Some of the benefits of a Community Farm

Some advantages of growing your own food locally

Getting together to grow food



·         Reduction of dependence on imported food which has a high food miles and a high carbon footprint tariff.

·         Mental and physical health benefits from encouraging local people to be physically active outdoors growing their own food.

A new  project helps build new friendships

·         Consumption of more fresh and local food.

·         Use of organic growing methods that help to increase local biodiversity.

·         Regeneration of underused urban and rural spaces.

·         Increasing community cohesion by bringing together diverse groups of people around a common theme.



·         Educational value through retaining traditional growing skills, learning new skills, and the possibility of exploring modern methods of food growing.



Sharing the burden reduces the load



·         New opportunities for putting more money into the local economy rather than International Supermarket companies. It is known that for every £1 spent locally generates £2.50 of wealth locally. Campaign to protect Rural England

·         Potential for creating and sustaining local jobs.

Two further advantages need a little more explanation.

Community farming ensures the highly efficient use of land for food production. It has the added advantage of getting a large number of people onto a small area of land

 

 To compare our vegetable growing field with a local allotment of an equal size  (0.71 ha or 7100 m²) it would be possible to place 20-24 x 10 rod allotments (1 rod = 25 m²) in a similar area. It is interesting to observe that individual allotment areas allocated by councils are now being reduced, some to five or even two rods.  So considerably more people can be involved our community farm than an equal area given over to traditional allotments. A further advantage of placing allotment size areas under the cultivation of a team of stakeholder is that we ensure that all the land is being cultivated all the time. Some stakeholders may be busy, or ill, or on holiday and so unable to cultivate for a period, but other members of the team will ensure that the crops are looked after and there are therefore no periods of time or pieces of land that are not cultivated or appropriately managed as is often found in allotment areas.



Each plot is about 200-250 m2

We feel that our community farm is of interest to planners of new towns and villages who are looking for planning gain from new and imaginative food growing projects into newer higher density housing developments. For example, in Kettering a provision of 0.4 ha  (4000 m²) per 1000 people is established for allotments and community gardens. Kettering requires developers to provide costs for 12 months of maintenance of these new sites, after which maintenance is transferred to the Council.


 

Hand weeding avoids the use of herbicides

Second, Community growing assures the health giving values of the food consumed. There have been increasing concerns in recent years over the safety of mass produced food available in the supermarkets.  Initial the green revolution of the 50's and 60's significantly increasing the amount of calories produced per acre of agriculture. At the same time battery farming was introduced with scarcely a murmur of protest despite the fact that animals were being kept in crowded conditions and dosed with hormones and antibiotics. However the British public soon became concerned about the state of farming when they discovered that their eggs were infected with Salmonella, (despite Edwina Currie's assurances 1988), cattle were developing BSE from being fed the brains of infected animals (the BSE crisis of 1992) and foot and mouth disease was spreading from farm to farm (2001). So the public has become more aware of some of the less pleasant aspects of intensive agriculture which is bringing us cheap food.  

We feed the soil, rather than add chemicals

Successive Governments have taken little interest in farming and food and in consequence supermarkets have been allowed to gradually take control of the whole of the food supply chain. An example of this are the powerful supermarket chains who have dictated the price for milk paid to the farmer and this has caused many dairy farmers to go out of business. Then supermarkets with their lower out of town costs, free parking and bulk selling which reduces the price have outcompeted the local green grocer and driven them off the High street.  So now we have a situation in the UK where many of the less competitive British farmers have gone into bankruptcy and we are forced to eat food such as apples imported from around the world from countries that can produce them more cheaply than our own farmers, but at unknown costs to their workers, the soil and the food's  nutritional value.

 Carolyn Steel: Hungry city


 

A community farm gives people the opportunity to get back to the soil


Some have suggested that there are lower nutritional values of food grown intensively compared with food grown organically. Other people have expressed concerns over genetically modified foods entering the food chain. For others rising global prices of food and the concept of having to import food from all over the world when we can grow the same crops in our own county have all stimulated the growth of local food growing projects in recent years. defra

Where our community farm is situated


Highbridge Community Farm in Hampshire is part of a larger farm -Highbridge Farm - of 240 acres which is situated on the Northern edge of the town of Eastleigh and straddles the beautiful River Itchen. Much of the farm is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) with managed water meadows which are flooded in late winter. Mr Russell is the last remaining farmer on the Itchen to manage the fields in the traditional manner. The grass on these water meadows warmed and fertilized by the Itchen waters and begin to grow a couple of weeks earlier in the year than surrounding fields which benefits cattle that can begin grazing there significantly earlier. Currently the meadows are home to about 60 beef cattle.

O.S. Map showing northern edge of Eastleigh and Highbridge Farm

The Water meadows

There are 100-120 stakeholders involved in Highbridge Community Farm working on an area of 1.7 acres (0.71 ha) of vegetable growing and 0.935 acres of fruit trees and bushes. The fields are just above the flood plain. A stakeholder can be an individual, couple or a family, so the actual number of people working this land at any one time is around 250 people. Our peak working time is Saturday morning when there are frequently 80 people or so present.

Table 1 How the land at Highbridge Community Farm is allocated

Designation	Area m2 (approx.)	Number of stakeholders involved
20 vegetable plots	4392	100
3 polytunnels	103	5
Soft fruit and rhubarb plus New Soft fruit area	1172	5
3 orchards containing approximately 250 fruit trees	3304	5
Paths, sheds compost bins, stores, selling area, meeting area, water containers.	2350	3

 

Crops being  grown in 2010 -our first 

The Aims and Ethos of our community project

As a group,

•  to produce food locally for ourselves
• To provide an additional, sustainable and resilient food supply in a world where future food supplies are becoming increasingly uncertain
• To encourage the consumption of food that is nutritious and fresh
• To give members knowledge and experience in vegetable and fruit growing, using organic methods as far as possible
• To help our own and the wider community understand climate change, the need for putting more carbon into the soil and less into the atmosphere and the need to transition away from fossil fuel consumption.

In the Ethos statement of Highbridge Community Farm we state:

We have evolved from the Transition Movement and retain their founding principles - a community-led response to the pressures of fossil fuel depletion and climate change, supporting local economies and moving towards a more viable and sustainable future……..we work together to produce food for ourselves with minimum use of fossil fuels and chemicals. We support growing techniques that maintain the natural balance of the soil, preserve wildlife and their habitats, and encourage biodiversity.

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