and lemons, both conventional and organic versions are sold. But it only makes sense to stock what customers want to buy. “We let members vote with their dollars,” explains Holtz. It was many, many years ago that conventional collard greens came off the shelves when customers stopped buying them. “The organic collards were just a better product,” says Holtz.

Food co-op BCN has taken a different approach: members democratically voted for a series of principles that guide the selection of products. Wherever possible, products are organic, local and offer producers a just price, explains Cristina. But given the barriers to certification for would-be organic producers, these principles have been flexible. “We have evolved over time to register the fact that the aspiration to have everything organic isn’t viable,” she adds. In that case, the products tend to fulfil the other requirements, coming from would-be local organic farms. “We can visit their farms, and the producers themselves come with their trucks to the supermarket,” explains Cristina.

Boothe disagrees wholeheartedly with this prescriptive approach, though. “That is not at all our philosophy,” he says. “If you wait for a product to be ethically perfect, your supermarket will never exist because the world is in a terrible state.” More importantly, it’s an issue of inclusivity. “It’s fine to say to people who are making good money that you have to pay the ‘real price’ for food, but you cannot say that to people who are making 600 euros a month,” he explains. For La Louve, 8% of members receive benefits, meaning they earn less than a thousand euros a month, and another 2% are students living on grants. In a world where people aren’t paid a true living wage, there is a very real tension between the ambition to promote the best food and farming practices and the accessibility of affordable food through the co-operative economy. “You can either start a club or a co-operative,” says Boothe. A participative food business with such prohibitively high product standards and prices would be more ecological club than egalitarian co-operative.

The difference between co-operative supermarkets and Community Supported Agriculture

It’s important to understand, moreover, the distinctions between co-operative supermarkets and Community Supported Agriculture. The CSA model can’t be extrapolated to a large, multi-purpose food store, Boothe suggests. He is sceptical of supermarkets working directly with delivery from lots of small producers. “That’s the least ecological choice in terms of logistics,” because it multiplies the number of truck journeys drastically. “Economically, those projects won’t work,” he suggests, advocating working with distributors instead.

Both La Louve and Park Slope know what it means to come up against extreme financial difficulty. The great financial strength of this model is also an Achilles’ heel: member participation means there are fewer labour costs, massively reducing one of the most significant supermarket overheads. During the pandemic, that apparent advantage quickly became a major liability. No longer able to ask members to come in for shifts, Park Slope hired 130 extra staff while La Louve hired five and relied on ‘spontaneous co-operation’ from members coming in and stacking the odd shelf while they shopped. Another weakness of these co operatives is that they tend to draw from a much wider geographical circle than conventional supermarkets. During lockdowns, that meant some of the members living farther away came less often or not at all. Despite these challenges, La Louve and Park Slope have endured and continue to be vibrant centres of community and sustenance for their membership.

These co-operatives demonstrate that there is nothing inherent in the concept of a supermarket – a single shop where a person purchases all their food supplies and household necessities – to make it a cold, soulless, monolith. On the contrary, supermarkets could be a rich social resource – “the public libraries of food” as Boothe puts it – that offer affordable and accessible food to all, and act as practical centres of learning about the food system.

Are co-operative supermarkets the future?

In these precarious times, it might be hard to see a future for supermarkets in which participative co-operatives have any major role to play. Venture capital has placed its bets on ‘dark stores’ and the gig economy as the future of groceries: Gorillas and Getir motorbikes patrol big cities from dawn till darkest night, steered by zero hours workers who carry groceries from ghostly, customer-free supermarkets to the front doors of those that can afford it.

In the UK, the economic and energy crises of the time can make the prospect of a bold new project like a supermarket for the communal good feel remote, if not impossible. It is worth remembering, however, that the Park Slope Food Co-op emerged in one of the bleaker moments in New York City’s recent history. Answering the needs of its community, it was a practical effort in imagining a different, more egalitarian future, through collective action. The cost-of-living crisis presents a gloomy, difficult winter for many in the UK. But it’s precisely moments like these when necessity can drive imaginative approaches to co-operation and food provision, sparking new ways of organising in the service of the public good.

