About Us

FFCC is the UK's independent commission for food, farming and the countryside. FFCC occupies a distinctive space; we produce highly regarded and evidenced reports and convene leaders across the whole system. We specialise in involving diverse and seldom-heard voices in policy development, coming together to focus on the difficult and intractable challenges that resist change. We work in places with citizens, farmers, businesses, local government and leaders, as well as all four governments of the UK, to understand and shape the policies which impact food, farming and land, and everyday people's lives.

We started off life in November 2017 as an independent inquiry led by a group of influential Commissioners. We commissioned research and sought practical solutions, including an innovation national bike tour to hear directly from people in the places they live and work. This formed the basis of landmark reports, Our Future in the Land, and its companion A Field Guide for the Future, which were launched by, and welcomed on, both sides of the aisle. Thanks to the success and impact of that report, we became an independent charity in April 2020.

We are enormously grateful for the confidence placed in us by our generous funders, and for the opportunity to work with them in service of our shared missions and purpose. The detail of our current list of funders can be found in our latest annual report.

Our 2026–29 strategy makes three commitments. We will work to change the political economy of food, the narratives, rules and incentives that keep the barriers to change in place. We will amplify the voices of citizens, farmers and progressive food businesses, because legitimacy is the scarcest resource in this transition. And we will help make food, farming and land use foundational to regional economic resilience and placemaking – designed into how places plan their futures, not bolted on.  

The programmes are designed to work together on what we believe to be the blocks to transformational change: the places work generates the evidence, the citizens' and farmers' work generates the mandate, and the policy work converts both into change that sticks.  

Sue Pritchard is the Chief Executive. Sue's background is in leadership and organisation development for systems change, working with leaders across public, private and not-for-profit organisations, especially on complex partnership projects. Sue has been researching, writing and practising whole systems change for over 30 years.  

She is an independent Governor at Royal Agricultural University, a Trustee of St George's House Trust, Windsor, and a member of the government's Net Zero Council. 

Sue and her family live in the heart of Monmouthshire in Wales, raising livestock and farming for conservation.

Martin Nye is the Chair of FFCC. He brings extensive business and charity experience gained in chief executive roles in private and public companies and from a portfolio of non-executive and chair positions. He was previously Chair and Trustee of the Soil Association and is a Council member of the National Trust. Martin is currently High Sheriff of Wiltshire, where he supports his wife, Victoria, in her efforts to make the family farm more financially and ecologically resilient.

The Commissioners are a group of leaders and specialists in food, farming and countryside issues. The Commission is responsible for oversight of programme strategy and activities to deliver the Charity’s objectives.

A full list of Commissioners can be found here.

The full list of members of the FFCC board can be found here.

FFCC's influence runs through the last seven years of UK food and land use policy, usually a few years ahead of the mainstream.  

We see our impact coming through in a number of ways: 

We set the agenda. Our Future in the Land (2019) called for a national land use framework, a transition to agroecology and a National Nature Service - ideas treated as radical then, now visible in government policy and mainstream debate. 

We build the public mandate. The Food Conversation is the UK's largest-ever public dialogue on food. Our Citizen Advisory Council, now working with government on the Food Strategy, keeps that mandate live, current and quotable.  

We turn ideas into institutions. The Nature Service in Wales, the Land and Nature Skills Service in Cumbria, and GrowIN in Northern Ireland are creating pathways into good work in nature and regenerative farming.  

We prove the transition adds up. Farming for Change, our modelling with IDDRI, showed the UK can feed itself well through agroecological farming.  

We piloted the Land Use Framework. Our work in Devon and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough showed how multifunctional land use decisions can be made well. This learning is now synthesised into a delivery protocol.  

We change the economic story. The False Economy of Big Food and Net Gain or Net Drain? exposed who really profits from the current system, and who pays. This analysis is now regularly cited across the sector and in Parliament.  

We are trusted advisers to governments. Our CEO sits on the Net Zero Council, representing food and farming perspectives; we provide services to government departments; and we contribute regularly to national and international debate.

The Food Conversation 

The Food Conversation was designed to challenge long-held assumptions about what ‘consumers’ want and helped to shift policy makers’ understanding of the public appetite for change. Learn more about how we ran the largest ever conversation about food here. 

As a result of the success of the Food Conversation, citizens have been invited into the heart of policy development. FFCC is now working with The Food Foundation to coordinate the Citizen Advisory Council (made up of Food Conversation participants and Food Foundation Ambassadors) which is helping to shape the government’s new food strategy.  

In addition, the evidence from the Food Conversation, alongside years of work by others, contributed to a significant shift towards government intervention on food. We are seeing new policy announcements from governments, new food strategies in England and Northern Ireland, and a growing momentum around food in all four nations. 

The Land Use Framework 

FFCC first called for a Land Use Framework for England in Our Future in the Land report in 2019. Since then, we’ve run on-the-ground pilots, published influential reports, coordinated workshops to support Defra's Consultation on Land Use, convened leaders across all four nations and more. All this has helped build a broad alliance around the concept of a multifunctional, land-led, transparent and inclusive Land Use Framework. FFCC's influence can be seen in the House of Lords report, the Royal Society’s Living Landscape report, the Glover Review and the Geospatial Commission’s report which shaped the final framework. 

In March 2026, the government published the Land Use Framework. It embeds many of the principles that FFCC first set out and advocated for. FFCC's work continues, as we turn attention to the implementation of the framework.  

More information about FFCC’s work can be found here. 

The Nature Service in Wales 

The Nature Service is a nationally coordinated initiative supporting nature recovery across Wales by strengthening skills, capacity and access to opportunities. It gives people from all backgrounds a clear, trusted route into volunteering, education, training, employment and early career pathways linked to nature restoration and climate action. It doesn’t deliver these activities directly. Instead, it works through partners – as a connector, amplifier and coordinator – to make existing opportunities more visible, accessible and joined-up across Wales. 

Co-founded and incubated by FFCC and co-chaired by our Chief Executive Sue Pritchard, The Nature Service has the support of a wide range of Welsh civic society and elected officials, the nature conservation sector, the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. More than 100 organisations that have co-designed the early work. 

Farming Transition 

Since our pioneering  Farming for Change report in 2020, FFCC has continued to influence and shape the debate about the transition towards a more sustainable, equitable and resilient future for farming in the UK. Recent reports, like Paying the Price, have been cited in parliament and gained national media attention; our content and films have been widely watched; a recent podcast series attracted a significant farming audience. FFCC's forums and events, including the annual Oxford Farming Conferences dinner, the long-running Farming Leadership Group, sessions at Groundswell, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Farming, draw high-level political and media interest, while bringing diverse farming perspectives to the centre of the policy conversation. 

Key FFCC narratives, such as the long-term squeeze on farmers' finances and the need to build systemic resilience, are increasingly reflected in mainstream and industry media, farming organisations, and government policy. More information about the farming work can be found here. 

The annual report can be found in the publications page on the FFCC website here.