Care farm’s community apple juicing service gives back to the community

A care farm that is home to adults with learning disabilities is giving back to the local community by offering a community apple juicing service to help prevent food waste.

Clynfyw Care Farm, Abercych, has offered a community apple juicing service in north Pembrokeshire since 2014.

Starting slowly, it has grown year on year until last year they juiced over 11,000bottles for around 170 different people.

Clynfyw’s Jim Bowen said: “Its a simple system – people bring their apples in, we juice, pasturise and bottle them and then they can enjoy the juice for up to a year. It is really hard to keep apples fresh and stop them rotting, but by juicing the apples, the goodness is stored and nothing goes to waste.

After ten years of running the scheme, the only issue being we have been swamped by the numbers of people asking us to juice for them. We were in danger of being victims of our own success.”

Worrying year

Clynfyw Care Farm is the home to ten adults with learning disabilities and a day service for around 25 others who get involved in farm based projects including growing vegetables, making vermicompost, charcoal making in the summer and the juicing in the autumn.

Each project has developed based around participant’s interests and what they want to do, with many people looking forward to the challenge of the juicing, however this year, the wet spring and the low number of bees and pollination, the wet summer and the winds early in September, there are far fewer apples around that need juicing.

Jim shared: “In past years we would have made a couple of thousand bottles by now, but we have barely done a thousand. The trees have far fewer apples, and the apples themselves are tiny. It is a real worry, not just for apple trees, but all the soft fruits and other seasonal crops too.”

The impact of climate breakdown in Europe is easy to see from the floods linked to Storm Boris in the east and the fires in Portugal and Spain. The impact in the UK might not be so startling, but it is telling.

Jim added: “We set up this scheme to help with local food security and reducing the carbon footprint of the food we eat.

“We’ve been shocked by the impact we’ve seen this year. And its not just us. This is replicated all over the place impacting on not just human food chains, but our whole ecosystem. There is a lot at stake. We are seriously worried about the future and how our communities will cope with less locally grown food around, and how our wildlife will fare too.”

Clynfyw’s apple juice service is open until the end of October.

If you have apple trees and would like to access the service, contact 01239 841236. The team are also writing a book about innovative, inclusive land use in a climate emergency. If you would like to contribute to it, email [email protected]