 

 

Fishing is one of the most important sectors in many parts of the world, supporting the livelihoods and nutritional requirements of millions. This is as true in Ghana, where the industry provides jobs for 500,000 people, and where fish accounts for more than half of all animal protein intake. Of this, as much as 70% is consumed in the form of smoked fish. Not only does the smoking process reduce post-harvest losses by extending the shelf-life of the fish, but it’s also an activity which has been central to coastal communities for hundreds of years, and the smoked fish itself is therefore highly valued for its complex flavours and cultural significance.

The Ghanaian smoked fish industry has worked in much the same way for generations. Local fishermen bring their catch to the beach – catfish, herring, mackerel, or whatever is caught that day – and go about selling it to women (often their wives or family members) on the shore. The fish is gutted and taken back to the home, ready to be smoked in the traditional way.

This is a familiar tale in many countries, as cultural norms dictate that women should not participate in fishing itself, especially in marine waters. Across Africa, women represent approximately 15% of the total fishing workforce yet account for 60% of processing roles. These roles are often low-wage and involve labour intensive, repetitive tasks which frequently have negative implications for health and wellbeing.

The hidden costs of fish smoking

Traditional West African smoking ovens consist of metal drums or mud stoves loaded with firewood to produce smoke, over which the fish are placed on a metal grill. These ovens are notoriously hazardous. Many women suffer from burns and backache while operating the stoves, as well as respiratory conditions, eye irritation and headaches, as a consequence of exposure to the smoke. In some cases, burns to the fingers are so severe that women are unable to obtain official documents which require fingerprint identification.

In 2008, the FAO led the development of a new type of oven, the FAO-Thiaroye. It’s a great deal safer and uses less firewood making it a more sustainable and efficient option. It was also specifically designed to improve the quality and safety of the smoked fish, which often contain extremely high levels of carcinogens called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Reducing PAH content is important, for example, the European Commission requires no more than 12 micrograms per kilogram in smoked fish which is imported to Europe. Fish smokers who are able to meet this standard can receive around 100 Ghanaian cedis per kilogram, roughly ten times more than the price fetched in local markets.

In theory, the FAO-Thiaroye can therefore help women to receive a higher price for their fish, while reducing the health costs associated with the smoking. But how far can such technology go in promoting gender equality in this industry? Modern ovens, cold storage and packing facilities still remain out of reach for the vast majority of small-scale, female fish smokers. In contrast, a small number of industrial-scale smoking units in Ghana are able to cater exclusively for the export market. They produce around 20 tonnes of smoked fish annually, which reaches African communities in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. These larger processing plants are, unsurprisingly, owned and managed by men, with women for the most part only represented in low-paid processing roles.

Gender-based constraints

There are many reasons why, relative to men, women may struggle to accumulate resources which help them benefit from an activity such as fish smoking. These factors which prevent access to resources or opportunities based on gender roles are sometimes termed ‘gender-based constraints’.

As mentioned above, one of the biggest challenges described by women in Ghana is in accessing finance to invest in smoking ovens and cold storage. It’s very difficult for most women to obtain loans from commercial banks in Ghana, for example, due to laws which prevent them from inheriting property or land which can be used as collateral. Without this, women may require guarantee from their husbands to apply for loans, something which is not always straightforward.

A commonly proposed solution to this problem is microfinance, the provision of small loans at low interest rates, usually by smaller banks or NGOs. In Ghana, microfinance has certainly had a positive effect on improving rural women’s ability to receive loans, but unfortunately it is not a silver bullet for a number of reasons. Often microloans are given to groups of women, rather than individuals, to avoid the need for guarantee from their husbands. Yet many describe tensions between group members when it comes to paying back the loans, sadly sometimes resulting in verbal abuse and enormous shame. Another concerning issue is that, according to one study, only 16% of women actually retained control over the spending of their loan.

