The Food Ethics Council has produced a report of its business forum “Brexit breakfast <200 days to go… How can we get the best post-Brexit outcomes for UK food and farming systems?”, which was held on 11 September 2018. Forum participants discussed the Irish border, future trade deals, organic certification, promoting public health after Brexit, farm labour, and future food standards.

The EU-funded CAPSELLA project, which develops digital tools for agrobiodiversity, has released an online tool to guide users through the steps of taking a “spade test” to monitor soil quality. Users can also choose to upload their results to a public database.

The Oxford Long-Term Ecology Lab has published a map of studies published between 1990 and October 2017 that report evidence on the effects of adopting one or more sustainability standards. You can filter the map by several criteria including country, name of standard, commodity covered and research method. Topics covered include agriculture, fishing, forestry and textiles.

The Carbon Underground, Green America and various food industry partners are developing a new standard for regenerative agriculture. It is claimed that the standard will encourage farmers to restore soil and improve crop resilience and nutrient density.

This book, edited by Gaetano Martino, Konstantinos Karantininis, Stefano Pascucci, Liesbeth Dries and Jean Marie Codron, discusses different types of organisations within the European agri-food sector.

An ad used by Arla Foods to promote their organic milk has been banned as it used the "misleading" claim that its production is "good for the land". 

This research measures dairy cows’ motivation to access the outdoors. The results show cows are highly motivated for outdoor access. The majority of the cows in this experiment pushed through a weighted gate at least as hard to access pasture as they did to access fresh feed.

As Asda becomes the first UK retailer to sell ‘free range’ milk, the Pasture Promise logo will be placed on the milk packages, to ensure consumers that the cows grazed for 180 days and nights and farmers were offered fair price.

In international trade agreements, restrictions on goods or demands for labelling which differ from country to country can be ‘barriers to trade’, effectively restricting the free movement of goods. Trade organisations which manage such agreements, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), have mechanisms in place to ensure that environmental or public health measures are not in fact ‘disguised restrictions on international trade’ which aim to protect national industries. Formal processes exist in the WTO to query public health and environment regulations for their ‘trade restrictiveness’, their necessity and the possibility of using alternatives.