We’ve found many inspiring and innovative examples of urban and peri urban agriculture from across the UK and beyond. We’ve produced a simple guide to the main and emerging trends – and we’ve produced a fabulous visual guide backed up with information and case studies to help fire your imaginations, and we hope to give you and your partners the confidence to embark on the development of more, larger scale urban agriculture projects.. Click here to find out more.
Perhaps it is not surprising that for lots of people, and for local authority officers, urban agriculture has no meaning, or they immediately think of allotments. Much that we love and support allotments (Jeremy has nurtured a plot for over 25 years in Bristol and was co-creator of the Allotment Regeneration Initiative from 2002-2014) there are many other existing and emerging ways that urban and urban fringe agriculture and horticultural food production is taking root.
Our simple guide has condensed this very complex landscape into six main themes –
- Protected and controlled environments – from polytunnels to indoor growing
- Peri-urban and urban fringe farming
- Orchards and tree based food production
- Farmstarts and incubator hubs – fostering new enterprises
- Patchwork farms and area-wide food production with a common identity
- Community food growing and social enterprises – including long established city farms and community garden projects
Of course it is far more nuanced than that – and there are many emerging ideas such as Co-Farms that we want to explore further, along with many financial and governance models such as Community Supported Agriculture, and different ways of growing such as permaculture & bio-dynamic: but we’d encourage all of them to use regenerative, sustainable practices to produce nutrient dense, local food.
Read more here