Sunday, 25 March 2012

Fordhall structure

Home

About Us

The Community Landlord

Fordhall Community Land Initiative
Allowing YOU to OWN Fordhall Farm

"The Fordhall Community Land Initiative reaffirms the relationship between the landscape and the way it shapes the prosperity of rural communities. It seeks to demonstrate that small-scale farming connected to the local community offers a viable way of life for generations to come."
What's it all about?
The Fordhall Community Land Initiative is an industrial and Provident Society with charitable status. It is currently owned by over 8000 shareholders from across the UK and indeed the world. This society owns Fordhall Organic Farm in its entirety.
Charlotte and Ben Hollins are now tenants of the Fordhall Community Land Initiative. Ben lives in the farmhouse and manages the farmland and the livestock. The farm shop is a commercial business run by Ben, from which he pays the rent and derives his income.
Our Legal Structure
The Fordhall Community Land Initiative is a charitable society set-up for community benefit, established by Sophie Hopkins and Charlotte and Ben Hollins in 2005 alongside many other volunteers (see the campaign page) to save Fordhall Farm from development, Fordhall had been chemical free for over 65 years.
The initiative is incorporated as an Industrial and Provident Society (IPS).
The IPS structure allows shares to be sold to the general public. The shares are completely non-profit making and cannot be traded on the open market. They can be returned to the initiative or passed down in a Will, but cannot be traded. This makes our society safe and secure to carry out the aims and objectives it was created to do so.
The society has the following aims:

To ensure permanently affordable access to the farm for farmers and the community

To advance education and provide facilities for recreation and other leisure time occupation in the interests of social welfare for the inhabitants of Market Drayton and the wider community, in organic farming methods, conservation, biodiversity, health, access, country life, heritage, wildlife and related subjects with the object of improving the conditions of life for the said inhabitants.
To ensure farmland is managed sustainably for community benefit with the appropriate management for access, and to research sustainable farming through community land trusteeship, public involvement and other methods.

The full society rules can be downloaded by following the link here

a good example of community ownership

I recently had the chance to hear Charlotte Hollins speaking about the Fordhall Farm project in Shropshire and was very inspired.

http://www.fordhallfarm.com/

Welcome to Fordhall Organic Farm
1 farmer, 8000 landlords!

Fordhall Organic Farm, in Market Drayton, north Shropshire has been organic for over 65 years. We rear grass fed beef, lamb and gloucester old spot pork.
After being saved from development in 2006 through a national campaign, it is now England's first community-owned farm and offers a warm welcome to all.

Restaurant open!
Farm Shop and Tea Room: Tues - Sat 9.30am-5pm and Sun 10am-4pm. Open Bank Holiday Mondays 10am - 4pm.
Farm Restaurant: Fri nights 7pm - 11pm (must pre book). Open Sat nights for parties 01630 638696 Click Here to see an example menu.

NEWS AND APPEALS

THIS WEEK - New Restaurant

Our restaurant is now open every Friday and Saturday night. Our talented chef Barney Richardson, will bring the seasons to your plate each weekend for that romantic candle lit dinner for two or a family get together. MORE>>

FARM SHOP

Fantastic grass fed beef and lamb and wonderful free-range gloucester old spot pork for sale. Ben always has offers to tempt you and you can order as much or as little as you want for delivery stright to your doo. Just follow the link here

24th March 2012
Beginners Basket Weaving more >>

31st March 2012
Composting for success more >>

4th April 2012
Easter Holiday Eggstravaganza more >>

Supported by
advantage west midlands

the field at West Meon

anothe old pic

easy hens

The most straight forward way to get hens mobile, plonk a shed onto a trailer

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

This menace is mysteriously not experienced by children who go for walks in real country.

The urban fields under threat from petty officialdom In his Budget the Chancellor needs to tackle the type of bureaucracy that is destroying a much-loved city treasure

