In this blog, Chris Maughan, discusses a recently published open access study into the development of regional grain networks in Europe. These networks have been working to transform the grain sector, built around principles of diversity, decentralisation, and ecological sustainability. The study explores what appears to be an emerging grain commons, and the link between this vision and the modes of governance the networks are using and adapting.
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What role can grain systems play in an agroecological transition?
If any part of our food system is overdue for a redesign, it’s the industrial grain system. Built on a global, vertically integrated model of mechanized monocultures, synthetic inputs, and commodity trading, industrial grain has had far-reaching impacts on our health, environment, and food sovereignty.
There’s growing evidence that the industrial grain system is deeply entangled with some of our most pressing global crises—catastrophic soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and rising rates of diet-related disease. And while increases in grain productivity have played a significant role in improving food security, grain systems have also been arranged in ways that leave us vulnerable to supply shocks, as evidenced during Covid-19 and the recent invasion of Ukraine.
The opportunity—and necessity—for rethinking industrial grain systems is enormous. Take wheat: it’s the most widely grown crop in the world and the single largest source of plant-based protein in the human diet. But wheat, like many other grains, carries a long legacy. For centuries, it has been at the heart of a global commodity system defined by stability, uniformity, and scale—a system that feeds the illusion of “food from nowhere.”
Its scale and historical entrenchment make change daunting. But that same embeddedness is why reimagining grain systems could be one of the most transformative steps we take toward a more just, resilient, and place-based food future.
Despite the scale of the challenge, an emergent network of farmers, millers and bakers in Europe are ploughing ‘against the grain’, searching for ways to re-imagine and re-build grain systems. As part of this process they have been centring ideas of common ownership, varietal diversity, and human connection in a sector defined by competition, uniformity and anonymity.
Credit: SWGN
In a recently published open access study, we report on a collaboration1 with representatives of these emerging networks. As part of this process we found signs of a radical political economic vision for transitioning away from the logic of the industrial commodity paradigm.
In particular, we found evidence of a new grain commons; that is, a system of shared material resources (such as seeds and infrastructure) together with immaterial resources, the social processes and relations through which people manage shared resources collectively. As Massimo De Angelis, one of the key contemporary thinkers of the commons puts it, “the commons are not simply ‘goods’ but social systems of use, negotiation, and cooperation.”
At the centre of this commons are the grains themselves, including ancient or ‘heritage’ varieties, but also ‘modern’ populations like YQ and Mariagertoba. Importantly, networks are also sharing organisational resources, such as decision making processes, supply chain agreements, and common labels. These innovative ways of relating, governing, and organising have implications, we think, for wider processes of food system transformation.
Following the structure of our ‘commoning process framework’ – Who? What? Why? and How? – this blog presents a glimpse of what we found and reflections for future work.
Who?
Our study explored three inspiring case studies from across Europe, each working to shape a new economics of grain. In Italy, GranPrato—the most established of the three—centres its efforts on conserving the region’s traditional Bozza Pratese loaf, using it as a catalyst to shorten supply chains and protect peri-urban farmland. In the UK, the South West Grain Network (SWGN) is fostering a transition toward agroecological grain systems, working in close collaboration with a constellation of other regional networks. And in Hungary, the Farmer Miller Baker (FMB) Network is building a national platform for knowledge exchange, aiming to revive and reimagine traditional grain-growing and processing practices.
While these networks have grown organically, they have also built collaboration by gathering a diverse range of perspectives. Each has gathered representation from across the regional grain system – what we call in the article a ‘territorial governance triangle’ – bringing together not just the private sector, but also civil society and local authorities to co-create a more inclusive and resilient system.
What?
All networks are re-building grain systems around a particular vision. At the heart of this is the grains themselves. While a lot of grain is being traded, they are also being commoned in a number of ways. For example, rare varieties are being ‘bulked’ on farms to ensure their availability to other growers, seed is often gifted to growers wanting to begin experimenting with new varieties, and knowledge about how to work with them is freely shared.
But it isn’t only grains – other immaterial resources are also shared. SWGN, for example, recently set up a shared ‘label’, True South West Flour. The label is a way to generate money for coordinating the network, but also a means to talk about the diverse wheat populations they are using and advocate for fair remuneration throughout the chain.
GranPrato have done something similar with their GranPrato brand, using it to communicate about the struggle to relocalise the cereal-to-bread supply chain. They have also established shared processing and storage infrastructure, often a vital missing piece of the local food systems (as discussed in the excellent Farmara podcast series, ‘Cereal’).
