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Home » News » Farming the Future

Farming the Future

Launching our new Food Forest partnership with the Soil Association and Shared Assets

We’re delighted to announce an exciting new project piloting food forests around the UK. After securing significant funding to establish three new food forests, we’ll be working together with the Soil Association and Shared Assets to put these productive spaces on the map, and push them up the policy agenda too.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve begun to recognise and champion the value of diversifying the orchard space to include other useful crops. We launched our accredited online course in Forest Gardening in 2020, and often advise community groups on complementary planting during the initial orchard design and later consulting stages.

Now, we’ve taking a further step in this exciting and important direction: the Farming the Future project is a ground-breaking pilot scheme that will allow us to really measure and quantify the value of food forests as a sustainable means of food production. We really believe that food forests can improve social equity and access to food, when applied in community settings, so it’s great to know that our work on the ground will feed into policy recommendations relating to Government net-zero and public health targets.

 

Our role in shaping a way forward for sustainable food growing

Our passionate team of experts will work with local communities to design, plant and maintain the different food forest sites over 18 months. We will take responsible for overall project management, volunteer engagement and site-specific considerations.

We’re excited to be working with Shared Assets, who will conduct a thorough evaluation and formulate recommendations. The Soil Association will then utilise the results to produce policy proposals, and disseminate these evidence-based recommendations to landowners, policymakers, researchers and other relevant networks. It’s a great opportunity for our ‘hard graft’ on the ground to go towards concrete efforts to improve the sustainability of our food systems.

 “This is a fantastic breakthrough for the movement to establish sustainable food forests.” – Our CEO, Kath Rosen.

The locations

  • Cyrenians Homelessness charity, Edinburgh: we’ll create a new small-scale, food forest at a hospital site outside of the city. We aim to improve the mental health of the volunteers involved, by engaging locals who are at risk of homelessness in skills training and meaningful outdoor time.
  • Cae Tan Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), Gower Peninsula: This is an existing community food growing site. But we’ll create a new agroforestry system to further develop the capacity of the CSA to provide new food species, and engage marginalised groups to get involved.
  • Viewpark Conservation Group: This local community group in North Lanarkshire recently bought out the land on Douglas Support Estate; we’ll be helping them achieve one of their ambitions for this site by creating a large-scale food forest.

Overview of the planting site at Cae Tan CSA showing veg beds which will be developed into an alley cropping system.

 

Our team have already begun working with partners on the ground. Our CEO, Kath Rosen, says, “this is a fantastic breakthrough for the movement to establish sustainable food forests.” Watch this space for updates as the project takes root.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: biodiversity, food forest, forest gardening, soil

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