We are steadily progressing with our long-term plans to establish a large farm, ‘Ecommodation’ and social change centre somewhere close to Manchester, and last month we carried out a survey to start gathering thoughts and ideas from friends, supporters and Manchester residents.
The response was great, with over 250 surveys completed, and some really encouraging results! Thanks so much everyone who filled it in. There was so much enthusiasm for the ideas we put out there, and we got some great new suggestions and some challenging questions as well. All really useful. We can’t wait to get more people involved in making our plans a reality.
Many of the findings were unsurprising. Over 90% said that if they could, they’d buy food that is grown & produced closer by using more sustainable methods. Part of our vision for the farm is to increase the amount of organic produce grown locally, and crucially, through mechanisms like Manchester Veg People, to make it a viable livelihood for the people who grow it. It was great to see so much awareness of the challenge this entails, 63% already knew that “many growers earn less than the minimum wage because the prices they get for their vegetables are so low”. And even more (80%) were prepared to pay a little more to ensure the grower got a fair price.
Huge enthusiasm was displayed for helping growers get established, with 88% feeling that our plans to make affordable land available to small sustainable producers was of value. Once we’ve secured our land this is an early priority, as we look to build on our existing FarmStart programme. Most people also agreed that low impact, highly efficient social housing on the farm (for people to be able to remain in their area and so producers can live close to their land) would be useful.
Nearly 90% agreed that “better food choices can help reduce the impact of climate change” but perhaps without knowing just quite how big an impact food has. The exact figures for this are debated, but agriculture certainly accounts for more emissions than transportation (it’s somewhere between 14% and 33% of global totals) and agriculture’s emissions are still rising. That’s why the farm will focus on organic production of plant-based foodstuffs for a local market, the lowest-carbon kind of diet there is.
Several people raised the issue of price for consumers, with a concern that sustainable food should not be something that is restricted to a lifestyle choice of the well-to-do. Tied to this, there was a very high level of support (90%) for the idea of making healthy, sustainable food available in schools, care homes and hospitals. This is something we are trying to achieve, affordably, with our Sustainable Fayre package and which we hope the farm will allow us to do much more of.
Excitingly, there was also a lot of interest in getting involved in some way, from coming on courses on living more sustainably or practical training in farming, bio-diversity etc. (60%), buying food grown there (80%) or helping spread the word about our plans (76%). Over a hundred people said they’d consider supporting us to get established by buying shares or donating, 70 were interested in volunteering and another hundred wanted to know more.
We know as with all these things that the people who kindly filled in our survey were a very self-selecting participant group! Nonetheless, we feel really encouraged that so many folk out there share our vision and view our farm plan as a positive and necessary response to the challenges we face in our food system and wider society.
Over the next year we will be talking much more about the farm and there will be opportunities emerging for more people to get involved. So….watch this space!