Stuart Meikle

Stuart Meikle is an agricultural management and policy specialist, an economist, a writer and an advisor. He was brought up with agriculture and studied at the University of London. He joined the faculty on graduating and spent several years teaching, researching and consulting. His last 25 years have seen him advising governments, the World Bank and the IFC, NGOs, universities and private businesses in places as far afield as SE and Central Asia, the Caucuses, the Levant, SE Europe and the UK. Over the years he has developed a particular focus on agricultural and food sector strategy at the national and regional levels and linking rural development initiatives with the consumer through the food supply chains. He first arrived in Romania to work on a Commission project in 1997 and he lived in Transylvania for more than a decade from 2002; a location to which he was appointed as the United Kingdom’s first Honorary Consul. Nowadays he and his family live in the Republic of Ireland.

vegan cheese

Time To Rethink ‘Plant-Based’ – Parts 1 & 2

Plant-based’ is the new ‘sustainable’. Marketed as the remedy to many of our crises, on closer inspection the label means little.

March 4, 2022

Trefoil

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part Four

Feeding the soil and avoiding fossil fuels is the Holy Grail of sustainable farming. Techno-solutions aside, this will entail working with nature by mimicking nature – and harnessing the capabilities of ruminants.

November 1, 2021

Swiss cow

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part 3

Methane has a role to play in sustainable farming. We cannot let the debate around methane emissions cloud the broader benefits of farming with ruminants…

October 20, 2021

sheep in conservation grazing

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part 2

A sustainable food system is one that will be able to generate nutrients from natural sources, and without using fossil-fuel supplied energy.

September 29, 2021

monoculture wheat field

Farming Bounded By Our Biological Boundaries – Part 1

We must adopt an ecosystem approach to identify sustainable food systems that can exist within our planet’s boundaries, argues Stuart Meikle in the first of a four-part series. 

September 17, 2021

View above imperial valley

Carbon Starvation – A Crisis Of Our Time?

Overall, it is only when we start with a soils-first-farming approach that we begin to understand what is needed to create genuinely sustainable agricultural systems.

September 9, 2021