The beginnings of Highbridge Community Farm

In late 2009 the world was reeling from three major threats to stability. First was the consequences of the bank collapses and the subsequent economic recession that was reducing global economic activity and causing a rise in unemployment.Global Food Security
Second was a feeling among Environmental groups that our world was past the days of peak oil production, that oil would become a scarce commodity, threatening energy production, transport and industrial scale food production. Here in Britain in 2012 the AgriFood industry, by burning oil was adding around 70 million tonnes metric equivalent of CO₂ to the atmosphere each year.  DEFRA p 35 Third, was the rapid rise in global food prices. In Britain food prices rose 18% in real terms between 2007 and their peak in August 2012, levelled until 2013 and subsequently fell back to January 2015 making a food price increase of 7.7% between 2207 and 2015.[iii] DEFRA p 18  Here in Britain we imported 47% of the food that we consumed in 2013[iv]DEFRA p26 and so it was felt that we could be vulnerable if there were major global crop failures caused by climate change.  The UK could be outcompeted for increasingly scare food resources by the rising superpower nations like China and India and so we could find ourselves struggling to feed ourselves.

These issues were debated in the newly formed Eastleigh Transition Network (E.T.Net.) during the autumn of 1979 and we pondered how we could act to inform, challenge and change our community response to these problems. The dozen or so of us in the Food Group of E.T.Net., were attempting to address the issues of reducing food miles and  increasing local food production and consumption. We had put an article in our local borough news expressing our interest in acquiring a field to begin to grow more food locally. Farmer Henry Russell read that article and was moved to help us. This is an account of how his kind initial gesture helped give birth to an unique project called Highbridge Community Farm.

18th February 2010. Mr Russell offers Eastleigh Transition Network use of two fields

In February 2010 Mr Russell offered us a field approximately 4 acres in size divided across the middle with a barbed wire fence. The smaller field had been sown with maize for a few years, for which the farmer received an EEC subsidy, but he never harvested the crop as there was no money in that. The larger field was a meadow which was occasionally cut for silage. We accepted Mr Russell's offer to cultivate the smaller of the two fields. At the time it was a gentleman's offer, no papers were signed, no figures of money discussed. Later we arrived at a cropping licence fee of £400 per year which included some initial help to plough the field and the provision of some fencing materials.

The smaller field had been sewn with maize, but not harvested

 Two of us had done some work in Community development and were keen to start a project that would help to create a community feeling with many unquantifiable benefits to the membership and also to use it as an educational project. Several members of our team had experience of growing on allotments and we decided on a fruit and vegetable growing project that might avoid some of the difficulties experienced at allotments where many people find the first year or two on an allotment very daunting. They are of ten confronted with a weed patch which takes months to dig, by which time the peak planting season has been missed. And then come the questions of what should be planted and so growing fruit and veg in an allotment is often a steep learning curve. We thought that some of the 400+ on Eastleigh Borough Council’s Allotment Waiting List might be interested in joining us rather than waiting another four years. Then there were the multitudes of people who were watching the TV programmes and hearing about the renaissance in growing their own food, despite the problems of getting land to grow it on, or even trying to grow their own in their back gardens and window boxes,  Would some of them be interested in joining us?

Chatting over the offer