NWT Communications Intern: Diversity, Meg Watts, reports on a visit to Norwich FarmShare.
I am often struck by the dilemma of coexisting with wildlife on a grand scale. We can all make individual changes: accommodating the hedgehogs that cross our outdoor spaces, or the migratory birds that fill our summer skies. But how can we apply these accommodations to vital industries that support our existence, like farming?
Just a few miles southeast of Norwich, you can find a farm with an overwhelmingly positive impact on both people and the planet: beds chock full of seasonal vegetables; piles of organic produce, weighed and sorted into bundles; polytunnels basking in the sunshine; sunflowers waving cheerily above the backs of workers as they pick the crop. This is Norwich FarmShare; a lovingly cared-for, three-acre plot of community-owned land.
It sounds like a utopian vision but Farm Manager Joel Rodker and his team have proved that small-scale, ecological agriculture can be reality. I caught up with Joel and some of Norwich FarmShare's community volunteers during the summer to hear about the personal harvests they reap from being involved.
Joel's work covers everything from overseeing growing to coordinating volunteers and ensuring that the farm is economically viable. "It's pretty small as farms go, but it's pretty complex," he says. "Although we're community-focused, I want people to recommend us and our vegboxes!"
Cucumber harvesting by Trisha
Joel continues: "We care about being accessible. We want the community to support us as volunteers and members, while we promise to provide fresh, chemical-free vegetables, and offer access and informal education to our community members. Then there are the bigger issues of soil degradation, the climate crisis and water abstraction. We're trying to model a farming system that demonstrates some of the solutions to those problems."
Norwich FarmShare avoids using synthetic pesticides and fertilisers in order to protect biodiversity on the farm and ensure streams are not harmed by nitrogen-heavy runoff. This environmental ethos is echoed by volunteers, including University of East Anglia students Ella Selbie and Trisha Margolis.
"We decided as a house to start using Norwich FarmShare vegboxes around June 2020. We wanted to access food as sustainably as possible," they say. Interest soon transitioned into volunteering. "Everything that we do in life has environmental repercussions; it's really hard to avoid. But spending one day a week doing something that actually is the opposite just feels right."
Ella has found a real sense of wellbeing from spending time outdoors. "You feel so deserving of rest after FarmShare. Yesterday I took unsaleable broccoli and bolted fennel home; it felt so good to make dinner with it. My body and mind are grateful that I've spent the day outside with people who are really nice. My housemate Trisha got to watch how it benefitted me and I've watched how it's benefitted Trisha."
Volunteers harvesting leeks by Joel Rodker
For Trisha, volunteering at Norwich FarmShare has been a chance to reconnect with their early childhood in nature. "I was born in a country where almost every person grows their own food and keeps their own cattle. It's the way that they preserve their livelihoods. That has very much stayed with me." This is the beauty of Norwich FarmShare: the organisation may rely on the financial value of its produce, but it also offers community education on healthy relationships with the land. "Knowing how to farm means so much to me," says Trisha, "because it gives me something that I can create with so few tools. What remains is not what I don't have, but what the earth already provides me."
Joel would like to make Norwich FarmShare still more accessible. "When you're managing land, you have to be aware of the histories of inequality and exploitation there. Where does our food come from? Who owns the land? Who has access to land and are communities welcome? How is land management going to solve the biggest issue we're facing: climate change?"
Trisha echoes this feeling, saying: "I have loved being able to hold space in this community as a Black person; not just because visibility is so important in encouraging communal involvement, but because as a working-class person the access I have had to communal growing space has been incredibly limited. I like that FarmShare is an open community, that you can put your name down and someone will help you organise a lift."
The ethos of inclusive communality can be felt throughout Norwich FarmShare, but this takes nothing from its focus on farming and land stewardship. "We're looking after the land and the soil and the water cycle," says Joel. "The way that we grow food has a huge impact on the planet. Even though Norwich FarmShare is very small, if we can work with nature, not against it, then that gives people hope for the future. An environmentally healthy, non-degraded future."
Header image: Norwich FarmShare vegbox by Trisha