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

A New Deal for Horticulture

(2017 - ongoing)

What’s the issue?

To meet the UK demand for fruit and vegetables, a massive scaling up of production is required. If everyone in Britain were to eat the “Seven a day” now recommended by Public Health England, we would need an additional 2.4 million tonnes of fresh produce, equivalent to a 66% growth in UK production.

The Eatwell Guide recommends that 40% of each person’s diet consists of fruit and vegetables; yet currently only 1% of the £3 billion agriculture budget is spent on horticulture. Over the last 30 years the area planted to vegetables in the UK has decreased by 26%.

 

Beth ydym ni’n ei wneud?

Rather than increasing the scale of production on a few large farms, the Landworkers’ Alliance believes that a dramatic increase in the number of small scale, agroecological producers growing fruit and vegetables close to the point of sale would help address the issues whilst bringing numerous additional benefits.

To achieve this we have created documents outlining the numerous benefits of this approach and developed policy proposals that would help make this a reality. We are now working with Defra and our members to get these proposals developed into policy.

Specific areas that we are working on include:
  • Growing the Goods – A horticulture test and trial for the new Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) to find ways to adequately incentivise and reward the delivery of public goods for both small and large scale growers.
  • Fringe Farming – Promotion of peri-urban horticulture across five cities in the UK and advocacy for local and national policies that would better support fringe farming. LWA hosts a “peri-urban practitioners forum” which meets quarterly to share experience and best practice.
  • Horticulture Across Three Nations – The policy co-ordinators of England, Scotland and Wales meet regularly to support one another in the mission to build the capacity of growers in all the devolved nations.
  • Food Zones Case Studies – Part of our horticultural vision for the UK is that most fruit and vegetables for every city would be supplied by a mixture of producers from urban, peri-urban, rural hinterland areas, supplemented by national and international produce. We are collecting case studies of where this is already happening, to help other cities develop their “food zones” supply systems.
  • Horticulture Study Tours – Visiting both rural and peri-urban horticulture holdings is a powerful way to demonstrate to MPs and civil servants the benefits of agroecological horticulture. We organise one or two opportunities each year to get policy makers onto farms.
  • Edible Horticulture Roundtable – Three times per year we meet with Defra officials and the Minister of Agriculture as part of the Edible Horticulture Round Table.  We are an active member of the Fruit and Vegetable Alliance, alongside other small growers’ organisations and bodies representing larger growers, such as the NFU, where we advocate for the needs of small and medium scale, agroecological and organic growers. We will be actively campaigning to ensure that the horticulture strategy recently announced in the Government Food Strategy supports such growers.

How can I help?

Please write and/or arrange a meeting with your MP to explain the aims of the horticulture campaign to them and ask them to support our policy recommendations.

Arrange Farm walks for MPs to your farm, or other farms around you so they can see first hand the benefits of small-scale diversified horticulture.

Contact

Rebecca Laughton: rebecca.laughton@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Additional Resources

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