 My name is Ashley, Ashley Brown and I work for the Ecosystem Restoration Communities Movement as the education coordinator and we've been working on this project that has been funded by Erasmus, the Erasmus Plus programme which for those who aren't familiar is an EU funded programme to facilitate a kind of cross country learning and sharing within the EU block and it makes me very very sad that UK isn't in the EU anymore but I won't go into that now. We have been working with our partner in Ireland called Shilter Cree and Gareth, the man with the mug is who is calling in from Ireland and we've been working together to visit different projects and different projects around the EU to learn about food hubs because food hubs are a way that the people in the ERC movement can create an income for themselves and food security for their communities. I won't go into it too much more than that because there's time for Gareth to do that but I just wanted to give you all a very warm welcome and I'll hand it over to Gareth. Hello everybody, so yeah thank you for joining us, it's amazing to see the diversity of the wide range of people from most continents I think are seeing there so thank you and thank you ERC for supporting space with us at Shilter Cree. We're in Ireland too and I also just want to name who's been on this journey with us as well as Open Food Network Ireland and then Open Food Network and Roan and Roan in there as well so yeah so the idea behind this project was just to document our experience as a way of trying to how do we develop a resource we're trying to work with restoring the ecosystems of Ireland and we really feel that farmers offer so much potential it's all been pinned as farmers against the environment but actually farmers suffer from the same system that we all suffer from in the environment most of all so how can we create a system that an alternative system too so working with farmers to restore ecosystems but then giving them a fair wage for the wage so supporting them to direct salad as well so this is the journey we've been on and to be honest I got a bit worried when I seen the title of this so everything you wanted to know about the food hub because we haven't got it figured out and we had a great two-day course with people running this in Ireland and Ash was over and in some ways yeah what's come up is that like yeah our current structures are not conducive to fair equitable work in the food system too so you know yeah so there's challenges there too but what we've done with our experience and we've hopefully documented other people's experiences along the way to give some sort of supports along the way and yeah I'm going to I'm going to share the manual that we've that we've developed as part of this project and just use it as a talking piece because the idea of the manual was that was to document and to document our experience too I'm just going to share on the screen. Gareth sorry to interrupt um a couple of us are just having a hard time hearing if you could just um up the volume that would be fantastic I know we were talking but I'm not sure like I'm not sure what's the best way to do is um just like project your voice a bit more I think yeah just show more okay yeah perfect so is that okay that's a bit better yeah anyway so the food hub again it's a guide and it's a way of hopefully documenting our experience as well too so hopefully it'll be a support to different groups around the world just use food as a way of restoring ecosystems so there's the partners too I'm not going to use this so I love this we were lucky we held a series of webinar talks and workshops earlier in the project and we were lucky enough to have them Donna Shiva speak and that can put that online there's a that's a recording that you can check out too and she just in terms of decolonial in terms of food, food and seeds apparently she's just a paradise so really worth checking that out but that was one quote from it the revolution now is growing good food and eating good food um and the purpose of the guide is to support people to support communities individuals and entrepreneurs around the world to um yeah to create fairer and food sovereignty communities yeah and it's for farmers families communities and entrepreneurs too so depending on depending on what your your niche is um and your maybe your motivations for getting involved whether it's trying to source good nutritious food for your family or create a livelihood that's in line with a value based or right livelihood yeah or a farmer to sell or produce but so again looking at how can food in terms of ecosystem restoration how can food be a contributor because that's particularly in Ireland at the moment like the agricultural in Ireland is is very damaging to the ecosystem too so how can we use food as a support for restoring ecosystems and that's really the the question and that we're exploring and we're still exploring it and then it going into John's work that many here will know about like what's possible and looking at you know in terms of what is possible what with ecosystem restoration connecting that with the sustainable development goals which are 17 goals that people may or may not know about but that every government has signed up to so then again these are the links to again touching on regenerative agriculture but also being using that word somewhat sparingly because again it pointing back to you know indigenous people from across the world and that have done practices for a long time and before you know before regenerative agriculture was ever a word so the question that comes up again in this space too was yeah it all sounds good but can local food systems actually really feed the world so again Vandana spoke to this and she said that already 80 percent of the food we currently eat come from small growers and is mainly local so only 20 percent is from large-scale industrial systems and it's very very expensive both financially and ecologically but the only reason it's cheaper in the supermarket is because it's unfairly subsidized and but but certainly most of the food we eat or a lot of the food does come from local sources so a food hub what is a food hub so our understanding of a food hub is and again it's drawn and building on the work with an open food network an open food network Ireland they're one platform but they're the one we point to in this manual for particularly reasons