n By Mark Metcalf
‘‘ Real green jobs can happen – says Clutterbuck
one time worked closely with food growers. It would mean restoring highly skilled jobs.
“Also by protecting the soil it will help fend off flooding and drought. There should also be smaller plots with a much wider variety of plants, interspersed with trees to help hold water which helps cooling.
Smaller tractor machines would be needed – hence a unique new UK industry – with real green jobs that help the environment in lots of ways - rather than just counting carbon.”
On the western side of the country, Charlie wants to see more animals outdoors instead of them being locked up indoors and fed on soy from South America and maize from USA. Again, green jobs.
In turn moors could be transformed because as shown by the Todmorden- based hand-built Incredible Farm, established in 2012 and which annually produces over a ton of food while also teaching small scale market gardening and farming, even the roughest of terrain can be used to grow food.
Grouse shooting, which even the Moorland Association estimates only create 1,500 full-time jobs, isn’t, it would appear at this moment, subsidised. Yet landowners with over 500 hectares can still obtain subsidies for rewilding and planting carbon offset trees.
Charlie argues instead that the £3bn that was once used largely by the EU to finance large landowners, who in many cases did not produce food, could instead be spent subsidising
19 uniteLANDWORKER Spring 2026
We need real workers on decent green wages to grow in ways that regenerate the soil, establish links between town and country, help resist climate change and encourage a bigger rural economy
Dr Charlie Clutterbuck, Unite activist and soil scientist
hundreds of thousands of green jobs rurally.
As growing cannot be replaced by AI then, “we need real workers on decent green wages to grow in ways that regenerate the soil, establish links between town and country, help resist climate change and encourage a bigger rural economy with all the corresponding new houses and facilities,” concludes Charlie.
“And our union is the best situated to create and promote this collection of real green jobs.”
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