3 November 2025
Newsletter
Newsletter – November 2025
This is our newsletter for October 2025. Please note that this page is not updated, so deadlines may have passed and links may no longer work. To receive future newsletters, please join our network.
Events
AFN Network+ Project Showcases
This week’s AFN Network+ Project Showcase will highlight key learnings from our funded projects. The AFN Network+ has funded over 30 scoping study projects and 24 Stakeholder FlexFund projects over the last 3 years. Join us online to hear about the key learnings from a selection of these projects, and the potential for action for the transformation of the agri-food system. There will be the opportunity for Q&A and discussion in small groups with the presenters. Each session will feature around 10 projects, with different projects on each day.
Wednesday 5th November 2025, 2:00–3:00pm
Featured projects:
- Twisted Orange, Encouraging school children to choose the more sustainable option through visual communication
- University of Greenwich, In situ soil organic carbon assessment with farmers and comparison with lab analyses
- Eating Better, To energise and build confidence in the Eating Better alliance on ‘less and better’ meat and dairy
- Royal Agricultural University, Delivering regenerative agriculture in practice – Farmer-led prioritisation
- Devon Food Partnership, People Planet Profit – an event to engage local food and drink businesses with sustainability
- Newcastle University, Implementation and acceptability of planet-friendly menus in primary schools
- James Hutton Institute, Assessing how substantive environmental changes in large land-holding trajectories can be enabled
- RegenFarmCo, Biohub Engagement: enhancing soil health, biodiversity, and crop resilience
- University of Bath, Assessment tool to measure the outcomes of their social prescribing of healthy food pilots
- Better Food Traders, Scoping carbon accounting for sustainable SME food retailers
Thursday 6th November 2025, 2:00–3:00pm
Featured projects:
- Queens University Belfast, GROW: empowering European farmers to move towards a sustainable food system
- Bristol Food Network, How to reduce food waste in Bristol’s hospitality businesses
- University of Southampton, Sustainable poultry nutrition
- Propagate, Agroecology – growing small farm resilience through enterprise stacking, and sharing ideas through learning
- University of Gloucestershire, Identifying food and farming-related actions local councils can take to support the transition to net zero
- Coventry University, Climate resilience for agroecological horticulture
- Lincolnshire Food Partnership, Workshopping the future of food in the Fens with a diverse group of system stakeholders
- Royal Agricultural University, Breeding Better Beef and Sheep. Codesigning breeding strategies to achieve net zero
- CSA, Resources for small-scale agroecological market gardeners on increasing climate resilience in their growing systems
- Scotland’s Rural College, Manure methane emissions decision support tool
News
Catch up on our Roadmap for Resilience – a UK Food Plan for 2050
If you want to catch up on our recent Roadmap launch, then please have a look at the Roadmap page on our website, which includes links to all the key documents:
- The Roadmap report
- A summary version of the report
- Briefings on healthier diets, resilient agricultural production, and smarter land use.
- A video of our recent webinar on the Roadmap
- Jez’s digests of the key points and priority actions, farming transition, and land land transition, and diet transformation.
News from the wider agri-food sector
Funding
AHRC: Design Generators
Apply for funding to combine design-led interventions with arts and humanities methodologies to make positive contributions to the green transition. You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding.
This round will focus on creating interventions within existing systems. These systems may include, but are not limited to, healthcare, food networks, governance structures, financial infrastructures, and other societal frameworks. They are particularly interested in projects that approach these systems from a community perspective and use design thinking and creative methodologies to identify leverage points for positive change.
The total funding is £1 million, with individual awards £150,000-£200,000.
Deadline: 29 January 2026
Innovate UK: Full ADOPT grant: round four
Farming, growing or forestry businesses based in England can apply for a share of up to £3.5 million for on-farm trial and demonstration projects, to improve adoption of new ideas or solutions in the agricultural sector. Individual project total costs must be between £50,000 and £100,000.
Deadline: 10 December 2025
Defra – Feasibility Studies competition
Feasibility Studies projects will test whether a research idea works in real-world conditions. Defra want to support early-stage, innovative solutions and encourage businesses to work together on new ideas. Projects can receive between £200,000 and £500,000 in funding and last up to 24 months.
