Farm Club is an idea that has two distinctive parent memes.
One is the direct-to-consumer marketing that some farmers are trying, with farm-boxes and local sales (as practiced by polyface farm). It’s a good way to increase the sustainability of your agricultural practice and still earn a living income – but it only works if your farm is mature enough to be producing a consistent amount of whatever your product is. Gallifrey isn’t that big or that mature; we still have production hiccups, and we’re years away from reliable production of most of the things we’d like to be offering (small batch cider and mead, authentic balsamic-style aged vinegars, pomegranate molasses, gourmet mushrooms, jams and syrups, fresh heirloom variety fruit and nuts, …)
The other memetic paren of this little project is the Swap-Shuffle-Share movement, which allows people (home producers and smallholders both) to swap their excess produce for other people’s excess produce in a barter system. It began (for us, at least) with an episode of River Cottage in which Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall organised a produce-swap, and we’ve been semi in love with the idea ever since.
The idea of Farm Club is that rather than taking produce to a marketplace and swapping in person with whoever else went to that same market, we could do a sort of direct-to-consumer barter thing.
So. This is what we have to offer to farm club members, and what we’ll take in trade:
Sign up for Farm Club here.
If you have produce to barter, PM us and we’ll see if we can add you in as a share-offering farm Club member.