This uncovers a fundamental problem in addressing gender equality, one which is often overlooked by promoters of microfinance and other schemes to improve women’s economic empowerment. Power to make decisions, whether financial or in other aspects of the household and business, so often lies overwhelmingly with male family members. Some women have admitted that their husbands do not trust them to hand over the money received through loans or selling their smoked fish, which has even resulted in accounts of domestic violence.

The deep-rooted socio-cultural norms which perpetuate this situation also contribute to other gender-based constraints. Women face a great deal of stigma when travelling alone, which prevents them from feeling confident enough to travel to (or indeed being allowed to) important training sessions in food hygiene, for example, or from reaching more lucrative markets in larger cities. Engaging in networks to secure contracts with supermarkets or to connect with service providers, is also a challenge, given that women are not expected to participate in formal business networks; they are encouraged instead to keep social networks to friends and family. Finally, it’s important to remember that in addition to their fish-smoking work, most women face a ‘triple-burden’ of household, childcare and community labour, placing major constraints on time and emotional resources. This is true across the fishing and agriculture sectors in developing countries, where women’s overall work burden is disproportionately greater, and mostly unpaid.

The way forwards

So, the development of new ovens such as the FAO-Thiaroye is greatly beneficial for female fish-smokers and goes a long way to address the health costs they face. But it does not provide all of the answers for solving the wider social issues preventing women from progressing in this industry, which is, of course, essential for sustainability.

A number of communal fish-smoking plants and co-operatives have been set up in Ghana, already helping to improve women’s access to better facilities, educational resources and business networks. The Ghanaian Fisheries Commission has also established a graded certification scheme which rewards small-scale smokers for improving their food safety standards, and that can help them to receive a higher price in local markets or supermarkets.

Crucially however, these solutions must be accompanied by action from the ‘top-down’, at a government level, to address the institutional biases which prevent women’s empowerment in Ghana, such as inheritance laws and a lack of representation in policymaking positions. At the same time, interventions from the ‘bottom-up’ are perhaps one of the most important ways to unpick the deeply entrenched ideas about gender roles and labour distribution within the household and community.

Featured image: FAO/Alexander Sasu 

It is a great privilege to call myself a beekeeper. Having bees in my life, constantly reminds me to notice the sheer wonder of the world around me and often leaves me with a visceral sense of my place within this world. Honeybees have seen a dramatic rise in public awareness and beekeeping has exponentially increased in popularity, however the mindset of industrial farming is still alarmingly prevalent in beekeeping practice, and how it is discussed and taught to the next generation of beekeepers.

I trained as a beekeeper about 10 years ago, and when I started I had already completed training as an organic grower. As I studied beekeeping, I was alarmed at the similarities between the methods I was being taught and the mindset of industrial farming. I was unsettled by some of the practices that seemed to be very common. Routine use of miticide within the hive, routine disturbance of the nest space, routine suppression of reproduction and routine sugar feeding, all seemed at odds with what I had learnt as an organic grower. A defining moment was a visit to a teaching apiary to inspect the bees. We opened the hives and carefully checked through the brood nest, the area where the young bees are developing, if we found any developing queens we would kill them. Our presence obviously disturbed the bees who defended their nest space, in hive after hive that we opened, by attacking us. The bees were clearly communicating the threat they felt and I was struck by the violence of this process which was charged with conflict – even putting on the beekeeper’s suit had the feel of preparing for battle. There was a clear cognitive dissonance between this experience and my imagined harmony between beekeeper and bees. It took some searching and some good luck, but I began to find people who were doing things differently. I began to see that there were other ways of relating to honeybees that are grounded in understanding bees in their wholeness, in much the same way as organic farmers, who aim to see the whole farm as a complex system, with their orientation on this system focused on overall health.

