By Matt Trevelyan, Farming in Protected Landscapes Officer for Nidderdale National Landscape

March the 17^th saw the launch of the Nidderdale Feast – a sustainable food project, aiming to fulfil nature, climate and heritage outcomes, whilst also providing a boost to the local economy and food culture.

The project harnesses funding from Defra’s Farming in Protected Landscapes programme –   and provides a context for further food-based projects in the region.

This blogpost, written by Matt Trevelyan, Farming in Protected Landscapes Officer for Nidderdale National Landscape, reflects on the launch event – a genuine feast, with fine local foods, inspirational talks, and good conversation – attended by farmers, conservationists and lovers of fine food from across North Yorkshire.

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I wanted the launch event to be ambitious – representative of what we could achieve over the next three years. I wanted to tell positive stories about farming and landscape – and to provide a stimulus for new food-based projects.

I’m inspired by my mum – who’s home-cooking nearly always features at least 3 vegetables from the kitchen garden – and meat from nearby farms. As being local and organic, her food is always delicious, echoing the philosophy of Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, who died in May 2026.

“Slow Food”, Petrini stated, “unites the pleasure of food with responsibility, sustainability and harmony with nature”.

This is one of the founding principles for our Nidderdale Feast Project.

I’m also inspired by my dad, now in his eighties, – who founded a business in the North York Moors, milling organic wheat and rye, to supply real bread bakeries around the UK.

I am deeply indebted to the dream team of chefs, led by Frances Atkins, as well as the producers, processors, speakers and event staff who came together at short notice to make this event a great success.

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Feast Story 1: A Nidderdale Maslin loaf: ‘Give us today our Daily Bread’

Given our family business, it is no surprise that I was determined to have good bread at the feast – this is a staple food – and the backbone of the UK diet.

I was delighted to discover a local farming family that has embraced regenerative principles and developed an own on-farm mill.

Andrew and Jenna Falshaw are third‑generation tenant farmers on the Swinton Estate. They farm around 450 acres, with milling wheat forming part of their arable crop rotation.

Inspired by a friend who is growing a ‘population’ crop of wheat, using regenerative practices, the Falshaws have followed suit – and now have the ambition to supply home milled flour to local bakers and restaurants.

Much UK milling wheat contains detectable residues from fungicides, plant‑growth regulators, glyphosate, insecticides, and mycotoxins.

Regenerative farmers aim to reduce and cut these residue products out, as well as reducing applications of artificial nitrogen fertilizers. The alternative is improving soil health naturally – by taking on practices which are also good for climate and biodiversity.

The Falshaw’s mill allows the family to become price-setters, adding resilience to their farm business, and meaning they are not vulnerable to a commodity price trap – set in response to the vagaries of the world market.

I needed to be sure that the Shaw’s Farm grist had baking qualities – so I took a batch of flour to be trialled at the Secret Bakery in Harrogate.

Expert real bread bakers, Jim Baron and Paul Gray found that it performed well, despite being relatively low in protein. “The secret is a long ferment, and our brilliant wild yeast ‘starter’ – the rye based ‘mother’ that we’ve been feeding for years is the best I’ve ever worked with,” said Jim.

The result was a Nidderdale Maslin loaf, developed especially for the Nidderdale Feast, using a blend of Shaws Farm Wheat Flour and Yorkshire Grown Rye.

The re-emergence of milling in the National Landscape connects the Falshaws to a long history of local mills that once operated across the area.

I am hopeful that the Falshaw’s will take advantage of FiPL funding, to help with additions to the milling enterprise – which can be upgraded with a new, rotary sieve.  I’m also hopeful that they will be able to continue their relationship with the Secret Bakery, who have the expertise to add further value to this local product.

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Feast Story 2: Lashings of Farmhouse Butter – A young farmer, reviving small batch dairy production in the Upper Dale.

Real Bread is much improved with great butter – and I was determined to find somebody who had the necessary skill to produce this essential product for the feast.

I was thrilled when my neighbour, Melissa Graham, a young farmer and entrepreneur, took the challenge on. Millie is already producing artisan ice cream, using local milk – and we hoped that artisan farmhouse butter might become a sister product.

Nidderdale has a long history of butter making – a story told by Nidderdale Museum, which has a collection of dairy equipment on permanent display.

With modest funding supplied by the FiPL programme, Millie was able to produce over 10kg of fresh butter for the feast. Millie has also committed to run three educational sessions over the course of the next year, which will give local children a hands-on opportunity to churn butter.

Millie also supplier local milk for the feast – and her signature Dale View Gelato was presented with Jerusalem Artichoke by Jon Atashroo from Masham Restaurant ‘Where there’s smoke’.

