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Farms to Feed Us
Farms to Feed Us
If you need something done, give it to a busy person, goes the old saying. Here Catherine St Germans, founder of the Port Eliot Literary Festival and last year’s regenerative agriculture gathering in Cornwall, details how she and a group of other busy people collaborated to create a database that is now helping to feed nearly 8,000 people nationwide.
On April 24th, the night the UK went into lockdown, I arranged my first Zoom gathering with some members of the Regenerative Agriculture WhatsApp group I am a part of, to talk about what was happening and how we could help each other. On the Zoom was Fred Price from Gothelney Farm near Bristol, Abby Rose of Farmerama Radio, Neil Heseltine of Hill Top Farm in the Yorkshire Dales, Oil Baker, a young grower with a seven acre farm near Liskeard, Sophie Chatz of Earthly Creative who had been helping the local food movement in Bristol, while others called in from Cornwall to London.
We had all heard about the CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and veg box schemes being overwhelmed with thousands of new customers, andalso knew that farmers had been left with none and were trying to set up new routes to market.I came to the group with an idea I’d had a few days before: a national database to help connect citizens with small scale farmers and local producers and their new businesses. The crisis had laid bare the fragility of our food system and I wanted to highlight the farmers that were waiting to bring well farmed and delicious food straight from a resilient food and farming network that was still flowing! No supermarket and middleman required.
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In Praise of Short Supply Chains
In Praise of Short Supply Chains
As the coronavirus pandemic affects every area of the food supply chain, the ORFC team find out how Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), box schemes and others working with shorter supply chains are responding to the sudden huge demand for their supplies.
For many people farming, growing or producing food in the UK, the date of March 16th will be etched on their memory forever. This was the first of the daily press conferences given by the government in response to the coronavirus crisis and the date that Boris Johnson recommended the public no longer visited pubs or restaurants. It was also the day the great British public really understood we were facing a crisis of such enormity that our normal food supply chains could be affected and started looking for alternatives, fast.
Within days, CSAs, box schemes, independent and alternative food suppliers received thousands of enquiries. CSAs used to attracting a dozen or so new members a year had so many people wanting to sign up they were forced to close their books. The bigger box schemes like Shillingford Organics in Devon doubled their customer base while the Riverford website received 43 million impressions in one week. Meanwhile, others who supplied the catering and restaurant business were left with no customers at all and had to find new ways to distribute their food. One week later, the country was in lockdown and farmers, and food producers had been officially named as “key workers”—i.e., one of the most important groups of people in our society.
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