Designing the Transformation we Need
Every choice we make either has a positive impact that regenerates or a negative impact that degenerates...
... our health and wellbeing, our land, water, air and biodiversity...all the living systems upon which we depend and are a part of. These impacts ripple out, and add up, for better or for worse.
At a time when it is so easy to feel paralysed by the scale of global instability and climate crisis, our small, deliberate actions made with deep intention and alongside others offers a way forward.
We’ve all heard ‘Think globally, act locally’. This is what it looks like, and it causes ripples out into the world.
This section shows the scales at which the Little Woodbatch Project nested and engaging. First, it begins with making the personal shift to our mindset from consumption to creation - to engaging as community members locally (Bishop’s Castle), making links across Shropshire County, and webs of connection across the Marches bioregion, the UK, and beyond.
More about LWB and different scales of engagement for food system change: Daphne on the Accidental Gods Podcast.
“We all know by now that plants grown in living, thriving, life-filled soil, give us living, thriving, life-filled food… but the steps to getting there in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive – and highly profitable – ultra-processed ‘food-like substances’ are harder to see. This week’s guest, Daphne du Cros, spends her life deep in the mycelial networks of food and farming systems, bringing both into genuinely regenerative balance.”
Individual Level: A Change of Mindset
This is our big personal choice.
We know that ‘stuff’ doesn’t buy us happiness, or a sense of security in a changing world - Our rampant consumption it has choked our planet and is threatening our future unless we change course right now. What if community, connection and skills can bring us together to give us a sense of purpose, confidence and a path forward, instead of just being overwhelmed about the state of the world and the future?
Will you choose to BE MORE, and be happier with less?
Farm Level: Little Woodbatch
Little Woodbatch is a commitment to radical optimism. It’s an invitation to connect, learn and skill up: to create something resilient at a small scale to show what is within the realm of the possible.
Community Level: Bishop’s Castle
Bishop’s Castle is a town with a long history of engagement on ecological issues, with a number of different initiatives in the community that focus on food, climate, nature and biodiversity and community energy.
Whenever possible, Little Woodbatch Farm links in with these efforts as a space for training, collaboration, learning, and sharing our abundance through seed and food production.
County Level: Shropshire
Shropshire Good Food Partnership
The SGFP connects the dots across Shropshire’s food system with the aim of building a more resilient and food secure county. It works with a wide membership and a network of partners to collaborate, driving joined-up, systems level change - like Shropshire Climate Action, Shropshire Hills National Landscape, Shropshire Food Poverty Alliance and others.
SGFP is a member of the Sustainable Food Places Network and Bronze level SFP award winner.
Bioregional Level: The Marches
The Marches Food Network
The Marches Food Network is a group of food partnerships working across the Marches bioregion to build stronger cross-border collaboration on food systems. The MFN includes Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and North and South Powys.
Read the Bioregional Food Growth Plan for the Marches.
Read the 3rd Space Interview with Daphne and others at the Marches Real Food & Farming Convergence 2025.
“We shouldn’t diminish the complexity, we have to embrace it, and we have to train up systems thinkers. That’s the superpower. There are different ways that we can connect people to the land, to become more reintegrated where we've had that severance for hundreds of years.
Civilisation has always gathered around a kitchen table, and people are making changes, caring about and enfranchising their neighbours once again, through sustainable food places and food partnerships. There are water warriors, soil champions, people thinking about livestock genetics differently and unpicking that as a monoculture of genetics. People are doing it because its values based. It does comes down to basic survival, but it's also to do with creating the version of the world that, through very specific and practical actions, we want to create." -Daphne Du Cros
National Level: The UK
Civil Food Resilience
The Sustainable Food Places Network and Sustain are coordinating a group of food partnerships who are working on building Civil Food Resilience plans and infrastructure, both in preparation for and in response to crisis events.
Food, Farming & Sustainability Curriculum change with Soil Ed UK & Partners
Our young people will be inheriting a food system that is fundamentally vulnerable, and they will be the ones having to reinvent it in a time of unprecedented crisis. We owe it to them to overhaul the National Curriculum so that they have the knowledge, skills and systems thinking ability to build more resilience - for health and wellbeing, National food security, livelihoods and nature recovery.