Farming the Future: We've Seen What Patient Funding Grows
- May 18
- 3 min read
Updated: May 28
We've been proud partners of Farming the Future since we began, 6 years ago, and we want to tell you why.
A partnership rooted in conviction
After Be The Earth Foundation came into being in 2019, one of our first commitments was to Farming the Future. Not a tentative pilot grant. A genuine, long-term partnership — the kind that allows real work to unfold at the pace that systems change actually requires.
That decision reflected something we believed then, and believe even more deeply now: transforming the UK's food system isn't a quick fix. It demands patience, trust, and funders willing to stay the course.
Industrial food production has proven both unsustainable and inequitable — prioritising efficiency and cost at the expense of soil health, ecosystems, and people. Transitioning to something better takes time, knowledge, collaboration, and sustained financial commitment.
Six years on, our partnership has deepened and our relationship has grown.
What Farming the Future does
Farming the Future exists to grow, strengthen, and connect the UK's agroecological movement. Through a pooled participatory fund, they mobilise philanthropic capital to support the diverse food and farming pioneers building a just and regenerative system — the farmers, networks, alliances, and grassroots organisations that individually can only go so far.
The model is deliberately collaborative. They fund the connective tissue of a movement — the shared infrastructure, the cross-sector relationships, the hard-won capacities for collective action that don't always show up in a single grant report, but make everything else possible.
“Our vision is a food system that centres wellbeing from farm to fork — supported by fairer economies, vibrant communities, and thriving ecosystems."
Why philanthropy has a critical role to play
Our long-distance food supply chains are not resilient nor fit for the more beautiful future we are collectively working towards. The farmers and food system allies on the frontline of change are being asked to shoulder a transition that benefits all of us.
Governments, funders, and citizens all have a role to play. Farming the Future has shown that transformation requires three things:
Consistency and patience
Diverse skills and perspectives
Collaboration built on trust.
These aren't abstract values — they are the operating principles of a fund that has been doing this work carefully and rigorously for years.
“Through partnerships, we can scale what works, connect what's emerging, and accelerate the movement for food and farming that truly nourishes people and planet."
What that looks like in practice
Farming the Future is building a collective approach to philanthropy that accelerates the UK's transition to a just and regenerative food and farming system. Working with funders, they seek to increase the flow of trust-based funding to collective efforts that catalyse real change — not just individual projects, but the broader movement those projects belong to.
The numbers speak for themselves: more than £3 million in grants distributed, 119 initiatives funded, and 140 partners supported. Behind each of those figures are farmers, growers, networks, and communities doing the quiet, essential work of building a food system worth having.
The breadth of that work is worth pausing on.
In Northern Ireland, the NI Land Justice Gatherings are supporting political education spaces that explore the necessary decolonising processes for the lands and peoples of the north. In Southeast England, Land in Our Names is creating accessible healing and community care spaces for Black and People of Colour landworkers and earthworkers — people who are too often unseen within the wider food movement. Across England, the Landworkers' Alliance and partners are building an Agroecological Mentoring Network, linking new and early-stage farmers with experienced mentors to help them develop their farming systems and find their footing.
The work reaches further still. The Gaia Foundation, UK Grain Lab, and Landworkers' Alliance are deepening international collaboration around seed diversity — recognising that the resilience of our farming system begins with what we sow.
And a coalition including the RSPB, Soil Association, and Friends of the Earth is doing the strategic groundwork to engage civil society in pushing for a meaningful reduction in pesticide use across the UK.
Five very different grants. Five very different entry points into the same urgent, interconnected challenge.
That is what a movement fund looks like.
The invitation
Be The Earth Foundation has been committed to Farming the Future's pooled fund since we began. We have seen, close up, what happens when you fund with patience and trust — and we wholeheartedly encourage other aligned funders to explore doing the same.
Farming the Future have extended an open invitation to philanthropists and impact investors who are committed to flowing more and better money into a food system that nourishes both people and planet.
We encourage you to read it.
