Feeding Martin

What happens when a band of villagers tries to produce its own food? Hannah Bullock finds out how far they’ve got on the road to self-sufficiency.

It was a gamble. They’d never run a farm in their lives, but they were going to try and get fresh food grown in the parish to feed 300 people. And sell it to them on the spot  - defying the temptations of a supermarket a mere six miles away. So, two years ago, a group of determined villagers put in the first row of onions in a stony field in Martin,  Hampshire.

The idea of launching a community-run farm was seeded by a local landscape gardener. Nick Snelgar was exasperated at being surrounded by fertile land, but not eating any of its fruits. He had a corner of a field to spare, and persuaded seven others at a meeting in the village hall to join him in growing vegetables and rearing animals to sell in Martin.

Futurefarms, they called it. And today, next to the onions on their roadside barrow, you’ll find leeks, carrots, aubergine, melons even - most fresh picked that day. The packs of sausages, chicken and cured bacon at the Saturday stall look pretty professional too.

This is “not just playing shops on a Saturday”, says Snelgar. Futurefarms can’t (yet) claim to be ‘feeding Martin’ single-handedly, but it now works six acres of land in the parish and has reared and sold over 2,000 chickens to locals. Takings from the daily barrow and weekly stall go up and down, but the company, run as a co-op and kickstarted with a £20,000 social enterprise grant, is in the black. It brings in enough money to pay several part-time labourers to do the big jobs like ploughing, regular harvesting and delivering the live birds to the slaughterhouse, though it still relies heavily on volunteers to collect the prepared meat (a 20-mile drive known as the ‘chicken run’) and put out the vegetable barrow.

Futurefarms is part of a growing movement of community agriculture schemes in the UK. But while scores of groups have joined up with local farms to run volunteering schemes or vegetable box services, only a dozen or so have grasped the nettle and set up their own farming business.

Learning the ropes

For those eight original committee members in Martin - including a grain merchant, a doctor and a Green Party candidate - it wasn’t easy getting to grips with everything from planting seasons to hygiene standards to pig herd licenses, especially when local landowners tended to be standoffish. The first year, short of land to get their spuds in, they were bailed out at the last minute when one sympathetic farmer rented them another field. Then their first batch of hens unexpectedly grew to the size of turkeys. They hadn’t realised they’d been donated Ross Cobs, bred for slaughter after five intensive weeks in a cage, not fourteen weeks in a country meadow.

Now they’ve got poultry farming down to a fine art, giving the birds what Snelgar calls “the best life a chicken could hope for” in specially designed huts with open doors overlooking the chalk downland. “Having seen the chickens running around in the field, I wouldn’t want to buy them anywhere else,” says Susan Sampson, one of several customers who have ordered for the rest of the year.

It’s this reconnection with the land that excites Jules Pretty, university professor and  leading critic on sustainable agriculture and (thanks to the media-savvy Snelgar) Futurefarms ‘associate member’. “Industrially produced food comes without a story, but community farming gives it meaning and identity,” he says. A lot of the co-operative’s customers will have checked the chickens once or twice, planted a couple of potatoes, or know someone who has.

But not everyone in the village, with its stark contrast of thatched cottages and council terraces, thinks chickens are so attractive at £3.45 a kilo. Pretty has his feet firmly on the ground too: “You’ve got to make it cheap enough for everyone. You want customers to think: ‘Oh yes, this is cheaper than Asda!’”

Is that realistic? The co-op sets its vegetable prices in line with local greengrocers, but its free-range meat has to reflect its production costs. They can undercut Waitrose organic, but there’s no way they can sell a whole chicken for £1.20, as Lidl does just 12 miles away, when each day-old chick costs 60p, a lifetime’s organic chicken feed £2.50, the trip to the slaughterhouse £1, and the killing, packing and processing £1.60 - on top of costs of renting the field, metered water, electricity and insurance.

The hard sell

Treasurer Janet Richards knows Futurefarms has to work harder at “explaining what goes on behind the scenes, and why they can’t expect to buy good food at such a low price”. That’s what the ‘mentor system’ is about, where committee members raise awareness in a particular area of the village, and why Snelgar is keen on applying for a grant for “marketing and encouragement”, as he calls it.

While ‘success’ is not proven on the arithmetic, the social benefits are already evident. Futurefarms’ secretary Margaret Scogings feels the humble vegetable stall “has provided a meeting place, which used to be the village shop when we had one”. Sampson has now set up a fairtrade stall in the hall alongside the veg, and the committee is toying with the idea of selling newspapers and groceries there, too.

“You can’t help feeling that something bigger will grow from an initiative like this,” enthuses Vicky Hird at Friends of the Earth. But she’s hesitant to herald community agriculture schemes as the start of a revolution against the supermarket monopoly: “It is a worry that they’re managing to get good, healthy food to people despite the system, rather than by actually changing it.” 

Pretty shares her concerns, but similarly it’s the social potential that excites him: “Consumers start to feel an ownership of the place; they feel responsible for it and go there to volunteer because it makes them feel good. Now that’s the transformation, the radical bit.”

You could see it happening on a blistering June afternoon this year, when an incredible 20 volunteers turned out to dib in the leeks - including five from neighbouring villages, perhaps lured along by the promise of a cream tea when all the plants were in. The next day, when the rain came, you could just imagine them thinking happily of their food growing in that field in Martin.

8 November 2006