Alice

I grew up on an organic farm in West Wales. Attended the United World College of the Atlantic & SOAS completing a degree in Social Anthropology. I have since worked at Ballymaloe Cookery School, River Cottage & Coleshill Organics, where I trained in horticulture as the pilot apprentice for the Soil Association apprenticeship scheme. I am currently the grower for Fforest Farm. A combined experience of my work and study has raised my awareness of how food inherently connects humans to the land.

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Atlantic College Sustainability Conference

In mid November I was kindly asked to attend a sustainability conference at Atlantic College. This is a very special place and one dear to my heart. The college, one of over a dozen internationally, was founded in the Sixties on Kurt Hahns vision of giving service and enhancing understanding. For fifty years since, students from all over the world have united to share, learn and grow-up together. This all happens in the wild and romantic setting of St Donats Castle, perched above the turbulent waters of the Bristol channel. I had attended the college myself leaving in 1999 – which was a shock when realising the students are now nearly half my age. Perhaps I did not grow-up as I did not feel such a gap.

Service is an important part of College life. At the beginning of the two years students choose a service for which they will dedicate 6 hours a week. Service can mean many things- from safe guarding the channel with the RNLI to visiting the elderly or helping deliver lambs in spring.

Back in the last century, when I was a student, my service to the environment was a bit limited. My connection to the incredible surroundings were skin deep. It was a wonderful stage set but there was no umbilical reliance to the immediate place. While we had brilliant kitchen staff, doing a great job on a minimal budget, one of the main areas of student complaint was the food. We were pale, stressed and perhaps could have done with supplementing our curly fries and chlorine dipped iceburg with some fresh greens.

Since my departure, having learnt more about food and resources, I have realised how much possibility there is for the college to remedy this old upset to the stomach.There is land, there is compost, there is a farm so possibly manure. Most of all there is labour. Willing labour in a community that could make the labour fun and possibly even one of love. Going back I am delighted to find there is also another key ingredient. The will is there to start joining the resource dots.

I delivered four workshops about food growing. November is not an easy time to capture peoples imagination and get them hooked. Generally I find seducing people with tomatoes is the best way to ignite a desire. However this was the challenge and hopefully I did not get anyone too muddy. My workshop was simple- the main thing I wanted to convey was that growing food is accessible and enjoyable.
Firstly I asked the students to name a benefit of growing your own food. Some answers below:

It is tasty
It is fresh
It is economical
No reliance on oil based fertilisers, chemical treatments or tractor fuel
No food miles or energy used on refrigeration
Exercise
Knowledge it has not been involved in causing pollution
Knowledge it has not been involved in causing exploitation
Knowledge about what lies on the leaves
You benefit your soil by cycling organic matter rather than sending it to landfill
You sequest carbon by composting
It can be fun
We talked a bit about practically engaging with the other discussions and lectures of the conference. What can we do better within our context? Where do our resources lie and what are we wasting?
We also did some seeding- a bad time of year for this but I wanted to demonstrate how accessible it is to grow things. Ten minutes and a few trays seeded, that will, (with the right conditions- namely spring or summer light and warmth!) provide over a thousand salad plants for example.

When I left I ran down to the valley to drop off my borrowed wellies. The sun was out and the students had built another couple of raised beds to add to their impressive efforts. I left happy and with the promise to return to help fill them next spring.

Meta

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Monday, 12th December, 2011

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Subterranean Homesick Blues

The subterranean homesick blues are rocking through my veins. I have moved to the city. The City. Crossed the great divide and become an urban dweller. After eight years of the wild West it felt almost a physical wrench to leave a place I have become connected to through people and through land. However I have done it before – a new love affair with some new place begins.
So how to survive the city and where can I be of use. Part of my move was driven by awareness that perhaps people need the kind of work I’m engaged with here where the majority of people live. The urban jungle, a place where it is harder to feel in touch with land and food. Almost instinctively I have spent the last couple of weeks seeking out the cracks in the pavement. I dream of how wonderful it would be to have a garden like the one I helped to create at Fforest farm right here next to the tarmac and ballast. After all nature is helpful. With few resources a garden can be raised almost anywhere.
Feeling the homesick blues, being in the city, soil has come on my radar more than ever. To me it means home, work and connection. In the urban fabric relationships with place are very different. Not necessarily bad, just different but I feel there is room for some re-balance- some more cracks to be opened up. After all, the city accepts a diverse array of neighbours side by side; council blocks and gardens; train lines and allotments; skyscrapers and a farm. Another possible dimension for urban diversity.
In the city space is a limited resource. Surprisingly London is comparatively very green. I begin to notice what is disused and lying waste. Polluted or scarred but all with possibility for growth- the economic term trying to be claimed back. Viaducts, council gardens, dormant school raised beds and even roof-tops offering space. Everywhere I go I notice bare tracts of land and I think of gardens and I think of food- soul and sustenance. Repeatedly I research them hoping there may be a way in.

