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