because it's open source and fits in with the values but so a food hub is a group of somebody bringing together growers or producers to sell online essentially an online farmers market is how I think of it too so using people can place rotors online and then there's a pickup date too but a way of bringing together producers growers and maybe other sort of enterprises together to sell locally the need for it so again what why why a food hub so again one of the reason to wear interested in it is in terms of some of them like self reliance economic reconciliation for restoring ecosystems strengthening food security and food sovereignty food as a commons a way of engaging in climate action seed at union and library so it's a way of seed saving new livelihoods and schemes so yeah creating fair livelihoods and a new way of thinking and being enjoying using food as a celebration many of the communities that we work with are we we talk to during this like they have community days and celebrations soup kitchens and ways of bringing the community together have been a really great thing there's some of the reasons and then in terms of local economics this is drawn in there's new economic finishing but they talk about how for supermarkets talk about how often they create so many jobs and there was a test go opened in a in a town close to where I'm based before and they said they're going to create a hundred jobs but if you look at the research it shows for every one job they create they cost at least one and a half so they're creating one job but they're costing 150 to create a hundred jobs or to cost 150 so we're actually losing jobs and that's from closing farmers or delicate tessons or bakers etc too so and yeah so again the analogy that's often used is the leaky bucket so we have this look our local economies but currently they're spraying out money because of corporate and supermarkets etc different ways of that this money is leaving our local economies so that's just a little story you can read separately about looking at what the difference of buying local and spending 80 percent of your income in a local economy and the impact that that has for the local economy as opposed to like online shopping and supermarkets etc so these are just these are guidelines that again there's no set way of this is what to do to create a farmers market we had a two-day training here with with communities around Ireland developing and trying to try either have done it or trying to do develop a food up and these are the steps that seem to come out that either things that they found useful or things that they would find useful to the sporting so understanding the context being key and there's a lot in that I'm not going to go through the money can look at them separately creating visions and the skills that are needed for a food hub so project management financing market again different niches just different things for different people everybody has a role you know what assets are in the community you know the legal structure that the food hub wants to hold whether it's that we're a cooperative but there could be a CLG or it could be a sole trader and again it might be different depending on your country but like what's the legal structure and the benefits and negatives for joining that or setting that up so there's some of them again taken on work that the OFN had done again understanding finances the money that's coming in and going out just having a grasp at and yeah so you know you know it's like using money as a resource but not as a yeah just as a way of supporting and the work and then how do we find producers that's some part that we found a little bit struggle to do it too so looking at things like OFN woofing other markets word of mouth door knocking so finding who's in your community and who might be able or be interested in selling through the food hub the platform and you need a platform to sell on we specifically mentioned the OFN because it's open source and they talk a lot in their work that there might be different even if it's got the best vision a platform if it's privately owned it could either be closed down and that hope happened with the food assembly you know in in the UK it wasn't making enough money so the company just closed it because they weren't getting enough of a return where's with the OFN it's open source and the values really align with certainly what shield decree is all about I think what's ERC is about and probably I would imagine what most people on the call resident but like open food surrounding ecosystem restoration social justice etc but how do we find customers again leafleting social media like but that's again a question how do we how do we get it how do we get the people to actually invest and that's that's a challenge because you know in some ways food is misrepresented in terms of price and yeah all that and then yeah partnership so it's again you don't have to do it all yourself working in partnership working in collaboration like it like an ecosystem does you know there's not one dominant actually there's all these interconnections all supporting that the overall thing so and that and then community using it as a way of community building and then community solidarity work so again there's different ways and different groups have done that so from street fest to soup cafes to and cooking one family cooking for another etc etc so and there's different ways of building community and offering community solidarity and then yeah supporting meeting people are I mean what we wish the people and you know we maybe wish the people want to have this you know stop in our local food hub but I remember talking about this at a workshop before the ills of supermarkets and all the jobs they cost and a woman said to me she yeah I'm a single mother with three kids and I have so I've experimented money so again that's that system not being conducive to so and yeah and then you know people are maybe unaware of like in some cases the damages that's been done so and how do we how do we create resilient systems a big thing that came up in our two days together is the burnout people can start whether it's growing or with the food up really really passionate but actually yeah burnout being a really big thing and just when we were doing the meeting the day before one of the food hubs found out the woman the person growing their food just wasn't going to