The Carbon Calling conference was held at Kirkby Thore, near Penrith
Or, as Patrick Holden from the Sustainable Food Trust put it, can we ‘make capitalism honest’?
Ellen Pearce from LESS attended the conference…
On June 24, this year’s Carbon Calling conference opened in a tucked away barn in Kirkby Thore, near Penrith.
Set up by two straight-talking farmers, Nic Rennison and Liz Genever, the event purports to be the missing link between conventional and regenerative agriculture.
This year a whole day was dedicated to the theme “How to stimulate more collaboration within supply chains to get better access to regenerative products?”.
A rather eclectic group of people were inspired to join these discussions – from micro producers, farmers and chefs, to the huge ABP meat processor (works with 13,000 farms in the UK according to their website) and the Westmorland family who farm in Cumbria and run the highly successful Tebay Services on the M6.
Patrick Holden and Sheila Dilan from the BBC Food Programme opened the day by exploring the ways in which the ‘system doesn’t reward the right things’.
Protecting and restoring nature is not rewarded financially in the food production process, while at the same time polluters aren’t penalised and farmers are not held responsible for any damage they cause.
One of the key questions seemed to be, can we shift from a highly anonymised and industrialised food system, to one where we bring back pleasure and pride, and where the connection with nature is there too, through food?
The discussions were wide-ranging, including everything from how can we protect and support the remaining 49 local abattoirs, without which, ‘there is no local meat system’, how can small producers collaborate around logistics and how can we create more awareness of seasonality and what grows where, when?
So how do we make more of a shift to more locally produced nature friendly food?
There was much consensus, as well as some disagreement!
A number of the ideas really resonated with the work of FoodFutures in North Lancashire and the current campaign for a Sustainable Food Places Gold Award which focuses on our local food economy.
These included ‘telling the truth about the food system’ so people can make more informed choices about their food, the need for more opportunities to connect people to place through farm visits, nature connection and education, and the hope that new ideas land in a ‘fertile’ space in the system, so that things can be tried without too much risk.
Perhaps the message that stayed with me most strongly was from Tim Bloomer from Fell Brewery.
Essentially he provided a hopeful analogy with the craft beer industry which has seen a shift in recent years from domination by mass produced lagers, to a wide and diverse landscape of micro and craft breweries across the UK.
Customer demand, apparently, is all that’s needed!
He did warn us though ‘you will have to do way more than you think, yourselves’.
A quote from the poet, June Jordan, was also echoing around the barn – ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’….
