JUSTLANZ – a just transition to net zero for the UK food- farming sector

JUSTLANZ aims to develop transformative pathways for a just transition to net zero for the UK food- farming sector, considering local, regional and national priorities. Working with livestock farmers and their communities, the food-farming sector, policy makers, academics and conservation organisations, JUSTLANZ integrates different knowledges, views and values to co-design, and develop innovative and sustainable solutions and pathways in four UK pastoral landscapes. Ultimately, JUSTLANZ tests how a transdisciplinary, holistic research approach can realise sustainable transitions.

I am working with FWAG (the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group) and Leeds University. My brief is to attend relevant workshops with the affected farmers on the Somerset Levels and engage with a selected group to write (at my suggestion) an Epic Ballad, leaning on West Country Ballad traditions, around what farming used to be about, what it is about today, and what it will, conceivably, be about in the future.

I have met up with and interviewed 3 Somerset Levels farmers and consulted another farmer, technically in the Brendon Hills, but with a very articulated approach to modern day farming practices, and am currently penning said epic.

Further information on JUSTLANZ

This is a poem I penned for the Bristol Capital of Culture bid, way back when (2008? Is that even possible???) , for which I was poet-in-residence. I worked with the Somali communities of Bristol, Henbury Golf Club (to get a bit of grit in there) and Chew Stoke Women’s Institute (why not?). My Chew Stoke WI offering was printed on, of course, tea-towels and distributed around the WI.

THE BALLAD OF THE YEOMAN FARMER

AD 2001

No, you can’t move them lambs there

And you can’t move them ewes here

Yer wot?

You gotta get the ram in or there’ll be no lambs at all next year?

Seems none of them up there did Biology at school

As they play the small farmer for a fool

And the Man from the EU

Gives it another turn of the screw

And the small farmer’s head bows

As they drag away his dead cows

And the small farmer’s head bows

As they drag away his dead cows

Yes! The big farmer’s doin’ alright with his monoculture

It’s the small farmer wot gets ate by the vulture

Bureaucracy, disease and official ignorance

Are the three grim partners in this death dance

And the small farmers weep

Over their coupla hundred sheep

And the small farmers weep

Over their coupla hundred sheep

(‘Bristol 2008’ Chew Stoke Women’s Institute Limited Series)

(Ralph Hoyte 2008)