Roots to Health - building Food Resilience at all Scales with Daphne du Cros of the Shropshire Good Food Partnership

Dec 3, 2025

Daphne du Cros, a food policy researcher, educator, and farmer, dives deep into the world of food resilience. She discusses the vital link between soil health and nutrition, addressing the challenges posed by the ultra-processed food industry. Topics include her transition to market gardening during the pandemic, community responses to food security, and the importance of local food systems. Daphne also highlights grassroots lobbying efforts, the significance of seed sovereignty, and practical steps for strengthening community ties through food.

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INSIGHT

Food As A Systems Lever

Daphne uses food as a systems-change lever because everyone connects to food and it links landscape, economy, health and relationships.
Framing food work as systems thinking opens pathways to broader regenerative change.

ANECDOTE

Rapid Scaling During The Pandemic

Daphne pivoted from 12 veg boxes in 2019 to producing 55 veg boxes weekly on 0.9 acres during the pandemic.
She scaled by overhauling production and adapting business models to meet urgent local needs.

INSIGHT

Horticulture And Seed Are Critical Gaps

The UK produces 56% of its food overall but far less horticulture and seed, creating vulnerability.
Loss of horticultural training and local direct-sales infrastructure heightens dependence on imports.

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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.

Daphne is a food policy researcher, educator, and farmer. She holds a PhD in Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City St. George's University of London, and a Master's in Environmental Science and Management from Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. She is Director and Coordinator at Shropshire Good Food Partnership; Director at Light Foot Enterprises; Project Lead at Food Forward BC (where BC stands for Bishop's Castle, not British Columbia or any of the other potential options) - and she's co-owner of Little Woodbatch CIC, a farm just outside BC that hosts the Bishop's Castle Community Seed Bank. She is the author of the town's Community Food Resilience Strategy - the only such policy in Shropshire.

Daphne and I are relatively near neighbours, we have swapped seeds - her more than me - and share ideas about systems thinking and how we might evolve our world. She's deeply involved at every level from actual growing up to governmental meetings trying to get those in power to find some wisdom when it comes to food resilience, food security and all the other things we say as we try to get them to move away from the corruption innate in our system towards something that actually works in service to life.

Daphne on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/daphne-du-cros-743128332
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlewoodbatch/

Shropshire Good Food Partnership: https://www.shropshiregoodfood.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shropshiregoodfood/

Soil Ed UK: https://www.instagram.com/soil_ed_uk/

Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty Network: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/

Serving the Public https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/serving-the-public-the-good-food-revolution-in-schools-hospitals-and-prisons-kevin-morgan/7657661?ean=9781526180469&next=t

Civil Food Resilience Report: https://nationalpreparednesscommission.uk/publications/just-in-case-7-steps-to-narrow-the-uk-civil-food-resilience-gap/ Little Woodbatch Farm https://www.littlewoodbatch.co.uk/

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