Nominee Summary
Lauren is a 35 year old farmers wife and mother to 3 who was formally a medical high dependency nurse. Following her marriage she relocated to highland Perthshire from her home in Aberdeenshire. Due to the distance from a hospital her nursing career proved difficult to continue so Lauren in partnership with her husband (Andrew Houstoun) founded Glenkilrie Larder a diversification on the farm to sell our own venison beef and lamb. Lauren sells meat throughout the year at farmers markets and to local hotels as well as running a cook school from her kitchen and teaching in schools.
Nominee – Qualities
Lauren runs her business with an incredible passion, her drive to promote and explain our rural way of life is immense. Through her social media platform Lauren regularly explains to her customers and followers how their food is produced and how many different aspects of rural life all contribute to our economy, environment and biodiversity. Lauren is an amazing people person and has a real talent at getting the message across, in a world where the rural city divide is constantly widening she works tirelessly to bridge this gap and educate the public on our fragile way of life. With no formal qualifications in the retail and food sector Lauren has shown an unbelievable level of drive and commitment to retrain and excel in this sector. Through a partnership with the Cairngorms National Park, Glenkilrie Larder now donates a ton of venison a year into Scottish schools. This has proved to be a brilliant initiative and given Lauren the ability to get into schools and tell the full story of deer management and teaching children how to cook with venison. This not only allows children to experience eating venison but also gives them an introduction to the rural employment sector as they learn about different aspects of rural life and the potential opportunities within our industry.
Nominee - Sectoral Impact
The health of rural Scotland and its people is central too all the work which Lauren does, she has really fought hard to put our way of life on the map. Many have benefited with the work which Lauren has done but mainly children, she has provided venison over 40 schools and gone into countless schools to run her venison workshops. When it comes to her cook schools the day is as much about teaching the participants about our way of life as it is about cookery, with both virtual and 4x4 farm tours taking place to ensure people really do get to see where their food comes from and the abundance of wildlife that thrive within such a system. We now live in a world where our children are so far removed from the countryside, and their knowledge of its working are often non existent if we are to have any chance of maintaining our way of life it is essential that we help them to understand it. Lauren is outspoken and is not afraid to tackle difficult issues, we live in a world which is governed by city dwellers who have become to familiar with making ill informed decisions which can have hugely detrimental effects on our countryside we need more people like her telling our story!
Nominee - Going the extra mile
Lauren doesn't seem to do anything by half, the majority of her work in schools has been done on a voluntary basis off her own back its driven by pure passion. It doesn't stop there this work has led on to Lauren regularly being asked to do cookery demos, speak and contribute at many events as well regularly contributing to a local newspaper giving her another platform to to sing the praises of traditional land use and the people that carry it out. Lauren recently was a panelist at the SLE conference which she took very seriously spending the weeks running up to it researching all kinds of facts and data to ensure she represents those she cares about as well as she possibly could. I see the side to her no one else does, a more dedicated and determined individual you will struggle to find. She has really proved this over the past year after a campaign she started to improve school meals for our children, after being appalled at the quality of food being served up Lauren started a petition to remove ultra processed foods from our school menu and highlighted ProVeg internationals influence on them, many not realising their involvement and anti-animal agriculture agenda. After John Swinney, Jim Fairly and many industry representatives sat round our kitchen table and a hard campaign Tayside contracts have now stopped working with them, a real success! I have no doubt Lauren is more than worthy of this award.
