Thursday 25 March 2010

What's going on down at the Farm this Easter?

Fluffy baby chicks are chirping, new-born lambs are bleating and bluebells are beginning to show here at Church Farm, Ardeley, so why don’t you come along with all the family for a “real” Easter treat this holiday.

Church Farm is a place for wildlife, beauty, diversity, community and people. It’s a place for people to connect with the land and food. Not only can you walk the footpaths, feed the animals and visit our Farm Store and Café at any time, but you can also sign up to one of our many Easter weekend and holiday workshops run by local craftspeople and experts.

Why not go for the hands-on experience this Easter – help the Farmer bottle-feed the lambs, get up close to our baby chicks and have a guided tour of our vegetable area. If spotting migrant bird species with our local bird expert isn’t wild enough for you, then come along on our magical and fascinating bat walk - bat by popular demand! Support the Prince of Wales’ Wool Project by learning how to spin wool in a day or try mastering the art of knitting in a couple of hours. Alternatively, if home is where the heart is, join our poultry breeder to discover more about keeping poultry in your garden. Or take a stroll down memory lane with Derek Turner as he reminisces about the land around Ardeley and how it has changed since his childhood.

What’s more, you can enjoy a delicious roast from ingredients freshly prepared and grown on the Farm at our Café on Easter Sunday. Arrive early or stay late and choose breakfast, tea and cakes or a wholesome meal from our Special Easter Café menu. Eat in, take away or picnic in the fields. Open everyday. Weekdays: 10am-6pm. Weekends: 8am-6pm (including Good Friday and Easter Monday).

Don’t forget to pop into our Farm Store either. Make your Easter lunches healthier, tastier and that little bit extra special by buying fresh, local produce, organic fruit and vegetables, free range high welfare meat all reared on the Farm, fresh bread, pork pies, eggs, dairy and much more. Open weekdays 8am-6pm. Weekends 8am-8pm.

Being a traditional mixed farm, aiming to enhance the environment, build community, treat the land, wildlife and animals as they should be treated and grow great food, Church Farm certainly has something for everybody this Easter.

We look forward to welcoming you.

For more information about any of our Easter programmes, please contact Faye on 01438 861 447 or faye@churchfarmardeley.co.uk

Wednesday 10 March 2010

Monday 8 March 2010

Let's make wool fashionable again!



Support the Prince of Wales' Wool Project by taking part in one of our spinning workshops. If you want to learn how to spin, dye and felt wool, we will be supplying Church Farm fleeces and the guiding hand of Anne Leonard. Our four session programme will begin on Wednesday 17 March. 10am-3pm. £160 for the complete programme.

Our one-day workshop - Spin in a Day - will take place on Wednesday 14 April. 10am-3pm. £40 (including a soup lunch in the cafe and materials).

Industrial Agriculture – Perilous for our Planet!

Why is small-scale ecological agriculture the way forward? That was the question answered by Dr Vandana Shiva, ecologist and founder of Navdanya, Patrick Holden, the Soil Association, and Liz Hosken, founder and director of The Gaia Foundation, at Friday night’s Gaia evening in St Stephen’s Church (London). Here’s the lowdown - thanks to our lovely residential volunteers who dropped their shovels (quite literally) to attend this inspiring and invigorating conference. They may have been disappointed having arrived too late to eat the delicious food on offer, but they were certainly pleased and excited to be representing Church Farm, Ardeley and to be actively playing a part in the solution to the food and climate change crisis.

So where shall we start? Here’s a little insight into the background of the conference as provided by The Gaia Foundation.

“Studies last year concurred that industrial agriculture not only destroys biodiversity, soils, nutrition and local food systems, but is responsible for a staggering 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which trigger climate change.

Industrial agriculture requires chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, intensive water use, inhumane animal factories, and large-scale transport, storage and distribution. All this transforms biodiverse landscape into enormous mono-cultural plantations, displacing the small-scale regenerative agricultural practices that sustain rural communities and healthy ecosystems.

This system incurs a social, ecological and climate debt which is perilous for our planet. Yet its advocates call for more land, technology and investment, to feed the growing human population. Why, when the industrial world continues to waste enough food to feed the hungry?

In contrast, decentralized, diversity-based organic agriculture improves soil fertility and carbon content, reduces emissions from fertilizers and food miles, and increases resilience to climate instability. These approaches can feed the world now and for generations to come.

Biodiversity-based agriculture is a proven, effective and accessible solution to climate change. Social movements around the planet are reclaiming their food sovereignty and showing the way for this vital transition.”
(The Gaia Foundation)

So what insights into the critical links between food systems and climate change were provided by the speakers? Dr Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker, primarily spoke about the hazards and limitations of genetic engineering – bringing to the forefront her concerns about the distribution of aubergines modified with a gene from the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis to Indian farmers. She spoke of her biodiversity programme to support local farmers and to rescue and conserve crops that are being pushed to extinction and reiterated the fact that food should be everybody’s basic right rather than a commodity.

