Agricology’s 10 Year Anniversary
Highlights from Agricology’s first decade
Our official launch in November 2015 marked the partnership of our three founding organisations; Organic Research Centre (ORC), Daylesford Foundation, and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and the bringing together of a steadily expanding variety of information on our website. This was and continues to be as a result of working closely with our partner organisations, farmers, and other key players in the industry. Representing diverse farming approaches and uniting science, research and practical experience to highlight agroecological principles and practices that can be applied in the field is how we endeavour to encourage the take-up of practices that enhance and protect the environment and increase the resilience of farm businesses. Take a walk through our timeline and explore some highlights – true to our core there should be something for everyone!
Nov 2015 – Oct 2016
Forging partnerships and taking to the field
Nothing beats exchanging information in-person, and preferably in a field! We held our first open day in 2016 at Daylesford Organic Farm in Gloucestershire. It brought together a variety of speakers from our partner organisations such as Defra, Natural England, the GWCT’s Allerton Project, Innovation for Agriculture, LEAF, FAI Farms, Innovative Farmers, the ORC , and Fit for the Future. It featured a diverse range of talks organised around a farm tour, providing an opportunity to discuss concepts and practices linked to information hosted on our website and to show how they could be applied practically. This is a recipe we have continued to refine over the years…
Ted Green’s 2016 blog about tree hay continues to be Agricology’s most visited web page!
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Nov 2016 – Oct 2017
Uniting research with demonstration
One example of working closely with our partner and founding organisations to disseminate and communicate research that could be applied practically in the field is collaborating with the Allerton Project, the GWCT’s groundbreaking research and demonstration farm at Loddington, Leicestershire in helping them to produce a series of reports (in 2017), with support from the Frank Parkinson Agricultural Trust. The reports focused on reduced tillage, organic matter, managing biodiversity, encouraging soil biota, cover and companion crops and sustainable control of crop pests.
This year we uploaded 72 new resources and 54 blog posts. One of these – Blackgrass: the potential of non-chemical control – quickly became one of our most popular resources
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Nov 2017 – Oct 2018
Informing practice and policy
2018 marked the first year of us having a stand at Groundswell and the launch of our in-person field days. In response to the Defra consultation paper Health and Harmony: The Future for Food and Farming in a Green Brexit, Agricology prepared a paper outlining ways the team (represented by the three core partners) believed Agricology could support Defra in achieving its aims, highlighting key actions to help UK farmers become more sustainable. A project funded by Defra in the same year Opportunities, Barriers and Constraints for Organic Management Techniques to Improve Sustainability of Conventional Farming was a great example of one of Agricology’s core aims (of identifying how one farming approach and practice can inform another), and of several of our key partner organisations working together. Factsheets from the project were published on Agricology for dissemination across the wide community of farmers.
The Agricology website broke the 100k view mark – receiving a total of 130,256 page views across the year!
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Nov 2018 – Oct 2019
Facilitating discussion and engagement
In 2019, we hosted the Agricology discussion tent at Groundswell for the first year and ran the Agroecology in Practice room at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. Over the course of 2017, 2018 and 2019, we were fortunate to work with several volunteer copywriters who made valuable contributions to our content. Here is a blog written by one such volunteer, Pen Rashbass, giving her take on Groundswell 2019. Read a blog from our most recent ORFC experience here.
Agricology hosted a total of 26 talks and panel discussions across both Groundswell and ORFC in 2019 featuring over 40 farmers, researchers and advisors
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Oct 2019 – Nov 2020
Responding to change and reaching out
Lockdown with Covid-19 precipitated us joining with our partners to take farm walks, shows, conferences and meetings into the digital world, bringing together farmers, researchers and advisors in conversation in webinars, videos and podcasts. This included a series of virtual field days focused on different practices and themes that materialised through collaboration with the Soil Association, Innovative Farmers, FABulous Farmers, LEAF, CFE, FWAG, Duchy College, Rothamsted Research, University of Reading, ORC, OF&G and NIAB. Two virtual field days exploring the practicalities of growing, establishing and managing herbal leys were particularly popular. We continued to create valuable resources allowing farmers and researchers to share their knowledge and experiences so others can learn from their successes and mistakes. One project we worked on with ORC was focusing on farm system health. Here is one of our profiled farmers the fabulous John Pawsey giving us some insight into the principles of how he achieves health on his farm.
Agricology’s social media followers grew in number from 10,455 to 14,044 in this period, representing a 34% increase!
