Agro-forestry – two inspirational farming examples.
“You’ll notice that the diversity theme keeps coming up” began Martin Wolfe “diversity in farming is the only sustainable way to farm and Agroforestry is the best way to maximise diversity”.
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Our Feeding Stockport co-ordinator Jemma recently helped run a workshop at the Sustainable Food Cities conference focussed on the Food Economy; helping to build skills, jobs, businesses and communities through healthy and sustainable food.
Many local authorities have started to recognise the key role a revitalized ‘good-food’ culture can play in boosting local jobs and businesses, and in making their town centres a destination of choice.
A three-strong team from Salford make up our new Abbey Leys FarmStart contingent. Brother and sister Sam and Jo plus friend Ashley have a mix of growing experience between them, including home growing, working on a potato farm and long-term wwoofing in New Zealand.
Bailey McCracken joined Kindling last year to help get our organic box scheme off the ground – if you’re a Veg Box People customer you’ll know her friendly face from the Tuesday afternoon pick up at Manchester University. But she’s also getting stuck in growing at our Woodbank Park site in Stockport. This means she gets to see the whole food chain, from plant to plate (almost…)
The EU influences every aspect of the UK’s food and farming systems; subsiding farming to the tune of billions and regulating everything from worker and consumer protection to rural development, biodiversity and river water quality.
We’ve just entered our one and a half acres at Woodbank Park into organic conversion, a process that covers the changeover from non-organic to organic growing. It’s being overseen by the Soil Association, one of the UK’s organisations for licensing organic food growing. The Association annually inspects every grower it licenses, to ensure that everyone sticks to its stringent set of standards. We now begin the three-year pathway to providing organic, local produce for the Stockport area.
We’ve recently spent a couple of days helping a group of 8-10 year olds from Hulme to create a Wangari Maathai Peace Grove, in honour of the first African women to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The grove is one of three being created in the city through the wonderful Manchester Environmental Education Network (MEEN). According to MEEN’s co-ordinator Raichael, the project aims to “inspire our communities with Wangari Maathai’s story, to bring young and older community activists together to share their stories whilst taking positive action together by planting trees”.
Once again the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) gave us a great start to the year, made even more exciting by the very first meeting of the Kindling farm's advisory group!
The conference, now in its fifth year, is a unique gathering of the UK’s agroecological farming movement. And the evening before the start of ORFC, some of the most respected people in the sector met to explore and challenge our vision for Kindling’s farm. As well as offering very positive and useful feedback, they started to look at how to help us communicate our vision for the farm to the outside world.
We’ve got a brand new crop of seven FarmStarters spread over our two FarmStart sites, who will soon be getting stuck into their first ever season of organic veg production on a commercial scale. Here’s some thoughts from the folk taking part:
We’re really pleased to share the news that two of our FarmStarters, Axel and Owen, are graduating to become fully fledged farmers with Glebelands City Growers.