Championing healthy,
sustainable food & farming​
​An alliance for change
Sustainable Food Somerset is an alliance of individuals and organisations who are passionate about making healthy, sustainably grown food accessible to all. We believe that farming regeneratively, building the market for good local food, and encouraging home and community growing are crucial to curbing carbon emissions, boosting biodiversity and building our long-term food security.
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LOCAL
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REGENERATIVE
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NOURISHING
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RESILIENT
Our mission
The current food system is unsustainable: a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss that is failing to nourish too many of us, but also hugely wasteful. Yet farming in Somerset – and across the UK – could be the very opposite. Farmland can be a vast store for carbon, a sanctuary for nature, a source of local economic prosperity and an educational and therapeutic resource like no other.
Our vision is for a vibrant, varied and thriving food culture where farming according to agroecological principles is the norm – restoring wildlife, attracting visitors, boosting the local economy, enhancing health and wellbeing. We hope you'll want to be part of our growing movement demanding a better, more resilient and nature-friendly food system.
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Key areas of activity
Reconnecting people with local, healthy, sustainably produced food through community action lies at the heart of everything we do. We seek to achieve this through three key areas of activity: ​Somerset Community Food, which has been supporting grassroots community food projects for more than two decades; the Somerset Food Trail which celebrates the best of sustainably produced food; and LandAlive, our major new sustainable food and farming conference, which will be held in November 2024. ​
“The actions that we take in the next ten years are critical to recover and regenerate nature; and to restore health and wellbeing to both people and planet.”
Our Future In The Land: A report by the Food Farming and Countryside Commission and the RSA 2019
Joining up the food system dots
We are part of the Sustainable Food Places (SFP) network, backed by a partnership of Sustain, the Soil Association and Food Matters. This gives us access to shared resources, guidance and best practice from over 100 regional 'food partnerships', each working to make the food system in their city or region more sustainable. Among other collaborative projects, we are working with a sub-group within SFP called 'the Counties Network', bringing together members who, like ourselves, represent large rural areas where agriculture predominates, with some different challenges to purely urban food systems.
“Biodiversity is in freefall. The UK is among the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with only 53% of its biodiversity left. Yet nature is the very basis of our food supply chain; our natural life-support system. Nothing short of a total re-think of our food system is required.”
Stewart Crocker, Chair of Sustainable Food Somerset