Deadline: 3 December 2025
NERC: Artificial intelligence (AI) for environmental science phase one
Apply for funding to use artificial intelligence (AI) and data science in new ways to address complex environmental challenges. They are seeking bold, innovative ideas with the potential to shape the future of environmental science.
Deadline: 11 December 2025
Events
Webinar: Building capacity for net zero literacy in farming and rural communities
Tuesday 4th November 2025, 2:00–3:30pm
This afternoon’s webinar, organised by the Land Use for Net Zero (LUNZ) Hub, sees three expert speakers reflect on their own experiences in capacity building for net zero literacy, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A. This webinar is for all land-use stakeholders interested in the topic of enabling transition to net zero in land use.
Webinar: Fork in the Road? 30 Years of COP and the Future of Food
Tuesday 4th November 2025, 4:00–5:30pm
After the LUNZ Hub webinar, why not pop by this TABLE event, which looks back on what has been achieved in advancing sustainable food systems over the last thirty years, and what role COP discussions have played here, in raising food’s profile or in incentivising actual progress.
Webinar: What does the government’s new climate and growth plan mean for the UK?
Wednesday 5th November 2025, 12:00–1:00pm
The government will publish a new climate and growth action plan this month, which will set out emissions reductions policies to achieve the UK’s carbon budgets, and its national pledge to cut emissions by 68 per cent by 2030 under the Paris agreement. Join Green Alliance experts for a deep dive into what the plan means for nature restoration and the transition to clean technologies in transport, homes and industry.
Webinar: Leadership & Representation – Women in Agriculture
Thursday 13th November 2025, 10:00–11:00am
The organisers of the Women in Agriculture Awards are launching a Women in Agriculture Network. Their ambition is to create a community that helps women in the farming sector build contacts, create friendships, and make progress in their careers. Find out more at this launch event.
Women in Food and Farming x Harper Adams Agrics
Tuesday 18th November 2025, Harper Adams University
Alternatively, join Women in Food and Farming (WIFF) and the Harper Adams Agricultural Society (Agrics) for an inspiring evening of conversation, career insight, and networking. This event brings together speakers from across the food and farming sector—spanning early career professionals to senior industry leaders—to share their personal career journeys and explore how networking has played a role in shaping their professional lives.
Nuffield Farming Conference
18–20 November 2025, Aberdeen
Making UK farming resilient – workshop at FarmED
Tuesday 25th November 2025, Oxfordshire
This workshop is part of a collaboration between the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and the UKRI-funded project Backcasting to Achieve Food System Resilience. A relaxed, interactive day discussing the kinds of disruptions that could shape the food and farming sector in the coming decades, from all-too-familiar challenges like drought and animal disease, to emerging risks like cyberattacks, extreme heat, trade wars, and global conflict. Your insights will feed into recommendations for government and industry, with the aim of shaping a more resilient food and farming sector that works for farmers and the public.
The organisers are particularly looking for participants from large-scale conventional arable, and pig and poultry farming.
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2026
8–9 January 2026, Oxford
Your views needed
Survey to Help Shape EU/UK Food Research Agenda
Closing in the next few days, the goal of this survey is to gather researcher perspectives about food research in Europe and the UK and better understand evidence and funding needs, work around food and food systems, and the barriers to and opportunities for generating and communicating food research.This survey is being conducted by researchers from TABLE at the University of Oxford in partnership with the Centre for Food Policy to inform the research funding strategy of the Wellcome Trust as part of their Climate and Health programme.
Call for Input – Transforming food systems to protect human rights and prevent climate harm
Elisa Morgera, Professor of International Law and Sustainability at Durham University and the current Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, is calling for inputs into her upcoming report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2026. She wants to synthesise and analyse a varied body of evidence (from across the natural and social sciences, including indigenous science, traditional knowledge and other knowledge systems) of the actual and potential contributions of transforming food systems to climate change mitigation, adaptation, prevention and responses to loss and damage, and human rights protection, taking an integrated approach to land- and ocean-based food systems.