20 March 2012 The most leaked Budget of all time will apparently include a bonfire of regulations. More than 170 meddling interferences will be scrapped, liberalised or simplified. This is mostly good news: if the triffid is not slashed it goes on spreading. But I have one suggestion for George Osborne: that he read out his doomed red tape not in Parliament but on top of the Mudchute in the Isle of Dogs. There it really matters. For the past 35 years, a valiant group of local people have converted 50 acres of derelict land into London’s largest nature reserve and urban farm. Just a few hundred yards from the skycrapers of Canary Wharf, mounds of dockland spoil heaps and clinker banks, home to ack-ack guns in the last war, have become a true “rus in urbe”. Cows, goats, pigs and chickens roam and are tended by volunteers. Horses trot along leafy rides. Rare breeds flourish; a farmer’s market has become a high street; most enchanting of all, a flock of sheep graze a nine-acre hill within bonus-tossing distance of the South Quay towers. For thousands of East End children, this is the nearest they ever get to rural life. The Mudchute has survived financial hardship, cuts and vandalism to run on a knife-edge budget of just over £100,000 a year. Hovering in the shadow of stupefying wealth, its staff struggle to present stock of some 180 animals to more than 90,000 visitors a year. The community supports them. Even Tower Hamlets council tolerates them and donates a modest subsidy, the lowest per acre received by any park in London. It is the big society with muddy boots. Now, however, the Mudchute has met its match, in the shape of our old friends, health and safety officials, and their trusty co-conspirator, the VTEC variant of the E.coli bacteria. Council officers patrol the site as might guards a prison camp, peremptorily ordering school groups out of fields, sheep off grass and children not to feed animals. The Isle of Dogs Mudchute has become a practice zone for petty officialdom. The farm has been ordered to fence the hilltop so as to separate sheep and humans, thus ending the celebrated photograph of sheep with Canary Wharf in the background. The reason given is that children might come into contact with sheep droppings occasionally found on the hill. They might transmit germs to their mouths, and might get ill. This menace is mysteriously not experienced by children who go for walks in real country. Nor is that the only menace they face. Because the paddocks are composed of spoil, the inspectors declare that minuscule levels of arsenic in the soil might get into the grass, which might get into children’s stomachs and make them ill. The paddock has been ordered shut. In all my monitoring of risk aversion and killjoy freakery by the health and safety executive, the treatment of the Mudchute by officers enforcing its edicts and handbooks takes the biscuit. They have ordered double fences with a “nomansland” to be erected around the pens, preventing any contact between people and animals, as if goats were grizzly bears. Picnics have been banned in the paddock. The order to segregate the hillside means mowers must be contracted to cut grass that was previously held in check by the sheep. The Mudchute’s former chairman and a local doctor, Michael Barraclough, has written to the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, pleading for him to intervene. He points to the absurdity of keeping sheep off a hill used by dogs, foxes and birds, all of which also carry the E.coli variant. Besides, he points out, the incidence of this illness in children is exceptionally rare, and curable. Of 125 incidents reported nationwide in 2010 only 12 involved hospitalisation and only five related to farms. No one has died. The Mudchute is festooned with signs about hand-washing. It has not recorded a single illness in all its 35 years. As Barraclough points out: “There were 15 deaths in rivers last year, yet officials do not fence off rivers.” As for the risk from arsenic poisoning, there is arsenic in every London garden and it is present in soil, not in grass. Even in soil, barrowloads of earth would have to be consumed for arsenic to be harmful. The risk from the Mudchute arsenic is so low as to be negligible — according to Barraclough, it is 20 times less than in a Cornish garden. Yet Tower Hamlets dares not curb the Taliban-style fanaticism of its health inspectors, for fear of being “liable” to health and safety prosecution should anyone get ill. These people are plain out of hand, yet ministers seem terrified of calling them to order. Like their attack on Guy Fawkes night fires, swimming pool diving boards and small craft on the Thames, health and safety officials are a law unto themselves, elevating minimal risks into grand threats, much as the security services do “the terrorist menace” to the Olympics. It is hard to dissociate their concern from self-interest in job aggrandisement. Health and safety officials are seeking to stamp out an experience of rural life which the rich can enjoy in the countryside but the poor only in a small corner of the capital. The logical next step will be to ban all farm visits by children everywhere and stop anyone walking on a sheep hill. As Osborne assaults the countryside with his new housing estates and advertising sites, he might at least compensate by deregulating a precious patch of country in the town. He and his colleagues should have the guts to bring sanity and humanity to public health and restore a sense of proportion to risk. Source................ Simon Jenkins http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/comment/the-urban-fields-under-threat-from-petty-officialdom-7578767.html

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

“Hens can be kept under certain circumstances that safeguard their well-being, avoid nuisance to neighbours and make sure vermin are not attracted.

Greenwich news

'Don't take my cockerel' - teenager's plea to Greenwich Council

4:59pm Monday 5th September 2011 in Greenwich news By Mark Chandler

Terence

A 17-YEAR-OLD chef says his family and the community will be left devastated if Greenwich Council makes him get rid of his cockerel Terence.
Ellis Hart, of Inigo Jones Road, Charlton, has been keeping chickens with his neighbour George King for around three years.
They began with two hens called Cluck and Duckling and, two-and-a-half years ago, they got Terence.
But, following what Ellis believes is one complaint about noise from a neighbour, Greenwich Council officers visited Mr King’s home where the birds are kept in a garden coop.
To their shock, the pair were told they had just two weeks to get rid of Terence.
Ellis said: “When we first got them we asked the council for permission. They said as long as they’re in your garden and there aren’t too many it should be fine.
“Now they say we have two weeks to get rid of him.”
Greenwich Council insists that cockerels are not allowed in the homes of its tenants and that Terence should never have been living at the property in the first place.
Ellis Hart, George King and Terence

But Ellis said: “It’s not fair to the birds.
“If he goes I don’t know what the hens will do.
“I’ll be upset because I brought him up from the day he cracked open his egg.”

According to Ellis, the cock crows around seven times in an afternoon, with occasional bursts after that. But he insists the community are fans of his chickens.
He said: “I’ve been up and down the road asking the neighbours if the noise has affected them.
“One neighbour said that when they first heard him, it was annoying but they love it now.
“The dogs and the birds make more noise than he does.”
The chickens were bought for their eggs, but also because Ellis is an animal lover. He says that children from the area sometimes come to look at the hens and he often gives away the eggs to visitors.
Ellis said: “My 61-year-old neighbour’s been crying. Everyone’s very attached to them.”
Terence

“The rules are clear”
A spokesman for Greenwich Council said: “The rules around keeping animals in council properties are clear and form part of tenancy agreements.
“Hens can be kept under certain circumstances that safeguard their well-being, avoid nuisance to neighbours and make sure vermin are not attracted.
“The keeping of cockerels is not allowed because they instinctively make noise which is not appropriate in built up environments and can cause a nuisance to neighbours.
“Following noise complaints we visited the property and Mr King was informed of the rules which mean that unfortunately the cockerel can not be kept at the property.
“We would like to meet with Mr King and help him come to a solution which provides a long term home for his cockerel.
“We are happy that the hens are being well cared for and we have no objection at all to them remaining at the property.”

Original story at http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/greenwich/9233647._Don_t_take_my_cockerel____teenager_s_plea_to_Greenwich_Council/