What can farmers do to make a positive impact on the health of their local community?

Whether looking at the more conservative or the more extreme data, everything points to the fact that healthcare is getting very expensive, public health prevention measures are underfunded and not making the required impact, and chronic disease and mental health conditions are on the rise. Poor diet is now recognised as the leading cause of avoidable harm to our health, contributing to lower life expectancy and earlier onset of ill-health, costing the UK £262 billion per year.

Just as the health sector is grappling with the scale and challenge of this, so too is the agricultural sector trying to navigate its own complicated problems, including an entire shift in practices aimed at becoming part of the solution to the climate and nature crisis, rather than part of the cause.

Perhaps these sectors can find some common ground to help solve some of each other’s challenges. Challenges that are often more connected than might at first be thought.

This study has a strong focus on food and healthy diets, exploring the idea that farmers could be in a unique position to contribute to their communities achieving healthier lives. Travelling to countries in Europe and North America that have similar agricultural and health challenges, the following healthy diet related ‘interventions’ were explored, including the role that farmers can play in them:

• Addressing barriers and facilitators to a healthy diet
• Food and farming education
• The ‘Food is Medicine’ (FIM) movement
• Unique health opportunities of local produce and short supply chains
• Public procurement of food and its role as a public health intervention

The study also recognises that the climate crisis is a health crisis and considers climate friendly opportunities within the interventions explored.

There were several key findings which were identified:

• Healthy diet related interventions can be designed to include a valuable role for farmers, such as prioritising procurement of local produce delivering benefits for the local economy and fostering a better connection to food
• Close partnerships between communities and producers can have direct health benefits
• A school’s strong commitment to food education can open opportunities for local farmers, through on-farm and virtual educational access and local produce procurement opportunities
• Some FIM programmes are recognising that the true cost of certain foods has knock-on negative health effects for their patients and are prioritising produce that delivers wider health benefits
• Examples of these ‘Wider Health Benefits’ include climate and nature friendly farming practices, practices that protect water and air quality, nutrient-dense food, local producers boosting the local economy and socially responsible and inclusive employment
• Food Hubs can fill geographical gaps and encourage supply of local produce to consumers such as public institutions and organisations focusing on equitable healthy food access
• Public procurement of food is an under-utilised tool to improve dietary intake
• Measuring the impact of healthy food interventions can be challenging and often lacks consistency between similar programs
• Linking additional, credible wider health benefit metrics to food produce through the supply chain will be a challenge

Healthy diet related interventions explored in this report

• Can include a valuable role for farmers in their design
• Should ask ‘where does the food come from’ and whether the food itself, including where and how it has been grown, has a positive or negative impact on the health of the consumer and their wider community. It is a false economy and missed opportunity, to supply these interventions with certain foods, and systems of growing food, that can negatively impact health
• Should collectively agree to provide data that can give consistent, comparable outcomes to help deliver a strong advocacy argument
• Can provide the demand and catalyst for developing values-based supply chains. These ‘value chains’ need support and innovation to manage ‘data-enriched’ produce that can deliver the transparency and logistical requirements of food with additional wider health benefits.