Growing Livelihoods – supporting new commercial growers across the UK
Kindling’s Director and co-founder Helen Woodcock recently went to Bristol to attend a Growing Livelihoods event that brought together projects from all over the UK and Ireland to discuss the challenges and solutions for supporting new entrants into commercial food growing. Read on for more from Helen.
There was a wide range of ideas and experience in the room, with projects ranging from a family farm looking at how to use their land to support and work with new growers, to a group of individual new growers looking at how to work more co-operatively together, to a growing project on National Trust land, to a project to install a geodesic dome and provide training to grow salad crops hydroponically and mushrooms on spent coffee grounds and shredded cardboard.
We spent the day putting our heads together on issues such as access to land, marketing, co-operative working and collaboration and heard about a great new producers certificate starting up in Bristol soon. Lots of food for thought – a summary of which can be found in the report of the day downloadable below, and it was great to meet everyone and to get to look around the Severn project (and look in wonder and slight envy at their spanish tunnels, seeders and salad bagger). We look forward to learning more from these inspiring projects.
FarmStart is one of the original 5 pilot projects supported by Growing Livelihoods (which has excitingly just taken on 5 more pilots) – a partnership between Carnegie Trust UK, The Plunkett Foundation and the Land Settlement Association, and is focused on supporting initiatives like FarmStart that support new commercial growers.