Producing local food is good for us in more ways than one. It has less environmental impact as local food production requires food to travel shorter distances to our plate and requires less processing, packaging and storage. It helps maintain farmland and green space in our community as well as supports local economies. It’s generally fresher and tastier too, as it’s harvested at its peak and doesn’t spend days in transit. It changes our relationship with food and how we value it, for the better.
If you want to read more about how communities have established local food production, you’ll find our inspiring examples below. If you are already involved in producing food locally, jump here if you want to do something bigger.
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Community supported agriculture
A growing movement
The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement began in the UK in the late 1990s to counter the negative effects of industrial agriculture, by reconnecting people with fresh local food produced with ecological farming methods. CSA has low carbon principles at its heart and does not contribute to the climate crisis in the way typical industrial food production does through the use of pesticides, heavy machinery use, packaging and transport. CSA farms are small scale and typically have less than 200 members; they grow by replication rather than increasing in size. Today, there are more than 220 CSA farms across the UK which feed over 55,000 people.
Sharing the risks and rewards
There are different approaches to Community Supported Agriculture in the UK, although they all share the same principles of sharing the risks and rewards of food production. Producer-led CSA farms, such as Canalside Community Food, are run by the farmer with community help, whereas community-led CSA farms like Glasbren are set up and run by the community. Community-owned farms are ones supported by community investment, such as Fordhall Organic Farm, while The Oak Tree Community Farm is an example of a producer-community partnership between the farmer and the local community that helps to grow and harvest a share of the farm’s land. Each model works well for their respective local food network!
Nurturing community
In building a kinder and more inclusive farming system, Community Supported Agriculture could as easily be described as Agriculture Supported Community. For years CSAs have also shown us how to build resilience within communities and the capacity to address localised food poverty and inequality – something that has only increased in importance with global food insecurities and the higher cost of living.
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Inspiration listen
Do Something Bigger
What would inspire you to do something bigger for climate and nature? In this, the first episode of the Carbon Copy Podcast series, Do Something Bigger, we introduce our year-long campaign: 25…
Do something bigger
If your community would like to start a CSA farm, the CSA Network UK offers a CSA mentoring programme. You could also do something bigger as a local council, landowner or school, by supporting these alternative initiatives.
Community allotments
here are around 250,000 allotment holders in England and Wales, and yet the potential for producing homegrown food in allotments and growing communities is scarcely tapped, with one in eight of the UK population having no access to a garden. Despite increasing popularity and waiting lists, the provision of allotment gardens to enable people to grow their own produce – regardless of whether they have access to a private garden – is declining with the most deprived communities facing an eight times greater loss of allotments compared to the least deprived. Landowners, from local government to the Church of England, could do something bigger to support community allotment cultivation by making more sites available.
Land matching
There are several land-matching advisory services that unite potential growers with landowners, helping local communities gain access to land and all the necessary permissions, including planning rights for cultivation and green space projects. These services also exist for landowners too, providing them with support and reassurance on potential community projects on their land. Together with Shared Assets and The Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture, the CSA Network UK is developing a regionally-led land matching service; there are also more localised matching services around the country, such as the one offered by Shropshire Good Food Partnership.
Edible playgrounds
Many children in inner city areas don’t know where their food comes from and, with limited opportunities for them to grow and eat good food, one in three children leaving primary school are overweight or obese. Edible Playgrounds is an urban farming programme that helps primary schools transform an area of their school grounds into a vibrant outdoor space that can excite and teach children about growing and eating healthy food in an engaging, multi-sensory way. Over 160 Edible Playgrounds have been created in school gardens across the UK so far, supporting thousands of children, with huge potential for more schools to join in.
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