A blog from Llwyn Ffranc
Over the last couple of years Open Platform has enjoyed a partnership with a farm, Llwyn Ffranc, near Abergavenny in Wales, run by our friend Stephen Powell. We go out occasionally and get our hands dirty turning over and planting veg patches or lugging around logs… you’ll even see some of those photos in our photo banner at the top of the website.
We’ve also helped out at times with the vision behind the farm. And to this end we invited Stephen to write an entry for our blog about what’s happening at Llwyn Ffranc at the moment. What follows are his words:
Open Platform first came to the Welsh hill farm Llwyn Ffranc in 2009. Since then OP-ers have come on a number of occasions, lending a hand with many tasks, such as shifting the debris of an outbuilding which collapsed under snow, planting vegetables and carrying in firewood from the forest.
Since Daphne and Chris Richards came on their initial visit a lot has happened that will shape the future of Llwyn Ffranc. For a start I set up a community benefit society in March 2010, to shift ownership to a broad base of investors. The follow-up was the launch of a community share offer in March of this year to raise £132,600 and put ownership of 50 acres of woodland and a 13-acre field into the hands of Llwyn Ffranc Limited.
I have been eating, drinking and sleeping this community share offer ever since! So what progress do I have to report?
First of all, we are ditching a lot of the business plan currently on the website www.communityforestfarm.co.uk (http://www NULL.communityforestfarm NULL.co NULL.uk). The new business plan has not yet been completed, but the farm’s elected board of directors (two women and three men) has united around a strategy which gives prominence to two main agricultural crops — gourmet mushrooms and lavender.
I tried growing mushrooms in 2009. A small team of us drilled 3,000 holes in alder and oak logs and hammered in Shiitake mushroom spawn. Chris Richards found one mushroom on the logs during an OP visit in April of this year and that represented a third of the total harvest! In other words the whole exercise was well nigh a total flop.
Or was it? I am hoping that it helped to pave the way for a second, more scientific endeavour. In mid-June a young man called Olly Carter came to the farm. Olly is a man of many parts who has spent most of his adult life living in woodlands. He is a direct descendant of a brother of Sir Isaac Newton and has a keen scientific mind. Olly has become a regular visitor to Llwyn Ffranc and we have started work turning the outbuilding near the vegetable patch into a “mushroom house”. The idea is to use woodchip from the farm as the “fruiting substrate” for Oyster and Shiitake mushrooms. In theory we could eventually build up to quite a significant growing operation, using not just the mushroom house but also the woodlands. Right now there is not a single commercial mushroom grower in the county of Monmouthshire and demand for gourmet fungi is strong.
So, we now have a mushroom man in the team. We also have a highly experienced biodynamic farmer, Peter Smith. Peter spent 24 years at the Camphill community of Larchfield, where he was the head farmer. He arrived at the farm in January and lived for the first few months in a mobile home in the farmyard. He has now moved into the farmhouse. Peter has expertise in organic farm management in general and in livestock and orchards in particular. Thanks to Peter and his strimming, the orchard is now looking in better shape than it ever has before. He believes that Llwyn Ffranc should be home to a flock of goats, with income coming both from meat and un-pasteurised milk. Funds permitting, I would like to see this happen.
But I see lavender as the other main source of agricultural income alongside the mushooms. I have been inspired partly by my sister-in-law Zoë who is successfully growing lavender near Rhayader in mid-Wales and selling bunches to farm shops as far away as Scotland. Temperatures in mid-Wales dropped to -18 Centigrade this past winter and the lavender was unharmed. Peter tells me that the one Camphill community in France, Le Béal in the southeastern department of Drôme, grows biodynamic lavender and I would like Llwyn Ffranc to do the same.
The farm team, then, has grown in significant ways since OP first made its way to this beautiful spot in the Black Mountains just north of Abergavenny. Our vision too is clearer. The challenge we face is to attract investment to make it all happen. So far we have received £17,400 from 75 investors. To buy 13-acre field, with the orchard and the future field of lavender, we need £65,000 and we need it ideally by the end of October. Without the investment the field would be sold to the highest bidder.
In recent weeks I have been working with Olly, bringing in seasoned firewood to boost immediate income and making the mushroom house fit for fungi. Now I am switching my attention big-time to marketing and selling. I have already been out on speaking gigs, for example at the Garden Festival in Herefordshire and the School of Economic Science in London. In a few weeks I’ll be speaking at an orchard project in Kingston-on-Thames. If any OP-er can help me to get speaking gigs in the Bristol area, that would be fantastic. Investment would also be good, but I know that OP-ers are often at the beginning of their professional journeys. I’ll report back to you all in November where things stand with Llwyn Ffranc. The world needs more projects like this one and I remain optimistic. I very much look forward to OP’s next visit.
Stephen Powell
e-mail communityforestfarm@gmail.com (communityforestfarm null@null gmail NULL.com)
website www.communityforestfarm.co.uk (http://www NULL.communityforestfarm NULL.co NULL.uk)
