Earlier this year the Faculty of Public Health published a paper titled: Influencing healthier and more sustainable dietary behaviours through planting and harvesting food-producing trees and hedges in the UK. The paper confirms that diet and food security in the UK face significant challenges, including poor nutrition, food insecurity and a heavy reliance on imported fruits. They suggest integrating food-producing trees and hedges into local communities to support healthier diets and contribute to environmental sustainability.
Only 13% of the UK’s land is covered by trees, significantly below the EU average of 38%. This low coverage further reduces the country’s resilience to climate change and limits its ability to produce more of its own food.
There is a possibility of change. Currently, the UK Government continues planning to plant 30,000 hectares of trees annually by 2025. This strategy covers the schemes that fund NHS Forest tree planting and a proportion of this target is allocated as fruit and nut-producing trees. However, the current goals don’t go far enough to marry tree-planting goals with food production potential. In their recent paper, the Faculty of Public Health argues that integrating food-producing trees into these large-scale planting initiatives has significant potential to expand the UK’s food production capacity.
Food-producing trees, orchards and hedges offer multiple benefits. They can significantly support biodiversity, provide communal spaces that are fantastic for nature-based interventions and offer serious potential for food. They could even enhance local food security and contribute to healthier diets by increasing fruit and nut consumption, both of which have been recognised for their dietary importance by the EAT-Lancet Commission in their global scientific review of healthy diets within a sustainable food system.
The number of food-insecure households has doubled since 2021 and in 2023 food price inflation reached a 45-year high, exacerbating food insecurity. Studies show that community orchards can help address health inequalities by increasing fruit and vegetable intake among participants. However, the Government’s planting of trees on public land needs to bring into focus the potential for food-producing trees and hedges to ameliorate this food insecurity trend. These efforts should be seen as complementary to other critical food system interventions, addressing not just food security, but also public health, environmental sustainability and community wellbeing.
The UK produces only 16% of its fruit, relying heavily on imports. This makes the UK food system vulnerable to global shocks and climate change. How fantastic it would be if fruit trees could be found on publicly accessible land such as NHS sites and provide fruit to patients, staff and the public? Orchards were once a common feature of hospitals and healthcare sites, we want to see them return.
The NHS Forest is funded to plant trees on public healthcare sites. We have a “wild food” bundle with damsons, hawthorn and other trees producing edible fruits and nuts. This year, we also have our orchard bundles. These bundles offer incredible value. To plant an orchard on your site, a minimum of 10 trees needs to be ordered together and preferably planted in a traditional orchard grid formation. Through our fruit tree supplier this season, RV Rogers we have a wide range of fruit trees to choose from, including different varieties of apples, plums, pears, and cherries as well as some more niche traditional varieties such as gage, quince, damson and medlar.
By embedding food-producing trees and hedges into community spaces like NHS hospital grounds, the UK can move towards a more resilient, sustainable and healthier food system.