It was after Laurence Candy lost most of his dairy herd to bovine tuberculosis that he decided he would no longer send animals to the slaughterhouse.

“It made me wonder if we can justify the industrial slaughter of sentient beings,” says the 50-year-old looking back on the event in 2017. “As a society, we have to question this.”

Since last year, Mr Candy has been working with a Scottish-based organisation called Farmers For Stock-Free Farming (FFSFF), which has been set up to support meat and dairy farmers who want to transition to animal-free agriculture.

He is now in the process of selling his remaining animals – 35 beef cattle – and concentrating instead on growing cereals such as oat, wheat, barley and broad beans.

Mr Candy is also switching to “veganic production”, which prohibits the use of manure, or any other animal product, to improve the soil. For this, he is working with a body called International Biocyclic Vegan Network, which promotes and certifies plant-based, organic farms around the world.

“It allows for two years to transition out of a livestock enterprise and establish suitable alternatives,” he says. “This approach enables the farmer to have a suitable timescale to develop their business plans, without a financial impact.”

Mr Candy adds: “I’m trying to add value. There’s currently very few farmers growing veganically, but obviously veganism is a growing trend in his country.”

Now, however, Hartlepool is hoping its future can be transformed by sunshine.

Three massive solar farms are to be built within a five-mile radius of each other on the outskirts of this Teesside port – effectively turning it into the UK’s most unlikely solar powerhouse.

Individually, it is thought all three sites – dotted on farmland along the A19 – would be among the top 10 biggest such energy farms in the country if they were opened today.

But combined they will cover an area roughly the size of 250 football fields and create enough energy to power more than 43,000 local homes. They will produce almost 150MW of energy every year.

The Prince of Wales has called for small family farmers in the UK and across the world to come together in a cooperative movement using sustainable farming methods, and for their plight to be at the centre of environmental action.

Small farmers, in the UK and EU, are facing their biggest upheavals in more than a generation, with the loss of farm subsidies and new post-Brexit trade deals in the UK, and sweeping reforms to the EU’s common agricultural policy to be announced this week in Brussels.

Writing for the Guardian, Prince Charles has urged small farmers to band together to cope with the coming shocks and shift to a low-carbon economy: “There are small farms the world over which could come together in a global cooperative committed to producing food based on high environmental standards … With the skills of ethical entrepreneurs and a determination from the farmers to make it work, I would like to think it could provide a very real and hopeful future.”

Farming is undergoing a “massive transition”, and the needs of family farmers must be taken into account, the prince said.

“To me, it is essential the contribution of the small-scale family farmer is properly recognised – they must be a key part in any fair, inclusive, equitable and just transition to a sustainable future. To do this, we must ensure that Britain’s family farmers have the tools and the confidence to meet the rapid transition to regenerative farming systems that our planet demands,” he said.

Plans for a new town in rural Sussex backed by one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors and close allies of Prince Charles, are exposing a split in the Tory party over how to rapidly accelerate housebuilding.

Kingswood, a scheme for 2,850 homes, is being proposed on open fields at Adversane near Horsham which have been assembled by hedge fund billionaire Sir Michael Hintze who has given £4.6m to the Conservatives. Its design is partly inspired by Poundbury, the ersatz Georgian town in Dorset created by Prince Charles, and Sir Michael Peat, the Prince of Wales’s former private secretary is a director of the development company.

But it is being opposed by local Conservative MP Andrew Griffith, who said it is “the wrong type of development in the wrong place” and local Tory councillors who have warned: “No community wants this on their doorstep.” It looks set to be a test case for the government’s controversial new planning strategy announced last month which is set to relax national planning rules and set significantly higher local housebuilding targets in areas including Horsham.

A new report examining the role of commercial agriculture in the UK says it has the potential to solve sustainability challenges, generate employment and boost the post-pandemic economy.

Yet, the report warns that commercial farmers are being systematically “written out” of emerging policy in the rush to push environmental enhancement above all else.