Patrick Holden, who has been Director of the Soil Association since 1995, based his speech on the newly released movie, Food Inc. He conveyed how impressed he was with the film and how applicable it was to all, despite it being rather US-centric. He highlighted the problems for small producers as a result of the actions of supermarkets and major corporations and also personalised his speech by mentioning the difficulties he’d experienced himself in keeping his own dairy farm profitable. He went on to talk about the ways in which the land around London could be put to better use in order to supply the city with all the food it needs. At the moment, it seems that London is surrounded by golf clubs and fields for equestrian purposes.

And last but not least, Liz Hosken, the co-founder and director of The Gaia Foundation in London, spoke about the violent and inhumane acts that take place in order to get food onto our tables. She communicated the need to educate people about what goes into the food we consume and the direct influence it can have on us.

The overall message of this conference was the need to reconnect people to the food that they eat. This is definitely right up our street! After all, the idea of our biological and ecological farm is to produce a maximum variety of food for local people, with 50% less fossil fuels from farm to fork. We want to enhance the environment and build a community to treat the land, wildlife and animals as they should be treated and obviously, grow great food.

Equipped with a DVD copy of “Pig Business”, our residential volunteers managed to make it back safely and were glad to be back on home “soil”. I’m sure we’ll have the chance to watch it in the next week or so – so keep a look out on here for our “Pig Business” review.

Saturday 6 March 2010

Meet Tim Waygood the Farmer


As published in The Food Magazine last month...

My parents met at the local young farmers club, their parents farmed two villages apart. I thought everyone was a farmer, until I went to school. Every relation was farming in some way, cousins, uncles and siblings in law.

I was going to be a farmer forever, I got a degree in agriculture but the farm was not a viable option. I diversified at 22, starting and growing an events business called MotivAction, by the time I had got to 42 none of us in the family were farming. A familiar farming story, over 200,000 (50%) farms have vanished in my lifetime. Now the average age of farmers that are left is over 60 and there are more people in prison than working the land.

The story of my life has been holding onto – albeit as tenant – this small farm over the years of set-aside and then starting to farm again, but totally differently – the objective being to create an ecological alternative to corporate supermarket consumerism. And, at least to have a go at making a future so my children will be able to say I tried. So Emma, my gorgeous agrarian partner, my brother, and I, with the bemusement and support of former farmers, set about farming again.

Reducing the number of farms is deliberate policy, enacted first by UK governments and latterly by the European Union. The big farmers are kept drunk on subsidies whilst the small, medium and family farms have been squeezed out. Farms have been commoditised in order to create and feed a food industry. This is a globally driven policy. Currently there are 1,500,000 small farms in Poland, some of the most biologically sustainable food production enterprises in Europe, being deliberately taken out of business, to make way for global agri-business.

Back in the UK, one supermarket now makes more profit than the whole of UK agriculture. We are reliant on oil and gas to make nitrates and pesticides – these accounting for around 40% of the fossil fuel inputs into agriculture. A few corporations dominate agri-business. Meanwhile the food industry has created an obesity epidemic, costing the UK billions, as well as a population totally disconnected from the land and food.

My father built a pig herd, when this became unviable in 1987, the pigs went, and the land was ‘set-aside’ sown to grass and left fallow – ironically I was studying a degree in agriculture at the time. As happened across Hertfordshire, the animals disappeared from view.

Shortage of cash led to a new business being spawned via a local advert entitled ‘Everyone remembers their first bang’ and inviting people to come to the farm clay shooting. Bizarrely, from this small start, quite a sizeable events business grew over the next 20 years that enabled the farm to be retained. We had fun creating games like ‘Human Table Football’, and ‘Blind Landrover Driving’. But, I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.

One thing that commentators all agree on is that food and farming must change. We must feed people in the future without using nitrate fertilisers. The only route that is being seriously considered and actively pursued by the powers that be (corporations and government have revolving doors and set the policy) is more of the same, more agri-business, larger farms, plus the promise of GMO’s being able to fix nitrogen - technical fixes, and the same chemical, and linear industrial model.

Could there be an alternative? Would it involve envisaging farms as a place to produce food, and the farm as a service provider - a polycultural, complex, vertically integrated, systems and ecological approach based on biological efficiency? Would it involve farms that connect directly with customers and so are not slaves to a single or handful of buyers? If we can combine food and farming systems that are environmentally sound and productive, with business models that work, then maybe we can forge an alternative and a renaissance of real food and farming.

Convinced by background reading and given a kick up the butt after falling ill for months and facing my mortality in 2007, my family and I moved from passive observer of the farming scene for 20 years to bringing the family farm back into production. Fire: Aim: Ready has been the approach to establishing a farm to feed people.

