The Source

We show that the category of ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ is not immutable and nor are the practices and interventions that are deemed acceptable. We caution against renditions of local communities as being resistant to change and provide examples of how endogenous pivots toward environmental practices and tourism can be incorporated into an authentic livelihood strategy.

The scale of the challenge is significant: by 2050, England is projected to face a daily shortfall of nearly five billion litres of water.  Against this backdrop, the central question is whether the Water White Paper – and wider government initiatives – will be sufficient to address these pressures. Jessica Sellick investigates.  

UK agriculture is operating in a fundamentally different pricing environment. Input costs – such as fuel, fertiliser and energy - are no longer moving in predictable cycles. Instead, they react quickly to geopolitical events, supply chain pressures and shifts in global energy markets.

Labour shortages are leading to an increase in the number of producers turning to Automated Milking Systems (AMS) to reduce the long and often anti-social hours associated with milking twice or three times a day. FAS Scotland has delivered several meetings and webinars on AMS production throughout 2025 for existing producers and those thinking about converting. This note condenses the key points from those events to help you get the maximum benefit from an AMS system

Recruitment in the agriculture sector has always come with its own unique challenges. Whether you’re a farmer looking for a capable operator, a farm manager building a team, or a consultant advising clients on business growth, finding the right people is rarely straightforward.

Corporate regenerative agriculture acts as a new form of rural governance. Four governance logics shape rural adaptation: compliance, experimentation, partnership, branding. Temporal and legitimacy gaps limit the depth of corporate regenerative transitions. “Legitimacy traps” explain why audit-driven systems sustain credibility without real change. True regeneration depends on co-adaptive governance and shared risk between firms and farmers.

Drawing from practical field experience at the Teaching and Research Farm of Obafemi Awolowo University, this paper examines how the introduction of the Ayaya cassava variety, combined with targeted value chain interventions, can improve productivity, enhance processing efficiency, and strengthen market value/participation.

England's first Land Use Framework sets out a plan for managing the country's finite land to ensure the nation's long-term resilience. Government commits to maintain food production and safeguard our most productive agricultural land. Developers, investors and farmers will be given access to cutting edge data to speed up infrastructure delivery, support business diversification and restore nature at scale to deliver our climate change and environment targets

Drawing on insights from systems thinking, this Nuffield Farming Scholarship report proposes a participatory approach to support more inclusive and context-sensitive policy development. Rather than offering a singular solution such as a wholesale transition to agroecology, it argues that by encouraging a diversity of perspectives, valuing lived experience, recognising different forms of knowledge, the policy process could support incremental yet cumulative change across the agrifood system even in the absence of complete consensus.

Through reduction of D. plantaginea fruit damage alone, our study shows that flower strips on the headland can be a positive financial investment. If non-crop land was not available, establishment of a flower strip in the centre of an orchard, instead of the edge, could recoup opportunity costs by providing benefits to crops on both sides of the flower strip. Our study can help guide the optimal placement of flower strips and inform subsidy value for these schemes.

ncluding plantain in perennial ryegrass/white clover pasture appears to be a low-cost option to reduce N leaching and nitrous oxide emission, without any substantive negative effects on pasture production, animal production, milk quality and animal health. On the contrary, under certain situations various positive effects of plantain on all these factors have been observed.

“This report calls for British farming to be treated as a strategic national asset, supported by more stable policy and practical reform for sustainable food production in the UK. We need to remove the barriers that currently hold the sector back to create a stronger and more resilient agricultural industry.”