CCRI is the largest specialist rural research centre in the UK, having expertise in all aspects of research in policy and planning for the countryside and the environment of the UK, Europe and further afield.
Today (5th December) is World Soil Day – a day to celebrate and raise awareness on the importance of our soils.
Can farmers improve their soil whilst increasing their profitability? This is a question that has been puzzling scientists on the SoilCare research project for the last four years.
For the past five years, the RECARE project has been working with stakeholders across Europe to develop a new way of saving the soil. As the project ends, it is presenting the accumulated learning from its research to policymakers in the cities, regions and nations of Europe as well as international bodies.
The urgency of this mission is underscored by recent UN reports highlighting the role that agriculture plays in climate change and how sustainable agriculture is going to be necessary to secure food production as well as liveable landscapes under climatic change.
As the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation uses World Soil Day to raise awareness about soil health, it may come as little surprise to find out that soil doesn’t just impact our food supplies, it also helps clean water and lower risks of floods and droughts. More surprising is the SoilCare team’s efforts to treat profitability for farmers as a central priority – a consideration many research projects on environmental health overlook.
The RECARE project has issued a media release in the lead-up to the final conference, which takes place in Brussels on the 27th of September in Brussels, where the research team are coming together with policymakers and influencers to discuss how RECARE results can influence the design of future European policies on soil protection
There has been a great deal of comment on the recently published draft Agriculture Bill, which seeks to set out how the government will support farming after Brexit. The CCRI Director, Professor Janet Dwyer has a number of important observations.
The CCRI is working in partnership with the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) who has announced a new £2.5m initiative to help meet the needs of the land management and agri-food sectors in the post-Brexit era.
One of the key recommendations coming out of a recently completed EU funded project is a new approach that would bring the social dimension – people – to the centre stage to deliver more environmental and social benefits.
More than 125 people attended a ‘Growing the Future’ rural policy workshop, held at the University of Gloucestershire, which revealed that British farmers get only 4.5% from all UK food sales and declared that ‘Brexit is happening now, not in the future’.
Researchers from the University of Gloucestershire’s Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) are working with a team of European scientists to develop a novel resilience-enabling framework that can support policy makers and the farming sector to enhance the sustainability and resilience of farms and farming systems.
David Drew MP and Julie Girling MEP are amongst those attending a ground-breaking workshop looking at the future of agriculture, which is being held at the University of Gloucestershire on Thursday, 29th March.