The Real Farming Trust is coordinating a UK-wide 4 year project supported by the National Lottery Community Fund, called Twinning. The project brings people together who wouldn’t otherwise meet – aiming to bridge social and cultural gaps and make it easier for people to access unfamiliar environments.

How does twinning work?

The Real Farming Trust has brought together pairs of organisations to work in ‘twins’, with each twin being made up of one urban and one rural group which are geographically close but socially isolated from each other. All of the partners were already working with food before the start of the project. In each case, one is a social justice organisation such as a food bank or refugee group, while the other is a Community Supported Agriculture scheme (CSA).

Each twin collaboratively decides what they would like to do together, with activities held on both sites and including both groups of people, to best understand each other’s perspectives. The Real Farming Trust enables access to Community Fund National Lottery funding to implement their ideas. Twinning began in April 2023 and will end in March 2027.

Measuring impact – Photovoice evaluation

We want the people involved in Twinning to develop and communicate their own ideas about their experiences. To aid this, we worked with Coventry University on a Photovoice evaluation, in which people take photos of their experiences, share them in a group and comment on what they mean. This method enables everyone to participate together regardless of access barriers such as language or neurodivergence.

Below are a few photos and captions from a Photovoice session with the Truro Food Bank-Soul Farm twin:

The Twins and their activities

The Twin organisations have had three years to build relationships and visit one another. Led by the Twins themselves, many exciting events and outputs have come from these relationships…

Stroud Community Agriculture (SCA) – Somali Kitchen

• A group of Somali families came to Stroud to cook Somali lunch with farm vegetables. The communities had a lively shared meal and farm visit.
• Women from Somali Kitchen had the opportunity to present a film at Stroud Film Festival. They shared their food and offered a Q&A session to members of SCA and the wider community.
• Farmers and community members at SCA welcomed a group from Somali kitchen to the farm for a Farm Games day.
• A group of 60 people from both twins went on a camping trip to Degmo, a centre for Somali heritage and rural life, that demonstrates traditional Somali farming practices in Presteigne, Wales.

Cae Tan Farm – The CAE

• Asylum seekers from several countries attended the Harvest Festival at Cae Tan Farm near Swansea. Everyone had a good time.
• A cook from Zanzibar led a cooking session with farm veg in the garden for a group of asylum seekers and refugees from several countries and from Cae Tan Farm. People shared stories of cooking on open fires at previous times in their lives.
• The Twins gathered for a community film screening and discussion of the 2023 Ken Loach/Paul Laverty film, The Old Oak, at the CAE. Read more about this event here.
• The Twins are currently running a programme of social events and Gower walks involving individuals sharing their different heritages.

Jubilee Farm – NOW group

• Adults with learning difficulties from NOW in Belfast learnt horticulture skills at Jubilee Farm. Resulting from this, Jubilee Farm is piloting a “Small-Scale Farming & Agroecology” course for neurodivergent young people.
• As part of this the participants will take a trip to a local regenerative agriculture festival, ‘Fields Good’.

Soul Farm – Truro Food Bank 

• The Twins hosted a trip to a local beach to collect seaweed for compost for the farm, following the composting workshop. “The engagement was great, people loved the sensory experience and rock pooling afterwards.”
• Farm community trip to Foodbank to help with regular service day. The farm community visited the Foodbank just before the Christmas period. A member of the foodbank community provided a lunch for all the volunteers from both organisations.

• There have been several farm visits, including a well-attended pizza event: “pizzas were enjoyed and participants learned about composting which they found to be engaging and enjoyed being offered something a little different”

What are people’s experiences so far?

The most consistent feedback is that people have enjoyed their experiences so far and found them very interesting. There have been many surprises for participants.

“It’s kind of changed my perception of what a community farm can be, because I knew that we could have this kind of very, very equal and…inclusive in the best sense, way of working together. But I didn’t really see how it worked in practice.”

“The families who visited the farm learned more about how food is grown in the UK and gained confidence spending time in a rural environment. …Through our Twinning activities, families have become more confident in sharing their experiences and interests. Many families expressed an interest in visiting the farm again during the summer holidays.”

“Visiting the food bank have just felt really good, like the knowledge that we’ve gained about the food system and then like kind of that lighting a fire of us wanting to continue to be able to provide veg and grow it and be part of, I suppose, like a positive solution in the food system.”

“I was amazed to see the amount of green that was there and how well the fruits and vegetables would grow…, there were things that I’ve never seen before, so it was just, it was just an amazing experience for me.”

“For rural people at the farm that don’t venture too much in the city centre, they know that there’s a place that they can come in and they’ll feel supported and feel welcome.”

Why the Twinning project is so important

• Because cohesive, equal and kind social networks and relationships are a key aspect of agroecology 
• Because everyone should have access to the physical, financial and social resources needed to make their own well informed choices about food and farming
• Because people themselves are the best placed to make choices about use of resources and food systems 
• Because confident, powerful, inclusive, well resourced communities can offer protective responses to the unjust social and economic forces affecting society 
• Because our experience and choices about food are not separate from other areas of our lives such as where we live, poverty, who we know, health, what ideas we come into contact with and how we spend our time 
• Because some food networks and some communities are limited in their ideas and solutions because their geographic and social worlds are boundaried
• Because some voices are too rarely heard in the agroecology movement 
• Because it creates opportunities to reduce discrimination and increase understanding

The Twinning project is supported by The National Lottery Community Fund.