This is a CTP of initiative: Transition Norwich (UK)
This CTP relates to the development of the Farmshare Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project.
Farmshare was established on the edge of Norwich. At the time of writing (June 2016), it is in a period of transition whilst it explores the options of a new site.
This was a significant Critical Turning Point because it was one of the most successful and high profile projects to emerge from Transition Norwich which is still active in June 2016.
A key objective of the project was to provide a model that others could follow (E.g. small-scale community-based agriculture).
A number of different threads fed into the development of Norwich Farmshare.
The Transition Norwich food group was one of the more active thematic groups emerging out of Transition Norwich. There was a series of meetings and workshops through which they identified some projects that they thought they would like to develop around food. CSA, was, probably, the most well supported idea. Locally grown beans, developing a local flour mill were other ideas that were considered.
Community Supported Agriculture is a fairly well established model of grassroots local food production. It was replicable, and the numbers seemed to add up in terms of developing a viable business plan. Technically, it can be classified as a horticultural rather than an agricultural scheme.
The economics of growing vegetables on a small scale are problematic. Par contraire, the economics of growing on a large scale and supplying via supermarkets makes a lot more sense in hard money terms. Hence, the interviewee describes the initiative as a balancing act of trying to make small scale horticulture possible:
“So if you want a sustainable, local, mixed organic gardening operation they have somehow got to pay for that to make up for the difference between big scale cost and small scale costs. Either you put more money in or some time (commitment). We were trying a mix of those: You buy a share and turn up the odd workday.”
Most importantly, the project was a useful marriage between the grassroots energy of the Transition initiative and the professional input from East Anglian Food Links (EAFL), a third sector organization which had been ‘battling’ for 10 – 15 years to try to find ways of building more sustainable / organic / local food systems in the UK region of East Anglia.
EAFL directors were sympathetic to the Transition model and vision. They had expertise in project development, fundraising and in growing vegetables and provided a lot of the expertise that went into a funding bid (see below), as well as supporting its development through time of their paid staff. It was one of EAFLs last attempts to find something that worked because they had tried lots of things and kept coming up against the economies of scale problem.
An ambitious funding bid was developed for the Local Food Fund that would fund the CSA (as well as the development of the flour mill and the growing of local beans). The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts was the intermediate organization that was administering the fund. Then there was a long period of trying to get the grant agreed. It took around 18 months to resolve the various details and queries with the bid.
A business plan was developed which specified the various financial aspects of the project, for example the number of members required to make it financially viable.
The Soil Association (an organic development and accreditation charity) also had a support programme around CSAs.
Transition activists were lucky to secure a lease on a 4 acre site at Postwick on the edge of Norwich. The owner was a landowner but not an active farmer. It was more an estate than a farm. He had various ideas what to do with this farm on the edge of the city. He saw Farmshare as fitting into a set of interesting ideas that might turn into something bigger over time. For whilst “most landowners would say no, he was willing to put some time and effort in.”
The Guild (a Norwich-based third sector support organization) helped with the incorporation of Farmshare as a social enterprise.
A large quantity of voluntary labour was put in by the Farmshare board members in developing and managing the project.
Subscribing Members needed to be recruited.
A paid grower needed to be recruited and managed.
The interviewee undertook a workshop on Dragon Dreaming at a national transition conference. There is a tool in it called a dreaming circle where participants say what they want to get out of a project and then the wider group commit to all those outcomes. Transition Norwich ran a Dragon Dreaming workshop and did the dreaming circle with 30 founding members of Farmshare. (N.B.: As this took place following receipt of the funding, they were, at core, trying to overlay some new objectives over the older ones.
The development of Farmshare was preceded by events which were part of the expected and specified Transition model. Following the Great Unleashing of Transition Norwich (see CTP 109), a Food related subgroup was formed. It had its own launch event where Peter Melchett from the Soil Association spoke. It was from the meetings of this group had that the Farmshare project was developed.
Nonetheless, the very idea of events being significant in the development of Farmshare doesn’t really fit with the way it was developed. It was more of a “networked effort” over a period of time.
Furthermore, it is also hard to judge the trajectory and the effect that it had on future events. Nonetheless, there was, allegedly, a sense that it absorbed a lot of the energy of Transition Norwich which perhaps prevented other things from happening. That’s not to say that other things would have happened anyway, as they were also struggling for project ideas. But it was such a struggle to get it up and running, constituted, funded, to grow vegetables, to recruit customers recruited, to establish the collection hub (the building where the vegetables were collected), etc.
The interviewee wasn’t aware of any significant conflict around the project.
The vision for Farmshare was mostly shared as it was a bottom up initiative and it incorporated people’s ideas and aspirations.
The funding bid contained resources to continue paying EAFL staff to support the project and the interviewee wondered if this might create tensions because other people were working on it voluntarily. However this didn’t seem to arise and it was accepted.
The development of Farmshare felt like a CTP at the time.
They had unleashed Transition Norwich with a vision that they would set up theme groups and they would then set up practical projects so that Norwich could learn and explore a post–oil world. In this sense, projects like Farmshare were anticipated from the beginning of Transition Norwich.
The hope was that this was the first of a number of significant projects. It was a £150K project that had a lot of buy-in and support. There were 70 members paying an annual subscription fee. The hope at the time it started would be that other projects would emerge from other groups (e.g. energy projects).
The successful establishment of the project felt like a coming of age for Transition Norwich. With hindsight, it is one of the most visible and long-lasting outcomes of Transition Norwich.
The establishment of Farmshare felt like it has contributing to the goals of Transition Norwich and symbolized an organization that was “going somewhere.”
Much of the learning was around the practicalities of running small scale Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the UK. At the time, CSA seemed like a well-established and viable model. The experience of setting up Farmshare changed the views of the interviewee. For he is now more skeptical about the model. Specifically, it would appear that CSA models often only work where one or two people put in vast amounts of extra time, often unpaid. It becomes their passion. The unpaid work makes that difference in terms of viability. Yet it can be difficult to enroll supporters: people generally want convenience when purchasing their food:
“The myth of a CSA is that it is a communal effort, Yet when looking around the country, there are only a handful of functional CSAs and it is that usually that one or two people put in a day or two a week and that is why they work. When that person burns out, they usually stop."
Further areas of critical learning include:
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