The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.

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If you have any comments, critiques, considerations, compliments, complaints, about anything the Landworkers Alliance is or isn’t up to, do let us know your thought. We love feedback, it keeps a system healthy. Please fill in this quick form.

Membership / Supporter / Donation Queries

Please contact Lauren.Simpson@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Requests for work, volunteering or internships

We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements. We currently do not offer any volunteer or internship placements directly with the LWA, but keep an eye out in the newsletter or on the forum for any members looking for volunteers or workers.

Academic/Research Enquiries

Please look at the Agroecology Research Collaboration to see if it fits your area of research/work.

Membership Support / Advice

Currently the LWA does not have capacity or resources to help individual members or potential members on their specific projects, farms or programmes. We get a lot of requests for individual support and would love to have the time to respond to each request in full. We are fundraising for a new role for somebody to focus on membership support and services as we have identified it is a gap in our offering so please watch this space. Having said that, if your query is critical and urgent please email info@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk including the word URGENT in the subject header and it will get picked up and we can try our best to help.

Contacting Individual Staff

Please take the time to explore our staff page here to see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is.

Our addresses format is firstname.lastname@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

You can also find information under the About Us header about branch and regional organising, and identity groups within the LWA membership.

Press/Media Enquiries:

For any queries relating to press please email press@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Merchandise/calendar Enquiries

For any enquiries to do with shop sales including the calendar please email merchandise@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

To Include an Item in Our Newsletter:

You can fill in this quick form to submit it to be included in the next bulletin/newsletter. The deadline to submit is the end of Friday each week for the following week’s member bulletin. With the same form you can also submit to the monthly non-member newsletter which goes out in the first week of the month.

All Other Enquiries:

For any other enquiries that are URGENT please email info@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk with the word ‘urgent’ in the subject header and we will do our best to help.

Follow Us

Soy No More!

Exploring agroecological alternatives to soy-based pig and poultry feed

What’s the issue?

Rising global demand for soy is contributing to widespread deforestation in the Global South, and the majority of this demand is coming from the animal feed industry – mainly for feeding pig and poultry.

Each year the UK imports around 3 million tonnes of soy for animal feed, and WWF estimate that the land required to grow this soy amounts to around 1.7 million hectares – an area nearly the size of Wales.

Over half of the world’s soy (and almost all of the UK’s) comes from South America – either from the Amazon, or from other biodiverse regions which, as a result of increased soy production and other land-hungry industries,
continue to be vulnerable to high rates of deforestation.

There is an urgent need to transition away from an industrial pig and and poultry farming model which is driving land-use change overseas, to a system where more ethically produced meat can be produced on a smaller and more localised scale.

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What are we doing?

LWA has launched a joint campaign – together with Pasture for Life (PFLA), Sustain, Feedback and Hodmedod – which aims to raise awareness about the land-use change and deforestation associated with the global soy animal feed supply chain and to explore agroecological alternatives for feeding pigs and poultry in the UK.

As part of this campaign we have published a report: ‘Soy No More: Breaking away from soy in UK pig and poultry farming’ which highlights the environmental impact of the global soy animal feed industry and models the opportunities and trade offs of replacing soy in pig and poultry feed with alternative protein sources.

 

What can you do?

If you raise pigs and poultry on soy-free feed – get in touch! Alongside Pasture for Life and Hodmedod we are organising a series of farm tours over summer and autumn 2023 to showcase alternative feed systems; including pasture, home-grown legumes and insect feed.

Please contact: jyoti.fernandes@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

More information on these farm tours can be found in the drop down sections below.

June 8th: Pastured Pigs Farm Walk: Working towards soya-free pig production

Helen and Sam Wade have farmed Organic pigs at Eastleach Downs for over 25 years. Their system has evolved over that time and they have recently transitioned to a herd of British Saddlebacks. They have been working hard to attempt to eliminate soya from the pigs diet by taking a whole farm approach to their pig enterprise and producing a home grown ration, growing crops of grain and protein (wheat and beans, and peas and barley) together. The pigs also play an essential role in the fertility building stage of the wider arable enterprise which incorporates herbal leys and fertility building clover leys within their rotation.

Eastleach Downs have their own on farm butchery which allows for a variety of routes to market for their pork including direct selling to consumers and local pubs/restaurants .

The farm walk will be an opportunity to hear more about the Wade’s system and approaches and how it has developed over the years. The walk will be followed by lunch.

This event has now passed.

August 4th: Pastured Poultry Farm Walk, North Ayrshire

Ramstane Farm is a small-scale nature friendly regenerative farm in North Ayrshire, where Colin and Jill Russell run around 600 pastured laying hens as well as broilers in a silvopasture system (which integrates pasture, fruit trees, soft fruit and trees for fodder).

Colin has constructed all of his own mobile coops and has worked to develop an organic soya-free feed that uses cereals, beans and oil seed rape grown in Scotland. Ramstane Farm is a registered egg packery and they also have a small-scale chicken slaughtery on site. Colin has also trained in Holistic Management and he is a certified ‘Soil Food Web’ lab tech.

Join us for a farm tour in the morning, delicious home cooked lunch and practical soil health session in the afternoon.

Register here.

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