Growing our Future UK

Our Routes to Market workstream (January to July 2024) explored the potential for markets for regeneratively grown produce through a series of four workshops with farmers, supply-chain businesses and NGOs. The goals were multifaceted: enabling the development of market routes for regenerative produce, identifying systemic changes needed in infrastructure, certification, and finance; and supporting individual and collective action to address the barriers to the transition.  

We discussed five principles needed for the shift to regenerative markets that you can read about in this blog. There you can also download the workshop materials we used together to create a vision of a future with markets for regenerative produce. The output of the workstream is an infographic that shares what the group envisaged for the future and what ideas and actions can move us towards that future.  

We hope this is a useful tool for others invested in the regenerative food transition to explore opportunities for action and collaboration.

The ‘Middle Actors’ workstream (February to July 2024) aimed to support supply chain businesses in the fresh produce sector to build a more regenerative future, working with fruit and veg businesses, industry experts, and NGOs. Together, we explored what regenerative agriculture means for the fruit and veg industries, the role middle actor businesses could play in bringing about its creation, and the challenges that might be faced throughout the transition.  

The output of this conversation with UK fruit and veg middle chain actors includes the collective vision of a regenerative fruit and vegetable future as determined by middle actors, the possible future roles they could play, and the challenges they currently face. This resource also features a planning process template for middle actors to use in their organisations, along with key questions to consider to identify what needs to change within their business practices.

While this resource is tailored for the UK context, it holds broader applicability, and we hope this will be a valuable tool for all middle actors’ ongoing efforts to align with the regenerative transition and ensure long-lasting impact.   

Read the middle actors blog

Download the PDF resource for middle actors

We are running a collaborative multi-stakeholder action-research project, from June 2024 to end 2025, to support the transformation of the UK orchard fruit sector for a regenerative and climate-resilient future.    

We aim to nurture the enabling conditions for positive change – building a shared understanding of the opportunities to scale up regenerative and climate-resilient practices within the sector, while fostering greater shared ambition, stronger relationships, and commitment to action among the stakeholders able to deliver that change.  

Change makers from industry, policy and civil society, and across the market, public health and agriculture – with growers in particular firmly represented – will work together to accelerate the scaling of regenerative and climate-resilient approaches, guided by the ultimate outcomes of securing affordable, accessible, healthy diets for all, while restoring the natural world, and ensuring decent livelihoods for food producers and workers.  

Together we are working to: understand the challenges and potential pathways for progress; showcase scalable solutions, innovations and best practices; generate recommendations and calls to action; support UK orchard fruit stakeholders’ capacity to act and collaborate differently for a regenerative transition; and generate insights about making change happen, for the benefit of other sectors and challenges.