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Middle Ground Growers CIC: Space for Nature winner (Community), Bee Bold Awards

Middle Ground Growers CIC, a food-growing collective in Bath, are creating a pollinator-friendly farming model which provides fresh food for the community whilst regenerating the environment.

The Bee Bold selection panel commended the focus of pollinators within the agricultural sector and how local businesses and landowners can tackle food insecurity issues in a nature-friendly way.

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My name is Sammy Elmore.

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And Middle Ground Growers is a veg box scheme in Bath.

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We are planning to get up

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we’re about 150 at the moment,

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looking to get up to about 200 veg boxes

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that we deliver around Bath. By bike.

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The way the farm works is that we have different

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different parts of the land

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and it goes from kind of being really intensively cropped

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to then being less intensively cropped.

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And then we have areas where we actually kind of

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at the moment have just completely let go to wildlife.

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A lot of this valley has been sprayed with pesticides

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and because we're organic farming, we don't

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we don't spray any pesticides whatsoever.

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We intentionally let

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when crops go over when they're going to seed.

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We obviously manage it,

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but we can actually allow them to flower

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and they benefit us as well.

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The more pollinators we have,

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the healthier community of insects we have,

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and that means we get less pests and diseases.

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If you get it right,

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which is a bit of a balancing act,

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you can actually increase

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the amount of food that you grow

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and the healthy, the health of the food

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by having the insects and pollinators around.

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It's bit of a myth that they are, they’re all enemies.

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With growing local

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food, you actually manage to get people like engaged

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with what can grow in their region. By the veg box,

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where they don't necessarily

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have a choice of what they're getting,

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they really start to understand the seasons.

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I think that's the biggest thing that I really enjoy,

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that we hear back from our customers.

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It's just that they start to really understand

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food and seasonality

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and what can be grown within Bath.

What they did

Middle Ground Growers CIC have transformed a 16-acre monoculture non-organic field into an agroforestry system of fruit trees with wildflower strips on the edges of their cropping 'alleys'. They have also dedicated wildflower meadows and other spaces for wildflowers, totalling 4 acres on the farm.

Middle Ground Growers have also amended their business, procurement and production systems to ensure there are no toxic or chemical inputs, no plastic packaging and no imported products. They deliver their veg boxes to the local community via e-cargo bikes that are charged from solar power on the farm.

They also offer a land-based traineeship which provides learning on agro-ecology, market gardens and regenerative enterprises on a working farm.

The impact for Middle Ground Growers and beyond

Shifting to a regenerative, pollinator-friendly farming model is enabling Middle Ground Growers to produce fresh food with less negative impacts on the environment. Shifting away from chemical inputs also means reduced costs for the farm.

By providing traineeships the organisation is sharing its knowledge and helping people to get into sustainable land work, regenerative horticulture, pollination, and community food or land projects.

The impact for pollinators

The pollinator-friendly farming systems provide fantastic foraging resources for a range of pollinators - from the blossom on the fruit trees to the wildflowers at the edges of the crop areas.
There are other environmental benefits including soil regeneration, integrated pest management and increased diversity in the plants and wildlife on the farm.

Middle Ground Growers is also hoping to expand its operations further, and are in talks with other landowners and farmers in the region to adopt pollinator-friendly farming, which will mean that across the farming landscape there will be more foraging opportunities for pollinators.

Videos created by Eight Creative Agency (eight.org.uk | @createwitheight)