Contributor Guidelines

Send a pitch of no more than 300 words to editorial@fisherandfarmer.com. In that pitch, tell us: what the piece is about and what its argument is (not just its subject); why you are the right person to write it; which section and format you are proposing; and your approximate word count.

Do not send a finished piece unless we have asked for one. Do not send more than two pitches in a single email. Do not pitch a piece that depends on a press trip, a comped meal, or a product placement — we will decline it.

We aim to respond within three weeks. If you have followed up once and a month has passed, assume we are not interested in that pitch at this time.

We accept pitches from unpublished writers. We do not require an extensive CV. We do require a clear sense that you know what you are talking about and can demonstrate it on the page.

The question to ask of every pitch: could this piece run in Saveur, or Edible, or The Field, or Country Life? If yes, it is probably not right for Fisher & Farmer. The pieces that belong here are too specific, too slow, too literary, and too partisan about landscape for anywhere else.

Afield is the editorial heart of the publication. It covers fishing, farming, foraging, and hunting — not as leisure pursuits but as practices with ecological, economic, and cultural consequences. The best Afield pieces operate at the intersection of reportage and essay: they go somewhere specific, find someone doing something specific, and use that particularity to say something larger about how we feed ourselves and at what cost.

Fish

Fish covers everything from inshore commercial fishing and aquaculture to fly-fishing, angling culture, and the politics of quota, conservation, and access. We are interested in the people who work the water professionally, the science of fish and their habitats, the history of fishing communities, and the experience of the water itself. We do not publish gear reviews in this section (see Provisions), but we do publish pieces that use a specific fish, a specific place, or a specific season as a lens on something larger.

1,500–4,500 words for features — 600–900 words for field notes

Farm & Garden

Farm & Garden covers food production: arable farming, livestock, market gardens, heritage breeds and varieties, soil science, and the economics of small-scale food growing. We are particularly interested in pieces that take seriously the tension between artisan production and commercial viability, and in work that examines what conservation agriculture actually looks like on the ground in our three geographies.

1,500–4,000 words for features — 600–900 words for field notes

Forage

Forage covers wild food: plants, fungi, seaweed, shellfish, and the knowledge systems and legal frameworks that govern their harvest. This is a section for writers who know their species and habitats with precision. Misidentification is not a literary device here — accuracy is non-negotiable, and we will fact-check botanical and mycological claims carefully.

1,200–3,500 words for features — 400–700 words for field notes

Hunt

Hunt covers game in the broadest sense: walked-up and driven shooting, deer stalking, wildfowling, and the ethics and culture that surround them. We are not interested in pieces that either romanticise or condemn hunting without engaging with its actual practice. We want writing from people who are in the field, who understand the quarry and its management, and who can discuss the subject with the seriousness it deserves.

1,500–4,000 words for features — 600–900 words for field notes

Library publishes reviews, essays, and criticism related to books and reading — specifically cookbooks, fiction with food at its centre, food memoir, natural history writing that intersects with food culture, and literary nonfiction that treats land and water as subjects of serious inquiry. We are not a general book review outlet. A pitch to Library should make clear why this book belongs in a publication that covers food, land, and water with the seriousness Fisher & Farmer does.

Cookbook Reviews

A cookbook review in Fisher & Farmer is not a summary of contents followed by a verdict. It is an essay that uses a specific cookbook as a way into a larger question about food culture, technique, tradition, or geography. We want to know what the book does, whether it succeeds, and what it tells us about the moment it was made and the world it addresses. Where appropriate, we expect the reviewer to have cooked from the book.

900–1,800 words

Fiction and Essay Reviews

Fiction reviews follow the same principle as cookbook reviews: the review is an essay, not a summary. We are interested in fiction that uses food, land, or water as more than backdrop — where the harvesting, growing, cooking, or eating of food carries moral or narrative weight. For nonfiction, we review work that would not typically be reviewed in food media but belongs on our readers’ shelves: natural history, memoir, landscape writing, and cultural criticism.

900–2,000 words

Essays from the Library

Occasionally we commission standalone essays prompted by a book or body of work rather than formal reviews. These use a text or author as a departure point for original thinking. A pitch of this kind should make clear what argument you intend to make, not just which book you want to write about.

1,500–3,000 words

Living covers the material and domestic culture of people who take food seriously: the kitchen, its tools and equipment, the objects that accumulate around a life of cooking and eating, and the places — fisheries, farms, harbours, markets — that have earned sustained attention. Living is where Fisher & Farmer is most deliberately a home publication, in the tradition of the best food and domestic writing.

