News

Paul Courtney is running a workshop on Wednesday, 23rd March, at a seminar organised by the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. The seminar aims to highlight a new guide to tools for evaluating health and wellbeing outcomes from community growing programmes and aims to share experiences from community growing groups, who are using the tools, together with leading academics in the field

Using findings from an in-depth, large-scale qualitative study with animal keepers and veterinarians, Damian Maye and Rhiannon Naylor have co-authored a paper entitled "The ‘good farmer’: farmer identities and the control of exotic livestock disease in England", which has been accepted for publication in Sociologia Ruralis, which will be published later this year.

George Osborne announced a welcome boost of £700 million funding for flood defences and resilience in his budget yesterday. The CCRI has been actively involved in natural flood management in recent years and hopes that a large part of this new fund will be invested in natural flood defences.

CCRI soil experts, Julie Ingram and Jane Mills, recently co-authored a paper on “Management of agricultural soils for greenhouse gas mitigation: Learning from a case study in NE Spain", which was published in Environmental Science and Policy. This paper has now been made available online. It is based on data collected from the EU FP7 SmartSoil project.

We are delighted to report that a film on natural flood management, which the CCRI helped to make, has won an award. From over 2,200 films, the public had nominated their best films in seven different categories. The winning film is called “Rural Sustainable Drainage – Natural Flood Management in the Stroud Valleys”

We are very excited to launch our new-look website, which we hope you will find easier and faster to navigate. We hope you like the fresh look - please take a moment to look around the site and let us know what you think! To celebrate the launch, we are offering a FREE eBook, which is ready to download now in a choice of three different formats.

CCRI was recently successful in securing around £287,400 EU Horizon 2020 funding as part of a project called SoilCare (SoilCare for profitable and sustainable crop production in Europe). SoilCare aims to identify and evaluate site-specific, soil-improving cropping systems and agronomic techniques that have positive impacts on profitability and sustainability in Europe.

CCRI’s Chris Short gave a public lecture at the University of Gloucestershire Oxstalls Campus on the subject of natural flood management on Thursday, 25th February.

Julie Ingram is presenting a paper at an international conference at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, Brighton, which is taking place on 23rd-26th February. The conference is called "Contested Agronomy: whose agronomy counts?" and is about the battlefields in agricultural research, past and present. Julie’s paper is entitled “Here, we argue that”: contested views of managing soil carbon for mitigation.