Adam and Douglas Share Their Groundswell Festival Takeaways

Our latest blog is a joint one, from Adam Forrest and Douglas Bowden-Smith, who recently visited the Groundswell Regenerative Agriculture Festival and share some of their thoughts and learnings here. 

Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Groundswell festival continues to live up to its name and was bigger than ever this year. SAOS was there again to learn, exchange ideas, strengthen relationships, and celebrate collaborative working.

Groundswell has come a long way since 2016, when it was founded as a relatively niche event with around 400 farmers in attendance at Lannock Farm in Weston, Hertfordshire. This year, the event attracted over 10,000 attendees (spread across two days), with farmers being joined by researchers, advisors, and a variety of industry stakeholders, including representatives from some of the biggest food and drink companies in the world.

The main focus of Co-op Development Manager Adam Forrest’s visit was to see first-hand how farmer collaboration is developing in England.

“One core message that kept resurfacing was that successful change in agricultural practice depends as much on relationships, trust, and collective organisation, as it does on individual farm practices. Farmer collaboration is moving from the margins to the centre of agricultural transition,” Adam reflected.

This is illustrated in part by the new £30m Farmer Collaboration Fund recently launched by Defra. The fund runs for three years and aims to help England-based farmers better handle shared challenges through collaboration, specialist advice, and peer learning. Delivery will be by local facilitators such as NGO’s and charities.

Another inspiring point from a co-op perspective is the strong farmer cluster network that has emerged in England over the past decade. Many of these clusters have received strong support from the government, as Adam explains: “One example is a project in Cotswolds which was recently funded with over £100 million of blended public and private finance, focused on delivering nature restoration. It would be great to see more structured government support for farmer clusters and informal forms of farmer collaboration in Scotland. It was also interesting to see the understanding around the value of facilitators. Skilled facilitation has been key to enabling investment and to the professionalisation of these partnerships – this has been really good to see.”  

When asked how this Groundswell has compared with previous years, Adam noted that the event is becoming more commercially-focused – most likely because the industry is changing while at the same time the event is growing and attracting a more mainstream audience.

The growing range of people attending was also something that surprised Project Manager Douglas Bowden-Smith, who attended the event with a focus on supply chain collaboration.

Douglas told us: “You really do meet people from all parts of the supply chain. I can't think of another example where you can chat to the Head of Sustainability at Heineken and then turn around and chat to a group of farmers and all kinds of corporates. Groundswell provides a wonderfully eclectic melting pot.”

A key takeaway from discussions with such major food companies, be it Heineken or PepsiCo, was the rigidity of their vertically integrated supply chains, with so many middlemen between the farmer and the producer. Douglas explains: “That left a bit of a sticking point in my head. I couldn’t help thinking that there’s a possibility here for SAOS to get involved, as more of a grassroots organisation, helping to reduce the distance between farmer and processor.”

Like Adam, Douglas was really interested in England’s successful farmer cluster groups. A key aspect of their success is having access to funding for facilitators, a role that SAOS could play if the concept were to gain further traction in Scotland. There is now a strong base of large, landscape-wide, multi-stakeholder collective projects deeply rooted in England, which was really encouraging to see.

One such example is the launch of the Food & Nature Resilience Fund, by Lloyds Banking Group and farming regeneration business, Wildfarmed, which helps UK farmers transition to nature-positive practices without having to carry the financial burden. The fund pools investments from banks, utility companies, and insurers to reward farmers financially for improving soil health and biodiversity while keeping land in production.

On a less optimistic note, Adam and Douglas were both shocked at the level of dryness in the countryside as they made their way down to Hertfordshire. “If there's ever a wake-up call for climate change, being down south and seeing how much of the country was tinder dry really brought the message home,” said Douglas. He continued: “water scarcity is becoming a real problem and there is definitely increased awareness of the need for resilience in farming systems. Things are getting hot enough that people really can’t ignore it.”

The challenges facing agriculture are too great for any farm to tackle alone. As the impacts of climate change become harder to ignore, collaboration will be critical in turning shared challenges into shared solutions.

Get in touch with adam.forrest@saos.coop or douglas.bowden-smith@saos.coop to learn how SAOS can help.