 

 

Meta

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Sunday, 27th November, 2011

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Something for the weekend

My bathroom is full of plants, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes just nudging their way up to the skylight above.

It is not too late to sow these things and we are on the approach to a full moon which effects all water on earth including the water in plants.  The period approaching a full moon (the waxing moon) is a time associated with vigour and growth meaning it is a good time to sow some spring seeds.

Things like tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are not from round here (Cardigan) and are a little more exotic. They will die if they get too cold so need to be somewhere warm and light with enough moisture in the soil to keep them going.  In the UK you are most likely to have success with these things if you have a green house to grow them on in when they are large enough to plant out.

If you do not have any covered space and live in these temperate climes, lettuce, chard and spinach are good things to sow now. I buy some seed and seed compost, fill the trays, pat the soil down and plant one seed shallowly in each hole. I start the seed all in the same module trays (as shown). One of my A3 trays holds 150 plants – all this fits on a window sill.  Then I water, wait and hope. While the seeds are germinating you have time to work on where you might put them when they are ready to go outside in about 5 weeks time.

Even if you only have a little space fill some containers with compost- you can use, pots, tubs, tyres or build a raised bed.

If you have never grown anything try a mix of lettuce. Pick a few outer leaves from each plant and the plant will grow back so you can have a steady salad supply.

It is handy to have a load of fresh leaves out side your door. No cellaphane, no chlorine, no refrigeration, no food miles.

 

 

Meta

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Friday, 11th March, 2011

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The real dirt on Farmer John


‘What do you do when nothing is left and in a community where you aren’t welcome because you are kind of different’ -Farmer John

Last night I watched a film called ‘The real dirt on Farmer John. This is  a moving portrayal of an unusual farmer.  Not fitting the mould myself many things resonated.

Farmer John was the third generation to inherit his farm, a dairy and mixed farm in Illinois, the Mid-West. His grandfather had safely seen it through the depression and his mother and father had worked hard to continue farming so they could stay on their land and raise a family there.

This piece of land is where John was raised. If you have the privilege of growing up on a farm it can instil a deep love of place. I feel this about the place I grew up and like him remember a time when the farm boundaries defined boundaries of my world. However the times were changing and family farm after family farm was dying. Larger and larger heavily mechanised, chemical farming was taking over rendering the smaller, mixed, family farms unviable and unable to compete with the prices of cheap food.

Farmer john had from a boy been part of the rhythm of sowing planting and harvest. It was instilled in him. It defined who he was so he struggled on with mounting debt.

Farmer John, though he worked hard was not like the other farmers in his locality. He responded with the times and In the 60’s whilst at college he had his friends stay on the farm and the place had become a diverse hub of hippie students, wishing to be close to nature. They made art and worked helping with the crops. It had been a time of real diversity, making the farm a richer place to be. On the flip side it had raised much suspicion from the local farming community.

By the age of 30- my age- he owed half a million to the bank. He had no choice but to sell land, good soil that would be developed, concreted over for housing. His world shrank from over 300 acres to 22. He got very depressed, felt like he had failed his ancestry, his community and failed his land. He stopped farming.

One day he had a call from someone in Chicago asking whether he would be interested in becoming part of a CSA –  a Community Supported Agriculture scheme. This is where the community pre buys shares in the harvest at the beginning of the season so the farmer has capital, pre season to grow crops and a definite market for the produce. At first he was not interested. He was in the depths of despair and did not want to share his final acres. But this despair was the turning point. The current model did not work for him-  isolated and dislocated from his consumers and in need of huge capital when there was unfair finacial return. The route of the CSA presented a new way forward. He rang back and said he would do it. He started farming again.

