10 February 2026

The work I do now is in small to medium-scale organic food production, so it’s useful to hear how other people view & understand things (Steven is the Co-ordinator for the Organic Growers Alliance). If I’m trying to effect positive change against a tide going in another direction, it’s good to see through somebody else’s eyes. For example, I went to one AFN Network event and on my right was a potato producer, and on my left was a PhD researcher in pure maths. We were in a workshop to look at modelling food systems and we all had a very good conversation over lunch about what we eat, and why we eat it. Because I’ve come into the Network from an organic and agroecological background, net zero is part of a set of messages that I already subscribe to. It’s helping me convey what I’m already championing. And for me, it’s also been about understanding how other people see things. 

I would strongly urge the funding organisations to see the AFN Network as transformational. I would definitely like to see the Network continue. We’ve only just got going and there’s a long way to go yet. This is the issue in the food system, and in climate change: we knew that 30 years ago, the evidence was strong and compelling. And the powers that be, those with their hands on the levers of change, have done very little. And in fact what many of them have done is taken two steps back. Long-term repercussions are not factored in. So the primary producer side of things is changing, but we’re being told to keep doing what we were, a few small changes here and there, but just keep doing that & feed a machine that hasn’t really changed in how it faces the climate and nature crises. And I think the Network is a really good way of bringing all of that wider perspective much more into focus, and there’s a lot of work we need to do yet.

We need to make that change and build that resilience today. We’re now being told we have breached 1.5 degrees of warming, and even if we switch off all the fossil fuels today, we will probably hit 2.5 or 3 degrees of warming by 2050. That’s the reality that we need to face up to, but we need to do it in a way that means we can face up to it. If it’s just too frightening, people will run away. But it has to have some hard truths in there, and help people find measured and focused solutions to move forwards.