Cereal production in Scotland is dominated by a small number of conventionally bred varieties of barley, wheat and oats. These have low genetic diversity and tend to require a large amount of chemical input to achieve high yields. Most of the grain produced from these varieties is
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The UK Government is currently consulting through a White Paper on how the UK internal market should operate after Brexit. Like much of the conversation about Brexit, it’s a political tussle pretending to be about economics. Devolution gives the Scottish Parliament and Government powers to legislate on
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The boss of Unilever wrote the foreword, and yet some sections of yesterday’s World Economic Forum report on ‘The Future of Nature and Business’ could have been written by Nourish: “COVID-19 is a stark reminder of how ignoring biophysical risks can have catastrophic health and economic impacts
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This blog post was originally a talk given by Keesje Avis at a webinar entitled “Scotland’s Response to the Climate Emergency” hosted by FoES and partners. See all the presentations here. When talking and thinking about climate change mitigation, we tend to talk about numbers and in
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Brexit was never going to be good for food. The EU, for all its faults, has been progressive on food safety and labelling, on safeguarding local food traditions, on environmental protection, on GM regulation and on animal welfare. The Common Agricultural Policy has been stubbornly misdirected towards
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A few miles West of Dundee is the Intelligent Growth Solutions’ (IGS) vertical farm, on the James Hutton Institute campus. On the outside, it looks like a square steel structure, ten-meters-high, in a muddy field. Inside, there are four ‘towers’, each of which potentially contain 50 growing
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At the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, supermarket shelves were emptying out faster than we wanted them to, and many of us turned our attention to our smaller producers and retailers. The demand on these smaller sources suddenly rocketed. Amongst them is a diverse network of small
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Pete Ritchie, Executive Director of Nourish Scotland, is also the co-owner of Whitmuir Organic Farm, shop and café. Today he writes from his perspective as a local food business owner during the initial weeks of the Covid-19 crisis. Even though he’s already retired twice, Robert was at Shotts
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Thousands of people have died, and thousands more are bereaved. Jobs are lost, businesses destroyed, hopes and plans in tatters. But it could have been even worse. What if the shops had actually run out of food, not just delivery slots? They didn’t. The massive stocking up,
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No one who can walk and chew gum at the same time would deny that we are facing a climate emergency – and more worrying still, the prospect of irreversible loss of biodiversity at a global scale. There’s no doubt that co-ordinated actions by governments, businesses and
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