Sunday 22st Jan
10am Guided farm walk (bring a packed lunch). Coffee in the barn.
Overnight accommodation is available at £15 per person per night. Don’t forget to bring a sleeping bag. Contact Stuart to reserve a place.
To book a place for an event or for further information and directions, please contact
Sara: Tel 07771 538459/ sarady12@yahoo.co.uk
Stuart: Tel 07732489195/ hayefarm@live.co.uk www.haye-farm.co.uk

Kiptik website: http://www.kiptik.org

Malcolm Currie wrote in his last email:

‘Rumour has it that Birmingham city council is to develop a “FOOD STRATEGY”, no doubt with the help of highly paid London consultants such as Qa, a social and market research agency, awarded a contract to inform the council’s decision making process regarding the relocation of the Wholesale Market.   

We’ll provide an update on our involvement in developing a FOOD THEME for next year’s Fair Trade Fortnight and Climate Week.  I wonder what Qa’s charges would look like for this work??’

Couldn’t agree more!

CONTACT: Malcolm Currie      info@globallylocal.net

MEETING PLACE:

LOCANTA RESTAURANT

31, LUDGATE HILL

ST PAUL’S SQUARE

B3 1EH

food and drinks from 6.00p.m. – guests and/or main topic introduced at 7.00/7.15p.m.

DATE: 1st Tuesday each month

It will be a day of food blogging workshops (food photography, writing skills, recipe development, video blogging, etc) with lunch provided, and also cooking demos, chocolate tasting (from Artisan du Chocolat), not to mention a chance to meet all the top food bloggers and food journalists.

The organisers hope this event will be a success and be made an annual gathering for all food bloggers all over the country to come and meet at Birmingham. As such, they have offered Digbeth residents a special discount (please use PR-FULL for 50% off full day ticket, or PR-HALF for half day ticket).
This looks great! Thanks Pamela from D.R.A. for the info.
Bite ‘n’ Write, the first UK Food Bloggers Conference outside London, will be hosted in the Old Library in Custard Factory on the 19th November.

Bite ‘n’ Write 2011 Press Release
Introduction
Bite ‘n’ Write is Birmingham’s premier event for food bloggers and food lovers!
Detail
Whether you are interested in our unique food photography workshop, chocolate tasting sessions, cookery demonstrations or how to get the most from your food blog, there’s something here for anyone who has a passionate interest in food.
Bite ‘n’ Write is an event for food bloggers to meet, learn new skills and build up their network. We don’t believe that you have to blog in a certain way, but we do believe that we can help you find your blogging voice by improving your skills and build up a supporting network.
The event will include workshops for food photography, food styling, recipe development, SEO, video blogging, WordPress tutorials and much more; basically everything you need to know for creating a media rich food blog. A well connected blog will earn you lots of readers, and by meeting up with fellow food bloggers you can do just that. As well as this, you will also get to take home some fabulous products that come along in our goodie-bag1.
2011 is the inaugural year of Bite ‘n’ Write, which will be hosted in the second biggest city of the country, Birmingham. We are delighted about hosting the event here because of the diversity and rich culture of the city, and we’re sure our bloggers will fall in love with the beautiful Custard Factory. See you there!
1 Free with Full Day single and group tickets, £5 otherwise.
Ticket Prices
Ticket Type Ticket Price (per person) Fee Comment
Full Day Ticket £75.00 £2.52 Includes lunch, tea/coffee and exclusive goodie bag
Half Day Ticket £20.00 £1.15
Tickets for 2 £70.00 £2.40 Includes lunch, tea/coffee and exclusive goodie bag for each ticket holder
Tickets for 4 £60.00 £2.15 Includes lunch, tea/coffee and exclusive goodie bag for each ticket holder

