by Kirsty Tait, Director for Scotland, Food, Farming and Countryside Commission

There is something quietly revolutionary happening on farms and crofts. Gatherings happening up and down Scotland of groups of people in a circle in a field, watching as someone with a shovel overturns a clod of soil and asks people in the circle to get down on their hunkers to look, feel and smell the overturned earth. Don’t get me wrong, groups of farmers and crofters have always gathered on foot in fields and still do, despite being in a mechanised age. Whether gathering & tending livestock, crop trials or ploughing competitions and generally doing jobs machines still can’t do. Soil management has also always been key. But this feels a little different. Farmers and crofters mixing with scientists, interested members of the community, food businesses & distributers and public servants to really open their eyes and senses to the soil. The natural, over the fence competition that exists between farmers and crofters turning to new ones - who has got the highest worm and soil insect count, who has got the best rooting depth, who is using the least amount of expensive chemical inputs and whose soil has the texture most like chocolate.

‘Well it’s anything but cheap this dirt
This is the finest space of earth
This dish is a rich mud cake cosmos
A most flavoursome universe.’

“Hey Dinner Lady” – a song by Sarah McFadyen commissioned for ‘You Are What Your Food Eats’

It was in one of these fields outside Huntly that we found ourselves in a circle during late February this year, facilitated by SEDA Land in collaboration with SEFARI Gateway, the James Hutton Institute and Scotland's Rural College and kindly hosted by organic, mixed farmer Roger Polson on Knock Farm. A mixed bag of interested local farmers and growers, food businesses, foresters, soil and nutrition scientists, educators and academics, organisations like mine supporting change in the food system, local authority staff tasked with feeding Aberdeenshire’s school children and hospitalised and passionate members of the local community wanting change.

We were gathered to consider the question ‘You are what your food eats’ and tasked to look at land use, climate change, food systems and nutrition. A different lens to the embedded ‘you are what you eat’ and a deeper analysis. What is the story and impact of the food we eat? The soil that supports the grain, vegetables and fruit, the food consumed by the farmed animals and fish we eat, the ingredients of the processed foods that make up much of our diets. Overarching was the challenge, can greater value be added to the food supply chain of this place to support new forms of employment, achieve food security, grow a wider diversity of crops, build greater community cohesion and better public health?

The day began with Roger giving us an insight into their integrated approach to managing the land. He showed us the crops, meat, energy and timber the farm produces, the carbon it sequesters, the water it protects and biodiversity it supports. After the walk, the group sat down over a lunch prepared using local ingredients demonstrating the possible. This discussion and the asks for change that followed in Huntly echoed so many facilitated and hosted across the country in the year Scotland’s drafts its first National Good Food Nation Plan. Further afield, they also echo what citizens across the UK are telling us at the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission through The Food Conversation.

Citizens want businesses and governments to take action on food. They want governments to take food systems seriously. What we grow and how we grow it, what we eat and how – shapes the health, prosperity, and prospects of all across the world. Bringing it back to the local, the group gathered on Knock Farm focused on some practical asks for the Scottish Government and businesses which would support the food system to operate in a more functional way- read the key findings and full event report here.

We are at a moment in time when visions of a Good Food Nation and the right to food, sustainable and regenerative agriculture and land management change for climate and nature have been set out. But this rhetoric does not meet the current reality of how dysfunctional and unjust our food system is, how the land is currently managed and the escalating and costly diet-related ill health crisis in Scotland. For the journey to begin, new ways of cross policy and department working in both national and local government will need to be forged alongside facing and addressing major challenges with the current food system. As we are finding at FFCC and reflected in this SEDA Land event, citizens are less divided, more thoughtful, and more ambitious in their policy asks on food and agriculture than those in governments. The support and permission is there for change.

After all our shared challenges
there now remains this seed
and in the circle of this long story of the battles fought and won
within this small hard casing is the story yet to come

“Seed” – a poem by Dawn McLachlan read at ‘You Are What Your Food Eats’

Watch the short film, the full event and read the report here

This series of Conversations was funded by the Scottish Government Climate Change Engagement Programme and SEFARI Gateway, and was organised through collaboration between SEDA Land, The James Hutton Institute and Scotland’s Rural College

You are what your food eats – the story yet to come