Retreat and Regroup

By Antonia

This September the four Community Roots directors had a wonderful “Autumn Conference/management retreat” down in Praa Sands. In amongst growing veg and hanging out with volunteers it can be very hard for us to find the time to finish a sentence with each other, let alone make plans for world domination, so it was great to get to spend some proper time reviewing where we’ve got to and making plans for where we go now (plus A LOT of eating and a fair few sea swims).

In order to be able to carry on with all the work we do, we need to become financially sustainable, but we also have some very clear aims and objectives around community benefit and environmental sustainability which we are determined to stick to, so finding a way to balance these is important.

We even used Powerpoint and had a projector!!

One important decision we needed to make was how much to try to expand our veg bag scheme. There are three main directions we could take:

1. Grow everything for the bags on our land. This would mean very limited or no veg at some times of the year. Some similar schemes who do this take a break for part of the year (e.g. from Christmas to May), so you’d have a part-time veg bag scheme.

2. Grow a bit of everything (including “low value” crops like potatoes, carrots and onions) so that you get a taste of everything homegrown, and then buy in some crops during the lean months to supplement our own (maybe buying in around 40% of the bag contents for the winter months, but supplying 100% for the rest of the time, as we have been doing so far).

3. Only grow “high value” crops (the ones it would cost us a lot to buy in, things like peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, fennel), and then buy in all the low values ones.

Option 1 is probably the least financially viable as it leaves us with periods of no income at all, while Option 3 is the most financially viable. However, for now at least, we are plumping for option 2. We really love being able to have a taste of everything from our plot, and we’re really keen to see just how many bags we can produce in this way from our 1 acre. We’d like to buy in as little as possible, but recognising that there will be times when we have to. We’re grateful for all your support and lovely feedback and comments, and hope you’ll agree that this is a good way to go for now. We’ll need to explore some other possible income streams alongside the veg bags to make this work, but we’re hopeful we can make this project sustainable without having to be cut-throat capitalists…another baby step towards the revolution?