SFI 2026: Hungry herds don’t form an orderly queue – how to ring the dinner bell without causing a stampede
A bun fight? Glastonbury tickets? The Taylor Swift presale? £233 million gone in under six hours. What happened on the ground Window 2 opened at 10am. Within two hours Defra emailed to say a quarter of the funding had been allocated, then half had gone 90 minutes later, 75% gone by the afternoon and just […]
What you should be excited about from the NEW IPM conference
I went to the University of Swansea UK-IPM conference last week to speak about how we engage farmers in research and close the loop on feedback into the industry, in my view the missing piece in the puzzle when it comes to understanding the end user. The relevancy of the collection of speakers at the […]
What Gets Farmers Out of Bed in the Morning? 500+ farmers on what motivates them to keep going and what makes the biggest difference on how they feel
New research reveals that age, more than any other factor including farm type, size, tenure, or location, is the defining factor in what is motivating UK farmers. The implications for anyone trying to design policy, training, or communications for British farming deserve serious attention. The picture painted by eighteen months of collecting data on What […]
A temperature check on where farmers are feeling heard and where the industry needs to hear
As part of our 2026 Five Bar Gate panel survey, we asked a simple question: is there an organisation out there that needs to get closer to understanding what farmers want? We tucked it in almost as an afterthought — one line near the end of the survey. What came back was anything but an […]
You Said, we did – The Five Bar Gate Membership Satisfaction Results are in
Every year we ask our panel members what’s working, what’s not, and what you’d like to see more of. This year, 520 of you took the time to answer – Sorry If you missed it but with a busy summer we only had a week in the schedule to run it! Pleasingly, a good number […]
The Clarkson Effect you didn’t expect: What getting closer to the land teaches us about changing our behaviour to be more climate-friendly
Jeremy Clarkson is probably not the first person you would choose to front a campaign on climate change. He’s probably not even in the top 100. For much of his career, he has mocked environmentalists, questioned climate science and made a very good living driving extremely powerful cars extremely quickly. Then, in 2019, he started […]
Clare Otridge Named Finalist for Agriculture’s Woman of the Year 2026
We’re pleased to share that our Director, Clare Otridge, has been shortlisted for Agriculture’s Woman of the Year at the 2026 British Farming Awards, sponsored by NFU Mutual. Clare is one of eight women on this year’s shortlist, alongside Sarah Felstead (Cheshire), Joanna Hilditch (North Herefordshire), Clare Price (Warwickshire), Helen Reeve (Norfolk), Hannah Rose (Monmouthshire), […]
Grounded Research Director Named MRS Sustainability Changemaker of the Year 2026
Clare Otridge, Director of Grounded Research and operational lead for the Women in Food and Farming (WiFF) network, has been named the Market Research Society’s Sustainability Changemaker of the Year for 2026. The award, presented at the MRS Excellence Awards, recognises individuals across the research, insight and data analytics sector who are driving tangible progress […]
Healthy Soil, Plenty of Worms. But What Are We Growing?
As any farmer will know, one of the simplest ways to assess the health of a soil is to disturb it. Dig into it. Add some water. Stamp on the ground. If the worms begin to emerge, it is usually a sign that something healthy exists beneath the surface. Life is present. Biological processes are […]
Why are Farmers Joining Five Bar Gate?
Five Bar Gate is Grounded Research’s farmer research community, bringing together more than 2,000 farmers from across the UK to take part in paid commercial, environmental and policy research. The community was created because we believed the people shaping the future of food and farming needed better ways to hear directly from the people living […]