Rural-urban supply chains: Letter to the Minister for Rural Resilience and Sustainability

We wrote to Llŷr Gruffydd to advocate the development of rural-urban supply chains following UK-wide publicity for our project in Powys and Birmingham.

Dear Llŷr,

Welsh cities need to source food from their rural hinterlands

The Guardian newspaper has just published the story about the supply chain we are building from the rural area of Powys into the city of Birmingham, which includes building new affordable farms for young farmers.

A joyful harvest: the young Welsh farmers growing food for Birmingham

The Guardian heard about our project because Professor Tim Lang mentioned it in his keynote speech at the NFU UK national conference in Birmingham in February this year.

We would like to invite you to visit the farms at Sarn.

This is the very first and tiny step towards a much bigger initiative. It will grow in three ways:

• Birmingham City Council will repeat the contract to buy food next year, and we are discussing considerable future expansion and diversification of this trade. This will be for all farmers in Powys, not just new farms. We are now discussing this with the farming unions. (FUW has visited the farms at Sarn.)
• We are about to invite the leaders of Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Wrexham and Bangor to a meeting with Birmingham City Council to discuss how cities can build markets for farms in their rural hinterlands. (In France, cities are obliged by law to do this.)
• We are working with ClwydAlyn Housing Association to build a financial and legal model for an “affordable farm” that can be rolled out nationally. In the meantime, we are planning three more farms on Powys County farmland north of Welshpool. We will integrate work experience infrastructure into these next farms to enable the development of a pool of experienced growers in the region.

All this is the very first part of a carefully considered strategic approach to developing food security. As I wrote to you on 13 May, we believe building food security should be the core of the new food strategy.

The three key things we are demonstrating for future scale-up are:

• Building demand for food grown on Welsh farms. We consider stimulating demand to be the fundamental engine of change, because farmers are good at responding to new opportunities. We see new demand possibilities in cities and large towns, public authorities, accommodation providers (housing associations, old people’s homes….), hospitality and local communities.
• Opening up land and career opportunities to a new generation of farmers, despite impossibly expensive land and a lack of housing after decades of agricultural depopulation. This needs to happen alongside diversification on existing farms as new markets open up.
• New farming as economic development. We believe that food security must become a foundation of economic development in every local authority area in Wales.

None of these are policies in Wales at the moment and we encounter a plethora of barriers every step of the way. Mainstreaming what we are proving to be possible at micro-level will require Welsh and local government strategy and policy. Making this case will be part of our contribution to the forthcoming discussions about the food strategy.

With best wishes, etc.