Aim 1: A landscape scale model for climate and nature friendly farming through partnership between the city council, farmers, nature conservation interests and other stakeholders
What have we learnt and achieved?
The team undertook and delivered the first stage of a GIS mapping project. Led by the Land Use Plus team and supported by local ecological experts it identified habitats of interest in the City Downland Estate (CDE) and surrounds. This map records existing and “hoped to be existing” sites from local knowledge, notes the conditions and suggests improvements. This is being combined with information such as access and archaeological mapping from local partners, to identify areas of particular focus for protection or interaction. An attribute table which can be used by citizen scientists was created as part of this process, and we hope this can be utilised to engage communities in recording changes in habitats going forwards.
We have created conversations with key stakeholders, set up meetings at the abattoir with local councillors and district food partnerships to flag up the issues farmers and food producers are facing locally. We have also worked hard to engage with the Abattoir Sector group, NFU and local agricultural college. As part of the Downland Advisory Panel, we are proud to have taken part in 4 task and finish groups to help inform farm plans for future Council tenancies.
The Land Use Plus project manager has recently become the food lead for the UNESCO Living Coast Biosphere, which leads a wider geographical boundary to the work.
Going forwards
Now that clear goals and routes to achieve them have been set from the project scoping done this year, a stakeholder coms strategy has been developed. The first set of stakeholders we wish to target to address the best way to achieve landscape scale restoration (and our other goals) is local Councillors and appropriate council officers.
Brighton & Hove City Council have already employed an ecologist to conduct surveys across CDE farm land, the finding of which are being fed into attribute table. We now want to seek funding to continue this process across CDE Parkland, and then the wider region up to the southern scarp.
We will continue contributing to stakeholder groups such as the DAP and Biosphere, and to task and finish groups. We will also continue to seek out new partnerships, create new relationships, and facilitate group working.
Aim 2: The support and investment needs of new and existing tenants transitioning to regenerative methods are understood
What have we learnt and achieved?
Tenant farmers are a key partner to Land Use Plus, and as such we have worked hard on building robust relationships with them. This has been achieved by attending relevant events and stakeholder groups, encouraging communication by sharing funding streams and other opportunities with them directly, and by engaging those already farming in a more agroecological way in coms pieces such as podcasts and social media campaigns. The Sussex Grazed project is overseen by the LUP team. This project is a meat box scheme and is part of the Changing Chalk initiative, and has allowed us to gain a working relationship with some of the tenant farmers who are conservation grazing.
At the end of October 23, we delivered a food and farming conference which concentrated on the barriers and opportunities for agroecological farming and local food systems. This engaged people from across the food system, but we pushed particularly hard to ensure farmers were engaged. Having their feedback on the barriers they experience and what they need to overcome them in the workshops was vital, and we have been following up on what they told us to ensure they feel heard and supported.
We are pleased to be sharing upcoming tenancies through non-traditional routes. We hope this will have the effect of attracting non-conventional new entrants to the local farming landscape. One of the key barriers to new entrant farmers we have identified is access to land. We are also using our influence on the DAP Task & Finish Groups to encourage opportunities for smaller portions of land and share farming arrangements, as well as supporting farmer voices.
Going forwards
There is the desire to sell locally but not necessarily the financial incentive, we continue to work to identify local routes to market and infrastructure that is required to support them. We need to better understanding the true cost of producing and selling, and so we are seeking out to new groups of producers that we haven’t yet been able to engage, as well as continuing to work with our existing contacts. We are developing “farmer packs” as a way to gather more information about our farmers but also to provide them with a guide to sell more locally – Whether through Sussex Grazed, OFN, or sign posting to other local buyers. These packs will also provide resources on food standards and processing costs.
It is clear that we need to use our office hours to deliver work local food producers need. This includes the meat working group, as well as brining issues (such as planning restrictions which can impact horticulture) to light. We have recently received funding for a partnership project (in conjunction with Wealden Food partnership, amongst others) to investigate the possibility of twinning farms with community settings, creating procurement and education links between the two.
We will be hosting a second Food and Farming Conference in October this year to further explore the barriers and opportunities in local farming.
Aim 3: A community-led localised food system enhances financial viability for producers.
What have we learnt and achieved?
Partner project Sussex Grazed has illuminated a lot of the challenges to delivering a localised food system, not least an enormous lack of local infrastructure. Land Use plus has found that one of the key issues is the recent closure of a local abattoir, leaving Sussex with only one small slaughterhouse in a landscape which can support sustainable grazing. In fact, grazing animals are essential to improving biodiversity on the Downs. From this, we are developing a meat working group, connecting farmers, abattoir representatives, butchers and local food partnerships to research potentials and requirements for expanding the local meat market, as well as the impact losing the abattoir would have on the local economy. This data-seeking project is part of our work to engage local councillors in some of the less palatable aspects of local food production, especially in an area where plant-based diets are perhaps more common than elsewhere in the UK.
Our food and farming conference highlighted the need for a wholesale “aggregator” food hub or depot. Farmers want to sell locally, but can only really do so in a piecemeal manner. Local retailers and restaurants would like to buy local produce, but there’s no established way for them to do this. By developing a food depot, a regular source of income can be created for farmers, allowing them to send more food into the local market, and regulated ordering systems can be created to allow local retailers to buy the produce. The ultimate goal here would be to engage local procurement departments so that local food is feeding into hospitals, schools, universities and prisons, allowing economies of scale to reroute surplus food into emergency and community food settings.
We’ve spent a lot of time talking local food. LUP recently delivered a lecture on local food systems and the CDE as part of Brighton Free Universities Food Systems Course, and another as part of Shoreham Ports Sustainability Week. These sorts of opportunities allow us to engage the community with the project and get them thinking about the complexities, barriers and opportunities to local food systems. We have also refreshed a citizen facing local food directory and supported a wholesale version with Restaurants Brighton, as well as delivering “good news” local food blogs focusing on forces for change
Going forwards
There is a strong drive to deliver a community or “Beacon” farm project. We commissioned a report on successful community farms, which highlighted some of the key requirements (housing) as well as what makes it work (scale). As we review tenancies, identifying the correct location for the project is a consideration. It should be easily accessible from Brighton, and allow for a combination of arable and livestock. From what we have learnt so far, a working farm with a community element would be the best model, allowing citizens to engage with the project, but the farmer to still make a living. We would also strongly advocate for an involvement with a local university, so that field trials to develop more nature friendly farming methods can be carried out on site. The ideal would be to “enterprise stack” at the same location, creating a hub for food production and learning.
