Getting started

Last time I wrote about the two-year process of getting the funding for Norwich Community Agriculture. In this post I want to come up to date with what's been going on since the grant was approved at the end of July 2010. So this is going to be a whistlestop tour of the last two-and-a-half months of activity.

I noted before that, while the ideas and outlines of the projects had come from the members of the Transition Norwich Food Group, it was mostly William and I who put together the funding bid and undertook all the related tasks of getting quotes, assembling budgets and applying for planning permissions. Perhaps we should have involved more people in the process, but at the time it felt like we just needed to get on with it.

Now that we're starting the project, though, it's very important that we broaden the team back out, and involve as many Transition Norwich members as possible. This is particularly true of the CSA, which absolutely has to be owned by the community that's going to support it. William and I are going to be paid to do quite a bit of the work involved in setting up the project, but our input will reduce over time, and the CSA needs to be owned by a wide and engaged group of people who will continue to make it happen into the future.

On September 13th we had a really exciting meeting at the URC in Princes Street, where about 20 CSA supporters came together to talk about how we should take the project forward. Lots of good ideas were exchanged, and there was lots of energy in the room to make the project work. People volunteered to join a number of subgroups, the largest being the "growing and environment" group: clearly a lot of people have expertise in organics, permaculture, arboriculture etc, and want to have a significant say in how the land is going to be managed. Another group offered to help with marketing the CSA and recruiting more members. We talked about creating a group to work out distribution (ie where drop-off points will be organised around the city and beyond), and one to help to develop the social life of the CSA - although so far we haven't managed to gather enough enthusiasm around those topics to organise a meeting!

The growing group has met once at Take Five, and again on a Sunday afternoon visit to the growing site at Postwick (the picture above shows people talking on the field margin), and a third meeting is planned for October 20th. Members of the group want to hurry up so that we can get trees planted this winter and so on. The marketing group has a meeting arranged (for 1 November) and work has been done on a logo as well as this blog.

Another subgroup consists of people who considering joining the Board of the new co-op that we are going to set up to run the CSA and the School Farm (working title: Norwich Community Agriculture). These people met with Sally at The Guild (a Norwich-based consultancy specialising in social enterprises) to talk about the exact legal structure of the new co-op. We'll meet again on October 19th and talk more about the responsibilities and liabilities that a person takes on when they become a Board member. We're pleased that The Guild has been able to use funding from the Co-operative Group to pay for their support to us.

My role over this period has been to support these processes (along with other TN members); to negotiate further with the Local Food Fund (we're now on the 4th version of the project budget); to start to make contact with the press. I've put a lot of time into the school market garden, where the Hewett school are being very helpful with issues like finalising exactly where on the school grounds the farm is going. I've met with various people at the school - Dale the Director of Resources and his team; Ian who will be the main teaching contact with the farm; Ingrid the Extended Schools Co-ordinator; Yvonne who looks after the Tycoon project, and most importantly Wendy the catering manager. All of them are promising a lot of help and support, mostly in how we engage the school and the local community with the project. I'm also working to establish a water supply for the school market garden, and generally on project management.

Meanwhile William has been working away at organising the practicalities of the project. He's scouring the farm machinery dealers for secondhand, small-scale equipment, and so far has bought a tractor, a shipping container, spader, forklift, rotovator and mower. Oh, and the flour mill is on its way from Austria.

William has also been negotiating and getting on with cultivating the land. Both sites need a subsoiler to break up the compacted subsoil, and then muck spread at a rate of 10 tonnes per acre. This has been done at Postwick (as the picture shows) and should start any day now at the Hewett.

Something I've learned about planning a market garden is that a supply of water is critical. William has been working with Chris (who owns the land at Postwick) and Joe (who farms it) to work out the best way to get the water from the river at the bottom of the farm, to the CSA site. And he's still got to formalise the tenancy agreement with Chris.

These fairly technical tasks need to be done, and William and I are getting on with them. But I'm very keen to avoid any impression that the whole CSA project will continue in that way. The Business Plan we submitted to the Local Food Fund sets out some very broad-brush targets - for example that we employ a full-time farm manager between the two sites (plus casual staff and a very part-time administrator), and therefore that we need to achieve an income of nearly £70k a year (starting in a year's time) to pay for those. But a huge amount remains to be decided: who we employ, exactly what we should grow, what trees etc to plant in the shelter belt, where the pickup points are going to be, how the produce is going to get to them, how we promote the CSA and the other schemes, what kind of feel the CSA has as a social group, what legal form the new co-op should take, and many other questions. We're relying on the CSA's supporters to determine all these things, and in most cases to make them happen. Please join us!

