Apologies everyone for being so quiet this last month. Time has been limited but I’m back and there’s been plenty happening that I need to share with you.

On 2nd Jan, the NFU newsletter went out and I had an email back from a farmer within 2 days. The next weekend I had a meeting with a business person who is helping me with the number crunching. Also been speaking to a guy from the NSALG (National Society of Allotments and Leisure gardeners) who gave me some info and some tips and my BIG meeting weekend before last with the Head of Agriculture at Reaseheath Agricultural college who works with Defra went REALLY well and he is going to help by writing a press release about the project, putting some stuff on the NFU, the college and Defra’s website, getting a business advisor from the college involved and seeing if there are any grants available. Next meeting with him is on 5th March.

This last weekend, I paid a visit to our interested farmer and he likes the idea and is keen for a potential partnership. Him and his wife are lovely people and it would be great to work with them. I need to get back to him with some more details which I’m working on at present, but it’s looking good. I also have someone who is quite keen to sponsor us by giving us top listings with regards to the accomodation and a contact for another potential farmer down south.

Guys, I have 2 burning questions that need answering - one is to do with accomodation and the other is to do with the plots of land. What I’m thinking is that the accomodation should be charged separately from the memberships - a) because it’s not exactly fair to charge the same price for camping as luxury accomodation in a B&B and b) the accomodation is potentially going to be different at each farm. (For those that don’t know, the original idea has expanded to help farmers round the country diversify and earn extra income so their farms can develop into eco-villages as well as having one main site). And the 2nd question is: do you think it would be better having the members share a piece of land and share the veg that are grown instead of having individual plots for themselves? The concern here is that people might nick someone else’s veg or take more than they should. I’m not convinced this is really an issue but maybe a shared area for growing veg might be better. What do you guys think?

Same questions on the GWM forum - monstertalk if anyone wants to head over there and vote.

Tags: accomodation, allotments, Defra, farmers, NFU, plots

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under The beginning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.