Letter to 108 community councils in Powys: do you want to grow food?

We wrote a letter to 108 community councils in Powys to ask if they were interested in growing food. We had 15 replies.

The local food partnership, Bwyd Powys Food, is setting up a working group to look at how to enable interested community councils to proceed, and has asked Duncan from Our Food Trust to chair it.

This is the letter.

Dear xxx

We are writing to you as the representative of xxx Community Council to ask you if your community is interested in growing more food locally for local people. We are writing to all 108 community and town councils in Powys to see if there is interest in working together across the county to grow more food for our communities.

If growing more food locally is an issue of local interest, please answer this email by the end of July. We have included some questions about local interest below.

We are a not-for-profit organisation working in Powys to expand growing of food for local communities. You may have heard about the project that we were part of to build three small farms with homes on Powys County farmland, creating opportunities for skilled young farmers to start growing in Powys.

Many people are realising that we need to grow more food locally to be safe in the future. Interest in local growing increased hugely during Covid, and leading experts on food are warning of more food shocks in the near future and the continuation of high food price inflation. These are driven by wars, cyber-attacks and climate change. We have summarised the most authoritative report on food security from last year by Professor Tim Lang at FoodSecurityAction.org.

There are three ways of growing more food locally:

1. Community growing, such as more allotments and community growing projects.
2. Teaching people how to grow vegetables at home. There is huge interest among people across all of UK in learning about this.
3. Establishing small commercial farm enterprises growing fruit & veg for the local market, like we have done in Sarn. This opens new opportunities for young people to work on the land.

A key challenge is access to land, even in a county as rural as Powys.

We would like to ask you:

• Are there already projects to grow more food in your community? (These could inspire other communities.)
• Do you want to grow more food in your community, but are encountering barriers?
• Are you interested to be part of a wider exploration of possibilities with other councils across Powys?

Together with all the community councils that respond to this email, we will build a proposal for supporting more growing of food across Powys for our communities.

With best wishes…..

We look forward to hearing from you, if this is an issue of interest!

With best wishes,

Duncan & Sue