Connecting communities through food: the development of community supported agriculture in the UK

Lead Research Organisation: University of Brighton
Department Name: Sch of Environment and Technology

Abstract

There is a convergence of the cultural and material worlds occurring in farming, driven by communities making connections between the production and consumption of food.

This new civic agriculture is experienced in multiple ways, from small groups of allotment holders, to large groups owning substantial farming businesses and land. Although characterised as a consumerist response to industrial farming and mass marketing, this research suggests the emergence of a 'new productivist' agenda in which diverse communities take bodily, commercial and political control over the food that they consume. Through exploring the role that visual art and culture plays in the formation and expression of individual and community identity, the research found that the convergence between the cultural and material is driven by transition in the ways in which people practice development of the self in the context of community. This is not just about food security, but also about expressing commitment to sustainable everyday life practices, informed by a range of aspirations including: a desire to support particular diets through locally-sourced foods; an ambition to challenge conventional food growing stereotypes relating to (dis)ability, gender and sexual orientation; and a wish to make an explicit commitment to personal, family and community health.
 
Title Community Farming: a life in the day of Tablehurst Community Farm 
Description Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch Community Farms commissioned a professionally produced film of their farm open day, 19th June 2011. It features the farm staff and volunteers explaining what it is to be part of a community supported farm (http://vimeo.com/28277968). 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2011 
Impact This film allowed, for the first time in the UK, people unconnected with community farming to gain access to the unseen worlds of communities that farm. In placing the oral histories of the community within the context of a farm open day, viewers see the familiar and unfamiliar folding into one-another. The film has been instrumental in catalysing new farm communities to form, and in bringing biodynamic community farming to newe audiences, including conventional agricultural journalists and film-makers (the farm has since featured on BBC Countryfile - twice - and Radio 4's Farming Today, for example) 
 
Title I love you allot, and Spearmint? I'll have some of that 
Description Likt Young Women?s Health Project (Likt): two films produced by the young women documenting their work at the allotment and the ways in which they engaged with the space and the food growing: http://www.likt.org.uk/activities/allotment/ 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2011 
Impact This film was shown at a film club in East Sussex, as part of a local festival, and gave the Young Women's Group the opportunity to give insights to their lives in inner Manchester. This provoked many questions and highlighted how both gardening and film-making are activities that bring people together, even if their lives are utterly different. 
 
Title Talking Quilt 
Description Spitalfields City Farm created an interactive 'talking quilt' which enabled the farm community to create a material document that could contribute to an oral history project with the Federation of City Farms. The Connected Communities research thus provided a context to the content of the quilt, both visually and aurally. 
Type Of Art Artwork 
Year Produced 2011 
Impact The quilt has been taken to many schools and community groups, and has enabled Spitalfields City Farm to explain the significance of city farms as well as the power of community art in communicating ideas and feeling of belonging. 
 
Description Food communities have been characterised in the literature as a largely middle class consumerist response to industrial farming and mass marketing. This research suggests that an alternative, 'new productivist' agenda is emerging in which socially diverse communities take bodily as well as commercial and political control over the food that they consume. The research has found that this cultural turn from consumption to production is driven by changes in the ways in which people practice development of the self in the context of community. This is not just about food security, but also about expressing commitment to sustainable everyday life practices, informed by a range of aspirations including: a desire to support particular diets through locally-sourced foods; an ambition to challenge conventional food growing stereotypes relating to (dis)ability, gender and sexual orientation; and a wish to make an explicit commitment to personal, family and community education and health through establishing stronger connections with local outdoor environments. This suggests that food communities of the type studied in this research may be in the vanguard of a new approach to connectedness where the narrow constraints of individualised neoclassicism are replaced by the inter-connectedness of multiple gift relationships, between human and non-human entities (see Hyde, 2006; Hird, 2010).

At the core of this new connectedness, for all of the groups in this research, is an intimacy experienced at particular moments between people and the spaces that they inhabit. Many of those in the research recall 'moments' when community happened and, often, the spaces in which these happened (the state of the ground and the task of clearing it remain strong for the Likt community, for example, as do the many people working together in the early potato harvests at TPH). In reflecting Sennett's (2012) arguments about the significance of informal ties, these moments and spaces equate to 'glimpses of community' - those times/spaces where community is present and visible, recognising that this often is not the case and that community may be absent, even when people are together. The role of visual culture, and photography in particular, in mediating understanding of the spaces of food communities and participation in them, emerged as particularly important.

