The growing
movement for healthy sustainable food production has lead to the idea of community supported
agriculture. This enables members of local communities to
fund, work at, and enjoy a small taste of farming in a way that
is socially positive for their community.
Members of the
Grosmont Pig Co-op are rearing Tamworth pigs and using them to naturally
manage woodland at Great Campston, in order to support the local
community and to begin to reconnect our daily lives with
local aspects of farming.
Members will cover
the costs and they will share the work, and benefit from the
experience and and education of hands-on stock rearing.
In the
longer term the aim is to encourage people in the
community to engage in such schemes with the real
farming community - to give farmers a fair price, to be
more directly connected with their work on the land, and
to show that the community values the agriculture
that we depend upon for life and health.
Grosmont
Pig-Co-op membership applications will be
accepted during December 2007.
Important:
Membership requires a £50 one-off joining fee. Eligibility for meat products
also depends on a member/family completing
approximately 10-12 working visits or other work activity (see
below). A
substitute payment can be made for missed work visits.
The kinds of tasks
involved include:
Checking and
feeding
Transport
Construction
and maintenance
Stock handling
and electric fences
Administration
and organisation
Please leave your
contact details with Christina (01981 240793) and we will contact
you during December in order to collect the joining fee and in January
'08 a meeting will be arranged for all new members. The result
of meetings, and other information, will also be posted on the
project's public Wiki webpage.
There is some work
to be done over the first two weeks of December '07. In
particular experience with building shelters and fencing would
be useful. If you would like to join in with this then contact
alastairmcgowan@btopenworld.com or 01981 241282.
The Tamworth
Pig
The Tamworth Pig
is the most traditional of British pigs, closest to the wild
boar which lived in our ancient woods. It has not been
influenced by Chinese pigs but by pigs from the West Indies,
giving it the red hair and greater resilience to sunburn. It is
a hardy animal well suited to our environment.
·Schumacher, E.F. (1976)
Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If
People Mattered.
·Seyfang (2006) Conscious
Consumer Resistance: Conscious Consumer Networks Versus
Supermarkets. Centre for Social and Economic Research on the
Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia.
·Soil Association
CSA Feasibility Study, Sharing the Risk, Sharing
the Reward
