In this piece, Elena Lazos Chavero draws on years of fieldwork in the Sierra de Santa Marta of Veracruz to illuminate how livestock-raising has spread into the region’s indigenous territories, and the role livestock have played in Mexico’s recent history. 

TABLE’s director, Tara Garnett, gave a talk at the Wageningen University & Research (WUR) symposium on the environmental impact of food systems earlier this summer. We are summarising the talk here, because it provides a good introduction to TABLE’s approach to food system debates.

This reflection about family farming in the UK – and some of the changes seen over 5 generations – was written in response to a conversation on social media, which led to the question: have we given up on the mixed family farm as a food producing entity? About the author: Richard Bainbridge is a 3rd generation English farmer and retired Methodist Minister.

Researcher Alma Igra finds that what it means for a species to be native has long been bound up with ideas of human belonging: relationships with animals have been one of the many ways in which colonisers have enacted and justified control over people, resources and animals. In this blog she asks if acknowledgement of this colonial legacy can give us a broader understanding of what it means to protect nature and who we protect it for, and a more inclusive approach to animal and environmental care. Alma Igra is a historian who writes about food, science and animals in the 20th century. She completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2020 and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy.

On 11 July, the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery hosted a debate between George Monbiot, a prominent critic and author, and Allan Savory, a founder and leading voice for Holistic Management. The event was titled "Is livestock grazing essential to mitigating climate change?" and was chaired by Professor EJ. Milner-Gulland, Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford. TABLE's director Dr Tara Garnett was asked to write about her takeaways from the event. This blog was originally published on the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery's website.

A number of sustainable agriculture approaches, and their supporting narratives, have been put forward over the decades in attempts to weaken the stronghold of industrial agriculture in the food system. Recent interest has centred on regenerative agriculture, with some of its proponents seeing in its appeal to farmers and corporations an ability to unite disparate agricultural approaches in a manner that might facilitate increasing ambition. In this essay drawing from recent research, Anja Bless compares the genealogical histories of organic agriculture, sustainable intensification, conservation agriculture and agroecology with regenerative agriculture, finding elements within each that resist absorption under the regenerative umbrella.   About the author: Anja Bless is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. Her PhD research is exploring the politics of regenerative agriculture, with Australia as the national case study. A component of this research project is exploring the origins of regenerative agriculture, in particular the social-ecological factors that have driven its rise in popularity and how it fits among existing sustainable agriculture narratives. Anja holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Government and International Relations and Sociology from the University of Sydney, and a Master of Environment (with Distinction) majoring in Sustainable Food Systems from the University of Melbourne.