Over time as I moved slowly into a working relationship with honeybees, I began to see more clearly some of the issues at the heart of conventional beekeeping and to find ways of working with bees that promote health in honeybee families. Studying them, I began to understand that contemporary science views honeybees as a superorganism, a complex whole consisting of interacting parts. This conception is radically different from a view that breaks down honeybees and their hive into different parts and focuses on manipulating these parts to increase yields. Different insights emerge from these lenses and different practices emerge from these insights. Viewing honeybees as parts we see workers, drones, queens, brood comb, honey comb, and we learn to manipulate these parts to our own ends, killing developing queens or moving the comb. Approaching bees from this perspective, it can be easy to forget the complexity of the interactions between these parts. Looking at honeybees as a superorganism, the interconnection and interaction of the parts produce a complex whole and this understanding should inform practice.

The framed hive, a fundamental component of much contemporary beekeeping, is itself an expression of this ‘part’ focused mindset. Frames are wooden components of vertical hives that contain comb and are removable. The invention of frames meant that, for the first time, beekeepers could enter into the heart of the hive, which previously had been difficult to access without causing serious damage. Over time this accessibility has led to an assumption that beekeeping involves entering the hive to manipulate individual components of the superorganism. However, this assumption has several problematic implications for the health of honeybees.

Honeybees, if left alone, maintain the internal environment of their nest with extraordinary precision. The area within the nest where the young bees are raised is maintained at 35⁰ C constantly. The bees use the muscles that power flight to generate this heat. This process produces a womb-like environment that is ideally suited for the optimal development of the young bees. The routine opening of the honeybees’ nest inevitably involves releasing this heat. It has become my working assumption that the changes in the hive’s atmosphere have negative health implications for the young bees which consequently affect the health of the whole family.

The space in which honeybees evolved is the hollow tree, generally high up in the canopy of the forest. The hollows are created by various fungi rotting out the heartwood of the tree and honeybee families carefully select hollows that are ideally suited to their needs. A family would move into this cavity, lining the inside with propolis to sterilise the space and then fill it with wax honeycombs. Bees survived in these spaces for millions of years. If we imagine for a moment the thermodynamics of this internal space we will see that the thick wood surrounding the nest provides a stable insulated environment where it is easy for the bees to control the temperature. It is also interesting to consider that the process of making honey involves evaporating water in the nest. Nectar, when it arrives in the hive, is typically about 80% water and 20% sugar; if left untouched this solution would ferment. The bees evaporate water from the nectar until the sugar content reaches 80% – only then are the bees satisfied that this is honey and won’t ferment. It is then capped with wax and stored to support the bees’ survival through the winter. Bees have evolved to live in a warm and humid nest in an undisturbed cavity.

Compare this internal nest space with that of the contemporary hive: much thinner walls, much larger entrance space, open mesh floor, no insulating material above, routine opening of the roof. We can quickly see that these hives function somewhat like a chimney, drawing heat, moisture and chemicals released by the bees, up through the nest space. As I began to understand this, I started to search for hive designs that mimicked the way hollow trees work and fortuitously came across alternative designs.The hive that I predominantly use to this day is narrower than most hives, contains a layer of insulation at the top of the nest and has no frames so the bees build natural comb. The design dramatically reduces the need to open the hive from the top. The internal space functions remarkably like a hollow tree, yet it is possible to make interventions within the nest space while causing minimal disturbance.

The beekeeping environment has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. The mindset at the very heart of industrial farming – which focuses on the increase of yield above the value of overall health – that once dominated perspectives on working with bees, is shifting. There is now a growing plurality in how beekeepers work with bees, and beekeepers across the spectrum are increasingly open to new perspectives. However, this change in beekeeping practice is still marginal and in itself does not negate the wider environmental issues of habitat loss and fragmentation, widespread pesticide, herbicide and fungicide use, soil erosion, water contamination and dwindling sources of nectar and pollen.