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Feast Story 3:Dalesbred Shearling Fackle – A tale of Fleece, Moss and Vikings…

The main course for our feast utilized a Dalesbred shearling supplied by Upper Nidderdale shepherd, Jack Graham.

Jack is directly involved in the creation of the Great North Bog – the effort to re-wet and restore peatlands at a landscape scale – critical for carbon sequestration – and vital as a habitat for treasured upland species.

Jack is working directly with scientists from the Yorkshire Peat Partnership to trial the use of raw sheep’s fleece to revegetate of eroded peat hags.

Moorland sheep also play a vital role in shaping and maintaining the upland landscape and its Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). Their selective grazing helps keep heather and grassland mosaics open, preventing scrub encroachment and supporting the diverse habitats that rare upland birds and plants depend on.

Jack’s shearling was transformed for the feast by Aled Williams, head chef at The General Tarleton, Ferrensby and Mikael Paylor, head chef at The Craven Arms, Appletreewick.

The name of the dish they developed is Fackle, is derived from the Norwegian word Fårikål. Norwegians still hold a Fårikål Feast Day. The dish is thought to have arrived in Yorkshire with the Vikings.

Feast Story 5: Mallard Grange Egg Tart – Stacking Enterprises at a Regenerative Farm

Jon Atashroo utilised Shaw’s farm flour and eggs from a local regenerative farm in his egg custard tart – with rhubarb, supplied by Swinton estate gardener, Joe Lofthouse.

The Farming in Protected Landscapes programme has been able to support James Johnson at Mallard Grange Farm, with the purchase of a “egg-mobile”.

This mobile hen house allows his mixed flock of pastured hens to function as part of a rotating, regenerative soil health programme. The hens help to fertilize the land, manage parasites, whilst also generating an extra income stream.

It’s no surprise that the eggs from this truly free-range enterprise, appeal to chefs, with superior flavour a result of a pasture based, soya free diet.

Feast Story 6: Stonebeck Wensleydale.

Low Riggs is the home of Stonebeck Wensleydale, a raw milk farmhouse cheese that has provided one of the inspirations for this project.

When I first tasted the cheese, sitting outside the farmhouse, I was amazed at how the cheese tastes and feels like an entirely different product to standard supermarket Wensleydale.  This really was a revelation – and I was an instant devotee.

This cheese is unique to Upper Nidderdale – with vanillin flavonoids originating in the unique botany of the Hattan’s meadows, giving the cheese a unique flavour – and a creamy, soft texture which is entirely dependent on the milk from the Northern Dairy Shorthorn herd.

Speakers

We were delighted to welcome several brilliant speakers – these included Hannah Fraser – who spoke about her work on the nutrient density in food – specifically, how UK farmers can grow food that is more nutritious and how the food system could reward them for doing so.

Rob Bunn, project manager at Pasture for Life, teamed up with regenerative butcher, Rich Summers, farmer, James Newhouse and chef, Iain Graham to speak about their project in the Yorkshire dales, which put regeneratively farmed Belted Galloway beef onto the menu of a noted restauranteur.

Conclusion

This blog post highlights just a few of the stories linked to our launch event.

I might have told a story about how Nidderdale can be a “landscape of sanctuary” – demonstrated by Huda and Mohamad Alhamwi, Syrian refugees who resettled in Pateley Bridge – bringing their Syrian cuisine with them (presented at the feast in the form of delicious Nidderdale Mezze).

I might have told a story about the Wildish Community Garden…which provides a space for people from all walks of life to get outside and grow with purpose – or the story of the Masham Cider Press – making good use of heritage apples from across the landscape.

The Nidderdale Feast project will continue to be punctuated by celebratory meals, which will showcase local ingredients – but the real impact of the project will be in the satellite projects which sit alongside these events.

Our next celebratory meal may be open to the public – and will perhaps revolve around wild caught venison, and the late summer glut of fruit and vegetables that was so palpably missing this March. I need to regather the troops and start planning….

Hope to see you there.

This launch feast raised money for local Curlew Conservation projects.

FixOurFood: Cultivating the Future

By Chino Bayoneta

There are moments when a room feels larger than itself. Not because of the building, the audience size, or the reputation of the speakers, but because you get the sense that something important is trying to take shape inside it. That was the feeling at the recent celebration event for FixOurFood at York’s Guildhall.

On paper, the event marked the culmination of five and a half years of research into transforming Yorkshire’s food system. But in attendance, it felt less like an ending and more like a checkpoint in a much longer journey.

