This weekend was the 17th annual Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival, a wonderful event which celebrates Suffolk’s food producers, and above all the rich farming heritage that makes up our eastern region. Over 128 producers in total were represented at the festival, from old stalwarts such as Hodemedods, to the newest Sandling Saffron.

WildEast was born out of a desire to increase habitat and restore species abudance within this farmed and worked landscape, so it was great to see so many local food producers present, and hear so many conversations about sustainability and nature-friendly farming.  This month’s newsletter explores how some of these producers are offering innovative solutions and emphasising that good food does so much more than just feed us. 

Beyond the wilder reedbeds of Snape Maltings where the Festival is set on the edge of the Alde estuary, fundamentally this is a farmed landscape. Over 70% of the region is dedicated to agriculture, the majority of which is now focused around large scale arable, but still with a small and growing base of both traditional mixed farming, and more innovative producers and growers. Sarah Langford a Festival devotee calls this a quiet revolution in her book Rooted, an exploration of an emerging network of producers that are both keeping farming traditions alive but also bringing innovation to these older patterns. Our September newsletter focuses on some of these producers, growers and outlets, stalwarts of the festival who are exploring the wider issues of sustainable farming. 

Gerard King from Salter and King Craft Butchers, almost the first stall you come to on site, has been attending in some shape or form from the earliest days. He sees it as a chance not just to connect with customers, new and old, but fellow producers, the network that the festival supports and grows. WildEast pledgee, Gerard has long been a passionate advocate of sustainable food systems long before they had become fashionable. He works  with a small group of farms, maintaining a close relationship with the farmers to check that both welfare and environmental standards are extremely high.

One of only two Pasture for Life butchers in the region, all the beef and lamb he sells is grass fed and often part of traditional mixed farms or conservation grazing such as the Yarn Hill Herd grazing the water meadows at Iken minutes from the Maltings as the crow flies. Working with farms like Yarn Hill he has developed a brand Good Meat Matters that encourages his customer base to eat less but better meat. He encourages his customers to ask difficult questions about his meat, like where it has come from, how did it live, and even how it died. The simpler the answers, the better the product he believes. 

Dingly Dell Pork started with the simple question of how to become a sustainable business and what did that really mean. Their answer turned out to be if not entirely simple, startling and dramatic. Taking the basic approach that they wanted to improve their habitat baseline they have gone well beyond the 20% increase we believe necessary to create the return to species abundance lost over the last 80 years. Using bumble bees as an indicator species for general resilience, they have created additional habitat by designing a rotation with their pigs based that leaves up to 50% of their land as pollinator strips at any one time.

Further upstream on our family farm we have been looking at the rotation in terms of a more sustainable approach to arable production. As farms are pressured to reduce input cost and focus instead on soil health I continue to be struck by how similar our new rotations look compared with the early field books and maps of my mother, local food campaigner, one of the founders and president of the festival , but above all a farmer. Winter wheats and spring beans, beat and barley interspersed with fallows, longer temporary and legume rich grass. A regenerative farming approach uses these same fallowing and cover crop tools, returning to these older patterns, or just using new terms to embrace an older system. The aim is to reduce inputs but the result like at Dingly Dell is the sharing of land as well as sparing. 

As part of a designed rotation fallows, cover crops provide greater continuous habitat opportunities. As a region, what we have lost is not so much the wilderness, though in the East wildlands have had their own pressures. What we have lost is connectivity, those fallows of a mixed farming rotation. The hot spots of biodiversity now for us are those areas on the farm where this mosaic of habitats is maintained, where there is scrub around a field pond, the thickets of the woodland edge standing strong against the pressure of deer, and a slow thickening out of our hedgescape, creates creativity alongside this rotation. 

Hodmedods, a constant voice in a move to more regenerative farming and food systems, are driving their own pulse and grain based revolution. Their view is that the food we choose to eat and the processes in which it is farmed can play a huge role in how the landscape is taken care of. Since their first stall at the festival 12 years ago they have sought to not just make us all eat our beans, but create a crucial connection between farms and markets. Like Gerard’s cows, each bean, pulse or grain has a provenance, a story. Since that first stall all those years ago, these stories have become more exciting, with innovative techniques and partners.

One of their long term partners has been Wakelyns. Starting out as a small experimental farm of 23 ha, the holding has long been punching above its weight. Founded in 1992 by Professor Martin Wolfe it is one of the longest running farms pioneering Agro-forestry techniques in Europe. Agro-forestry incorporates strips of trees within a cropped farming system, with obvious habitat benefits, but also a myriad of dynamic and partially understood interactions between the cropped strips and the wooded allys. At Wakelyns the narrow strips are hedged in some cases, lines of orchard fruit trees in others and even fully grown forestry strips. The farm has been shortlisted for the BBC Food and Farming Awards in Farming for the Future Category, celebrating not only its research but also as an incubator inspiring others to follow an agro-ecology path. Nearby Maple Farm in Kelsale and Grange Farm Hasketon are both experimenting in agro-ecology, following this lead. 

Both Maple Farm and Grange Farm have farm shops and in the spirit of the Food Festival are this year sharing a stall. Sustainability is at the heart of both businesses and both are entwined in the local food economy so visibly present in the producer stalls of the Festival. William Kendal of Maple Farm explains that these are almost a living cross section of their shelves, from the large scale at Nacton Farms to the micro LA Brewery. Will Long from Grange Farm explores this further in the Newsletter, whereby committing to provenance, a circular local economy and short supply chains that is part of their route to sustainability. The other is teaming up with a growing number of people who realise that soil health as part of a living ecosystem is vital for producing better food for us, as well as a better environment. Like Salter and King and Hodmedods, he argues that it is high time we take where our food comes from more seriously. 

As we write this there are deep concerns about the direction of ELMS and support for nature friendly farming from the current government. Increasingly it feels difficult to rely on government to make the right decisions. As consumers we have immense power. Good food matters. Ask those difficult questions and seek out the simple and evocative answers from the myriad of great producers and suppliers who are making a difference and who can be found across the WildEast.