2020 Steven and Gillian Bullock Award

The winner of the 2020 Stephen and Gill Bullock Award has used his Nuffield experience to transform his farm business over the past decade. But he has also had a significant impact on farmers and policy makers on a national and European level, championing an approach to farming designed to boost yields, increase farm resilience and improve soil quality.

Stephen Briggs used his Nuffield travels to study the application of agroforestry in temperate climates, having seen it in action in the tropics when he worked in East Africa in his youth. He visited farmers who had adopted agroforestry in North America, Europe and China and returned convinced that the approach could work well in the UK. He set to work on his rented 100 hectare Cambridgeshire farm, persuading his landlord to allow him to plant 4,500 fruit trees alongside organic wheat, barley and oats to establish the UK’s largest agroforestry system. As he hoped, Stephen found that the trees made his farm much more resilient to erosion and crop damage from fenland winds and rain. They also created better drainage in Winter and helped to retain moisture in the Summer, boosting conventional crop performance while adding a fruit crop to his farm output. And the trees attracted birds and insects, increasing biodiversity on the farm. From the beginning Stephen also championed agroforestry among fellow farmers, giving talks across the country and working closely with organisations such as the Woodland Trust to bring agroforestry from the margins into the mainstream. He now lectures on the topic at Warwick university and provides agroforestry advice to farmers throughout the UK and Ireland as well as in France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and China.

Ten years after embarking on his Nuffield journey, Stephen is now widely recognised as the pioneer of agroforestry in the UK - he literally wrote the book on the subject, as co-author of the Agroforestry Handbook published last year. Not content with driving change in the UK, Stephen set up the European Agroforestry Federation to promote agroforestry across Europe and influence policy at an EU level. The organisation now has 280 members in 25 countries and successfully lobbied the EU to relax restrictions on the number of trees per hectare allowed for land to qualify for support under the CAP.

Keen to connect with consumers and educate the public on farming, three years ago Stephen built a farm shop, café and education centre on his farm. That £250k investment has produced a business that now employs 11 people and generates an annual turnover of £400k, bringing thousands of people onto the farm each year. Stephen’s growing involvement in policy development has led to him presenting to Government ministers, acting as a steering group member for DEFRA’s Environmental Land Management scheme and advising