Putting food back at the centre of a farming community

Carwyn Graves

At first glance, Luke and Rebecca’s story of moving to Gwynfe, Sir Gâr is little different to many others who have moved to rural Wales in search of a better quality of life.

But in their case, the impulse to simply share veg with neighbours led to the discovery of threads of community self-sufficiency lying dormant, waiting to be picked back up.

There has been an upsurge in community food initiatives across Wales over the past fifteen years, which has only gained pace since the 2020-22 pandemic. As the mainstream system frays at its seams, pushing increasing numbers into food poverty, energy is being poured into experiments and creative solutions to feeding ourselves and each other.

Gwynfe

Nestled in the folds of the lower slopes of Y Mynydd Du (the Black Mountain), Gwynfe is almost half an hour away from the nearest town, a scattered village of hill farms, former smallholdings and oak-dappled streams centred around an old church and community hall. The pub, school and shop closed a long time ago.

This was the community Luke and Rebecca moved to in 2021, with an itch to grow enough veg to feed themselves and as many neighbours as were up for it. A terrible spring put paid to plans for a veg box scheme, but front gate sales partly made up for it.

“I know this sounds twee,” Luke explains, “but for us it was genuinely always about what food could taste like. I’m a vegetable grower who used to hate salad – until I tasted the real thing!”

What they found was that people in this agricultural community immediately ‘got it’ when it came to their desire to grow great food for local people. And many were already growing, selling and swapping produce themselves.

In fact, in a community like so many others where farming had been forced to simplify on one cash crop (lamb or beef, sometimes milk), it turned out that most people in the community had strong memories of different ways of doing things, and an appetite to try some of those out again.

Mountain

In Gwynfe, bordered by the lime outcrops on the open mountain, quarrying became an important seasonal occupation from the 1700s if not earlier. With the opening of the mines in the Aman valley in the late 19^th century, the familiar routes to the quarries could naturally extend to both markets and jobs the other side of the mountain.

One of the things this meant was gardens! With so much toing and froing, it was practically feasible in this area to maintain communally tended productive veg gardens on the edge of the open mountain on the quarry workers’ way to work.

These harked back in turn to older patterns in Wales of growing vegetables in strips among larger crops – the gerddi that sometimes turn up in placenames in surprising locations.

Those larger crops (oats, barley, potatoes), now absent from this land, played an important role in a remote community like this until very much within living memory, enabling people to feed themselves without parting with too much of their hard-won cash.

Shared

What Luke and Rebecca realized was that in a community like theirs, far from supermarkets, with strong memories and plenty of knowledge still around, it made perfect sense to try and meet each other’s needs.

They set up a ‘crop share’ in the village hall, where they could sell some of their own veg – but so could others. Not only that, but where many gardeners had annual gluts of predictable crops (runner beans, anyone?), there was no reason the crop share couldn’t also host a swap shop.

The thinking being to ensure enough of a range of seasonal veg that people could depend on it and so cut out the supermarket.

“The amazing thing,” Luke enthuses, “is that people immediately changed the way they planned their gardens, coordinating their growing plans so that Sharon deliberately tried to get a glut of beans while Sarah went all out on the courgettes!”

In fact, the appetite for this organized sharing was so great that a neighbouring farmer came forward to offer to grow potatoes for the village if enough people could buy into the crop just a little in advance.

Twenty-five shares at £30 each later and James the farmer had set half a field  aside to grow a potato crop for the community, with a muck-in planting and harvesting day to bring everyone together – in what feels like a spontaneous rediscovery of the West Wales tradition of cymhortha.

“We’re serious about showing what can be done,” both explain over tea. We called the enterprise ‘Gwynfe growers’ for a reason – this is about investing in our local patch, and its people, and we’re fortunate that we don’t need the enterprise to do much more than cover costs and time.

“We’re all dreaming now about what it could look like to have the potatoes in a four-year rotation and bring in other crops – pumpkins, pigs for a hog roast, and so on. It is all work, but we all get great food out of it and build friendships too!”

With global instability increasing, loneliness high and many of us priced out of putting fresh food on the table, Luke and Rebecca’s social innovation and the community’s eagerness to get on board may turn out to be farsighted indeed.

This is part of a monthly series on Nation.Cymru on the diversity of Welsh food culture by Carwyn Graves. You can read the other installments of the series here.