do it this year because he just burnt out because it's just too much okay it was isolating doing his own so how do we create when we design this that we have that we don't burn out or we minimize the chance and then yeah in terms of like it's not just we don't want to just create and these little islands we want to create systematic change too so advocating for change in our food systems and in our entire societal systems too and then again there's different case samples so I'm not going to get into some of these here we're going to talk about we're hoping to have them speaking at this but they were unable to make it last minute so myself and Ash are going to maybe give we visited that farm as part of the project so and again there's an online talk listening to and who have been talking about it so again you can check that that's a really interesting model so I'd encourage it and I'll come into that and we're talking about the food assembly again it's not just important to look at all the examples that work this is one Ashley was involved in and it didn't work and it's important to look at well what doesn't work and maybe why it didn't work and try and take learnings from that talk Jordan Ireland again another eco village in a community farm gardens of hope again that's Vendana Shiva's we put that in just because yeah there wasn't so much information about it but it's it's great and she was saying like these are like a lot of farmers in a region in India who committed suicide because of the food system and different reasons and so they started creating this thing called gardens of hope and then she talked about during COVID when the big industrial systems weren't able to get out and meet so it was these women in the communities and gardens of hope that were feeding the communities so again example I'm sure I'm saying that wrong but again another farm that we visited anyway so I like this quote so local food systems that is where you can make a difference you can't create a different supply chain but it's not our role your role is to build from the ground up from the soil up from the earthworm so to care for the earth and care for communities too so I really food has been a really powerful way to create the alternative system that we all I'm assuming on this call desperately want and then yeah these are just reminders too so and then there's the invitation to join if you're not already involved in ecosystem restoration like you know world community across the world working for restoring the ecosystems of the world and in the ground up so the invitation to join that too so that is enough from me and yeah I think I'm just a bit over time so but if there's any questions I'd be happy to answer I think we're going to have a section towards the end of the call actually where people can ask any questions so let's keep it until then and I realised that was a very whistle stop tour of of everything so the manual is there for you to read and look through in your own time it was posted in the chat so just have a scroll up and you'll see a link to it there a lot went into it there were many many visits to lots of different farms as Gareth mentioned and also speaking to people who have run their own food hubs and people who want to start them and a lot of insights and Brian just asked for a copy yeah it's if you scroll up Brian you'll see that there is a link to it maybe Kath can post it again or I can post it again quickly yeah there you go um cool okay so we are very honoured to have Karim here with us he works for an extraordinary ecosystem restoration community in the South Sinai area of Egypt which is an extremely dry and desertified region and yet they are growing all of this beautiful colorful abundant food there to feed their their community and he's going to share exactly how that is working bearing in mind is Ramadan this man has not eaten all day so incredible incredible incredible basically as someone who can't go without eating yeah and yes I'm fasting under my way for breakfast as well so that's why I'm in the car right now to have a talk with my friends Ash I sent to you the presentation if you can share it from your side that would be great I'm going to take you briefly on Habiba food hub what we do and why we do it as well Habiba basically we started in 2007 2008 due to the economic crisis that happened and mainly we wanted to have our food security sense we have a lot of desert that we can cultivate and we have water as well so that's why we started to do agriculture and we are located in Sinai, Venezuela, South Sinai, Nueva in Egypt as you can see in the map we can go to the slide and as I mentioned that we started in 2007 and our area it's mainly desert even this is how the desert looks like and now I'm on my way this is how it looks like right now don't know if they can see it Karim because I'm sharing my screen sorry sorry this is the desert climate that we have and we are working on greening our desert and mainly we work with our local community which are the Bedouin tribes that we have we have two tribes Mizena and Tarabin tribe and those are the two tribes that we are working with mainly in Nueva and the third one is Jabalaya tribe in San Catherine due to the weather it's different than Nueva than San Catherine now we are more than 75 farms all of us almost we all work together trying to collaborate together and trying to overcome our obstacles that we face because we have one of our projects if you can go to the other slide Ash please we have several food hub here in Sinai we have the local market and the green box project and we have the processed food so the local markets where all the local farmers for our farmers market we go and join our products over there and regarding the weekly green box this comes from Habiba and from other farms as well in Nueva that we deliver our products from farm to door because we do crop rotation we share our crops together we sit we see what we're going to do in the season because here in Sinai in Nueva especially we work only and farming around six months seven months because of the heat and this is during winter time and during summer time we work in the olives trees and in the dates as well and then the last processed food that we have that we turn our products into dry like kale we turn into kale powder beetroot powder moringa powder all of those herbs we turn them into powder in order to sell our products