The Salford Care and Urban Farm Hub (CUF) brings together geographers, nurses, public health researchers, environmental scientists, planners, business school academics and a range of external stakeholders to explore the potential for urban agriculture and care farming globally. Formed in early 2015, and through drawing on over 10 years of research into the practice, the hub is a leading centre for urban agricultural research. CUFs has a range of researchers, post-docs and PhD students working around the concepts of care farming and urban farming.
To date, the CUF’s team has worked on a range of external projects with the likes of global funders, such as UNESCO and South Africa’s NRF, to national bodies such as Social Farms & Gardens to DEFRA and a range of regional/local bodies, from local authorities to charities and beyond. Some key highlights of our work includes:
- Creating models for upscaling urban agriculture and demonstrating the potential of the concept, such as our funded work for local authorities/landowners using GIS to identify opportunity space
- Supporting the development of policy tools to enhance urban agriculture, such as our work on creating food charters/policy councils, to our work on creating a national code of practice for care farming and urban farming
- Enabling the development of urban agricultural sites, such as our extensive soil testing services, to our work on creating the largest urban farm in the UK in Northern Roots (based in Oldham)
- Evidencing the impact of urban agriculture and care farming, such as our work evaluating large-scale projects and their impact on behaviour change/eating habits
- Connecting people around care and urban farming, such as our work on creating EU wide networks on the practices, to our international work in North America and Africa around the practice or our efforts to co-found the Food Geographies Working group of the Royal Geographical Society
- Encouraging businesses, people and others to get involved with care farming and urban agriculture, such as our public workshops and exhibitions (e.g. free soil testing or the Carrot City exhibition (www.carrotcity.org))
- Working with other universities on the topic, such as our work over the years with SusFoodNW (which brings together 6 universities) or our work with the University of Kent and many other institutions.