The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.

Feedback for us

If you have any comments, critiques, considerations, compliments, complaints, about anything the Landworkers Alliance is or isn’t up to, do let us know your thought. We love feedback, it keeps a system healthy. Please fill in this quick form.

Membership / Supporter / Donation Queries

Please contact Lauren.Simpson@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Requests for work, volunteering or internships

We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements. We currently do not offer any volunteer or internship placements directly with the LWA, but keep an eye out in the newsletter or on the forum for any members looking for volunteers or workers.

Academic/Research Enquiries

Please look at the Agroecology Research Collaboration to see if it fits your area of research/work.

Membership Support / Advice

Currently the LWA does not have capacity or resources to help individual members or potential members on their specific projects, farms or programmes. We get a lot of requests for individual support and would love to have the time to respond to each request in full. We are fundraising for a new role for somebody to focus on membership support and services as we have identified it is a gap in our offering so please watch this space. Having said that, if your query is critical and urgent please email info@landworkersalliance.org.uk including the word URGENT in the subject header and it will get picked up and we can try our best to help.

Contacting Individual Staff

Please take the time to explore our staff page here to see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is.

Our addresses format is firstname.lastname@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

You can also find information under the About Us header about branch and regional organising, and identity groups within the LWA membership.

Press/Media Enquiries:

For any queries relating to press please email press@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Merchandise/calendar Enquiries

For any enquiries to do with shop sales including the calendar please email merchandise@landworkersalliance.org.uk

To Include an Item in Our Newsletter:

You can fill in this quick form to submit it to be included in the next bulletin/newsletter. The deadline to submit is the end of Friday each week for the following week’s member bulletin. With the same form you can also submit to the monthly non-member newsletter which goes out in the first week of the month.

All Other Enquiries:

For any other enquiries that are URGENT please email info@landworkersalliance.org.uk with the word ‘urgent’ in the subject header and we will do our best to help.

Follow Us

Resilient Local Food Systems

What’s the issue?

Over the last 50 years, our food system has become dominated by a handful of corporate supermarket supply chains. While they have delivered cheap food to millions, this convenience has come at enormous cost; to the environment through the promotion of unsustainable farming practices and high food miles; to local economies and communities though decimation of local food and farming businesses; and to health through the promotion of cheap, highly processed, nutritionally poor foods. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of supermarket supply chains in terms of their capacity to respond to systemic shocks, resulting in empty shelves and a spike in food insecurity. 

What are we doing? 

We’re advocating for local food systems which operate along shorter farmer-focussed supply chains as the solution to many of the above problems. We believe that this is the route to a fairer, more sustainable, and more resilient food system that is fit to meet the climate, environmental and public health challenges of our time. 

To this end, our work involves:

  • Developing practical learning resources for those engaged in local food production and short supply chains
  • Peer-to-peer learning and information sharing sessions, you can find details of these by signing up to our LWA newsletter
  • Research and report writing, such as our 2021 Vocal for Local report
  • Working with partners to carry out cross-sector research and develop a collective vision and action plan for the short supply chains sector. You can read more about the need for a collective approach in this blog post
  • Campaigning for policies that support local food systems and short supply chains.

Current phase

In 2023, we began a new phase of the Resilient Local Food Systems project. It became clear to us through our previous work (see below), that there was a particular area of the short supply chain sector which could benefit from attention. 

There is already a great amount of work going taking place in the local food systems sector, and in order for us to scale-up this work and receive the investment we need to do so, we believe must work collaboratively to create a shared vision and action plan, as well as develop metrics to measure our current position and future growth. 

To develop this shared vision we are working with four project partners: The Sustainable Food Trust, Pasture for Life, the Food and Farming Countryside Commission, and Sustain’s Local Food Retail Project. 

This two year project (2023-2025) will focus on three main elements: 

1/ Creating a collective vision for the short supply chains sector

2/ Co-designing a specific and focused action plan for future growth 

3/ Designing a sector-wide collaboration framework to help us get there together

All of this work is underpinned by new research to determine metrics the sector can use to measure its progress. If you’d like to find out more about this current phase of the project, feel free to get in touch with Bryher or Peter: bryher.bloor@landworkersalliance.org.uk / peter.samsom@landworkersalliance.org.uk 

Previous work (2021-2022)

Vocal for Local Report (2021)

As our submission to the National Food Strategy for England, we wrote the Vocal for Local report which sets out where we think the food system should be heading and what the advantages are of a short supply chains approach.

You can read the report here

Local Food System Resources & Learning Opportunities

We have created a number of resources for existing farms and new entrants to aid the move towards shorter supply chain selling. We also organised a series of webinars and on-farm visits so that farmers could learn directly from each other.  

You can find the guides and links to some of the webinars on the Business Support page.

Building Better Food Systems Conference 2022

In 2022, the Resilient Local Food Systems project hosted the Building Better Food Systems Conference, funded by the European project COACH.

This event aimed to bring together actors from across the short supply chain sector, including; producers, distributors, policy-makers, consumers and everyone in between. Together, we shared information and worked on co-designs to identify challenges, opportunities and potential future solutions for the sector. 

Want to get involved?

  • Join the Local Food Working Party. Are you already working in the Short Supply Chains sector and want to add your voice to the conversation? The Local Food Working Party brings together organisations and actors across the sector to share ideas and speak with a unified voice. If you’d like to get involved, get in touch with Peter: peter.samsom@landworkersalliance.org.uk 
  • Join one of our Consultation Groups. Are you working with short supply chains in any of the following sectors: infrastructure, public procurement or wholesale? We are running group consultations with the aim of developing shared visions and action plans for each of these sectors. If you’d like to feed into the conversation, get in touch with Bryher: bryher.bloor@landworkersalliance.org.uk 

 

Resources

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