Kitchen

Kitchen covers technique, equipment, and the practice of cooking at home. We are interested in pieces that take a specific question of technique or a specific tool seriously enough to actually investigate it. Not lifestyle coverage of kitchen trends, but essays that use a method, an ingredient, or a piece of equipment as the occasion for genuine inquiry. A piece about cast iron should tell us something we did not know. A piece about stock should argue a position.

1,000–2,500 words

Material Culture

Material Culture is our most essayistic section. It covers objects: the things people use to fish, cook, forage, and farm, with particular attention to craft, provenance, and the way tools accumulate meaning over time. A split-cane rod, an Irish dresser, a copper fish kettle, a hand-forged knife — this section is interested in the stories these objects carry and what they reveal about the traditions they come from. Writing here should be careful with detail and generous with context.

1,200–3,000 words

Places

Places covers specific locations: fishmongers, farms, harbours, markets, restaurants, and other food-producing or food-serving places worth knowing about in our three geographies. A Place piece is not a review and not a travel guide — it is a portrait of somewhere that deserves to exist and that our readers should know about. It should tell us who runs it, what they are doing, why it matters, and what it is like to be there.

800–1,800 words

Provisions is the section closest to the shop and the larder. It covers ingredients, products, and the practices of preserving, fermenting, curing, baking, and preparing food at home. It is the section where recipes appear most frequently, though we are not primarily a recipe publication and a recipe alone will not be commissioned. In Provisions, a recipe must be earned by the writing that surrounds it.

Larder and Pantry Features

The Larder covers ingredients and their producers: the salt panner, the cheesemaker, the heritage grain miller, the miso brewer. The Pantry covers prepared and preserved foods. Features in both subcategories follow the same model: a specific ingredient or product, a specific producer or tradition, and enough context to explain why it matters. Recipes may accompany these pieces but are not required.

1,000–2,500 words

The Key Ingredient

A short essay about a single ingredient. The format is: what it is, where it comes from, what it does technically in cooking, and one recipe that expresses it at its best. The writing should be specific and confident. We are not looking for a summary of Wikipedia and a lifted recipe — we are looking for a writer who has spent time with this ingredient and has something to say about it.

600–1,000 words, plus one recipe

Life of the Partie

Taking its name from the brigade de cuisine, Life of the Partie is a profile and interview format focused on the people who cook and produce food professionally — chefs, fishmongers, butchers, bakers, producers, and others working in the food trades. Each piece centres on a single subject and uses conversation and observation to illuminate their craft, their background, and their perspective on the food world they inhabit.

1,000–2,500 words

Taste Test

Taste Test operates as both a comparative tasting format and a cookbook testing kitchen. We select a category of product — oysters from three producers, canned fish from five countries, salted butters, oat flours — taste them with rigour, and report the results honestly. We also test recipes from new and notable cookbooks, working them in a home kitchen and reporting honestly on what succeeds, what fails, and what the experience of cooking from the book is actually like.

800–1,500 words

Agenda is our events, calendar, and news section. It covers festivals, markets, workshops, seasons, and the public life of food in our three geographies. Agenda content is largely commissioned from writers with close local knowledge of a specific place or event. It is the section with the shortest lead times and the tightest word counts.

We publish event previews and reviews, workshop listings, and short reported items about developments in food policy, conservation, and trade that are relevant to our readership. Agenda is sometimes where a subject that will become a longer Afield or Provisions piece first surfaces.

150–600 words depending on format

Fisher & Farmer uses the following formats across all sections. When pitching, please specify which format you are proposing. If you are unsure, describe what you intend to write and we will advise.

The Reported Essay

Our most common and most valued format. A reported essay combines first-hand reporting — interviews, observation, research — with an essayistic voice and a clear argument. It goes somewhere, finds people doing something, and arrives at a position. It is not a feature in the magazine journalism sense, which tends to subordinate the writer’s perspective to a neutral structure of claim and evidence. In a reported essay, the writer’s presence and judgment are part of the material.

A reported essay in Fisher & Farmer typically has: a specific setting and time; at least one major source encountered in person; a thesis that is argued, not merely stated; and a prose style that takes the writing itself seriously.

2,000–5,000 words

The Personal Essay

A personal essay uses the writer’s own experience as the primary material. It does not require reporting in the conventional sense, but it does require the same rigour and precision of observation. A personal essay is not a memory piece that mistakes detail for meaning. It should have a subject, a form, and an argument — even if that argument is carried through implication rather than stated directly.