In my experience, working with honeybees opens us to a wider sense of connection and participation within the biosphere. A honeybee family is an integral part of the life-cycle of plants and trees for 3 kilometres in every direction. As a beekeeper, being part of this process has left a visceral imprint on my experience and practice. It is only with a wider perspective of the wholeness of the biosphere and our place within it, that we will be able to overcome to the environmental challenges we face today.

This article was originally published December 2017.

The following extract is from Simon Fairlie’s new book Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir (Chelsea Green Publishing, February 2022) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Unlike a nuclear family, a community provides an economic foundation for a viable farming operation at a scale appropriate to its size. Monkton Wyld with its quota of visitors and volunteers is well-suited to a small herd of three cows, and indeed has supported just such a herd since 1982, apart from the two years prior to my arrival. In fact, a functioning micro dairy goes back to 1941 when the school began. It may well be the oldest dairy enterprise of its size in Britain.

When I arrived most of the infrastructure for providing this was still in place: a milking parlour with stalls for six cows, cow sheds and a small dairy. Not so long ago there were thousands of such steadings around the country, supporting up to a dozen cows. Every stately home possessed one and so did countless humble smallholdings; the cash flow of family farms was guaranteed by regular payments from the Milk Marketing Board for a few churns left out for collection every morning. But by 2010, virtually all had either been left to go derelict, or else been converted into holiday cottages.

Monkton Wyld’s dairy farm was on the way to a similar fate. There were all the symptoms of a hippie commune in decline. The milking parlour and cowsheds were full of plastic guttering, unused beehives, broken tools, old timber and bags of rubbish. One room was stuffed with detritus from courses in which children were taught to manufacture hideous contraptions out of yoghurt pots, toilet rolls, plastic bags and all the other effluvia of capitalist culture. A tile was missing from the roof above the beehives: instead of replacing the tile – a ten minute job – someone had placed corrugated iron inside to divert the dripping water away from the beehives onto a tie beam, which as a result had rotted away.

The state of the land was similar. The pasture, which hadn’t been grazed or mown for two years, was thick with yellowing tussocks, while briar and bracken patches were invading from all sides. A half-acre orchard was completely engulfed in six-foot-high brambles and bracken. The fencing was in total disrepair. Even today, if you dig into the earth through decades of topsoil, you are likely to uncover hippie archaeology – rotting carpets, plastic sheeting or woven ‘tarpaulins’ that disintegrate into thousands of polypropylene strands – indicating that the ground had once been ‘mulched’ or was the site of an old sweat lodge.

All of this decay could be remedied. It was not a priority for the community, which had more pressing matters to address on the main house. But the rent I was paying Monkton Wyld for accommodation for the scythe business covered the cost of installing fencing and carrying out repairs. My old friend Gill Barron, now a well-known painter, came to visit, decided to stay, and helped me get set up. Eleven years later, I’m glad to say, she is still here. Within a few months we had bought one Jersey cow and borrowed another. Within a few years we had rented a further three acres and milked three Jerseys.

Now, a decade later, the dairy is still functioning, usually with three cows, though we went down to two during the pandemic. Our oldest, Folly, has been with us ten years and is still in top form. After my half-cocked attempts at agriculture in previous years, it is good to have tumbled on something that works.

The reason it works is because the cows, the land and the community are in near-perfect symbiosis. The cows benefit because we provide them with the winter feed they cannot harvest for themselves, in the form of hay, with medical care, and with a more painless death than nature can offer. In return they each give us about four thousand litres of rich creamy milk a year, containing enough fat, protein and calories to feed four people indefinitely. They produce this by grazing Britain’s most abundant, easily grown and biodiverse crop, grass, keeping bracken and brambles at bay, and letting the sunlight in to allow meadow plants to flourish, along with butterflies and other insects. Moreover about 85 per cent of the nutrients that a cow ingests come out the rear end. She harvests biomass, chips and shreds it, bioactivates and digests it, transports it, and extrudes it as the manure that is vital for our acre of vegetable garden, all without using a gram of fossil fuel. Meanwhile the whey from our cheese, along with vegetable and food waste, goes to feed our pigs.

