English Rebecca Laughton, Horticulture Campaigns Coordinator at the Landworkers’ Alliance, shares a vision for a market garden renaissance, where every village, town and city in the UK would have access to fresh produce from regional agroecological growers, bringing multiple social and environmental benefits.
Growers will be familiar with the fact that much root growth occurs underground, before a plant’s vegetative growth really gets going. This metaphor can be applied to the LWA’s horticulture campaign, the idea for which began six years ago at the Food Foundations’ Pea Please Veg Summit in October 2017. There, the seed of a vision germinated.
The vision was that every city in the UK would be supplied with fruit and vegetables from a series of “Food Zones”, while every village and town would obtain its fresh produce from a number of local market gardens and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes.
Since then, much “root growth” has occurred, as we have been running our horticulture ELMS trial, “Growing the Goods”; campaigning for the removal of the 5ha threshold that prevents most market gardens accessing agricultural payments, and attending Fruit and Vegetable Alliance (FVA), and Edible Horticulture Round Table meetings with the Defra Horticulture Team, to keep the needs of agroecological growers on their radar.
This latter has taken considerable time over the last year, particularly as we worked together with other FVA members such the British Growers’ Association (BGA), NFU Horticulture and British Apples and Pears to agree our priorities ahead of the publication of the horticulture strategy for England, that Defra was intending to create in September 2022 (see Cultivating Success). Since plans for a horticulture strategy were scrapped, the agroecological members of the FVA have turned their attention to the announcement made at the Downing Street Farm to Fork Summit last May, that a new Fruit and Vegetable Aid Scheme would be created by 2026.
It is with this in mind we have written A Market Garden Renaissance, to illustrate to Defra how altering the Fruit and Veg Aid Scheme to make it accessible to agroecological growers would generate multiple environmental and social benefits. At present, the F&V Aid Scheme, which has been carried over from the EU and match funds investment in productivity and environmental measures, is only accessible to groups of growers who sell at least 75% of their output via a Producer Organisation (PO) have a combined turnover of £1 million.
In the UK, PO’s tend to be made up of large scale growers selling to supermarkets. The LWA is working to understand how POs and the F&V Aid Scheme could be adapted to make them accessible to our members, and will be communicating our suggestions to the Defra Horticulture Team over the coming months. “A Market Garden Renaissance” will also be useful as we look for broader opportunities that the upcoming election provides for getting our vision into the oppositions’ manifestos.
A Market Garden Renaissance is a short version of a much longer report that we will launch at Oxford Real Farming Conference in January 2024. Our session – ‘Horticulture Across Four Nations’ – will explore, using numerical modelling, how manifesting our vision for a market garden renaissance across Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England, could substitute for 20% of fresh produce imports, while delivering multiple environmental and social benefits.
This autumn we will be reaching out to you, our horticultural LWA members, and to allied groups, such as the CSA Network UK a Organic Growers Alliance, to check whether this vision of a market garden renaissance is one that you can get behind.
We invite you to join the LWA “Horticulture across Three Nations” policy team on Wednesday 8th November (6-7.30pm) for an online engagement session, to share with you a preview of the report contents, gather your feedback on it, and find out how we can hone the messaging to appeal to and motivate our members to help us ramp up the campaign in the New Year.
Please book a free place yma, and come along to have your say about how we move forward with promoting the interests of agroecological growers. Lets make 2024 the year when the vegetative growth of the horticulture campaign really takes off!