The times are changing – is this not just the natural pattern of progress… why does farmer Johns story matter?  The same thing that is happening in the USA is happening here and all over the world. It matters because it is our story too. We need food so we need the people who continue to desire to produce it. Our food system has shifted and now relies on mining capital that is not soley ours- soil and oil is not just ours but the property of generations to come. It  matters because for our health in its broadest sense we all need to maintain a connection with the soil.

This is a classic story but farmer john did not give the classic response. He realised the times were changing and he had to as well but he was not prepared to go down the path of mining his land.

The CSA model allowed a mutally beneficial relationship beteen farmers and the community. Allowed diversity, allowed support, financial and other. The people who joined the CSA came to the farm regularly and began to refer to it as ‘our farm’. The CSA movement is growing in this country too and is based on organic principles of sustainability -methods that are not just based on short term thinking.

Farmer John wanted to continue farming and this was a way he could do it that encompassed the things he loved about it.

At the end of the day it did not matter if he owned the land. What mattered was that he maintained his relationship to it and that he had the security to do this. For the people buying the produce these were the things that mattered too. They had a relationship with their land and food and they felt security in that it was being grown in a sustainable way – they had security of the most basic kind that they had a source of sustenance that was resilient to shock and not at the mercy of the wider system. Angelic Organics is still going and the share-holders have bought back more of the land.

Check out the film – you can see the trailer at

http://www.angelicorganics.com/ao/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179&Itemid=307

 

Meta

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Thursday, 3rd March, 2011

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15 Tonnes of Muck

Yesterday my sister told me about her experience of setting up a community raised bed plot on the housing estate where she lives in Stoke Newington, London.

She got some funding for labour, tools and seed through a great scheme called Capital Growth (www.capitalgrowth.org) which is trying to set up 2012 food growing sites in London by 2012.

She then got the council to build  a raised bed.

She needed more space so then built another herself out of reclaimed free scaffolding boards.

Then she got asked to move it because someone didn’t like it being too near their house.

She took it down and rebuilt it.

Then she got asked to move it because someone didn’t like it being too near their house.

She took it down .

She then discovered that from some councils you can obtain recycled kitchen waste/green waste compost for free (from those little green bins for food waste some councils collect).

There is a catch. You can only get it free if you order it in 15 tonne loads.

Sometimes one of the biggest impediments to change comes down to a process of dwelling too much on the reasons why something may be a bad idea rather than a good one.

She weighed it up ( though not really having a clue of 15 tonne measures) and ordered a load from the council.

When she found the 15 tonne, stinking load dumped on the Stoke Newington pavement, in the light of her recent run ins with the locals, she knew she was in a spot of bother.

She was then rung up by the council because all the neighbours had complained.

She had to do something and fast so having used what she needed for the beds, she put it on free cycle, a web-site advertising things for free as long as you come and collect them.

To her huge relief a gaggle of very grateful people, (the first she had seen in a while) immediately appeared out of the London ether, with vans, wheelbarrows, trailers and sacks. In a week it was gone.

There is now a raised bed plot on smalley road estate and Barley, my sister is on good, if not notorious, terms with the neighbours.

You too can obtain 15 tonnes of muck from the North London Waste Authority for free! To someone who views the stuff as black gold, I find this quite exciting. However please do this at your own risk and make sure you have somewhere to put it. Otherwise it may not be free for long and we may all be evicted.

Meta

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Wednesday, 15th December, 2010

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My Llareggub

No matter the weather or my early morning mood the weekly Tuesday market at St Dogmaels near Cardigan NEVER fails to lift my spirits. It is the best remedy for reminding me that the cold mornings picking are worth the graft. This is not just in terms of saving food miles and doing the uncommonly logical of growing food here and not taking it away to sell. The very best thing about the market is the people – the other stall holders, and our so very loyal rain or shine regulars. The characters, the stories, the reliable and the unpredictable. Chickens, wonder around scaring Mandy on the fish stall. My veg selling cousin in his cowboy hat chats animatedly with the lady from Foxhill preserves, who strikes a deal selling jam to the vicar. Occasionally the ladies at the back row of stalls burst into an African song they have have been learning at weekly choir club. I have my Tuesday chat and exchange of books with Trehale rare breed meats, while I pick up my treat of wild boar chorizo and try not to get tempted with the black pudding -made by Adam who dedicates a day a week to making it. Today I was given a box of local grapes grown at Mwnt, a box of apples, a book about sailors and a story about a lady’s pet tortoise which she walks down on the slip by the river. It is in a beautiful and unpractical spot sandwiched between the Abbey and estuary. There is always more than what is for sale. You usually come away with more than you bargained for. Whether we are eccentric or what was once normal the market gives us a fine stage to come together and flaunt our colours. It makes me think of Dylan Thomas and his characters, and that Under Milk Wood and Llaregub live on.