Coming into FixOurFood during its latter stages and outside the core research work, what stood out most was not simply the scale of the work, but the unusual sense of coherence surrounding it. Across the day, speaker after speaker returned to the same underlying idea: food is never just about food. Food was connected to health, farming, our climate, education, local economies, public policy, and community life all at once – which all sounds obvious when written down. But hearing researchers, farmers, policymakers, councils, schools, businesses, and public health professionals actively trying to organise around that complexity gave the idea a different weight.

Opening the event, Charlie Jeffery, Vice-Chancellor and President at the University of York, described FixOurFood as an example of the kind of public-good work the university wants to stand for. He spoke about the university’s role as an “anchor institution” — not simply a large organisation rooted in Yorkshire, but one willing to stay present through uncertainty and long-term change. That mattered because much of the conversation revolved around a difficult truth: transformation work is messy. 

Food systems are deeply interconnected. Health links to affordability. Affordability links to farming economics. Farming links to biodiversity. Procurement links to local businesses. School meals link to long-term public health. The temptation in systems this complicated is to retreat into siloes because they feel more manageable. Yet almost every speaker warned against exactly that.

Mark Suthern, Chair of the FixOurFood Advisory Board, reflected on how FixOurFood deliberately sought to work across the many dimensions shaping the food system instead of narrowing itself into a single-issue campaign. That meant building relationships between sectors that do not naturally work together.

Listening to this, it became clear that much of the programme’s achievement was relational rather than purely technical. While research gives us the knowledge needed to make better decisions, equally important was the infrastructure of trust and dialogue created around it. You could sense this throughout the room as people from very different parts of the food system gathered with a shared sense of direction.

When Bob Doherty, co-lead of FixOurFood, reflected on the programme’s achievements, what stood out was how consistently FixOurFood tried to move beyond research sitting passively on shelves.

There were examples of policy influence, regenerative agriculture initiatives, school food research, efforts for procurement innovation, and practical tools designed to support decision-making. Bob also noted the workshops led by Ioan Fazey, a transformations expert from the University of York, where the Three Horizons Framework proved valuable in helping stakeholders imagine what a healthier food system could actually look like in practice. 

Perhaps the strongest example of this systems thinking came through Ruth Everson from the North Yorkshire Council Public Health team. 

What seemed most important in Ruth’s reflections on their Food for the Future framework was not simply the final strategy itself, but the process behind it. Looking at food systemically forced people to recognise the true scale of the challenge and connect with actors across the county in ways they previously had not.

That balance between realism and hope gave much of the day its energy. Nobody suggested transformation would be easy. But neither did they speak as though meaningful change was impossible.

Throughout the event, Ioan Fazey repeatedly returned to the idea that Yorkshire now sits at a critical juncture. Momentum exists, he argued, but momentum is fragile. Systems can just as easily regress as transform if collaboration weakens or ambition fades.

That challenge carried into the panel discussions and group activities later in the day. Participants spoke about improving local food procurement, supporting regenerative farming, reducing junk food advertising, strengthening food education in schools, and helping communities reconnect with cooking and local food systems. Some pledges were large and political. Others were deeply ordinary: relearning how to cook, supporting local producers, or carrying lessons from FixOurFood into other communities and workplaces. Oddly, it was these smaller pledges that made the larger ambitions feel believable.

What lingered after leaving the Guildhall was not the sense that Yorkshire had solved its food system challenges. Rather, it was the feeling that a different way of approaching change may genuinely be emerging. It was a way of working that was rooted less in isolated expertise and more in long-term collaboration, shared responsibility, and collective learning.

There was a clear recognition that this work could not simply end with the conclusion of a research programme. Many of the conversations throughout the day focused not only on what FixOurFood had achieved, but on how its momentum, relationships, and learning could continue evolving into long-term action across Yorkshire.

A major part of that continuation now sits with the FixOurFood Commission, introduced during the event by David Kerfoot, who chairs the group. The Commission aims to carry the programme’s momentum beyond the lifespan of the original research funding by helping connect people, organisations, and initiatives working across Yorkshire. Its focus includes supporting transitions to regenerative farming, improving local food procurement, strengthening community involvement, and ensuring that the ideas and relationships built through FixOurFood continue translating into practical action rather than simply sitting on a shelf. Importantly, there was also humour and warmth throughout these discussions, with David expressing his desire in making sure transformation efforts still involve enjoyment and human connection. 

In a time where conversations about the future are often dominated by a strong difference in opinion and division, there was something quietly hopeful about seeing people genuinely trying to build something together despite the complexity – transforming Yorkshire’s food system to better support people, communities, and the environment.

