Championing healthy,
sustainable food & farming​
​An alliance for change
Sustainable Food Somerset is an alliance of individuals and organisations who are passionate about making healthy, sustainably grown food accessible to all. We believe that farming regeneratively, building the market for good local food, and encouraging home and community growing are crucial to curbing carbon emissions, boosting biodiversity and building our long-term food security.
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LOCAL
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REGENERATIVE
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NOURISHING
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RESILIENT
Our mission
The current food system is unsustainable: a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss that is failing to nourish too many of us, but is also hugely wasteful. Yet farming in Somerset – and across the UK – could be the very opposite. Farmland can be a vast store for carbon, a sanctuary for nature, a source of local economic prosperity and an educational and therapeutic resource like no other.
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Our vision is for a vibrant, varied and thriving food culture where farming according to agroecological principles is the norm – restoring wildlife, attracting visitors, boosting the local economy, enhancing health and wellbeing. We hope you'll want to be part of our growing movement demanding a better, more resilient and nature-friendly food system.
Key areas of activity
Reconnecting people with local, healthy, sustainably produced food through community action lies at the heart of everything we do. We seek to achieve this through three key areas of activity: ​Somerset Community Food, which has been supporting grassroots community food projects for more than two decades; the Somerset Food Trail which celebrates the best of sustainably produced food; and LandAlive, our major sustainable food and farming movement, which we launched with a major new conference in November 2024. ​
“The actions that we take in the next ten years are critical to recover and regenerate nature; and to restore health and wellbeing to both people and planet.”
Our Future In The Land: A report by the Food Farming and Countryside Commission and the RSA 2019
Joining up the food system dots
We are part of the Sustainable Food Places (SFP) network, backed by a partnership of Sustain, the Soil Association and Food Matters. This gives us access to shared resources, guidance and best practice from over 100 regional 'food partnerships', each working to make the food system in their city or region more sustainable. Among other collaborative projects, we are working with a sub-group within SFP called 'the Counties Network', bringing together members who, like ourselves, represent large rural areas where agriculture predominates, with some different challenges to purely urban food systems.
Food is a fundamental part of what it is to be human
And yet when it comes to what we grow, make, sell and eat, we are disengaged and disempowered – individually, as households, communities and even as a species. We now face catastrophic, intertwined losses – of health and security, of biodiversity and habitat.
But the solution is simple, enduring and consistent: to produce and consume real food, carefully. In Somerset, as across the world, that's exactly what thousands of people now do every day. And it's working.​
I believe the key to recovering our relationship with real, local, sustainable food and the way we eat, grow and work within the natural world boils down to one thing – empowerment. Biodiversity, climate change and human health are in freefall, but the universal demand for change, for recovery, has never been louder.
When it comes to food – and everything that goes with it – there has never been a more important time to be empowered. That time is right now.​
Kate Hughes, Chair of Sustainable Food Somerset