Discount Code
Simply enter the voucher code PROMO20 when purchasing tickets via www.bite-n-write.co.uk to get 20% off the ticket price
Schedule
Time Slot * Activity
10:40am – 11:00am Welcome speech (and short speech from Action Against Hunger)
11:00am – 12:00am Food Photography workshop by Craig Fraser from FraserShot
12:00am – 1:00pm Lunch
1:15pm – 1:45pm Promoting your blog using Social Media and SEO by Judith Lewis
1:50pm – 2:20pm Finding your blogging voice by Jeanne Horak from Cooksister
2:00pm – 2:45pm(Breakout session) Cooking demo by Craig McKnight from WeGrowOurOwn
Chocolate Tasting by Artisan du Chocolat
2:45pm – 3:00pm Tea & Coffee, mingle time
3:00pm – 3:30pm Recipes Developing and Food Allergy by Charlotte Pike from GoFreeFoods
3:35pm – 4:15pm Wordpress workshop by James Bolton from Derezzed Media
4:15pm – 4:45pm Video Blogging by Ben Frazer from Cupcake Artisan
4:45pm – 5:00pm Thank you speech
5:00pm – 6:00pm Drinks
*subject to changes

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Carol

I think the reality is we are divorced from the process of producing our own fruit and veg and therefore often there is an expectation that it should be really cheap, this article nicked from the Guardian Farming basically highlights this and shows the damage that these supermarket price wars have on the grower.

12 October 2011

Horticulture board chair Sarah Pettitt told the council the board was carrying out an inquiry into how the sector operates in light of the huge uncertainty faced by growers as supermarkets enter into consumer price wars.

“Recently we have had growers reporting that their prices are being squeezed to help their retail customer offer better value to consumers,” she said.

Ms Pettitt said UK growers were currently facing a ‘roulette wheel of production’ and were being forced to invest in putting crops in the ground with little guarantee they would be able to sell the produce and how much they were going to get for it.

She said recent price increase had come nowhere near to covering soaring production costs. It was little wonder horticulture came out second from bottom in the NFU’s member confidence survey, she added.

With other crops looking increasingly attractive, many horticulture and potato growers feel the rewards are no longer worth the risks and are set to leave the sector, she warned.

“Against this backdrop, the horticulture and potato board has agreed to carry out an assessment into supply chain operations. It will include price transmission, margin, contract terms and retailer and customer behaviour.

“These issues have gone unchallenged in the horticulture sector for too long and we are simply not prepared to tolerate it as a commercial reality any longer,” she said.

The aim is to complete the review within six months and Ms Pettitt urged growers who feel they are ‘swamped and drowning’ to contact the board.

NFU president Mr Kendall the NFU was getting ‘more and more information coming through’ about the pressure being put on processors and suppliers by supermarkets.

“We will take that information and we will name and shame and use all the power we have in the press where retailers are abusing their position and putting downward pressure on suppliers,” he said.

CropWorld Global 2011: Changing our global approach to farming 1 September 2011 | By Alistair Driver http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/arable/cropworld-global-2011-changing-our-global-approach-to-farming/41304.article