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Nov 2020 – Oct 2021
Improving the ways we communicate
In partnership with University of Reading and CCRI, the Agricology team conducted an ELM test to explore the potential role of videos and podcasts in supporting farmers transitioning to ELM, looking at how they might be used in the delivery of advice to farmers (based on a literature review, analysis of Agricology’s video/podcast channels, and a survey involving farmers and focus groups). Read the report here. Our Podcast, launched in 2020, built on us continuing to explore potential ways of exploring complex, topical themes in an engaging format that do not rely on face-to-face contact, offering insights from farmers, researchers, advisors, and innovators in the field. They have gained increasing popularity as a means for farmers, advisors and researchers to share knowledge and practical experiences with agroecological farming.
Agricology hosted a total of 26 talks and panel discussions across both Groundswell and ORFC in 2019 featuring over 40 farmers, researchers and advisors
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Nov 2021 – Oct 2022
Responding to change and reaching out
For a couple of years, we were joint sponsors of the Carbon Calling conference (launched in 2022) – a regional spinoff of Groundswell in Cumbria – with more of a ‘pasture’ focus. One of the co-founders Nic Renison explains in a blog the importance of bringing learnings home… “When you start seeing things differently, things you never even noticed before stop you in your tracks and it becomes difficult to ‘unsee’, whether that’s the topsoil running down the road after heavy rain, over grazing, or your neighbours spraying the verges…” We see one of our main priorities as being to help communicate these learnings.
2022 was also the first year of our involvement with the Oper8 project, a European wide project but with a regional emphasis in the UK that involved trialling how cereal growth habits, yields, straw production and weed competitiveness compare. See a video produced here.
We published a profile of the Barbour family in Perthshire – now one of Agricology’s top 3 most visited profiles
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Nov 2022 – Oct 2023
Turning funding into action
2023 marked the beginning of a new look for Agricology – our website got a makeover! This was a direct response to feedback as we endeavoured to improve the way the information we offer can be accessed, with thanks to one of our core funders over the years, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. As a charity, an avenue of funding we rely on is that of philanthropic funding. The Down to Earth project, launched in 2023, is an example of a project funded via this means, due to the generous funding of the Rothschild Foundation. Two events and four videos focusing on regenerative agriculture explored approaches being used to transition towards no / low input farming methods on the Waddesdon Estate and beyond whilst highlighting the potential for agroecological innovation.
We welcomed nearly 100 farmers and industry experts to Waddesdon for our Down to Earth events
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Nov 2023 – Oct 2024
Uniting science, education and farming
2024 was the year we united with the Agricultural Universities Council to sponsor ‘The Study’ session venue at Groundswell, where we put on ‘a veritable agri emporium of science, education and farming’, with a varied and stimulating range of talks over the two days. View recordings of the sessions we ran here. We also hosted information for the second-year running on the Countryside COP programme, which provided a platform for spokespeople from farming, local authority, education, research, and finance to collectively explore how the UK’s rural economy and agriculture can help tackle climate change and improve sustainability.
We published 7 new project pages – our highest number to date over the course of a year – bringing the total to 20
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Nov 2024 – Oct 2025
Pushing the boundaries…
We endeavour to unite experience, research and innovation in exploring what can often be polarising or controversial topics. Our two most recent podcast series, Optimal Carrying Capacity and To Till or Not to Till being two such examples. The Optimal Carrying Capacity series built on an ORFC session organised by Agricology which presented ideas and approaches that looked to re-frame the case for livestock in the landscape and didn’t shy away from asking difficult questions.
We dived into 2025 with an emphasis on producing new information in new ways. Designed to help farmers make informed decisions about adopting living mulch systems in arable rotations, and building on interviews with UK farmers, research from an Innovative Farmers Field Lab, and ongoing studies by the ORC , our Living Mulches Technical Guide and Hub and accompanying video marked the first of this type of output from the Agricology team.
In November 2024 the Agricology newsletter reached over 3,000 subscribers for the first time
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Nov 2025 – beyond
New frontiers…
Some of our most recently published farmer profiles came out of a collaboration with one of our longstanding partners, the Woodland Trust, and resulted in production of downloadable printable pdfs (see an example here) which proved to be extremely popular handouts at the last Agroforestry Show.
Our Agroforestry Hub brings together a diverse range of material from our archive of case studies, research summaries, farmer profiles, blog posts, toolkits, videos and podcasts, to help farmers and land managers navigate their way through planning, establishing and maintaining agroforestry projects of all scales.
November 2025 marked a re-branding with a fresh new look. From our beginnings as a small platform connecting farmers and researchers, we’ve grown into a fully independent charity
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Associated Agricology Partner Organisation(s):