to Cairo and we are glad and proud that all our products now are plastic free biodegradable plastic and the recycled package the package itself it's a recycled cartoon package and one of our most and here is a product that we have are the dates the maztul palm tree this is the type of the dates itself and we chose it for several reasons because of it contains a lot of nutrition flags it's meaty it's nice people who have diabetes can eat it as well it's not high with sugar this is the part of it from the nutrition part but from the social responsibility part that when we sell the dates it sustains our learning center Habiba part of its social responsibility we have a learning center it's an after school for the bedroom kids and the money that we generate from those dates it sustains the learning center and by this this model can cannot be stoppable because it's not attached to the business model it's always attached to the learning center and hopefully inshallah that that winner as well and other teenagers and the elders as well Karen remember this was our sorry just remember to tell me when to move to the next picture yeah yeah yeah you can you can go to the next picture no and no worries okay and see this is the local markets approach that we go we go in the way by and also to the farmers market in the app as well that we collect the vegetables from Habiba and from other prod other farmers and we deliver you can go to the other slide dash please this is the green box initiative these are the boxes that we deliver to the app every week people would order from a google form what they need from their weekly vegetables and we collect them and then we start to distribute them to the app in the few years we used to do for them a box a plastic box but we stopped doing this kind of plastic box and now we're doing cloth bags as in the picture the chef while he's putting with the vegetables in it you can go to the other slide please and those are our end products of Habiba the food process that we do from olive oil to dates as you can see on the left side this is the package of the date and the herbs that we have from moringa powder to kale powder beetroot powder chili powder all of those herbs we turn them we dry them first and then we turn them into powder and this is the final product that we sell and sent to Cairo and in Sinai as well you would like to go to the other slide please and this is how we collaborate with our local forms we collaborate with them we harvest we collect and then we sit every winter time to discuss how we're going to collaborate together and alhamdulillah things are going well on different aspects and we're getting bigger and bigger and expanding more and more as you can see in the picture this is melon harvesting he looks very happy with those melon the best man is alhamdulillah as you can go to the other slide as well please and as i was telling to you this is the adding value of it from the palm trees that we have the majdul dates and this is the picture of magid the founder of Habiba community and the kids at the learning center having fun in them so if you can go to the other slide sorry we're passing some traffic and of course we we are facing some problems always due to climate change every year we're facing new obstacles from insects from heat waves or even cold waves and salinity also affects us but we are trying to overcome those obstacles as much as we can with the tools and resources that we have so i go to the next one as you can see from the other picture insects and the the effect of the insects on the dates and figs and stuff like that and we're trying to treat them as much as possible and face those climate change and insects that are invading our space every year thank you all and i hope i was clear as you can see those are the dates this is magid the founder of Habiba the greenhouse our ducks Pietro one of our superhero volunteers happy with the harvest of the fox and i hope i have been clear in all the food processed cycle that we have in in Habiba thank you thank you okay great um we have five minutes now if anyone has any questions that they'd like to ask Karim about their food hub model over there in the Sinai please raise your little yellow hand um if you have a question or you can write it in the chat depending on what you prefer or was uh was Karim so clear that there's no extra questions needed here okay Von uh where's your question gone oh how many customers slash households are you selling to Karim can't hear you there we go we have 36 customers that we deliver to the hub and also we supply a couple of restaurants as well vegetarian or vegan restaurants in the hub around us and this is regarding the farm the fresh products but regarding the food processed unit we supply almost eight stores in Cairo and three in the hub as well that we supply with them from dates to olives to moringa powder, kale powder all our food processed unit great thank you oh that's a question i also had um but i'll go with Nicole's first are you exporting your products can we buy them in canada? Nicole asks we don't have that quantity to export however when we have since we work also in the tourism industry people take products of Habiba as giveaways or even to be used for their personal usage uh in their countries yeah we we're very lucky to take some of these products home with us when we visited and i've still got it in my cupboard downstairs because that's one of the models on the open food network as well one of the some groups do is the solidarity work so you know you could if there's something you can't grow in your region they're connecting with a community who's working on support so for example getting olives from a Palestinian community so you're buying directly from them the salad too so for that this is the question within the food hub do you buy do you eat just locally or do you buy from the wider range things like dates from um from from carrying um but buying sourcing bringing them in and then doing it that way so it's just yeah there's a question here how do you how did you find your customers Karim it's a big question isn't it for everyone working in this kind of area by going to the farmers market this helped us a lot to to interact with our customers this with the first phase the second one through awareness and and branding uh of Habiba products and the cause as well of the project that we we have like the