1,500–4,000 words

The Profile

A profile puts a single person — a fisher, a cheesemaker, a seed librarian, a chef, a conservationist — at the centre of a piece of reported writing. It is not an interview transcribed and formatted with pull quotes. It is a portrait in prose, built from observation, research, and conversation, that uses this particular person to illuminate the practice, place, or tradition they represent.

1,500–3,500 words

The Field Note

A field note is short, immediate, and concrete. It records something observed or experienced in the field: a day on the water, a foray into a wood, a morning at a fish market, a single hour in a kitchen. Field notes are written close to the experience and in a plain, direct register. They do not need to argue a thesis, but they do need to be precise. A field note that could have been written by anyone, about anywhere, is not a field note we will publish.

400–900 words

The Review

Fisher & Farmer publishes book reviews, equipment reviews, and place reviews. In all cases, a review in this publication is an essay as much as an evaluation. We want a considered position, clearly argued, with the evidence to support it. We do not publish star ratings or scores. We do publish opinions, including negative ones.

800–2,000 words depending on subject

The Interview

We publish interviews infrequently and tend to commission them for specific purposes rather than accepting pitches. When we do publish an interview, it is edited for clarity and given a strong editorial frame — it does not run as a raw Q&A. If you have a subject in mind and a reason why their perspective is essential reading for our audience, make that case in your pitch.

1,000–2,500 words edited

Fisher & Farmer publishes across three editions. Pitches should specify which edition they are aimed at. Some subjects — a comparison of inshore fishing policy in Ireland and Scotland, or a piece on the historic connections between Irish and American Southern food culture — may span more than one.

We do not commission travel pieces about food. We commission pieces about specific places written by people who know them. The distinction matters.

Ireland

Connemara, the west coast, the midlands, and wherever Irish food culture and the people who make it are found. We have particular interests in west coast fisheries, Gaeltacht food traditions, and the intersection of conservation and livelihood in marginal landscapes.

United Kingdom

Hampshire, the Solent, the New Forest, and the broader UK food landscape. The UK edition is currently the least developed of our three, and we are actively seeking pitches from writers with strong local knowledge of specific British food places and practices. This is an open lane.

US Southeast

The Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, coastal fisheries, the food traditions of the Sea Islands, and Southern food culture understood historically and ecologically rather than as a nostalgia project.

Accuracy

We fact-check all published work. Species names, place names, historical claims, statistics, and quotations will all be checked, and we will come back to you with queries. Please keep your notes and be prepared to provide sources. If you are writing about foraging, we will check botanical and mycological identifications. If you are writing about fishing, we will check species biology and regulatory information.

Voice

Fisher & Farmer has a clear editorial voice: plain, precise, undecorated prose that earns its moments of beauty rather than reaching for them. We do not want lush nature writing that performs wonder at the expense of observation. We do not want food writing that confuses sensory description with meaning. We want writing that knows what it is talking about and trusts the subject to carry the weight.

The publication is written in British English for the Ireland and UK editions and American English for the US Southeast edition.

Originality

Submitted work must not have been published elsewhere, in print or online, in substantially the same form. If you are pitching a piece that develops from an earlier published piece of your own, tell us clearly what is new. We do not accept work submitted simultaneously to another publication.

Conflicts of Interest

We do not accept pieces whose travel or expenses have been funded by a commercial entity with an interest in the coverage. If you have a material relationship with a business, person, or organisation you are writing about, disclose it at the pitch stage. Fisher & Farmer does not carry advertising in its editorial content, and advertisers have no influence over commissioning decisions.

Photography

We welcome photography alongside editorial pitches. If you have original photography, tell us in your pitch and attach one or two low-resolution samples. Images should be supplied as high-resolution JPEGs or TIFFs (minimum 2,400px on the long edge) if a piece is commissioned. We do not use stock photography in editorial content.

Fisher & Farmer pays for all commissioned work. Rates vary by section, format, and length and are discussed at the commissioning stage. We pay on publication for pitches and on acceptance for commissioned work.

We purchase first serial rights in English across our three geographic editions, digital and print. All other rights remain with the contributor. We ask for a six-month period of exclusivity from date of publication before the piece may be republished elsewhere, and we ask that any subsequent publication credits Fisher & Farmer as the original publisher.

We do not pay kill fees for pitches that are not taken forward. We pay a kill fee of 25% of the agreed rate for commissioned work that is completed to brief but not published for editorial reasons.

Submissions and invoices can also be sent directly to editors@fisherandfarmer.com.