GT Grown in Totnes Goes Back to the Community

Grown in Totnes Case Study

Totnes Case Study

Grown in Totnes Goes Back to the Community

Spending time planning for the end of Grown in Totnes turned out to be as important as planning for the beginning. It also provided an opportunity for us to celebrate the successes of the enterprise and consider those areas that could have been improved. By sharing these with the community, and this toolkit with you, we hope the seeds that we have nurtured will inspire others to grow a vibrant local, small-scale grain and pulse food economy.

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Chapter 9 Sections

9.1 Approaching the End

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9.2 Back to the Community

9.2.1 Invitation to the Presenters
9.2.2 Invitation to the Community
9.2.3 On the Day
9.2.4 Follow Up to the Day

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9.3 How the Toolkit Came About

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9.4 Was Grown in Totnes a Success?

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9.1 Approaching the End

The seed of Grown in Totnes was sown back in 2012, with the formation of Transition Town Totnes’s Crop Gaps Group; interested parties from the local community met to explore types of crop that were not grown in the area, but for which there was a demand. This involved looking at crop varieties suitable for local growing conditions, finding out who had experience of growing them, and what was needed in order to make them more widely available. On the back of this work and the resulting Crop Gaps Report, Grown in Totnes was funded for 3 years by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation from March 2015, with funding later extended to November 2018. We were selling our products for less than 18 months of this funded period, not enough time to become commercially viable without additional funding. We didn’t feel comfortable going back to the community, cap in hand again when we hadn’t proven the viability of the concept we had set out to demonstrate.

Founder; Holly describes a feeling of impending doom as the end of the funding period loomed, with no clear way of ensuring that the hard work continued to benefit Totnes and district. She recalls feeling “like a lemming, getting closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.” An overwhelming sense of paralysis pervaded, a sense of letting down the community and their faith in the vision.

It was this sense of Grown in Totnes being a community-owned project that led to the realisation that the enterprise didn’t have to hold the responsibility for its future alone, and that like any challenge this was an opportunity. This re-framing turned the project’s thinking around, and in true Transition-style we held a community event and invited everyone that had ever supported us, whether as customer, investor, volunteer or advisor.

We created a day that informed people of what we had achieved, where the struggles had been, and some of the many high points and achievements.

We spread our finances out for scrutiny and asked the community for their solutions. We were doing what we were good at; engaging the community, celebrating what we had achieved and flying into the unknown with a smile on our faces as we entered this, the closing chapter of Grown in Totnes.

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9.2 Back to the Community

9.2.1 Invitation to the Presenters

We invited those who had ideas for future scenarios to present them to the community members present, the community were then asked for their assessment of each scenario, enabling us to gauge where the support lay.

In order to give the process the best opportunity for a positive outcome we met and spoke to a number of businesses in advance; local bakers and growers who we knew, and thought might benefit from taking on our equipment and model.

9.2.2 Invitation to the Community

Here is the invitation that we sent out:

9.2.3 On the Day

On the day, we had presentations about:

Chagfood (CSA vegetable box scheme), who had teamed up with a local artisan baker in Chagford
A small-scale grower interested in setting up a mobile bakery
Representatives from Dartington Hall Trust discussing the option for a food processing hub at some point in the future
Others discussing the option of moving the enterprise to the Dartington estate
Hemp Avatar, a local hemp project also based on the Dartington Estate keen to keep the equipment local so they could use some of it
A local bakers’ buying group, with local artisan baker The Almond Thief

It was clear that the greatest enthusiasm was for the Chagfood vision; there was a good synergy between them, as crop growers, and local business, The Stable Yard Bakery. It was felt that the direct link between grower and end user was an important element that would cut out the middleman role that Grown in Totnes had created, and that this would make for a more efficient and financially viable business model. At the same time they were in a better position to achieve our initial goals of ensuring both the farmer gets paid fairly, and the end product remains affordable to customers. Chagfood would sell flour to their veg box customers and the bakery, who in turn would sell bread that could be sold via the veg box as well as their own outlets. The down side was that they were based in Chagford, 25 miles away, on Dartmoor, which meant that the community who had initially supported the project wouldn’t directly benefit, nor the other projects local to Totnes that had presented their ideas and would benefit from using the equipment on an ad hoc basis.

