Highland initiative that's creating a local food system!

Highland Good Food Partnership (HGFP) provide support and opportunities to collaborate for community food related projects in the Highlands, including community food growing and food banks.

Their members are individuals, charities or businesses who support a transition to a sustainable, more localised food system in the Highlands – and Scotland more generally – which provides social and environmental benefits for local communities.

Encouraging and facilitating collaboration between producers is a feature of a recent project facilitated by HGFP. The Farm Cluster project examines the grassroots entities created when farmers, crofters and/or land managers work together at a landscape or local scale, often for the benefit of wildlife, biodiversity and the climate.  Cluster activity can also be centred around food production, sharing resources or other forms of collaborative land management. Above all, cluster activity is led by on the ground ‘members’ and operates on the principle of collaboration.

An online discussion into the key ingredients for a successful farmer cluster, the potential barriers and solutions and the opportunities for new clusters in Scotland is happening online on Tuesday 29^th August. You can sign up to attend here or see the event section of our website.

HGFP is a Community Climate Advocate through Highland Adapts and they have recently been involved in the Highland Climate Conference. What started as a conversation at the initial Highland Good Food Conference event, has now turned into a working group researching the benefits of Controlled Environment Agriculture in the Highlands and ongoing work to address detrimental effects our current food system has on the planet.

You can find out more about Highland Good Food Partnership here