We want to get people eating healthy foods, from overlooked local crops.   

We're at a bit of a cross-roads in the UK: poor diets and health, poor biodiversity, and a messed up food system. We'd like to try to help change that. So we've decided to start growing overlooked crops on our family farm in East Lothian, and turn them into healthy, tasty foods.

We believe this can help deliver: 

• healthier people
• a healthier environment 
• a healthier food system

Camelina is the first crop we're trying (and we think it's easy to see why) but we're working on more!

Why are we doing this?

Greater (agro)biodiversity

There are so many wonderful nutritious plants out there (over 50,000!), but we only eat and farm a tiny proportion. 60% of calories globally come just from three plants: rice, maize and wheat (FAO). 

Agricultural biodiversity, is the range of species that we eat (like vegetables) and that support our food production (like pollinators). Our food system has become overly simplified, focussing on just a handful of species, and highly intensified, so there is little room for supporting species (we've seen a reduction in biodiversity in the UK by about 19% since the 1970s (Natural England, 2023). This simplification makes our food system and wider environment less resilient, especially as we experience climatic changes.

Trying to expand what we grow is tricky, as most crops in the UK are sold as commodities in a global market, or on tight contracts. If the supply chain isn't set up for something (so there isn't the equipment or buyers) it's a big risk for a farmer. We're taking the risk by just doing it, and selling directly to people. Hopefully, we can make it easier for others to do the same in the future. 

Better diets

According to the World Health Organisation, a diverse diet is a key feature of a healthy diet. Diverse diets have been associated with a wide range of health benefits such as lower risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and healthier ageing (as well as reduced risk of all cause mortality). In contrast, low quality diets are contributing to a concerning rise in non-communicable diseases - unhealthy diets are now a bigger risk to our health than alcohol, drugs and tobacco use combined (EAT Lancet Commission).

Unfortunately, diets in the UK are often poor, and it's affecting our health: in the UK poor diet accounts for over 1.2 million Disability Adjusted Life Years (1 DALY is one year of healthy life lost), and diet-related diseases (like type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and colorectal cancer) are rising (UK National Food Strategy, 2021).

Large multinational firms, making highly processed unhealthy foods, dominate our food-system: 57% of total energy intake for UK adults comes from ultra-processed foods (UK National Food Strategy, 2021 ; Rauber et al., 2019). But, the good news is that improving diets in the UK could result in an extra 10 years of life for both men and women (Fadnes et al., 2023). Changing diets is not easy. But adding new foods to our diets, that are healthy, tasty, and minimally processed, seems like a good start.

Locally grown

We use more land to produce the food we eat than the whole area of the UK: 70% of the UK is used for agriculture and the same land area again is farmed in other countries to produce our food (The National Food Strategy has more on this). We only grow 15% of the fresh fruit we eat, and around half of the vegetables (DEFRA, 2024). Of course we're probably never going to grow avocadoes and palm oil commercially in our climate, but we still import about a quarter of the foods that we can grow domestically (DEFRA, 2024). Eating local food can help us support our local communities, reduce our food miles, and ensure our food is grown and made in a positive way. 

A small shift

We need to shift from simply trying to grow (and eat) more of the same, to trying to produce diverse, nutritious, minimally processed foods in a sustainable system. Easier said than done... But we hope that growing nutritious low-input camelina (and hopefully other plants soon) is a small positive step. 

"Food has the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability. Instead, our food is threatening both. The challenge before us is to provide a growing global population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems." (EAT Lancet Commission)