Deadline: 15 December 2025
News and publications
Food Shines consultancy placements and conference
The BAFR-UK (Backcasting to Achieve Food Resilience in the UK) project is launching Food Shines: six paid consultancy placements and a conference exploring current wide-ranging food system challenges.
Food Shines consultancy placements
There are six paid consultancy placements with BAFR advisory board member organisations, each of which has identified a food system challenge for the successful candidate to tackle. These placements, open to UK-based doctoral students of any discipline, will involve desk-based/field research and the delivery of a 10-15 page report addressing the assigned challenge. Placement hosts include Defra, the Met Office, WWF, WRAP, Better Food Traders and Sustain.
Deadline for applications: 1 December 2025
Food Shines Conference
Thursday 19th February 2026, Cambridge
UK-based doctoral students of any discipline are invited to explore current wide-ranging food system challenges. The conference offers career- and research-boosting presentations, networking opportunities, and chances to help solve multidisciplinary food system challenges. This conference is free to attend. Food and refreshments will be provided, and travel expenses for UK students will be covered by arrangement.
A climate risk assessment of the UK food system
A new assessment from IGD aims to quantify the financial impact of physical climate risks on the UK food system up to 2050, based on ten critical commodities. The model represents a useful tool for businesses to identify what the impact of expected climate risk is likely to be on certain products. This is a first step in developing an open-access model to quantify the UK food system’s exposure to climate risk.
Agriculture and climate change: Does the UK have the statistics it needs?
In a recent article in Significance, Ian Plewis looks at how current data on reducing emissions from livestock and arable farming is inadequate, leaving us unable to make good policy and slow the rate of global warming. DEFRA and the devolved administrations are responsible for a range of farmer surveys which provide some understanding of the substantial contribution that agriculture makes to the UK’s GHG emissions. Unfortunately, these surveys are not well-integrated into the climate change agenda as exemplified by the Climate Change Committee, suffer from low and declining response rates, and the value of the microdata from them is diminished by not being made available for re-analysis to interested parties outside Government.
The elephant at the table
A new report by an international group of researchers and fellows at The New Institute calls out what’s often overlooked: power. In The Elephant at the Table: Policy Pathways to Confront Power in Food Systems they say, “Food systems will not be transformed unless power is confronted— not as an abstract concept, but as concrete control over land and water, markets and labour, taste and narratives. The stakes could not be higher: food systems must feed everyone, regenerate ecosystems, and provide decent livelihoods, yet we are failing on all fronts… This report moves beyond diagnosis to proposals: concrete, structural, and actionable recommendations that address power directly.”
Flying in the face of criticism
A critical review of the environmental benefits of insect farming has been published in Biological Reviews. Insect farming is frequently promoted as a sustainable food solution, yet current evidence challenges many environmental benefits claimed by industry proponents. This review critically examines the scientific foundation for assessing the environmental impacts of insect farming in both human food and animal feed applications and reveals substantial limitations in existing research.
Cutting the costs of food hubs
A study in Transportation Research has investigated how local food hubs can work more efficiently. Food hubs act like a central marketplace: farmers and small food businesses bring products to one place, where they are packed and delivered to shoppers. The research team worked with Food and Drink North East (FADNE), a community business in Newcastle. Using real delivery data, the researchers created a model to test scenarios. The results show that if producers share transport more effectively, they can cut delivery costs and fuel use. And if they replace diesel vans with electric vehicles they could reduce costs by nearly one-third and carbon emissions by up to 70%.
Journal article and University of Manchester press release
Bridging Fields programme
The Royal Agricultural University’s Bridging Fields training programme aims to equip the UK research community with the relevant skills, knowledge and confidence to co-design and conduct collaborative research with farmers that has real-world impact. Bridging Fields have a lot of events coming up over the next few months.
Workshops before Christmas:
- Thursday 20th November 1–3pm – Not another survey! From extraction to collaboration.
- Thursday 18th December 1–3pm – Indigenous Knowledge
A series of residencies next year:
- 20th–22nd Jan 2026 (food systems and story telling). Register your interest.
- 24th–26th March 2026 (livestock)
- 29th June–1st July 2026 (crops)
- 8th–10th September 2026 (tech)
Sign-up here to join their mailing list, or join their LinkedIn group for more information.
