Local food
Several years ago, walking by the canal, I discovered Nat growing and selling organic vegetables within two miles of my home.
Nat Cross (Undercliff Urban Farm)
At 18 I had a crisis of conscience because I didn’t know how my food was produced. It was a sort of existential angst. I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to grow food. Over several years I started learning. I did a permaculture course. I lived and worked in Thailand and Malaysia on two farms for a year. Back in Bath I started tinkering with growing and learnt more about organic market gardening.
Know where your food comes from
It doesn't make sense not to. Or not to know someone who understands how to grow food. Because you can't expect the current structures to persist indefinitely, especially ones based on non-renewable fossil fuel extraction. Those structures are quite precarious.
Even my local food production is totally reliant on plastic and a little bit of fuel, but it's one step closer to how it needs to be. If you could measure all the plastic usage in sustainable agriculture there'd be a lot of other things higher up the list in terms of fossil fuel use.
Local food
Local food has become a buzzword. Nevertheless, it's a way in, isn't it? People have to keep in touch with food production somehow and they do it best by knowing someone. There is a lot of change ahead of us, either implementing change or dealing with change. We have a system based on extracting and burning fossil fuels that is creating more and more precarious situations. What's the best way to mitigate the upheavals and make the transition? We've evolved to be quite social, and the mechanisms around change are going to be highly interpersonal. Well, just do something small and local that people find tangible. Something that can help provide a buffer. Something that can do a bit of midwifery on the transition. Ideally, it will be a transition rather than a jarring collision. But in either one of those scenarios, being a local food producer helps for the good.
I could potentially grow more food. Some of the limits in production are to do with my growing sites and situation; some are to do with where would the food go? How do you set up your infrastructure to deal with having more food to ship? I don't want to expand just from a business perspective. It would only make sense to me if people were asking locally for more food. I'd love to scale it up if there's a real demand, if people understand why it's important to eat local food and support local producers. That would be the reason for me to take on more land and loans and have more people working with me.
How do you create a cultural shift that involves supporting local producers while also making food equitable, affordable? Organic local food can’t be a virtue of the rich. Some of the issue is down to cost, some of it is a weird cultural thing that means organics falls into the PC brigade area.
The social side
Social area, with pizza oven
It would be nice to do more socially. I’m now almost more interested in that than growing. But how do I make a livelihood doing that? The social side is like putting out advertising flyers, but doing it in a way that is much more enjoyable for all of us.
You create a space where people can explore the reasons why they should change their habits. It has to be person led. People have to understand why they're doing things. It's not sustainable if you're forced to do it, or if you just randomly do it because you have to go on a diet. Human beings are their own worst enemies. It's very hard to find the correct social dynamic that appeals to them or that helps them to move in a different direction.
Wholesale
I do wholesale when I like the people I sell to and there is feedback about what they're doing. I certainly don't go looking for those outlets. I tried to, especially early on, but it just didn't work. How long should I keep trying? I find it a bit psychologically exhausting because we operate on different wavelengths.
The local economy
Compared with a multi million pound tourist economy, it would be more valuable for people to be growing food locally. Not that it isn't lovely to have people visiting. But in terms of the actual economy, the meat and bones of a long term sustainable economy, it doesn't get much more important than local food.
I’ve heard a bit about bioregionalism which I think is based around looking at the resources that you've got available in your area and how to best make use of them. Coppicing is a really good example, managing woodland to provide timber. Or having local limestone and using lime in building. For me, the local economy ought to have a lot of resilience based around local production.
I’m still buying potting compost, though I’m trying to use more green manures. I buy seed from someone who's maybe no more than 100 miles away.
With a local economy, some of my money has to go to other local producers ideally. It does, but not as much as I might like. I’m always thinking about how I can do it better. For example, when I buy dairy I should buy it from a local producer.
It's such a sliding scale with some of the things that we permit ourselves, especially if you have a child. Blueberries for instance are a very healthy and easy snack for a child. But I couldn't justify buying them for myself. It would be lovely to contemplate and develop an alternative that is based around local production. It could be based on preserving or dehydrating and rehydrating like dried prunes. Or it could use a really low impact system of production that's based around using thermal mass and ground source heat pumps and glass. You could have season extension that way, but it would be quite radical.
Eating seasonally
That is what humans were doing 200 years ago. For us to transition, it has to be really nice - and it can be. Or it will just be different. But the more people try to do little things the more chance we have of making it work rather than panicking when the supply chains that we've become so dependent on show signs of stress. COVID and other things have shown us that recently.
Regenerative agriculture
I've taken this phrase off my website because I do it in theory, but it's become a bit of a greenwash thing. It's about improving the soil but even that is such a nebulous term. Well, I guess people do measure for organic matter, but I don't.
I use compost that's a byproduct from my chickens. I use my wood ash and I've been dredging my ponds. I just take this sort of mineral anaerobic sludge and put it on the soil and cover it. When I come back the worms are just all over it.
I also bring in the green manure. That is really interesting, but at my scale it's hard to do a lot. But it still is exciting. Some green manures are quite quick, a two month turnover, but generally it’s slower, which is a really nice place to be.
I keep meaning to do plant ferments. I did a day course on them. You cultivate local microbes from different woodlands around your area and you create biofertiliser. The main theory is that the microbes can help extract nutrients that the plants need from whatever is around. The microbes are doing that in woodland settings. Every year they turn leaf litter into nutrients and they help extract more nutrients from the ground rock like Fungi do.
The problem with being a sort of serf is you can't win either way. Investing the time and effort to improve soil and so on is building natural capital for the long term. I might not even benefit. Alternatively, I can’t scrimp because my process needs some of those elements now.
Some positive outcomes can be ten, twenty, thirty years down the line. They're intergenerational. If I can find the time and energy to protect the process, whatever that looks like, then that's what I feel is the correct direction for my energy.
Community Supported Agriculture
(There are many forms of CSA. Basically the customers invest in the grower in advance of the harvest, and are paid back later in produce. )
Some CSA's provide members with veg boxes all year or for part of a year. Mine has flexibility, the customers take produce as and when they want it which I think is better for them. I like my system because I'm less stressed about making boxes. I don't mind the work of making boxes, but I don’t have to convince people they must have a box to support me as a grower.
Being low-tech
I can look after all my bikes and maintain my little tractor. I serviced my parents’ bicycles recently and that felt great because I've got all the tools and I know how to do everything.
I think in farming generally, you have to learn to be a bit of a Jack of all trades because if you employ people to maintain your machines and create your structures you don't make much money. I don’t even know who could maintain my bicycles or fix the tractor. Anyway it is just very fulfilling ultimately.
Low-tech tools are often easier to maintain. Well, in theory. The scythe is lovely but I couldn't make one. I could probably build a forge.
Applying the same approach to growing, green manure is the very traditional way of maintaining soil quality. Horses would be a great thing. But I don’t own the land. If I got involved with horses and suddenly had to leave, I’d have homeless horses and that would be a disaster. I’d feel irresponsible. Maybe a mule. I could probably keep a mule - but it would be a bit much.
It's about not wanting to get too far into drudgery.
Climate change
This is my 7th season so my scope is limited. We can definitely mitigate climate effects here. But the winds are getting windier. Some of the seasons are getting wetter and some are getting much drier.
April 2023
Find Undercliff Urban Farm online at undercliffurbanfarm.co.uk