“Commercial Farming: Delivering the UK’s new Agriculture Policies” has been released today (10 June) by the Commercial Farmers Group to coincide with the second reading of the Agriculture Bill in the House of Lords. As well as laying out the areas farming can impact positively, it argues that UK farmers should be ready and willing to compete with food imports – provided there is clear labelling identifying differences in production standards.

James Black from the group, who runs the family farming business producing pigs and arable crops in Suffolk, explains that commercial farming is important as fewer than 10 percent of farming businesses currently produce over half the UK’s agricultural output.

“These businesses are also ideally-placed to stimulate local economies, support wider industries and address pressing problems such as use of finite resources, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and biodiversity decline. However, they can only do this if allowed the chance,” he says.

“Unfortunately, UK history is littered with the results of so many great aspirational concepts which have been poorly delivered – because policy makers have not fully engaged with the people most involved in the implementation. We must avoid food and farming becoming a casualty of this too.”

North Sea cod stocks were once plentiful but plummeted – and came perilously close to collapse – between the early 1970s and 2006. A “cod recovery plan” sought to restore stocks to sustainable levels by limiting fishing days, decommissioning boats, banning catches in nursery areas and putting larger holes in nets to allow young cod to escape.

In what was seen as a significant achievement, the stock rose fourfold between 2006 and 2017, when the MSC – on whose guidance big retailers and many consumers rely – awarded three fisheries sustainable status. The MSC’s distinctive blue label with a white tick was a huge fillip to the industry.

The UK consumes about 115,000 tonnes of cod each year. Only 15,000 tonnes comes from the North Sea, with the rest imported mainly from the fertile grounds in the Barents Sea and around Norway and Iceland. But the species is of huge symbolic importance to the UK fishing industry, which employs about 24,000 people – more than half of them working in Scotland.

Ices, an international organisation of scientists from countries bordering the North Atlantic, advises governments and the industry on stock levels and the sustainable quotas that can be fished without endangering future stocks.

It sounded a warning last year with its recommended cut in the cod catch of 47%, but this year’s assessment – based on extensive scientific research – warned that levels were dangerously low and another two-thirds reduction was needed.

“It is unclear what the reasons are for this; further work is required to investigate climate change, biological and fisheries effects,” the report said.

Environmental organisations point out that cod has been fished above its maximum sustainable yield in recent years, meaning the fish are taken from the sea faster than they can reproduce.

The species is not breeding as fast as it used to, too many unwanted “juvenile” fish are caught, and the practice of “discarding” – throwing dead fish back into the sea to keep within quotas – continues despite being banned.

It certainly offers new and powerful arguments about the overall value of rural places to well-being. I think we should take it more seriously and as this article explains we now have a new charity to help us with the process:

“The findings, from a survey of 3,000 adults over the past three months, were presented yesterday at a meeting to discuss how data on well-being could be used to change policy and create a happier and more productive society.

“The session coincided with the launch of Action for Happiness, a charity aiming to encourage a mass movement of people pursuing a better way of life, which was addressed by the happiness guru Lord Richard Layard, of the London School of Economics, Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, and Geoff Mulgan, director of the Young Foundation.”

“The slide signals the first drop in real incomes since 1981, when the UK was struggling out of a recession, and the biggest since 1977, when inflation was running in the double figures. Per head, real income dropped from £14,181 in 2009 to £13,980 last year, according to the Office for National Statistics.

“Statisticians blamed the annual fall, only the sixth seen since records began more than 60 ago, on the failure of wages to keep up with prices.”

We don’t have a detailed breakdown of the figures yet but I suspect rural areas will be amongst the forefront of those places suffering with their high level of dependence on the public sector as an employer. This will raise a series of challenges across rural life affecting issues such as housing demand.

Seamlessly, this creates a link to the Glossary of Terms I have just completed in relation to a rural affordable housing project. I am pleased with it and would like it get used as widely as possible – if you would like a copy please do let me know.

It should help anyone in the “RSN family” with an interest in local housing provision and will help them to get their foot on the first rung on the housing understanding ladder.