Helping develop a resilient food system for the East of England

• Purpose: Feed Humanity
  • Peak Oil and Gas
  • Climate Change
  • Economic Shocks
  • Water
  • Phosphate
• Principles: Resilient Food Systems
  • Reducing Meat and Dairy
  • Urban/Peri-urban Horticulture
  • Resilient Bread
  • Low-Input Agriculture
  • Nutrient Recycling
  • Community Supported
  • Seasonal & unprocessed
  • Reducing Waste
• Potential Red Herrings
  • Local Food
  • Supermarkets
• What EAFL is doing
  • Who We Are
  • What We Do
  • Contact our Team
  • Our Board
• What You Can Do
  • Consumers
  • Business Opportunities
  • Local Authorities

Updated March 2010

Board of directors

EAFL is guided and overseen by our board of directors, elected from our membership:

Jeremy Darby
Nigel Dowdney Nigel runs two independent grocery stores, the Stalham Shopper and Earlham Shopper, and is an active member of the Red Orange buying group and the Association of Convenience Stores. Nigel also plays an leading role in the Localise It! campaign in support of independent shops.
Mike Hall
William Hudson William grew soft fruit in Essex for nearly 20 years. He now works as a consultant to EAFL on fresh produce supply chains.
Mark Karaczun Before moving to Norfolk, Mark lived in the USA and Thailand where he developed a passion for food from various cultures. In 2000, he started working for the local NHS as Public Health Adviser. In this role Mark worked closely with EAFL, taking the broad view that a vibrant local food economy was as much a public health issue in a rural county as population nutrition. Mark founded Norfolk’s Food and Nutrition Group (FaNG) and secured funding for initiatives such as 5 A DAY Norfolk. In 2005, Mark resigned as Public Health Adviser to study medicine at UEA.
Dolf te Lintelo
Josiah Meldrum Josiah has over 12 years experience working with food in the voluntary, commercial and not for profit sectors. In that time he has helped to establish social enterprises, secured and managed funding streams, set up an organic box scheme, sat on funding panels, developed transnational initiatives and acted as a consultant on various community-led projects. Josiah joined the EAFL team in August 2009 and is also a partner in Provenance, EAFLs commercial sister organisation.
Nick Saltmarsh Nick joined EAFL in October 2002 to support the creation of the Eostre Organics co-operative, subsequently working on projects from the production of educational materials to support for independent retail outlets and work with community food groups. Nick's work with EAFL is now mostly on the development of red meat supply chains. Previous experience included two years on organic farms in the UK, Italy and Ireland, work for a London organic wholesaler and home delivery service, a food service company specialising in wild foods, educational tourism and running a forest products company in north Wales.
Martin Seymour Martin is a Health Improvement Officer with Breckland Council and Norfolk Primary Care Group. His background is in local authority leisure, community development and more recently health improvement. He has an interest in food issues relating to public health and sustainability. Until recently Martin worked with the East of England Public Health Group and EAFL as the Regional 5 A DAY Co-ordinator, responsible for supporting the 5 A DAY community initiatives in the region and for the delivery of the School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme. Martin also worked on sustainable food and farming initiatives including public sector food procurement. Martin is currently the Chairman of Norfolk FaNG.
Bill Starling Norfolk born and bred, Bill returned to the county after 25 years running a part time farm in Lincolnshire. Bill has many years practical and political involvement with the organic movement, including 15 years trading organic grain. He is a long standing Trustee of the Soil Association and works as a self employed organic inspector. A strong supporter of local, organic and sustainable lifestyles, Bill was a director of EAFL in the early days, and is very pleased to have rejoined the board.
Tully Wakeman Tully is co-ordinator of EAFL, having joined in 2001 with a background in local government policy, management consultancy, IT and e-commerce development, social economy consultancy and running profitable small businesses. His work at present focuses on establishing sustainable food supply chains for public sector caterers in the East of England. He has a leading role in sharing best practice with others doing similar work in relation to public sector procurement and other topics relating to local and sustainable food. He has worked on projects relating to local food, food access and healthy eating; mapping the food economy in part of Norfolk; a feasibility study on sustainable sourcing of the Schools Fruit Scheme; research into the issues facing village shops; and various projects relating to school meals. Tully’s other current focus is on the world’s dwindling energy supplies and on climate change, and the implications of these for food systems.
Professor Martin Wolfe Martin is currently Research Director for Elm Farm Research Centre. After working for 28 years at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, he held the Chair of Plant Pathology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, for nine further years. Martin and Ann returned to England in 1997 to farm Wakelyns Agroforestry in Suffolk, the main site for EFRC arable farming research and trials. The theme of the research is ecological agriculture for sustainable land use, the framework for which is six agroforestry systems which have been developed over the past 10 years.