First RISE

Yorkshire Grain Alliance field trip. Credit: Chris Young / www.realbreadcampaign.org CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

Published: Thursday 4 June 2026

From 2 to 4 June 2026, people involved in regional, non-commodity grain networks (RGNs), and other organisations involved in democratised, relocalised grain webs, converged in Yorkshire.

The first day centered around a visit to test plots of a range of wheat varieties and populations being grown for Yorkshire Grain Alliance.

The second day saw the first of four RISE Community of Practice convening events, hosted by Yorkshire Grain Alliance at Botton Village. This involved representatives from Common Grains, East Anglia Grain Alliance, the Real Bread Campaign, South East Grain Alliance and UK Grain Lab. The main discussions were:

Identifying key strategic targets that RGNs want to prioritise within the movement and how to achieve these, focussed on activities and outcomes.
New geopolitics of grain economies and what it means for the movement.

The day incorporated visits to the community’s bakery, seed lab and dairy herd.

Day three offered the opportunity for participants to visit Tockett’s Mill, guided by one of the enthusiasts behind restoration of the mid-nineteenth century, water powered mill in the mid-1970s.

RISE is coordinated by Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme, UK Grain Lab and Coventry University Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, and funded by Farming the Future.

Facebook album of photos from the gathering.

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Chris Young
Campaign Coordinator
Real Bread Campaign

Chris Young has coordinated the Real Bread Campaign since March 2009. In addition to lobbying for an Honest Crust Act of better loaf composition, labelling and marketing laws in the UK; he created and runs initiatives including: Sourdough September; Real Bread Week; Real Bread For All; Together We Rise, promoting therapeutic/social benefits of bread making; No Loaf Lost surplus reduction guidance; and Lessons in Loaf for schools. He’s the author of the Knead to Know…more microbakery handbook, Slow Dough: Real Bread recipe book and Bake Your Lawn grow-a-loaf guidebook; and edits True Loaf magazine.

From 2014-18, Chris also coordinated Sustain's London Food Link network, which included editing The Jellied Eel magazine and helping to launch and run the Urban Food Awards with the Mayor of London’s office. Chris has pulled on his judge’s wig for BOOM Awards, The Cateys, The Great Taste Awards, The Scottish Bread Championship and The World Bread Awards. In 2017, The School of Artisan Food honoured Chris with its first Fellowship, and in 2025 he was named joint Person of The Year by Slow Food in The UK.

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