Since the beginning of lockdown, people involved with local food and farming have faced all sorts of interesting changes and challenges, from a decrease in visitors to physical stores (and subsequent increase in online spending) to a higher demand for organic food. To help the industry learn from these experiences, The Community Farm, a cornerstone of Bristol’s local food and farming scene, has curated a collection of 15 articles titled Lessons From Lockdown, which details exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people involved with food, wildlife, local economies and social outreach in the local area, and how they’ve attempted to tackle it.
The articles include everything from business and personnel strategies to focus group results, personal experiences and market analysis, from contributors such as the Soil Association, Feed Bristol, Better Food, Going For Gold Bristol, EcoWild, Poco Tapas Bar and The Community Farm itself. The contributors state that they hope the collection will prove useful to small businesses and organisations in terms of learning how and why some groups fared better than others, and how the knowledge can be used to thrive in this period of socio-economic upheaval and potential future lockdowns.
“I’m so thankful to this diverse group of people for taking the time to collect their thoughts and create this time capsule,” says Kim Brooks, managing director of The Community Farm. “It provides great insight into not only the impact of the pandemic, but our daily choices as ‘investors’ in our food system. Now we have an opportunity to learn from this time, and, as Sarah Pitt says in her article, ‘care about the local little things, and let the changes ripple out’.”
The hope is that other geographical regions will take inspiration from this collection and create something similar, in order to develop a big-picture view of how COVID-19 has affected – and continues to affect – different areas.
You can download Lessons From Lockdown for free here.
