• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Home

Local Food in a Changing Climate'''

We had a fantastic lunch and community discussion in the Town Hall on Sunday 16 November. There were inspiring speakers - Nick from Future Farms in Martin, Andrew from WORM and our own Dirty Nails - and great debates that generated some great ideas about what we can do in Shaftesbury. Some of the notes we made are written out below, but, in brief, this is what we want to do:

• Future Farm Shaftesbury - renting local fields as a community and working to produce enough food to feed hundreds of families in Shaftesbury
• The Wessex Diet - teaming up with Shaftesbury Local Food Festival to encourage everyone to eat local
• Garden Share and LETS - bringing together people who want to garden with people who need help in their gardens
• Apple Juicing - helping out at a local orchard'''

Transition Town Shaftesbury Food Open Space, 16/11/08: Notes

Wessex Diet

• I’m an ‘ELF’ – Eat Local Food
• Shaftesbury local food challenge
• Fife Diet – Square Mile Living
• Dorset Farmer’s Market – allows non-Dorset eg. Venison from Devon
• Shaftesbury Local Food Festival (joint TTS) – 2 May

- Low food mile challenge for meal - Add up food miles – eg. Average Xmas dinner 25,000 miles!!! - Recipe book launch

• Monthly Wessex communal meal
• Use TTS forum to discuss
• BVM – blog, recipes
• Nutritionist – analyse diet, Dr
• Wild food map, forage walks eg. Elderflowers/berries
• Run Wessex diet for a year – awards local food festival 2010
• Inaugural meeting, Jan 09 – publicity
• As well as ‘organic’ have ‘chemical free’ or ‘natural’

Future Farm Shaftesbury

• Rent land from farmer (17 acres)
• Hire in machines & drivers
• 6 steering committee – scientist, computer, veg grower, admin etc.
• Letter – meeting – we want to grow veg, chickens (14wks), pigs (26 wks), polytunnel
• Needs to be tangible to average consumer
• Grants – unlimited
• How many?
• 200 families?
• 8 people who look after 20 families

Apple Juicing (Quiet Corner Farm, Henstridge, 01963 363045)

• 2 acre orchard – huge crop
• Tuesdays & Thursdays mornings 10-1 – juice your own
• Primary school classes could go
• Need screw top wine bottles
• Future of orchard
• Investment in equipment already made

Garden Share & LETS

• Website & phone contact to be organised
• Security check? References for people taking part
• Combining allotment waiting list with garden share
• See how Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Totnes TT run scheme
• Not everyone has pc access
• Chicken share
• Bee share
• Collect together numbers or contact details of people with smallholding or veg growing experience
• Collaborate between local garden share schemes – to swap experience & avoid overlap
• Training & mentoring in growing for beginners
• Local WWOOFs – working weekends on organic farms
• work experience exchange parties
• Exchange seeds & gluts within LETS scheme
• Share info on permaculture within LETS
• Compost masterclass & workshops on pruning etc
• Communal compost site – would enable horse/goat manure to be collected & used
• Advice on manure suitability – shit inspection
• Bulk order of seeds would be cheaper
• Join LETS to share & barter food & expertise & help
• LETS will hold workshops on most topics asked
• Local schools might be good contact for matching need with experience
• Think about how to advertise scheme locally
• Help the Aged good contact for land available

The food in our bellies

How resilient is our town to the shocks and scares of a global crisis? We are living in very uncertain times and the recent collapse in the financial markets has demonstrated all too clearly just how interdependent our world really is – who would have thought a year ago that the council tax payers of Shaftesbury were so directly connected to the American housing market or the fate of Icelandic banks? And we face other global challenges. Scientists now fear that climate change is happening more rapidly than predicted. Many geologists think that the oil supplies are beginning to run down. Our world may be on the brink of a new era – no more easy credit, cheap energy or carbon pollution.

But what will this new low-carbon future look like? We will most probably need be more thrifty and re-learn some of the ‘mend-and-make-do’ skills of the past (the older citizens of Shaftesbury have much to teach us here). We might also need to think about how we share what we have with our friends and neighbours. But what about that most basic staple of all – food? If the lorries stopped coming to town – for any reason - how would Shaftesbury feed itself? I don’t mean to sound alarmist by asking this question – I just think we should pause for a moment to think about it, and think about how dependent we are on a global system of growing, preparing and distributing food. Some major towns only have enough food reserves for 2 meals per person! It all works fine if everything carries on just the way it is – but the world is telling us that business-as-usual isn’t working any more – the credit crunch is only the latest in a series of calamities. We need to change the way we think and the way we live. We need to get creative.

That’s why Transition Town Shaftesbury is organising a special event to think about the future of food in Shaftesbury. We’ll have speakers from Martin in Hampshire - where they’ve had amazing success growing food for the whole village – from the Wessex Organic Movement and (hopefully) from the NFU. It’ll be a chance for people to get together to talk about the foody things that inspire them – from allotments to community supported agriculture, from feasts to food miles. So why not bring a sandwich – or slap-up lunch - and come to listen to our Samba band and chat about the future of local food in Shaftesbury.

Local Food in a Changing Climate, Sunday 16th November, 11:30-3, Shaftesbury Town Hall