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.