Farming v.2.0 at Church Farm

-Vegetable garden of 8 acres growing over 200 varieties of vegetables and herbs grown in Beards Oak Kitchen Gardens.
-New orchard of 8 acres, 130 varieties of fruit: apples, gages, plums, cherries, quince, medlar, damsons and more...
-Vicarage Field 2 acre soft fruit enclosure
-60 Black Welsh Mountain sheep
-60 Lleyn sheep & ram
-30 Red Poll cattle & bull plus followers
-6 British Lop & 6 Berkshire breeding sows plus boars
-600 Light Sussex, Cuckoo Maran, Black Rock, Rhode Island Red and White Leghorn hens
-300 Sasso outdoor reared poultry
-200 Norfolk Black turkeys
-100 Embden geese
-100 Aylesbury ducks
-3 Bee hives
-20 acres of new woods in-filled with wild cherry and hazel
-2 acre walnut orchard
-4 acres of wild bird seeds and pollen/nectar mix
-30 acres of woods: 3 of ancient hornbeam coppice, 7 acres of established 60 years old woodland and 20 acres of mixed, mainly hardwoods, planted over the past 10 years
-2 acres of rough nesting ground amongst a line of old clay pits
-2 ponds established in 1996, two more flood ponds and a new pond in the vegetable gardens.

Church Farm spans 175 acres in Ardeley, a small village in north Hertfordshire. Now two years into what I call Farming v.2.0, we have managed to open a farm store, farm café, veg box scheme, local mechanic service, green gym, offer green meetings, events, courses, wood cabin hire, summer camps, have started a mobile farm shop as well as set up a ‘rural care’ providing places for people with learning difficulties to help on the farm. Next month there will be a farm vet service. In the summer we held a camping and music festival. Every type of animal, vegetable and local fruit, even walnut orchards have been established. All these efforts are concentrated on offering an alternative to corporate supermarket consumerism, putting provenance and human scale enterprise first. This is a farm that grows food and provides services for customers.

All of this depends upon customers. I use the word deliberately rather than consumers. Here we have conscious customers who can see the provenance of their food and get as involved as they like. Some visit nearly every day, to some we deliver. The produce we bring into the store is either from local, organic or fair trade sources.

The happy co-incidence of a farm to feed people is that I tend to say, “come on my land,” and customers never ask me to abuse the animals, chemically castrate the pigs, destroy the hedges or pump carcinogens onto their vegetables. I don’t do this as I eat the produce and live here. The farm does not rely on any one product or customer, true diversity is, I believe, essential for long term resilience in any sphere.

Coming soon at Church Farm will be a Farm Vet service and then the culmination of the plan will be proving the viability of a Farm Membership. Something that could, depending on the future, be of far greater value than joining a golf club or gym. The farm is designed to be able to feed a wide diet to at least 200 people, joining the farm will enable 200 members to have a stake in the farm’s success – and when profits are made, 30% will be distributed amongst the members.

Membership is for a 10 year period and although members are not obligated to spend any money with the farm, the win: win also means that, in the event of food security issues, farm members will have 10 years food security. Currently even the wealthy enjoy only about 3-5 days food security through the ‘just in time’ supermarket supply chain. Pioneer Memberships will be released at a cost of £2,000.00 for 10 years to people within a 10 mile radius of the farm. Groups from further afield, including London, will be able to join the farm by combining together in groups. We will then provide weekly deliveries to pick up points.

That’s a bit of an introduction and update. We certainly do not have all the answers, but we are giving it a go.

Next step is getting together with other like minded farmers to form a national network, an agrarian renaissance if you like… there are 5,000 farmers who deal direct with the public, it’s from this base we could pull off creating a nationwide, alternative umbrella brand. So that’s next week’s job.

Read the full article on The Food Magazine website: http://tinyurl.com/ybvstl4

Great Food. Great Farming. Great Life.


Welcome to the Church Farm, Ardeley blog – a virtual rural hub where you can be a part of our environmentally sustainable farming adventure. Situated between Stevenage and Buntingford in Hertfordshire (UK), Church Farm is a mixed, high welfare, ecological and low carbon food and farming enterprise, a place for wildlife, beauty, diversity, community and people. This may not be Farmville, but it is a traditional yet modern place for people to connect with the land and food. It’s what we call Farming v.2.0.

We have a farm store, farm café, veg box scheme, and mobile farm shop, as well as a local mechanic service and green gym. We offer green courses and workshops, wood cabin hire and summer camps, and also provide a perfect setting for Corporate sustainability events and meetings. What’s more, we’ve set up a ‘rural care’ scheme, providing places for people with learning difficulties to help on the farm.

So why don’t you come onto our virtual land and find out what really goes on in the day-to-day running of a biological and ecological farm. If you would like to know more about where your food should come from, horticulture, chicken keeping, wool spinning, rural care and much more, then this is the place to be!

You can also check out our website:
www.churchfarmardeley.co.uk

Happy Spring!