‘Now, behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the street rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailpairings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whalejuice and moonshine and small fry dished up by the hidden sea…..

The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The Wood, whose every tree-foot’s cloven in the black glad sight of the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary Ann Sailors who knows there is Heaven on earth and the chosen people of His kind fire in Llaregyb’s land, that is the fairday farmhands’ wantoning ignorant chapel of bridesbeds, and to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly wind-shaken wood springs awake for the second dark time this one Spring day…’

Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas.

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Saturday, 16th October, 2010

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Compassion

I have just listened to Maggie Doynes Do Lecture.

A week later, at home. Last time I heard her was in person. I was about to give my talk but though I had been completely distracted with nerves, when I walked into the tent, a third into her talk, she touched me. Seeing another young woman, someone who had not let a fear of failure or a lack of confidence stand in the way of helping those in front of her who so needed help. Someone with such powerful compassion. She demonstrated that our care and empathy can be our greatest strength in a culture that has a habit of portraying such qualities as weaknesses of vulnerability.

I feel currently there are crises on our doorstep. Crises over  fear for the future, whether this regards energy, climate or jobs. This I feel is especially hard on young people as such fears can create a sense of inadequacy or purposelessness. At the same time in other respects we have so much open to us that it is easy to sometimes feel lost.

As Maggie said I don’t think we necessarily have to travel 8,000 miles to unearth such feeling but we can work on finding ways to help each other connect- with their environment and with one another. Whether it is compassion for the earth or compassion for one another the two come hand in hand but how can you care about something if you have no relationship to it.

I got into growing things not because I like to reel off Latin names of plants or have an obsession with the perfect tasting tomato but because it is something so miraculous and simple to open up to everyone. I hope to be an an enabler, to help people experince their connection to the food we eat and in doing so, develop respect for our planet and have a sense of self worth.

Maggies Do Lecture made me think of this poem by Marianne Williamson that Nelson Mandela used in his inauguration speech and that my mother sent me on my 21st birthday.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us…Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory…. that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Watch Maggie’s talk here

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Thursday, 30th September, 2010

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Sovereignty

This project takes the idea of reorganising the territories of Europe (and, interestingly, North Africa) based around Europes’s collective renewable energy potential. A Europe-wide energy grid allows for the reduced solar production of Southern Europe in the winter to be compensated by a seasonal increase in energy production in the windy north. Europe is thus reorganised from the perspective of its geology and geography.

The map takes a practical perspective in addressing how we might produce our base resources sustainably through re-organising the resources we already have. Of course if we are to do this comprehensively food and water would have to be added to the equation. How might we organise territories based on an agenda of food production? After seeing it I thought it could be a useful format  to map out climate zones, soil fertility and water in relation to food production potential.The map interestingly makes it clear that, while it may be assumed that an energy crisis is solely about scarcity in available resources, it is also largely about the uneconomical use of what we already have.

The map does not deal with the complex political power relations involved  in how we precisely arrive at  a more sustainable re-organisation. In the map shown there is a natural balance between what the North and South can provide one another. In the case of food resources this balance may not be so neat. The more wealthy North, though having vital temperate zones, is not so rich in its resources of available sunlight (the light and warmth necessary for producing much of our food crops). While the North may be more wealthy financially the South has an abundance of vital resources that support the whole system. It raises many interesting dilemmas over ownership, power and sovereignty.

It is clear that global commerce and nation states have already begun to reorganise such notions of sovereignty- through nations effectively ‘buying’ parts of the developing world to protect against potential food shortages, or multinationals colonising latitudes that provide ideal growing conditions. The imbalances of power, production and demand that currently characterise our (global) food systems are in stark contrast to what we might assume to be the edges and frontiers of contemporary sovereignty.

The map also made me think about questions of scale. In the case of food there may be ways that one resource can be exchanged for another – Much of Northern Europe does have  the temperate climate zones, ideal for the growing of many crops and giving a higher rain fall. But should we be looking for solutions of such scale where resources are exchanged over such large areas. Is this the only realistic way to feed so many people or isn’t such large scale out-sourcing underpinned with vulnerability? Though there could be a mutual reliance would this guard against political conflict and exploitation? Currently we (and I am talking from a Eurocentric position) have a global system that feeds us but what if part of the chain collapses?

