After three years of events, outreach and discussions with the Northern food and farming community, 2023 saw NRFC launching a collaborative reflection and review process with the goal of better understanding where we should focus our efforts to realise our vision of a healthy, fair and sustainable food and farming system for the North.
Through a series of participatory workshops, discussion events and surveys, a strategy was developed which will guide NRFC’s work over the coming 3-5 years. The overall impact that we aim to see is a resilient food system in the North of England, as well as the importance of the strong platform that NRFC provides as the foundation for this work.
The remaining elements of the strategy illustrate the routes needed to achieve the overall impact goal. Crucially, the strategy highlights six action areas which we have identified as being key to bringing about a resilient food system in the North of England:
- The land based workforce is thriving
- Landscape recovery projects embody good practice in agroecology
- Genetic diversity in Northern seeds and breeds has increased
- Northern food processing capacity has increased
- Public and anchor institutions’ procurement of local agroecological products has increased manifold
- More agroecological producers have secure, long-term access to land
These action areas will form the focus of NRFC’s work over the coming 3-5 years and you can explore them in more depth here.
Each action area has a goal and is supported by a series of desired outcomes and activities which we aim to progress by working collaboratively and in partnership over the next 3-5 years.