One of the keystones of the Hungarian Farmer-Miller-Baker network in envisaging an entirely healthy value chain of bakery products, was the sharing of knowledge and skills relating to ‘mild-processing technologies’. As beautifully showcased in a short documentary ‘True Bread’, the knowledge sharing capacities of the network and the (re-)implementation of small-scale stone mills at the farm level is enabling farmers to produce healthy, additive-free flour which previously was missing from the commodity market.
What we found is that each network’s shared (or ‘commoned’) resources were more than the sum of their parts. They became a vehicle for more sharing, the circuits through which grain varieties, skills and knowledge can flow. Accordingly, we found evidence of a commoning of the resources of governance itself, meaning the shared set of tools, methods and practices for managing shared resources. This could be supply chain agreements, shared values documents, or decision making processes.
These ‘immaterial resources’, seemed to be at least as significant as missing material infrastructure. Without this ‘commons for food’, as we call it, or the ‘common resources of governance’, regional networks can fall at the first hurdle. Without a clear decision making process in place, for example, new initiatives can end up ‘going round in circles’, unable to put in place the basic elements of the organisation.
That said, as we set out in more detail in the article (and in Figure 1, below), shared resources are only one part of a wider process of commoning, which demands attention across all its parts. Not only the commoned resources (the ‘what’), but also the commoners (the ‘who’), the ways of working (the ‘how’), and of course the ‘why’ – what we, following other writers and activists, call ‘food as a commons’.
Source: Maughan et al. 2025.
Why?
The commodity system is not working, whether for the farmers, millers and bakers, or for anyone. It is no coincidence that a lot of the networks we heard about found new traction after the disruptions of covid-19, and a further boost following the supply chain shocks triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While many members of these networks were already well aware of the frailties and economic injustices of industrial grain chains, these recent events brought this into greater visibility, revealing a volatile legacy of concentration, centralisation, and uniformity.
While our three networks were all different in form, the similarities of their shared values were striking. Democratic participation, decentralisation, human connection, and of course ecological principles like agricultural biodiversity were mentioned by all cases.
For these networks these shared values functioned as a design tool, informing decisions about how assets are shared, relationships mediated, and where to invest energy and resources. As such they were able to create organisational alignment, mirroring the diversity at the field level with the diversity ways of working and knowing at the network level.
How?
Along with new coalitions of actors, commoned resources, and guiding values, this new economics of grain demands a new approach to governing. A central challenge for these networks has been identifying and refining these practices (this is the ‘how’ our commoning framework) in ways that complement the ‘what’ ‘who’ and ‘why’ of the commoning process.
In many ways the tools of governance we heard about are not strictly new, but being used and adapted in new contexts. Many of these approaches will be familiar to those working in other movements for social change; for example, the use of sociocratic methods, co-design processes, and shared ownership of resources. Though there are a large variety of approaches, what we think unites them is their ‘transformative’ potential towards a convivial, diverse and distributed grain system.
Many of the future plans of the networks have to do with developing this side of things, increasing the capacity and skills of its members towards participating in an agroecological grain transition. Importantly, this doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel, but instead drawing on and adapting the knowledge and innovation of millenia of commons.
Picture credit: SWGN/Field Bakery
What next…?
In some ways ‘the how’ is where the main obstacle is. While the tools of a ‘transformative governance’ are proliferating and becoming more commonplace, regional grain networks sometimes lack the information to identify the right strategy for regional grain systems, and certainly the capacity to collectively test and refine new tools and approaches.
Along with researchers, we are also developing collaborations with key national-scale NGOs like UK Grain Lab and the Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme, who are already building an institutional memory of what works and linking together regional networks in a process of collective learning.
A new grain commons is flourishing. Not only around a commoning of grain varieties and practical knowledge, but also the shared infrastructure of transformative governance. This movement is of considerable significance, evidencing a fervent desire to scrap the old system, and find new economic forms that complement the diversity and resilience in the fields.
Yet despite their energy and mobilisation, these regional networks are contending with deeply entrenched, globalised structures. Movements of this kind can only sustain their momentum for so long without adequate resourcing and institutional support.
As a research collaboration, our next phase of work will focus on supporting these initiatives—by providing spaces for experimentation and co-design, and by generating and sharing knowledge about effective strategies emerging elsewhere.
We invite continued engagement as this work evolves.
- Researchers from the Centre for Agroecology Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK; University of Florence, Italy; and the Environmental and Social Sciences Research Group, Hungary. The collaboration was funded through a Horizon 2020 project: COACH (Collaborative Agri-food Chains).
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