At the end of the timetabled part of the day attendees were invited to accompany John Letts and the Grown in Totnes team to visit the two populations of wheat: John’s heritage wheat - grown by Jon Perkin at Old Parsonage Farm

and the YQ modern population grown at the Apricot Centre biodynamic Farm in Dartington, less than a mile apart from each other.

We were joined by the respective farmers at each farm, and then went on to visit the Grown in Totnes processing unit on the Totnes Industrial Estate.

9.2.4 Follow Up to the Day
After the event, further conversations led to a proposal for a similar arrangement to that of Chagfood, but based in Dartington, just outside Totnes. This came from the two farmers who had grown our population wheat, and the local sourdough bakery The Almond Thief. This seemed a perfect match, particularly as they expressed an interest in taking on our premises, enabling a seamless transition from our operation to that of Dartington Mill, as the collaboration was to be called. In the end, keeping the GinT unit didn’t stack up financially and the enterprise was moved to Old Parsonage Farm. We spent the remaining few months training-up their future miller and making arrangements to sell them the equipment and pass on our learnings, customer list and other various documentation. We offered the equipment to them at a favourable cost over 10 years.

9.3 How the Toolkit Came About

We were aware that Grown in Totnes was riding a gathering wave of momentum around small-scale crop production and processing and that we had learned so much that could help this movement to grow if we shared it. Enquiries and visits to our facilities were ever increasing from other growers, bakers and researchers and, as a charity, we were in the perfect position to take the time to compile our knowledge. We carried out a survey to gauge the areas of interest and check that the demand was out there for what we were proposing - you can see the survey here. Our generous funders - the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Halleria Trust - supported us to put this Toolkit together, and this, with additional help from the project’s key volunteers, resulted in this resource. Please share it freely and widely to all who may benefit.

9.4 Was Grown in Totnes a Success?

The original vision was to test and develop a financially viable business model that could support one or more livelihoods through the creation of appropriate, local-scale crop processing infrastructure, and by working directly with local farmers and independent retail outlets. Whilst this wasn’t fully realised, so much else was: Grown in Totnes helped accelerate an evolution towards regenerative and ecologically appropriate food systems. As a funded enterprise we were able to take chances, to dare to think big, to have strong ethics and to vision a new future for our food economy; an economy we believe it is imperative to transition towards. An economic food system that values appropriate scale and collaboration over conventional unchecked growth; one that focuses on localisation, diversity, resilience and community. That has ecological integrity, valuing the health of our ecology — including land and people, over financial returns - at its heart.

We started a conversation about the feasibility of growing grains and pulses on a small scale for the local market. Bringing these products to the local food agenda exposed the fallacy that local food can only be about fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy. We inspired local bakers to question where they source their flour and their concept of a loaf of bread. We encouraged three local farmers to grow grains and pulses for human consumption, and they continue to do so. We created collaborations between local businesses that continue to thrive today, supporting and adding more value to their businesses than would be achieved individually. We helped raise awareness of the lunacy of growing monoculture crops with limited genetic diversity in the face of climate uncertainty. We instilled a sense of pride in our community and encouraged other enterprises to be big and brave in their visioning. We informed and created opportunities for our community and visitors alike to get involved, to skill-up in the art of crop processing and to be inspired by the power of community. Our innovative, cutting-edge work paved the way for the next level of adoption.

To be able to pass GinT into the hands of three local businesses with the skills and resources to take our work to the next level and into financial viability feels like the perfect ending for a Transition Town project. We are incredibly proud of what we achieved and want our work to be of benefit beyond Totnes, by inspiring and supporting others. We hope this Toolkit will help you take up the baton, learn from us, do something even greater, and then share it.