Andrew Barnes in our team has collected financial data from upland farms with a view to identifying characteristics of disadvantage that make farms more or less vulnerable. The findings are fascinating, if in some ways counter-intuitive.
There has been talk in recent years of the need to develop an upland vision for Scotland. But without also ensuring greater government and agency support for establishing locally-led partnerships it might prove difficult to achieve any such vision in practice.
The ResULTS project focuses on beef and sheep production in upland regions of Northern England and Scotland. We are interested in how livestock farmers and the rural systems that depend on them adapt to adverse events such as climate change, reduced subsidies and price fluctuations, and in what effect their adaptations might have on local, national and global food system.
The overall aims of this project are to understand the resilience of livestock production in remote upland regions of the UK to climate change and other shocks, the consequences to the global and local food systems of these responses, and to provide policy makers, food chain actors and individual stakeholders’ knowledge with which to adapt to challenges to food systems.
