Our Food

Duncan Fisher & Sue Holbrook

Project Managers Our Food 1200 / Ein Bwyd 1200

We’re experienced and proactive local people working together through Our Food 1200 / Ein Bwyd 1200, a community benefit society.

We’re responding to an emergency that is threatening our climate, nature, food supplies and our health. We’re working through partnerships, including with the National Park and other Y Bannau: The Future partners.

Our Food

To create a vibrant local food economy, we need to grow demand for local food – from residents, from local authorities, and from neighbouring cities. At the same time, we need to grow more food locally, using regenerative principles that fix carbon and do not damage nature with phosphate or nitrate pollution. To do that we must find land, attract skilled growers to work this land, and support these new small farms with finance, housing, planning, marketing and technology.

Our Aims

Success will be eight things: reduced carbon emissions in our region from growing and consuming food, safe local supplies for when global food chains are disrupted, more local jobs, providing healthy and more nutritious food, reduced pollution, protecting and enhancing biodiversity, stronger community cohesion around food trade, and helping to alleviate local food poverty.

Our Actions

We’re building demand for local fruit and veg – town-based marketing campaigns, working with local authorities to supply schools, and working with the Cardiff food programmes to build supply chains there. We’re supporting the development of small, highly productive, commercial horticulture businesses that use regenerative techniques (fixing carbon, building soil biodiversity, and following organic principles) and that employ about 1 person/acre. We’re matching growers with private landowners, we’re looking for farms to buy into, community ownership for multiple small food- based enterprises, and we’re seeking county farms for the same purpose. We’re working to increase commercial horticulture training provision and talking to school pupils about a future career in growing. We’re helping new farmers to develop joint sales and marketing, find start-up and growth finance, find housing, and employ zero carbon small-farm technologies. We’re also working with local authorities and Welsh Government to develop supportive planning regulations and policies.

We want to communicate to the local public in unison with the National Park Authority. We also want to work with the Authority to create planning regulations that support small-scale regenerative farming.

Y Bannau: The Future means we can work in partnership with the National Park and all its other partners. Like everyone else, we cannot achieve our aims without strong partnerships.