FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD !!

Ruth and I love our food... and a lot of our lives revolve around it. If we're not cooking, eating, storing, growing, looking at recipes, harvesting or shopping for it we'll probably be digesting it or thinking about it. So I don't like to think that we're moving into an era of steadily increasing prices and shortages.

FOOD SECURITY

I have to say that our food security in the UK generally is pretty terrible. We live in an age when people expect to be able to drive to a huge hall and be able to get anything they want at any time of year. Many people have become so dependent on the industrial way of life that they now haven't a clue about growing their own food.

How much of the food in our Perth supermarkets is grown even within a twenty mile radius of town? And how much barley, the main Scottish crop, have you eaten this year? Does it really make sense to fly raspberries from Morocco into what was once a prime raspberry growing area? (And what sort of conditions do those Moroccan farm workers work in?)

This is a chart showing the main Scottish crops - how much barley have you eaten recently? 
Scottish Government report on food production here

I think we have a much better chance of growing more of our food locally by starting small and scaling up, ie starting in our gardens, allotments and small holdings, rather than starting from industrial agriculture scale farms. Those huge fields of one crop would be a difficult place to start for all sorts of reasons - the degraded quality of much of the land and the infrastructure it would require. Also, those farms and farmers have bought into huge capital expenditure for machinery. They depend financially on getting a return on their investment and keeping things going as they are.

MISSION

Our main mission at Perth Community Farm is to show people how to grow some food (and as many other sustainable living skills as possible). We aim to grow as wide a range of food as possible, rather than maximum quantities, so we're not as intensive as a full-on market garden. Visitors are often surprised that we have grapes growing - but they're not that difficult. People can see all sorts of ways of keeping the hard work of weeding and digging etc to a minimum. Some of the things that may be in short supply in the near future are actually quite easy to grow: tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers for a start - though you really need a polytunnel, greenhouse or conservatory to grow much of them in Scotland.

Get in touch about visiting and helping us - even if you look in for a few hours I'm sure you'll get some great ideas for your own plot. And depending on the season, you'll be able to sample some really tasty, nutritious, chemical free, fresh, zero-food mile produce.