Oliver Moore

Community owned farms may not be able to answer every question posed by a dysfunctional agri-food system, but they can offer insights and realistic alternatives to many of them.

So what’s needed, and what can be done to help embed and amplify agroecological local food provisioning by communities, for communities? 

Feeding ourselves is a lot of things – it’s a network, it’s an event, it’s movement building – and it’s growing. First with CSAs, then agroecologists, then local food proponents, then those with wider food justice concerns, then environmentalists and ruralists, and now also conventional farmers from the region – in all their way, with their own diversities.

A recent rural resilience gathering in the Loire-Atlantique, France saw farmers, cooks, elected officials, analysts, rural activists, volunteers and others drawn from the local and European agroecology and rural resilience movements, meet to work on the future of the socio-ecological transition.

Yet again, now is supposedly not the time to do the very things that would reduce our exposure to destructive inputs. There is a fear that this terrible war in Ukraine will give European business-as-usual forces one more excuse turn the EU Green Deal into that potentially perfect but always elusive pie in the sky.

So now that we have the evidence of the risk of excessive reliance on feeds, fertilizers and fossil fuels – what are we going to do to adjust to this reality?