June opened with a new offering to the SCAF membership: our fourth round of pump priming awards, supporting projects of up to nine months with £10,000 available per award. For anyone seeking inspiration, we also announced awardees from the third round of pump priming awards. The five successful projects, running from May to October 2025, explore emerging research topics including community nutrition, alternative food networks, sustainable agriculture, and communication strategies. With collaboration from 21 researchers across nine Scottish institutions, the projects align with SCAF’s ethos of cross-sectoral research to build a healthy, sustainable, and equitable food future for Scotland.

In other funding news, the first event to be supported through SCAF's Create! Innovate! Participate! fund took place in early June. The Soil Association held their event “Organic for All” at the Scottish Parliament, bringing together farmers, caterers, retailers, and policymakers to highlight the challenges and solutions to providing organically grown food for all as an approach to sustainable food and farming. Find out more about what was discussed in the blog written by the Soil Association. 

Dedicated time, the right setting, and a great group of people: that is what made our second writing retreat a highlight of the summer. The retreat brought together 21 participants from academic and non-profit backgrounds, offering protected time for focused writing and invaluable opportunities to connect with other SCAF members. Alongside the work, interdisciplinary conversations happened in breaks, walks, and informal sessions. As one participant put it, “Lovely space to focus and be around people who want to talk about food and systems! Great mix of work time and social/rest time”.  Another noted “The group from SCENE will certainly become part of my long-term research network and may even become future collaborators. [...] Many attendees were studying food systems using very different approaches compared to my own research. Discussing their work helps me place my [...] research into context, build my understanding of how other disciplines view food system transformation, and helped expose me to research methods.” You can read more about the retreat in Satya Dunning’s blog here. 

Group photo from the second SCAF writing retreat

The Food Futures networking event at Stirling brought two communities into one room - Scotland Beyond Net Zero (SBNZ) and SCAF - with productive results. The morning SBNZ roadshow showcased both the SBNZ and SCAF networks and visions, with presentations from the leadership team and most attendees surfacing shared challenges and potential collaborative projects. The SCAF-led afternoon focused on grant writing and collaborative working. Our guest speaker, Alex Cheswick, from Zinc introduced the Zinc x UKRI Multidisciplinary Food Systems Catalyst fund – an initiative designed to bring researchers from the social sciences and biosciences together to share skills, expertise and ideas and develop truly interdisciplinary projects. If you participated in the Zinc UKRI Catalyst, please get in touch to tell us more about the experience!

Group photo - SCAF x SBNZ event

Alongside these member-focused events, two SCAF members, Profs Emilie Combet and Mary Brennan, were appointed to the Scottish Food Commission, a new body dedicated to scrutinising and making recommendations in relation to the Good Food Nation Plans and progress reports; conducting research; and providing advice to Scottish ministers, Local Authorities and Health Boards in relation to their good food nation plans. Mary and Emilie join Graeme Jack and Scottish Food Commission chair Dennis Overton. 

Around the same time, our colleagues Ash Lyons (Quantum Technologies ARC co-lead) and Mette High (Energy, Homes and Livelihoods ARC lead) were invited to present the ARCs progress to our funder, the Scottish Funding Council, showcasing how far the ARCs have gone in the last couple of years, and the extent of their reach, engagement and ability to federate. This was a chance to highlight how interdisciplinary food systems research can help meet national ambitions.

Our latest webinar turned to crofting, community, and the lived realities of small-scale food production on the Isle of Eigg. Chaired by Professor John Crawford, the session featured Ed Pybus, independent policy consultant at Crow Consulting, and Neil Robertson, crofter and long-time resident of Eigg. Ed discussed crofting as a community-led model for food production, the specific barriers faced on Eigg, and the wider lessons for rural resilience. Neil brought this to life through personal experience: 35 years of crofting on the island. The session was based on a recent report exploring the challenges and opportunities for crofting on Eigg. The full webinar is available on our YouTube channel. 

As we head into autumn (maybe not right now, but soon enough), SCAF’s main focus of bringing people together ramps up again, first with our annual event (programme now live!), new projects starting (including monitoring and evaluation of the Alliance), and policy conversations picking up pace. We hope to see you all soon in person, online, or on slack! 

First published: 6 August 2025

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