Soul Farm, Falmouth. Credit: Soul Farm
Access to land key issue at the UK's first peri-urban farming forum
In partnership with the Landworkers' Alliance, Sustain has launched a practitioners' forum to respond to barriers and opportunities for peri-urban agroecological farming in the UK.
April saw the first peri-urban practitioners' forum as part of the Fringe Farming project, with 70 people attending a web session to explore the issue of 'access to land' on a Thursday spring evening.
The event, hosted by Catherine McAndrew from the Landworkers' Alliance, began with a series of presentations to share experiences and introduce broader campaign efforts from: Steph Wetherell (Bristol Food Producers), Sarah Alun-Jones (Grow!), Gareth Roberts (ShefFood) and Rob Logan (Sustain). The story of Grow!, a community farm on school grounds and integrated into the curriculum, was well documented in a video played as part of the presentation - which you can find here.
The aim of these forums is to provide a space for farmer-to-farmer learning, action-focused dialogue on key issues, and to develop ideas for policy recommendations at a national to local level. If you want to shape the theme of the next forums in 2021 please fill out this survey here.
The next forum is pencilled in for the end of June, which we will publicise on the Sustain website and in the Sustainable Farming Policy newsletter when confirmed. Sign up to the latter at the Fringe Farming project page.
Fringe Farming: The Fringe Farming project is a collaboration with partners across the UK to understand barriers, identify land opportunities and local actions, and develop national policy to enable agroecological farming at the edge of cities as part of a green economic recovery.
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