It seems to me that more localised solutions, though perhaps not offering such continuous choice and abundance, are certainly less complex and more resilient. At the time I write our  food system is very much a global one. Going local does not mean that that we shirk what Vandana Shiva terms as our ‘global responsibility’ and any legacy  our current consumption leaves for the future.

I think the difficulties we are faced with in providing for the future need to be answered over many levels and scales. We need to be thinking in terms of large scale economy and resourcefulness but this should not undermine our efforts in focusing on local creativity in resourcefulness. This offers us things that the larger systems cannot. Resilience, community and a sense of connection.

Meta

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Tuesday, 27th July, 2010

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Pantsaeson Farm

The winter before last I moved to Cardigan to take on the management of a hundred acre farm. The farm had just been purchased by a philanthropically minded lady who wished to invest her money in land and enable someone like me the use of it. In return I would care take of it producing sustainable, local food. I had fallen in love with Pantsaeson the first time I saw it, despite my father warning me to use my head and not immediately loose my heart. However we only managed to get half way down the track before he stopped the car and voiced some fierce profundity about the beauty of the place.
I knew little about farming and land management on such a large scale, I was alone and when I first arrived a tractor was the only vehicle I could legally drive. It was easy to come up with many rational reasons to not take on the farm but overall I knew that if I didn’t the only thing really stopping me would be fear. This was not a good enough reason to not try.
I was at Pantsaeson for a year. In that time I planted an orchard, got it fully through organic conversion kept 60 sheep, 20 cows, and raised two pigs from piglet to slaughter. With some help I put about an acre over to horticultural production and started a local producers market in Saint Dogmaels. Put like this it sounds like a success story but there was also a lot that went wrong – My tractor gave up after running beautifully for forty five years, the poly-tunnel blew down in a November gale and the cows got into next door and trampled their crops.
In the end it was simply too much for me to manage alone. There was also the problem of economics. The very fabric of the place seemed to absorb money. In the current farming climate the farm was deemed too small and un-modernised to be considered economically sustainable. All the reasons I fell for it – the intact unconverted farm buildings, its lack of mechanisation and the farms relatively small scale were the very things rendering it unviable as a business. I still believe these things can once again be valued as its assets.
There are examples of farms successfully monopolising on such assets but to do this takes investment. Even if there is money available to invest, farming is risky and if the money is not yours this is problematic. Farms being passed from one generation to the next solve so many difficulties. There is a natural commitment to investing in a place. Ultimately an investment underpinned with a love of place cannot be created overnight and money and ownership can so easily come to dominate the equation. But family succession of farms will not continue if farming is predominantly equated with isolation and unjust return. The average age of a farmer is fast approaching sixty. We need a new generation to produce our food . We also need a new model to make them want to do it.
For those like me who are wishing to go in cold, it is a hard road but it can be done. My year at Pantsaeson was one of the hardest and one of the best. This is what it taught me:

  • I don’t want or need a hundred acres. I really thought I did.
  • A small amount of land can be a blessing – I can be more productive as I can manage it more intensively and sustainably without any reliance on fuel.
  • Farming is hard work. Work creates engagement. Engagement is life.
  • Succession of farms from down a family line is not only about passing down land and knowledge. It is about a love of place .
  • The knowledge of our elders is invaluable. We need to learn from them now.
  • Farms need the communities around them to sustain them in the long term. This works both ways round.
  • Farms don’t have to be lonely, male, large scale, heavily mechanised and mono-cultural.
  • Farming can be the best, most rewarding and important job in the world.
  • It can be fun being an anomaly – a young, female farmer.

Meta

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Friday, 16th July, 2010

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There is no beginning

I was sitting here trying to write my blog with the words ‘Begin it now’ swirling round my head. So I went down to the greenhouse to think and there I found the first ripe tomato of the year. Having grounded myself  it struck me that, with growing, the principle behind a truly sustainable and organic system is that there is no beginning and no end point. From the decomposition in compost to the nutrients transformation in forming a new fruit. The beginning is merely the initial point you view the cycle from. And so I begin it now but from the wider context – from greenhouse to internet even these words are just part of a wider cycle.

Meta

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Monday, 5th July, 2010

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