Yet another fantastic day at the Leek Show, this time our third visit with an MCA stall. It was a great opportunity to promote Nature in Your Neighbourhood, the Moorlands Connect campaign and of course invite visitors to play the Land Use Game, which triggers conversations about the best ways (or not?) to use land. The idea was based on the Royal Society's Land Use Challenge, an online interactive game that provides scientific feedback on your choices. Better still, you can assess them on different targets, such as food production, carbon capture, water quality and biodiversity. Their extra dimension is the concept of multifunctional land uses, such as agroforestry, as well as single ones, such as grazing or forestry.
It's always valuable to talk to farmers, so some of our group made a beeline for the Young Farmers stall and we also distributed many of the Farm of the Future: Journey to Net Zero guides that had been provided for us by the Royal Agricultural Society of England. In addition, we took up the invitation from the organisers to deliver two short talks in the theatre marquee - one by Mike Jones on the Repair Cafés and one by Alison McCrea on Nature in your Neighbourhood. We can't claim to have attracted huge audiences, after all it's the first year they've done it, but we did benefit from coming after the flower arranging talk and having the stage graced with a wonderful floral display. Our grateful thanks to all the volunteers who helped on the day.