Our story
Our Food 1200 emerged from a series of online conversations about local food, organised during Covid with support from the Conservation Farming Trust, a charity registered in Crickhowell. We established ourselves formally as a community benefit society in 2022, to provide local leadership for rebuilding a local food economy. The two organisations now work in symbiosis, accessing funds and implementing work according to their different constitutions.
Our Food 1200 believes in change at scale. To commit itself to that, the Directors decided to put 1200 into the name of the organisation – 1200 acres of agroecological growing of fruit and vegetables for local markets. This ambitious target is enough to trigger a recovery of the whole local food economy, decimated by the global food system since the Second World War.
Prior to our launch, the Conservation Farming Trust supported the launch of Langtons Farm, built on land leased from Crickhowell farmer John Morris, now one of our Directors. Doubled in size since this photo, Langtons Farm employs one person per acre and, working within a network of inter-trading small farms, provides 120 households with weekly veg boxes all year round. The farm is also part of an innovative food procurement programme for Welsh schools.
However, when we tried replicating the leasing model with other landowners and farmers, we discovered this approach simply isn’t scalable, due to a combination of legal, financial and bureaucratic barriers.
We will continue to try to find ways to make the leasing model work, as we know there is real appetite from some landowners. But to deliver the scale of change needed, at pace, we have concluded that building affordable small farms on Local Authority or community-owned land is the way forward. This is now the linchpin of our strategy.
Our directors
Judy Wayne
Chair
Judy is a former trustee and vice chair of Garden Organic and a keen gardener and allotment holder. She has worked with governments and housing providers in the UK and internationally on housing governance, finance and service delivery. In Wales she supported the development of community mutual housing associations.
Duncan Fisher
Director & Co-Manager
Duncan lives in Crickhowell and was one of the initiators of the Our Food project. He worked with James Skinner and Sue Holbrook in the 1990s to found The Travel Foundation. He has a parallel interest in child welfare and development and manages the US-based Child and Family Blog.
Sue Holbrook
Director & Co-Manager
Sue is a sustainable development advocate and co-initiator of the Our Food project. Together with James Skinner and Duncan Fisher, she helped create The Travel Foundation to improve the sustainability of tourism internationally. She was CEO for its multi-award-winning first 10 years. Her current passion is to make healthy, local food the norm.
Adam Alexander
Director
Adam, with a lifetime’s experience in growing fruit and vegetables, is a passionate advocate of reconnecting people with their local food culture. He works with the Heritage Seed Library focusing on identifying and growing Welsh heritage and heirloom vegetables with the aim of making them accessible to local growers and consumers.
Patrick Hannay
Director
Patrick is a journalist and architect, currently chair of Abergavenny Transition Town and a founder member of its JUST FOOD group as well as a member of the Land Workers Alliance Cymru. He has been editor for the past twenty five years of Touchstone the Journal for Architecture in Wales.
John Morris
Director
John runs a 70-acre organic farm near Crickhowell. He has diversified into a number of businesses, including Welsh Farmhouse Applejuice, which currently holds a Royal Warrant. In 2020, he rented out some of his land for the establishment of a successful small-scale regenerative market garden and farming project.
Dianne Spencer
Director
Dianne is a journalist and has been writing about food for over 20 years, and growing, pickling and preserving her own for the past 15. She’s passionate about building local resilience and has been instrumental in two successful community share offers for local renewable energy projects totalling close to £1m.
John Wheelock
Director
John runs a 425-acre estate near Monmouth with his brother. The farmland is let and the woodland managed in hand. They have diversified into holiday, residential and commercial lets and the generation of solar and biomass energy. After giving up farming for health reasons he qualified as a Chartered Accountant.
