Welcoming Leyla Pope to the Future Food Movement Farmer-Led Working Group
Ask a farmer to invest in soil health and you are asking them to accept a return that may not show up for three, five or ten years. Most of the commercial signals reaching them run on a much shorter clock.
That gap sits underneath a lot of the food industry's sustainability commitments. Targets on climate, nature and nutrition depend on changes made on farms and many of those changes take years to show a result. The contracts, prices and forecasts shaping farm decisions rarely stretch that far.
Future Food Movement’s Farmer-Led Working Group exists to get those two timeframes into the same room. It brings farmers and food industry leaders together in small, confidential sessions to talk honestly about what supply chains are asking of producers, and what would make those asks workable. We convene the group in partnership with Cool Farm and Regenagri.
Today we are happy to welcome a new farmer into the group:
Leyla Pope, Tynyrwtra Farm Joint Venture
Leyla farms in mid Wales and she arrived in farming from a long way outside it. She has worked on malnutrition campaigns for Médecins Sans Frontières in Geneva and served as Chief Operating Officer of a MedTech start-up. Two years ago she and her husband inherited a number of small tenanted farms and she began asking whether the land could be farmed differently.
After a visit to Groundswell, they took one farm back in hand and set up a joint venture with a farmer open to regenerative methods. The intention was to build something they could learn from and experiment on rather than a finished model. Starting this year, one hundred cattle have arrived through the ABP Gamechanger scheme, with another ninety due to follow. The family also owns a sheep farm nearby.
Leyla is early in all of this and says so plainly, which is a large part of why her perspective is useful. She is making the decisions a new entrant has to make in 2026, with today's prices, the schemes that currently exist and a good deal of uncertainty and without decades of habit to fall back on.
What she wants the industry to hear
Leyla wants to see the food industry move away from volume-driven, short-term decision making and towards a genuinely long view. A view long enough to give farmers the confidence and financial security to invest in soil. Without it, producers get pushed towards practices that protect this year's yield at the cost of resilience later.
Leyla sees soil health and human health as inseparable, and she is following the work on nutrient density closely, including the American farmer Dan Kittredge and the Bionutrient Food Association. Her view is that the industry has not yet reckoned with what nutrient density would mean for the food it sells and for the people eating it. Underneath both threads is a conviction that good, nutritious food should not be limited to the people who can afford it.
She joined the group on the recommendation of fellow farmer and working group participant Tim Parton, who came into the working group earlier this year and is her mentor.
Why this matters for our members
For members across retail, manufacturing and finance, the Farmer-Led Working Group offers something the food system makes surprisingly hard to come by. Direct, unfiltered insight from the people producing the food, in a room where nobody is selling anything.
New entrants like Leyla are a particular kind of useful voice in that room. Land is changing hands, and some of it is passing to people with capital, professional backgrounds and no inherited assumptions about how a farm should run. They tend to test things, and to be alert to whether the numbers hold up.
Leyla will be joining our sessions over the coming months. If you are working on supplier commitments, soil programmes or nutrition standards and want to test that thinking with the people carrying the risk, this is the room for it.