Despite the significance of time and space, all three projects reflect constant fluidity, people coming and going, getting deeply engaged with the work then moving away, having 'done their bit' (it is interesting here to consider the possibility for exchange between 'insider' and 'outsider' status). At Likt this is about moments of engagement with what is often a transient population; introducing young women to the possibilities of gardening and making community through the garden, but equally expecting most of them to move on at some point (the archetypal youth work project). SCF exhibits some of the same dynamic, although this is less about the mobility of the community and more about the ways in which community needs and funding priorities change over time. TPH is different, because there is no broader public agenda to pursue, and the 'member community' is largely static. However, there is still the fluidity of movement in and out of deep engagement. There is also a strong dynamic of work shifting from 'volunteers' to 'professionals'. Many projects start largely as volunteer programmes, staffed by those who wish to participate. Over time these projects either get taken over by paid staff (as funding becomes available), or they fall away as the volunteers lose interest. This suggests, to some, the notion of often being at a 'crossroads' with new directions to choose and new connections to make in order to new the vigour of the project.

The therapeutic qualities of gardening are made most explicit at Likt, and underpin some of the core work of SCF. They are also exemplified in the care home and associated activities at TPH. Yet all three projects suggest that therapy goes far beyond the formal institutional frameworks demanded by youth work and social services, to embrace all those involved. Many people involved in the projects describe their sense of peace, or fulfilment, or health, when engaged with farming and gardening. Some participants experienced this more deeply - describing the conversations that they have had in the allotment or field as 'better than any counselling session.'

There is an emerging theme around the identity, role and understanding of 'community makers' - people (or maybe even events) that contribute significantly, or define, the community. At SCF, for example, Lutfun Hussein is closely identified with the Coriander Club, which is viewed as one of the ensuring successes of the farm. At Likt there are stories about the originators of the allotment project, and the youth workers remain significant to the sustainability of the project. At TPH there are many stories about the significance of the milk round and, in particular, the milk deliverers as makers of community. There are also strong memories and associations with key events in the project's history - the early community meetings, the first harvests, singing to the animals on Christmas Eve.
Exploitation Route This research has already been used to help several food groups understand some of the key dynamics involved in starting and supporting communities of interest around food. The research is particualrly useful for new communities that are seeking to understand how they maintain their vibrancy.
Sectors Agriculture

Food and Drink

Communities and Social Services/Policy

Education

Environment

Leisure Activities

including Sports

Recreation and Tourism
 
Description The findings have been used in two ways: to help farming communities understand the dynamism and instability of community, and to view it as an asset rather than a liability; and to question whether academic understandings of community and leisure are as robust as has been supposed. This work has now been taken up by farmer organisations in China, who are interested in learning about the potential of community supported agriculture. This has led to a number of visits to Chinese farms. The PI, Prof Neil Ravenscroft, is now an Advisor to the Chinese Community Supported Agriculture Alliance. New work has been published on small community and ecological farming in Shanghai, with the Chinese research team invited to present their findings at the 2017 Chinese CSA conference in Guiyang.
First Year Of Impact 2016
Sector Agriculture, Food and Drink,Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Environment,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice
Impact Types Cultural

Societal

Economic
 
Description Community Supported Agriculture Workshop
Geographic Reach National 
Policy Influence Type Influenced training of practitioners or researchers
 
Description Fudan Fellowship
Amount ¥25,000 (CNY)
Organisation Fudan University 
Sector Academic/University
Country China
Start 04/2016 
End 09/2016
 
Description Circular storytelling: reimagining stories as a means of doing community histories. 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The 2-hour workshop, which took place in Amsterdam, on a new conceptual approach to oral history research has led to several requests to use the approach and for more guidance about how it might help curators and other archivists and museum professionals

After this workshop we were invited to join a research group that was bidding for new research on the cultural heritage of Europe's minor waterways. This was successful (AHRC EUWATHER)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015