Our cows are the backbone of a traditional mixed farming system that enables us to provide thirty people a day with healthy home-produced food, and to do so with zero packaging and zero food miles. Perhaps, given today’s nucleated social structure, this cannot be widely replicated, but it can be scaled up. There is no reason why schools, hospitals and prisons couldn’t run their own dairy farm providing, in the case of school children, the free milk that Thatcher took away – a nourishing and educational alternative to sugary carbonated beverages. That was precisely what Monkton Wyld did when it was a school feeding seventy pupils and staff from the milk of six cows.

And what if villages reclaimed some ownership of their land, and members of the community supported the agriculture that flourished around them? That’s what real Community Supported Agriculture should look like – not just green hippie types driving miles to pick up their ethically sound vegetables, but every rural settlement with its farm shop and its milk dispensing machine selling all the fresh dairy produce, meat, bread, fruit and vegetables that its farmers can sensibly produce. This must surely be the direction rural people should be taking if we are to eliminate fossil fuels and plastic packaging, while safeguarding the complex relationship we have forged with the natural world through traditional agriculture. The alternative looks increasingly likely to be a diet of hydroponic and lab-grown junk food, courtesy of a hydrogen-powered urban bio-technocracy.

A revival of micro-dairies would also bridge the gulf between the majority of citizens, especially children, and the farm animals and plants that provide their nourishment; this rupture is a direct result of the centralisation of livestock production. Visitors to Monkton Wyld come to gawp at us at milking time and bring their children to view the spectacle as if it was an educational rite of passage, when once it was as banal an activity as changing a baby’s nappy. A generation of urban youth is subjected to propaganda about what goes on in intensive dairy farms, some of it accurate but most of it exaggerated, and comes away with an erroneous interpretation of the bond between cows and humans. Yes, that relationship is open to abuse – as is the bond between married couples, or parent and child – but that doesn’t prevent it being basically a benign one.

Like all farm animals, over the course of several thousand years, cows have adapted to domestication. Literally, that means acceptance into the household (though in the case of cows, not the sitting room). For the most part, cows and oxen are pretty chilled creatures, more so than horses, pigs, sheep, chickens or dogs, all of which are prone at times to over-excitement or panic. Whether grazing, giving suck or chewing the cud, their presence soothes the human spirit. The act of ruminating has become a metaphor for composed contemplation. Even vegans like domesticated cows, and those that visit our farm are hard put to find anything to object to.

Escape the Saturday evening endless-scroll and settle down with one of the latest films from the world of food and farming.

The Ants and the Grasshopper

Director: Raj Patel; contact Kartemquin Films for viewing

Raj Patel’s latest film is an exploration of perspective – it’s all a matter of how you are looking at things. The champion of the movie is a young farmer, Anita Chitaya, in Malawi. Women are traditionally responsible for food production in Malawian culture – the men are largely left to hang about. Anita is up at dawn drawing water for the day; she is acutely aware of climate change. Rain in the region is coming far less frequently and growing the food needed is getting harder. She is an activist and community leader, looking for better ways of working, so that it’s easier to survive. But she knows that in other places in the world, in America to be precise, there are people not attending to what is happening on the earth.

Driven by a deeply felt concern for this, she wants to speak about climate change to farmers in the US. Anita travels across America visiting an array of different farms both urban and rural, asking about each farmers thoughts on climate change and getting a diversity of responses. There is clearly a lack of consensus about whether climate change is happening. What haunts the film is the quiet frustration of wanting to be heard. It is, inevitably, a struggle and coming from a place so small, she is trying to change beliefs in a place so large. Anita comments at the end, that ‘there are so many ants, but only a few are lifting the grasshopper’.