SOCIETY has gone ‘properly wrong’ in the way it produces and consumes food, according to Hans Herren. Dr Herren, a renowned scientist and international development expert, is on a mission to promote what he insists is a better alternative to the current global ‘industrial’ food production system, which he describes as ‘bankrupt’. He is a leading advocate of agroecology, a holistic farming model based on organic principles, where food is produced by small family farms using green methods which nourish soils for future generations. “We have tried to have more efficient farming, with fewer people, more machines and a greater dependency on pesticides, fertilisers, GM crops and energy, using 10 kilocalories to produce one kilocalorie. But that is only possible if there is cheap oil,” said Dr Herren. “The system basically is bankrupt, which is why we need to change it to a more modern, advanced system, which will create energy, rather than consume it, and is not dependent on fossil energy, but more on people and better science.” Dr Herren, originally from Switzerland, co-chaired the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology, (IAASTD), a three-year project involving more than 400 experts from across the world. Its 2008 report called for a radical overhaul of the way the world produces food to ‘better serve the poor and hungry’. It demanded a shift away from the ‘focus on production alone’ and a greater emphasis on methods which conserve natural resources, backed up by trade and subsidy reforms and investment in science, education and training. Report findings Dr Herren described it as ‘the mother of all reports on agriculture on a global and human scale’, but admitted being disappointed about how little its findings had been implemented globally. Dr Herren, who spent 27 years in Africa researching pest management and sustainable production, continues to promote agroecology through the US-based Millennium Institute, of which he has been president since 2005. He said the key to future food security was not to use more inputs to produce more food per hectare, but to rely on techniques backed by ‘solid science and agronomy – such as crop rotation with legumes and green manure, a cover crop grown to add nutrients to the soil – ‘to enable the land to regenerate’. But he also claimed it had been shown in experiments and in the field these farming methods can ‘double, treble or even quadruple’ yields in Africa. {BP: see work of Jules Pretty] He added: “Agroecology will produce food which is affordable because more people will be working, so they can actually afford it. “We need to support small-scale and family farms, where more people get employed. We have 1.5 billion people who have no job. We really have to see all this in an inter-linked system.” He refuted the suggestion that, while agroecology may have merits in developing countries, where prevailing yields were relatively low and labour was abundant, it was unrealistic and idealistic to imagine it taking over in developed nations. Instead, he insisted productivity levels could be maintained in developed countries if agroecology displaced intensive farming. “It has been shown in the US that organic agriculture actually produces equally good yields as traditional agriculture,” he said. “But when there is drought or a flood, organic produces more as it is more resilient. There is no question we can deliver.” The catch is that increased crop rotation would require a change in the way food is consumed. “You can’t disassociate consumption from production. In a rotation where you have more legumes someone has to eat those beans.” He added people in urban-centric nations such as the UK and US would return to the land if agriculture became a ‘better and more rewarding job’ through greater investment, better prices for food and a reappraisal of farmers’ importance. “We need to look up to the farmer and down to the professor,” he said. Lacking support Dr Herren blamed the lack of wider support for this model of food security partly on what he claimed was a misconception of what it represented. “We need to dispel this idea that agroecology is a back-breaking, low-yielding process and that we want to go back to grandfather’s agriculture. Actually, agroecology has a lot of science in it and a lot of knowledge,” he said. Dr Herren was dismissive of the concept of ‘sustainable intensification’, the alternative view of food security with food production at its heart, championed by the UK Government-commissioned Foresight report. He described it as ‘an excuse to sneak in GMOs and to continue with business as usual’. “People think food security is only about producing more food, but we need to make sure we can nourish the world in the long-term and not for companies to profit in the short-term,” he said. “We have shown if we start to invest in green agriculture – agroecology – we can produce better food, use less land, use less water, employ more people and have less deforestation. I think we are making some headway. It is very slow, but I won’t give up that easily. We are going somewhere.”

The day will follow the popular formula of a mixture of talks, an open forum and field workshops.

Keynote speakers will be AHDB chief scientist Professor Ian Crute and Potato Council sector director Dr Rob Clayton, who will be looking at challenges resulting from climate change and sustainability of the potato industry respectively.

“It is important for growers to understand the language being used by retailers and policy makers and to decide whether practical actions need to be taken at farm level,” says Dr Clayton.

Growers looking to maximise efficiency will not want to miss the practical field workshops given by industry experts such as agronomists Denis Buckley, Andrew Wade, Luke Hardy, water consultant Peter White and ADAS’s Martyn Silgram.

“The Water Framework Directive has resulted in many growers already having to adopt new ways of working,” explains Potato Council technical executive Chris Steele. “We are looking at ways to help them maximise efficiency, including irrigation scheduling and tools.”

Furthermore, minimising phosphate losses is becoming increasingly important, particularly as fertiliser costs have seen year-on-year increases of around 30 per cent. Growers will have the opportunity to quiz Martyn Silgram on the work done to date on soil management strategies, their application and effectiveness.

The Defra-funded MOPS2 project led by ADAS and run in conjunction with the Potato Council, has been comparing alternative management strategies in potato rotation to minimise the risk of surface runoff and diffuse pollution of soil (sediment), phosphorus, nitrogen and surface-applied materials (e.g. herbicides) to water courses.

Additionally, there will be opportunities for networking and viewing the latest machinery.

For further information please visit www.potato.org.uk/events

Wokshops include: food politics, alternative media, setting up a
workers and housing cooperatives, migration, animal rights, and many
more.

“Taking Control West Midlands Gathering 2011, a weekend of workshops
and practical sessions aimed at creating a more unified West Midlands
Community of people and groups interested in actively pursuing
democratic and liberating social change”

http://takingcontrolwestmidlands.wordpress.com/about-2/