We are a registered charity. Our mission is to build food security as part of a response to the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. We do this by working out how to make change happen on the ground and then sharing our experience with others.
Central to food security in the UK is to grow much more of the food we eat (especially fruit, vegetables and legumes) and to sell it close to where it is produced.
We believe the primary way to stimulate new growing for local and regional markets is to provide new and reliable markets for agro-ecologically grown food, and to support farmers in the transition to supplying it.
This means:
Working with Our Food 1200, with the Future Farms Partnership, and with Powys County Council, we are piloting the first three affordable farms on land leased from the Council for 95 years.
The Sarn Farms
Food security requires feeding the cities from their rural hinterlands. This is a big opportunity for farmers in rural areas.
We are building a food trade route from Powys into Birmingham. The key to this is reducing the risk for farmers so that diversifying is an attractive business decision.
We need thousands of acres of growing for local and regional markets. Alongside diversification on existing farms, we need to open up land for new entrants.
We are designing a Farmland Trust as a vehicle to combine multiple sources of investment finance to buy land into community ownership, to be held in perpetuity for growing of food for local and regional markets.
Based on the report by Tim Lang, Just in Case: Narrowing the UK civil food resilience gap, we are exploring ways that regions can proceed at speed with building food security.
We aim to demonstrate this in Wales, and to host, with other organisations, discussions about how to support rapid action across UK.
Learn more about the report
James Skinner started it all. He has said all his life, “Actions speak louder than words”. So, he established Our Food Trust (originally called Conservation Farming Trust) to demonstrate, in action, what sustainable food and farming can be.
He called together the leadership team that founded the Travel Foundation 20 years earlier, which had dispersed to raise children (incompatible with international tourism work). The team knows it can be successful in establishing new programmes, because it already has.
For many years, I worked in Central and East Africa as an economist and then as the CEO of national development corporations of two African countries.
My experience in managing and promoting economic development, particularly of tourism and agriculture, made me realise the importance of preserving biodiversity and protecting nature from the devastation so often caused by the growth in the numbers and prosperity of human populations.
Back in England, I served for more than 20 years as a trustee, both of the Organic Research Centre at Elm Farm and the New Economics Foundation. This made me acutely aware of the terrifying rate of increase in expanding human demands on the resources of the planet, which has led to the destruction of half the world’s biodiversity in the last 50 years.
I grew up on a traditional Irish farm (beef, dairy, lamb, barley, oats, sugar beet and peas), and was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where I read physics.
I then completed a Master’s in Business Administration at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and worked several years in various countries in the European Union.
In 1975, I set up the international consulting firm, the REL Consultancy Group, which I ran for 30 years. During this time, from 1980, I was invited to be Non-Executive Chairman of the Organic Research Centre at Elm Farm, and currently I sponsor the development of a secondary school and organic farm in Ghana.
After a varied early career as a geologist, an economist at the World Bank and Managing Director of a group of packaging companies, I moved to Oxfam mid-career, taking my salary down by two thirds and my wellbeing up tenfold!
At Oxfam GB, as International Director, I was responsible for 10 years for Oxfam’s emergency, development and policy work worldwide. I became increasingly convinced that the prevailing economic system was a major cause of poverty, inequality and environmental harm.
This led me to moving to the New Economics Foundation (NEF) as Director in 2003. After 12 amazing years in this role, I retired in 2016 to write, do academic and local economy work and look after our 20 acres on Exmoor, where I live with my wife and two large dogs.
In 2018, I ‘unretired’ to help establish a new global organisation, WEAll – the Wellbeing Economy Alliance – and am currently its Executive Chair.
Throughout my early career in the international travel industry, I witnessed the profound impact of tourism on destinations and was motivated to persuade the industry to do better.
Teaming up with James and Duncan, we founded The Travel Foundation, the world’s first industry partnership focused on bringing greater benefit to the people and environments of holiday destinations.
I was CEO for 10 years, establishing it as a respected and award-winning charity. After a short, family-oriented career break, my focus is now on a sustainable lifestyle closer to home.
We live on a small-holding and are learning first-hand the challenges of having ambitions of self-sufficiency! I’m currently A Director of Our Food 1200 in Wales, and it is a privilege to have so many inspirational pioneers to learn from.
Over the last 30 years, I’ve been involved in creating a series of new organisations and projects in the fields of child welfare and environment. In the 1990s, I worked with James and Sue to set up The Travel Foundation.
I’m currently working in Wales. I am a director of Our Food 1200 that the Our Food Trust helped to set up there. I also edit the international child development website, Child & Family Blog.