The key to feeding Lincolnshire communities over the next few years lies in regenerative growing using circular economy principles. We must end take, make, break and waste, by recycling, re-purposing, reusing and working together by caring and sharing bridges age, class and skills gaps.
When we SOW, STUDY, SUSTAIN at our Kenwick Park Micro Farm, we push up together and community wealth build outside of the digital and financialised matrix. Take one step outside the matrix and we embrace nature, opportunity and find the confidence that builds community resilience.
Shall we Conform, consume, own nothing and be happy? Or it is time to make a stand if you want to keep at least one foot outside of the digital matrix that aims to maintain a feudal system for the benefit of the 1% and their entourage. With the true scale of food shortages kept from us and controlled by a cartel already in the counting house piling up the money, now is the perfect time to think about growing our own. We can push up and we will, working together with our friends, neighbours and wider communities. Napoleon talked about us as a nation of shopkeepers, that is long gone thanks to the marketing machine that parrots the needs of the food cartel eager to profit from any food deemed fit for human consumption. So we need to rethink food, simplify the processes for local and community needs.
The majority of UK land is farmed producing more than half the food that we eat. But there is increasing pressure on farmers to increase production without damaging the environment. Given the closure of the UK and Europe’s fertilizer factories last year they won’t even be able to feed us full stop, let alone ensure sustainable agriculture.
Thankfully the concepts of the circular economy are being applied in agricultural practices. The conversion of biological waste such as crop stalks, leaves and animal waste can replace agrichem fertilizers. They are rich in nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other nutrients, and can reduce the cost and resource demand for external inputs of synthetic fertilisers. The reuse of wastewater from cities, towns, and agricultural activities such as animal production and irrigation runoff, which if treated properly, can also be reused for pastures and plant production. Biomass from plant and animal waste can produce biofuels that can be used for heat, electricity, or transportation fuel production.
All good intentions but only community food growing cuts to the chase, because it eliminates the middlemen, the speculators, the unnecessary gatekeepers who protect profit and perpetuate the linear model of take, make, break and waste. Less miles, more smiles, healthier not wealthier. A poly tunnel, netted tunnel and raised beds, incorporating vertical growing will yield crops every 6-8 weeks all through the year.
Perhaps we need to take a step back with regards circular economy given those good old self appointed stakeholders are over complicating matters. They do that, because buzzwords and long words keep us from formulating our own ideas and, thus realising we can take things into our own hands, because the projects and outcomes are faster cheaper and more democratic at community level. Every street has the old wise heads with the knowledge, the tradesmen with the skills and a younger generation eager to help if they were no longer ostracized for errors of judgement. The Global Leveling Up agenda will simply down for the majority of stakeholders, namely us, simply because if we were given the money directly we would do far more with it. We can apply the two circular economy models to just about anything.
So how can we ensure both the sustainability of the food system and long-term economic and societal resilience too? By localising and building a community based food economy. Big business may green wash but their linear economy traditionally follows a take, make, dispose system, where products are created and used once and then disposed of as waste with the additional extraction of profit for beneficiaries outside the community. They will preach circular economy, but, the model is one of a circle of self interest, one maintained by lobbying for regulation and governance that perpetuates their profit maximisation model at the expense of the consumers and environment.
In a regenerative community circular food economy all activity is focused on value chain rather than GDP, to rebuild overall system health by cutting out the concept of waste and unnecessary extraction from the circle. Instead we build in environmental and economic benefits, maintain raw material sources and reduce the environmental impacts of production and consumption.
For more on our Sow Study Sustain model and how we can community wealth build by caring and sharing, feel free to follow us.
