Speciality-Food-Magazine-March-2025

specialityfoodmagazine.com 47 F airfields Farmmakes thick- cut, skin-on potato crisps that also happen to be vegan, gluten free, carbon neutral, and with nomajor allergens. While the brand is celebrating another year of record growth at its potato farmand crisp factory, the team is obsessed with growing sustainably and going even beyond carbon neutral to Net Zero. It’s easy to keep doing things the same way as they’ve been done for decades, but sometimes you need tomake big changes tomake big differences, plusmore than a few leaps of faith. A few years ago, Fairfields Farm put their plough in the shed and they haven’t taken it out again. That sounds small, but the impact is huge. Every single time soil is turned, greenhouse gases get released into the air. Today, when the team prepares the land for planting, they take care to use what they call “minimal till” techniques that minimise carbon release. To help recapture some of that carbon, they use a green cover crop between harvests, which sucks carbon dioxide – and other good stuff like nitrogen – out of the air and into the ground, providing themwith nutritious and natural ‘manure’ to be used during the next crop. They also use crop rotation tomake sure that land gets a nice rest after growing potatoes – around seven years, in fact! Other crops they grow include maize and rye, which feed the farm’s on-site anaerobic digestion plant, which produces clean energy and also has amarvellous byproduct called ‘digestate’, which they use to fertilise the soil. Water is hugely important, too. Fairfields Farmhas been busy building reservoirs and filling them in the winter, making sure they can be as self-sufficient as possible in those summer months when potato plants are particularly thirsty. Of course, the commitment to sustainability extends beyond farming practices: Fairfields Farmmaintains wild spaces for biodiversity, has created two brand newwoodlands, engages with schools to promote farming, uses green energy including solar panels and even the cooking oil used to prepare the crisps is collected to be repurposed into biodiesel. UK consumers are hooked on ultra-processed foods (UPF). Over half of our weekly shopping baskets are filled with them. When people criticise UPFs, as they rightly and increasingly do, they mostly focus on UPF links to obesity, cancer, and mental illness. Less discussed but no less important is the damaging role they play in worsening the climate crisis. There are three key ways they contribute: ● First, UPFs drive overconsumption while offering little or no nutritional benefit. These worthless ‘empty calories’ are expected to double by 2050. In Australia, optional calories already account for a third of diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water use. ● Second, UPFs heavily rely on fossil fuels. The food industry prioritises a handful of high-yield crops for UPF production. These require intensive agrochemical inputs - fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides. Raw materials then undergo energy-intensive processing - extraction, modification, refinement. They are often (non-greenly) shipped around the globe between each stage. ● Finally, there’s the packaging. Nearly all UPFs come wrapped, packed, or bottled in plastic. With only 9% of all plastic packaging ever recycled, the rest is burned, buried, or is still bobbing around contaminating our oceans. Consumers need help to ditch UPFs and return to scratch cooking, eating a variety of fresh, minimally processed whole foods. Speciality retailers have a key role to play here – over to you. JASON GIBB CO-FOUNDER OF BREAD & JAM AND OH SO WHOLESOME The environmental danger of UPFs Consumers need help to ditch UPFs and return to scratch cooking, and speciality retailers have a role to play here FAIRFIELDS FARM “Our commitment extends beyond farming practices” ORGANIC FRUIT, VEGETABLES AND DAIRY ACCOUNT FOR 50% OF ALL UK ORGANIC SALES SOIL ASSOCIATION CERTIFICATION THE GARLIC FARM “To reconnect food with nature and health, we need to work together” T he Garlic Farm is inmany ways setting the ‘gold standard’ for sustainability in Britain. Not only is the farm an organic operation, but in recent years it has embraced regenerative agriculture, and these practices combined have led to healthier soil, a healthier environment, and to a wealth of biodiversity on site. Viewing the farm and its operations holistically, and taking a nature first approach has long been important to director Barnes Edwards, who wants the business to ‘lead from the front’ on these issues, inspiring others to follow in its footsteps. “We collectively fractured the food systemgenerations ago,” he says, adding that the challenge now is to come together to deliver radical socio-economic change. “The approach to a singular challenge of, for example agricultural emissions, needs to be considered in the context of the interconnected elements of wildlife, water and health,” he continues. “The economics impacting these foundations of our ecology are not in balance. This is a really, really big problem.” Barnes says the changemakers reading our Green Issue “understand the issue, feel strongly and act boldly”, but as a sector, they are in the minority. “How can we scale the methods and efforts on holistic impact mitigation by brands among these pages? How can speciality retail incubate, evidence and roll out the respectful, regenerative service they offer communities? And what levers can we pull to encourage and accelerate nature-led solutions?” Thankfully, he thinks, some of these solutions exist, including organic farming with, he says, details in a recent OF&G white paper demonstrating that whole ecosystem restoration could be possible with a concerted increase in organic food production. “Alongside other restorative farming techniques and nature- based approaches to land use such as agroforestry, adaptive grazing and a focus on soil biology, there are solutions that deliver. But how do we transition? “The truth is, we as a business and family have no idea. We are busy asking lots of questions, listening to all sorts of impassioned innovators and doing plenty of experiments on the farm. Some stuff is working well, with visible results. Some not. What is clear is that to tackle the metacrisis and reconnect food with nature and health, we need to work together!”