WeekNote #1: Farming the Doughnut
I’m starting a new job this week (my first new job in 7.5 years) so I thought I might try and start a new habit too — Weeknotes. These are short reflections on things that have interested you from your week of work, shorter than a blog and often containing a pick and mix of unconnected subjects. It doesn’t need to be of interest to others (sorry guys) but I’m doing it because my new role is as Director of Farming the Future, which among other things, coordinates participatory grant making from a pooled fund for the agroecology sector - so I want to be as accessible and transparent as possible in my working practices and I need to put in some graft.
Getting started — the hole in the middle of the doughnut
I’ve had a staggered start with this job, working Fridays since December alongside my previous job, but this week was my first and I knew it would be glorious and painful in equal measure as I finally got stuck into all the folders and realised how much I have to digest and understand. There is a hole in the middle of my head that I have been stuffing full of info and I have brain indigestion (braindigestion?) But I have faith it will translate into a clear picture in due course.
Farming and the Doughnut
What’s all this about doughnuts then? Well it turns out the doughnut hasn’t fallen far from the doughnut tree. I’m not just sitting at the same desk in the same home office, even talking to some of the same people as in my old job — but also all the work I’ve been doing on place, power, ownership and transitioning to a fair green economy all applies to the land, food and farming system too. And one of my favourite ways of thinking about this is through Doughnut Economics.
The purpose of taking an agroecological approach to farming is essentially to ensure that we can meet our human needs whilst operating within planetary boundaries. This is beautifully visualized by Doughnut Economics and it is not hard to see how a just and adequately resourced transition to agroecology for the UK farming sector, as part of a wider move to a regenerative and distributive economy, will help us to sit more comfortably within the safe space for humanity.
To bring about this transition in farming we need to consider not just the overshoot areas that industrial agriculture has historically contributed to (biodiversity loss, soil degradation and deforestation, water pollution, methane and carbon dioxide emissions etc) but also the social foundation upon which it is built (equitable access to land and food, fair but affordable prices for goods to enable fair wages, affordable housing in the countryside, sustainable energy for food production, appropriate training and advice, and access to networks to help source alternative inputs etc).
I’ll leave it there for now but maybe now you can see why doughnuts are on my mind?
The Sprinkles on the Doughnut
Everyone has their favourite doughnut topping and I can tell there is a huge amount of diversity of experience and perspectives within the Farming the Future Network. Everyone is very passionate about collaborating more effectively and reflecting on how we do things as well as what we do. Its a joy to be (re-)entering this luscious, creative ecosystem of relationships (which I have been attempting to map on kumu) and to be embracing the challenges and opportunities that come with working in a different way with funders, practitioners, movements and infrastructure organisations to shift things, connect things, fix things and grow new things.
