organic farming and climate change, the nutritional value of organic food, resource use in agriculture, feeding the world, GM, pesticides, the abuse of antibiotics in livestock farming and animal welfare. Melchett played a leading role in guiding the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, an alliance of health, environmental and animal-welfare groups – coordinated by non-governmental organisations Compassion in World Farming, the Soil Association and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming, campaigning to stop the overuse of antibiotics in livestock. The Alliance was founded in 2009 and has helped put the issue of antibiotic resistance at the centre of farm policy. By 2018, large cuts in antibiotic use in British farming had been achieved, and the European Union had agreed to plans to ban routine farm antibiotic use. Melchett was one of the leading people responsible for launching the Soil Association's successful school food programme, Food for Life and Food for Life Served Here, a certification scheme for healthy and sustainable catering, currently covering 1.7 million meals served outside the home daily. He was the first Chair of the Food for Life Partnership, led by the Soil Association – originally in partnership with the Focus on Food Campaign, Garden Organic and the Health Education Trust, awarded a five-year, £16.9m Big Lottery grant (2007–2011) that resulted in engagement with 20% of English schools (which now covers over half the primary schools in England), and which is delivering radical improvements in school meal take-up, significant improvements in attendance, behaviour and academic achievement, and major improvements in children's and their parents’ diets. From 1973, Melchett was the managing director of 890-acre (360 hectares) Courtyard Farm at Ringstead near Hunstanton,[5],which was owned by his father, and is now owned by a charitable trust. The farm fully converted to organic in 2000, and crops include barley, wheat, and beans, all grown for seed, and clover and grass for cattle feed. The prize-winning farm is well known for the wildlife conservation work done there over the last 50 years, and for the high level of public access provided for more than 30 years. The farm has been involved in numerous agricultural and conservation research projects. Panel and board memberships Melchett was a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology (1981–1985), a member of the BBC's Rural Affairs Committee (2005–2018), the Government's Rural Climate Change Forum (2009–2010) and Organic Action Plan