Hay Food Assembly

 I arrived a little early at the Swan, to drop off my donation of biscuits to go with the free tea and coffee that was being provided.  Michael was giving some last minute direction to the facilitators who would be working with the rest of the people there during the afternoon.

Inside the function room, there were 9 or 10 round tables to sit at - I found a place just under the TV camera, at table 6, along with Janet from HOWLS, the Hay Library group, and a lady from Swansea who was acting as the note-taker for the table - she'd come up with some others because a group in Swansea wanted to try something similar, so she was seeing how it worked in practice.  There were also a couple of farmers on our table (one retired) and a lady who just wanted to see what was going on.  And Wayland, our facilitator, of course, who was there to keep the conversation going and stop anyone who was speaking over other participants.  (we were a very civilised group, so he didn't need to do much to keep us on track!).

There were a couple of tables at the back for anyone who didn't want to be filmed or photographed.

The idea for the forum came out of Hay Library CIC, and this is the first of three forums on different topics - the others are energy (can Hay do anything to generate our own energy?) and well-being (intervening with mental health problems before it gets bad enough for the NHS to become involved).

So this one was about food.  Can Hay get anywhere near self-sufficiency in food?  It used to be the case that local farmers fed local people, but now the supply chains can be very long indeed.  Even Kieran at the greengrocers has to travel to Birmingham to get some of his stock, though he tries to source as much as he can nearer to home, and some of the produce he buys in Birmingham will have come from much further away (we still can't grow bananas very well in the UK!)

The meeting started with a series of short films or speeches about the sort of things that are happening around the country to improve local access to fresh produce.  

First, the Mayor of South Yorkshire gave a quick introduction to how Citizen's Assemblies work - he organised one in his area to get an idea of what the local communities needed to be done.

Then there was a short film on Permaculture, which is a way of designing the landscape to provide food and shelter and all the other necessities of life in a sustainable way.

Katie Hardy spoke about Growing Local, the 20 acre site near Hereford where she's Head Grower.  This is a CSA - a Community Share Agriculture scheme where share holders pay in advance for food boxes, and the market garden grows the food.  They're also planning a cafe and a learning garden for schools.

The next film was for Incredible Edible, showing a scheme in Wrexham where volunteers plant fruit trees and vegetables in public spaces for anyone to harvest.  The council allowed them to plant on a piece of waste ground in one of the housing estates, on the basis that they couldn't make it any worse!

Then there was a film about LEAP - an organisation that provides loans for all sorts of growing and farming projects.  Funding can be a real problem for initiatives like this, but as well as LEAP there are grants available if you know where to apply for them.

Finally Geraint Powell, from Cabalva Farm, talked a bit about Regenerative Agriculture and what they are doing at Cabalva.

So, the audience now had an idea of what was possible - the next stage was to discuss it around the tables....