In the latest edition of the Ecologist Sir Julian Rose, pioneering organic farmer and owner of the Hardwick Estate, asks if organic farming has “sold out and lost its way”. Rose argues that organic production has gone from being the practical manifestation of an ecological and social movement to a marketing opportunity for the supermarkets [...]

Last week Provenance was invited to attend a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture and Food for Development (APPG). The subject of the meeting was agroecology, a systems approach to agriculture born of ecology and taking into account sustainability, resilience and equity as well as production. The speakers, Prof. Martin Wolfe, Patrick [...]

As well as being one of the founding partners of Provenance, I’m also a director of ECCE-Bio, a network of European organic producer co-operatives. The network has taken some time to find its feet – not helped by the current economic climate – but is beginning to make contact with other farmer groups, CSOs and [...]

In a recent conversation with Stuart Orr, a friend from WWF International, the topic of water management and the value of water footprinting came up. In particular we talked about the localised impacts of basin and watershed management and the indicators, incentives, sanctions and technologies that could and are being employed to effect positive changes [...]

PAS 2050 is a publicly available specification for assessing product life cycle GHG emissions, prepared by BSI British Standards and co-sponsored by the Carbon Trust and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). PAS 2050 is an independent standard, developed with significant input from international stakeholders and experts across academia, business, government and [...]

Increasing interest in wild harvested foods goes beyond usual plants and mushrooms to more unusual naturalised garden escapees and overlooked native flora