A brief history of the last two years

Welcome to the new blog for Norwich Community Agriculture. In this first post I'm going to try to recap the two-year history of this projects - how we got to the point of starting to deliver it.

After the Unleashing of Transition Norwich on 1 October 2008, one of the first theme groups to get going was the Food Group. We had a big inaugural meeting at The Playhouse later that same month, with Peter Melchett as our special guest speaker.

The group was so big that we split into subgroups looking at issues like bread, a city farm and so on. Some of these groups then continued to meet as subgroups of the Food Group. The bread group met with local artisan bakers, and the idea of the Norwich Mill and the Norwich Loaf began to take shape. The city farm group picked up the suggestion from Toni Hassett, then a teacher at the Hewett, for a market garden at that school. On 14 Jan 2009, Kirstin Glendinning from the Soil Association addressed a meeting of people interested in starting a CSA.

Meanwhile East Anglia Food Link were working with Transition Norwich to develop a Food Plan for Norwich. (Tully was a member of TN's Core Group but also co-ordinator of East Anglia Food Link). The Food Plan, looking at what would be the most resilient and low-impact way to feed Norwich, highlighted the importance of arable staple foods like beans, oats and barley (as well as wheat), and the lack of local supply chains for these. The Food Plan also highlighted the importance of skills and equipment for growing fruit and vegetables as locally as possible, on a range of scales, and thus strengthened the case for the CSA and the school market garden.

The launch of the Big Lottery's Local Food Fund coincided with these developments. Accordingly in February 2009 we submitted an initial application to that Fund. At the end of March the Fund approved this first-stage application and invited us to submit a full application.

At this point activity moved more towards East Anglia Food Link. Tully and William (in particular) worked hard to put together a proposal, working up a business plan and budget for each element of the project, seeking expressions of support from key partners such as the Hewett school, the bakers, Rainbow Wholefoods, Wholefood Planet and so on, and getting quotes for dozens of items of capital equipment. This full application was submitted in July 2009.

Then, things went quiet until 10 December 2009, when we received a conditional approval from the Local Food Fund. By now, EAFL had run out of money. So, whereas up till the end of October Tully had been working part-time for EAFL to progress the project, he was now signing on as unemployed - a state of affairs that was to continue for 10 months.

The conditional approval left plenty still to be done to meet the conditions. Planning permission was needed for the two polytunnels we had planned (one at Postwick, one at the Hewett). We had to meet the Lottery's stringent requirements regarding ownership of buildings. More quotes were needed for the capital items we needed to buy. And there was a big question about who would step in should the project's income (from selling vegetables) fall short of expectations.

Meeting these requirements took longer than any of could have imagined. Getting planning permissions for polytunnels was a particular headache, especially at the Hewett, which had just become a Trust School. The City Council thought it was the County Council's jurisdiction, but County thought (rightly) that it was the City's - and it took three months just to get them to agree. And then another three months to decide to refuse planning permission. So then we negotiated a change to the funding proposal, to use cloches at the Hewett instead of a polytunnel.

Another problem was that, during this period, Wholefood Planet (the social enterprise who were going to host the flour mill) ran out of money and ceased trading. Eventually one of the bakers who is hoping to use the flour agreed to host the mill - and again we negotiated that change with the Local Food Fund.

By July 2010 I'd pretty much given up on the project. I'd been on the dole for over 9 months, we were still hitting obstacles at every turn, and I'd decided that it was seriously time to find a job - any job - and stop waiting for the funding to turn up. And then, on 27 July 2010, I got an email from Graham at the Local Food Fund, announcing that the project had been formally approved.

Reflecting back on those 18 months, I have to say that if I'd known it was going to be that hard, and take that long, I wouldn't have done it. It cost EAFL its last £20k or so of reserves - and when that ran out, my family lived on the dole for 10 months. I kept thinking we were nearly there, but we weren't. Part of the problem was that we'd lumped together several small projects into one big project. We did that because it demonstrated how strategic and joined-up the vision was, but it created a huge problem in that there were so many things that could go wrong, each of which held up the whole project.

But, at last, here we are, with funding in place and exciting projects to deliver. In my next post I'll say more about what's happened since that email of 27 July.