Addressing food waste in schools is no longer just a sustainability goal—it’s becoming a regulatory necessity. With new regulations under the Environment Act 2021 coming into effect as of March 2025, schools in England with ten or more employees are required to separately collect food waste, dry recyclables, and residual waste. For schools producing more than 5kg of food waste per week, this often means arranging separate collections at an additional cost.

To help schools navigate these changes while saving money and supporting the environment, the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with School Food Matters, has launched the “Food Is Not Rubbish” toolkit.

What is the “Food Is Not Rubbish” Toolkit?

Led by the Department of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, this project draws on academic research, real-world case studies, and interviews with school staff and waste professionals. The toolkit is designed to be a suite of interventions that can be tailored to an individual school’s needs, rather than a “one-size-fits-all” solution.

The toolkit is organized into three primary sections:

• Understanding Food Waste: Provides the policy context and explains the hidden environmental and financial costs of food waste.
• Getting Started: Offers practical tools to identify why waste happens, including guidance on measuring waste, curriculum integration, and optimizing the lunchtime experience (such as dining room layout and scheduling).
• Further Information: Includes best-practice case studies and practical guides for on-site solutions like composting and creating wormeries.

A critical part of a regenerative food system is closing the loop on waste. By teaching young people to be more mindful of the food on their plates, schools can foster a generation that values food as a resource rather than rubbish. This toolkit empowers staff and pupils to take practical actions that complement FixOurFood’s broader efforts to transform school food systems for the better.

Food is Not Rubbish has highlighted key areas with potential for improving food waste reduction in school.

• Tailored & multi-component approaches: Each school needs a customized mix of interventions rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.
• Environmental framing: Food waste education should be embedded within broader environmental learning, not treated as an isolated topic.
• Food-system perspective: Schools should view food waste within the full system from procurement and preparation to consumption and disposal. This could save money, as resources spent on wasted
  food could be directed to other school resources.
• Student involvement: Actively engaging students in menu planning, decision-making, and food-waste strategies foster ownership and long-term behaviour change.
• Enhancing school meals: Children were keen for greater choice at lunchtime, for example with choosing side portions, serving sizes, and for more taster opportunities.
• The dining room: Operational challenges for change during lunchtimes like rushed service, limited dining space, and competing priorities could be addressed through observations of the lunchtime
  session.
• Campaigns: Research indicates that while educational campaigns raise awareness, they are most effective when paired with behavioural nudges, student-led engagement, and practical tools
  like waste tracking. Campaigns need to be repeated regularly due to changing cohorts.

Take Action

Reducing food waste is a powerful way for schools to meet sustainability goals while complying with upcoming environmental regulations.

You can explore the full Food Is Not Rubbish toolkit and start developing your school’s action plan by visiting the resource page here: School Food Waste: Food Is Not Rubbish.

The Yorkshire Stories of Sustainability is a documentary-style film series produced by FixOurFood, which serves as a visual showcase of the “quiet revolution” happening across Yorkshire’s food landscape.

The series was born out of a partnership with the Deliciously Yorkshire Taste Awards. FixOurFood sponsored the Taste Awards and more recently introduced and sponsor the “Best Sustainable Product Award,”. The film series was created to tell the deeper stories of the highest-scoring entrants. The films aim to explore the process, people, and ethics behind the brand.

Featured Businesses & Innovations

The series highlights a diverse range of producers who are reimagining traditional industries:

• York Cocoa Works:  Focusing on transparent supply chains and circularity.
• The Yorkshire Pasta Company: Showcasing how sustainable practices can be integrated into every step of a startup business.
• Acorn Dairy: Demonstrating how dairy farming can lead the way in biodiversity, soil health, and reducing chemical inputs.
• Source Climate Change Coffee: Proves that even a global supply chain can be regenerative by focusing on agroforestry.
• Sloemotion Distillery: Focusing on circularity and how a distillery can work in harmony with the local ecosystem.
• Yorkshire Rapeseed Oil: Demonstrating how a family farm can scale while staying rooted in its environment.
• Soanes Poultry: Highlighting integrated sustainability, from solar power to recyclable packaging.
• Wold Top Brewery: A pioneer in “closed-loop” production

Core Themes

The films typically revolve around three key pillars of the FixOurFood mission:

1. Regenerative Agriculture: Moving beyond “sustainable” to practices that actively restore soil health and capture carbon.
2. Circular Economy: Finding innovative uses for “waste” products and investing in biodegradable packaging.
3. Shortening Supply Chains: Breaking down the disconnect between the field and the fork, ensuring farmers are paid fairly and consumers know exactly where their food comes from.

 Watch the films on our YouTube channel: