FarmStarts

• Farmers are an ageing population. 42% are already 60 or older. Succession plans are notably absent, and the next generation is not queuing up to take over. 
• Farm businesses and land are becoming increasingly consolidated into fewer hands using increasingly intensive farming practices. 
• Half of UK farmland that was sold last year was bought by non-farmer buyers.

What could possibly go wrong?

All our eggs are going into fewer and less thoughtfully crafted baskets. It’s a high risk approach to food security (a metric that focuses on keeping supermarket shelves fully stocked), let alone food sovereignty (think fair food systems, where farmers are valued and communities have access to good food).

Farming is not an easy place to be right now: farmers have seen massive rises in input costs, labour shortages especially in horticulture, policy uncertainty, crop losses through flooding, and supply chains where power is ever more unevenly distributed, forcing farmers to shoulder all the risk with little negotiating power over price.

At the same time as maintaining or increasing food production, the food and farming sector is being asked to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions: around a third of greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system as a whole. 

But we still need to eat – and we need healthy soils and ecosystems to support ongoing food production.

At a time when farming could really use some new blood and fresh ideas, access to land and opportunities for new entrants are thinner than ever, constrained by outdated land-use, farming, environment and housing policies as well as the cost of land.

This needs to change, but in an otherwise pretty grim landscape there’s a bright spot of opportunity:

FarmStarts

FarmStarts are small incubation projects that support new entrants to farming by providing them with access to land and equipment, routes to market, and business support, training and mentoring.

According to the Landworkers Alliance, “they provide an opportunity for people to test their farming and growing ideas in a protected environment, whilst building the knowledge, skills, confidence and experience to progress to their own farm or market garden.”

FarmStarts are working especially well in the peri-urban envelope, where there is easier access to both land and housing for trainees, as well as good potential for creating short, direct routes to urban markets. 

There are now numerous FarmStarts in the UK that are successfully creating routes into agroecological farming – farming that integrates natural systems and social equity with food production, with emphasis on diversity, resilience, social values and circularity. 

“Agroecology is a holistic and integrated approach that simultaneously applies ecological and social concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agriculture and food systems.

It seeks to optimise the interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment while also addressing the need for socially equitable food systems within which people can exercise choice over what they eat and how and where it is produced.”

UN Food & Agriculture Organisation

Nottinghamshire County Council recently commissioned research into opportunities for Farm Start in the county of Nottinghamshire, and maybe it’s time we took a leaf from their book here in Lincolnshire… 

Is the public sector ready for the food and farming challenges that lie ahead?

Here in the east Midlands and East of England, a collaboration between food partnerships, with the support of the Urban Agriculture Consortium, has been exploring the potential for setting up FarmStarts in the region and how we can feed our communities properly, with equity, dignity, the power of good nutrition and in alignment with nature.

We held a webinar on 24th July 1-2.30pm to talk about how practitioners and policy makers can collaborate to lay these essential foundations, starting now.