Under the Soil

Director: Archie Guinchard; Amazon Prime

Mental health among farmers and farm workers in the UK is a significant issue – between 2019 – 2020, 133 farmers and agricultural workers committed suicide and a 2021 survey found that 88% of farmers under the age of 40 said they had poor mental health. Farming is a hard, difficult profession, subject to struggle and failure, and these figures testify to its toll. Under the Soil, in a series of interviews, takes a close look at the issues that farmers and farm workers struggle with. Through three interviews, it picks apart the dangerous decline in mental health that can lead to depression and potentially suicide.

Matt, a young farmer building his own herd of sheep, is faced with the impact of a sudden devastating snow storm that kills many of his sheep. Forced to make difficult decisions over what animals to save in this crisis, he descends into depression in the aftermath, now facing significant financial loss. A second late spring storm brings further loss.

Risk is an ever-present pressure in farming, and weather a constant threat – both capricious and dangerous. Making the bottom line work is something many farmers struggle with throughout their farming life. But the money and the weather are just one aspect of farming that is hard; it can also be a lonely, exhausting existence that pushes people to their limits, and support is much needed. The final interview of the film is with Emma; she lost her husband, an agricultural worker, to suicide and as a way of leaving a meaningful legacy for her husband, she founded the DPJ Foundation to support the mental health of farmers and agricultural workers. The Foundation’s programme is called ‘share the load’.

Follow the Food: Series 1, 2 & 3

BBC

This BBC series takes a comprehensive look, across three seasons, at our food system and the issues at stake – series 3 is just kicking off. The world is producing more food than ever before, but at great cost to the environment, biodiversity loss and climate change. One in three people do not have enough to eat, despite the fact that there is a vast amount of food waste across the world. Food security is a continuing issue in many countries and it’s not just about having enough food, it’s also about having the right kind of food to nourish a person. And ironically, the people producing our food, are the least able to afford it.

With James Wong as the presenter, the critical problems that we face in food production are unpicked in detail, with a focus on food affordability, availability, resilience, quality and safety. Series 1, which started in autumn 2020 looked at the impact of COVID-19 on food supplies and followed on with problems of hunger, soil degradation, food waste and how tech might change the way we farm; series 2 takes on the role of food production in climate change and topics like ‘Why we need to expand our diet’ and the often overlooked issue of where the next generation of farmers are coming from.

The first episode of series 3 asks a big question, ‘What would it take to produce cheap, healthy food for everyone on the planet without harming the environment?’, perhaps both the easiest and the most complex question to answer in a world teetering on potential collapse. Food production is at the heart of our global problems, so watch this and get a grip on what we face!

Fat Fiction

Director: Jennifer Isenhart; YouTube

The dietary guidelines of eating less fat have been at the root of US food policy for decades, but more recently thinking about the role of fat in diets is changing significantly.

From the 1950s onwards, American diets began to change, largely as the result of one highly influential figure: Ancel Keys, a physiologist who was researching cardiovascular disease which was on the rise. Keys hypothesis that dietary fats were the cause of heart disease and should be shunned, remarkably became the dominant orthodoxy of US food policy, despite no robust evidence.

Fat Fiction unravels what led to the belief that saturated fat is bad for you. Saturated fat, in particular linked to animal fats, has been demonised for its role in cardiovascular disease. Immortalised in the longstanding US ‘food pyramid’, carbohydrates have for decades been the basis for a supposedly ‘healthy’ diet.

The film pulls up some extraordinary figures in terms of the resulting food policy that gained traction in the 1980s: servings of 7 – 11 slices of bread per day, 55% of calories coming from carbohydrates, and with fat consumption reduced to less than 10% of dietary consumption.

Gary Taubes, speaking in the film, argues that ‘…medical orthodoxy latched on to the wrong explanation and made a tragic mistake, and now we’re living with the consequences. It’s a fascinating watch and well worth the time. It will make you rethink how you eat and maybe even bring change for the better.