dates that it's sustained the learning center all of this kind of things helped us to uh to engage with the market and to to sell our products in it and and our and our mind said that we complete we don't compete so we don't have a competition by the meaning of competition because we collect the vegetables from Habiba and from other farms so everybody is doing its part from the from the locals as well and our partners okay great thank you um if there aren't any more questions here I think we'll move on to the next part of the of the webinar today so I'm going to be well me and Gareth are going to be presenting a model um that we visited when we were in the Netherlands which is called here at a boarding um I hope the Dutch people in the call think that I said that okay me and Gareth are struggling to pronounce these very Dutch words but um that's fine and we were very blown away by this model because it's working really really effectively there um someone was meant to be here with us from here abroad today but they couldn't actually make it in the end for a last-minute emergency reason so I'm going to show you a video of the model and then run through a few little extra pieces about it because me and Gareth are lucky enough and Christina who's here to visit last year so I have a notebook stacked full of notes about this place I know quite a lot about it so I'm going to share the film now oh wait sorry no I have to do I have to press a special thing when I'm sharing a film that I forgot to do one second oh no it was there okay cool for here it's a group of about 200 households invested in an organization of their own company they take the ground they take a farm and they produce the food that they want to eat I just know literally where you come from my main reason for that is that I just eat right away that I know my work, that I know what kind of work is going on, do you hear the noise and also that we have been working with ourselves at some point at some point, we have worked on the plant machine in the spring for example with the plant set for the coal what is important is that the owner of this farm is the owner of this farm and so the owner is also the owner of everything that is produced here and that you can get that after a couple of months at a time when you can get rid of your country, of course, that's beautiful. You show that you can arrange the farm with a group of people and that you can eat with each other and by taking those steps as an individual, you slowly contribute to a step-by-step transition to a new food system in the Netherlands. That slowly, by the owners of a place where food is produced, is becoming more and more a social movement about just a different way of seeing food. We are part of the owners and I'm proud of that, of course, of the one thing that you get from the country, of course, that's just very beautiful, but that's what we stand for. The collaboration on the farm, it all wins us all and with that you feel a part of a larger whole and that starts with our own farm, but it's actually much bigger. Once upon a time, starting with this concept of calculating with the thought of what, if every Dutchman has his own farm, you get 17 million farms of that is of course not done, you won't make that. That's where it comes from. How many people do you need for one farm? That's the concept of the farm, but look back to 17 million Dutchmen. You would do that with 500 mounds per farm as we do here, then you have 35,000 companies that need to be able to feed the Netherlands in this way. And if those 20 hectares are like this one, then you have 35,000 times 20 hectares, that's 700,000 hectares. And 700,000 hectares is less than one third of the Netherlands' area, so it is possible to bind all those components with this system or with a comparable system . Yes, you have to take the time, but if you eat it, then you know that it's just nice. Look around you, this is much more fun than an abbey. And I still come to see the abbey, so it's not like that, but I think it's really fun to get out of here every week and just to see who eats what. The 2,000 euros that we invest in a month actually gives you a lifelong access to the fair, traceable, safe and sustainable food produced. If you put that on a lifelong EETZ, that 2,000 euros is actually not that much money. We all don't want to be a number, but in some way it is the number of your membership on this farm. It is a kind of pride that excites you, because I am member of the number, I am member of the number 46. And that is, yes, I'm already getting goosebumps because that's nice. If people are all going to do this, then we just have 700,000 hectares in the Netherlands, it just really changes. Really changes. Then you just have to eat it yourself. When you think about investing in a house and in your house-festing, then it is easier to invest or close down a mortgage, while we have something else in our lives about it, namely the primary need for food. And so investing once in 2,000 euros to have a lifelong access to your food is actually a small contribution in that light. So invest in your house, invest well in your food. So to summarize, this model is essentially a community-supported agriculture scheme, which is where the community invests and promises the growers in advance that they will buy the food from the grower, which gives the grower or growers the faith that they can go and produce this food, because they will have customers to sell it to. But what they've done with this model is they've asked people to invest in being co-owners of the farm. So each family has 200 families of roughly 500 people, each invest 2,000 euros, which produces a total amount of 400,000 euros, and then that's enough to buy or rent the farm and pay the farmer a really decent salary. The salary of the farm is roughly 60,000 euros, which is a lot more than farmers normally make. And the customers kind of feel a real sense of ownership over the farm because they co-own it, and therefore they really care for the land, they really care for the animals, and they're really committed to that place as that's now theirs, and that's where they get their food from. And this model has been so successful that they are now rolling out many, many other examples of this all over the country. I think the last time we spoke to Budevine, they are working on 50 more farms like this around the country and also in Belgium. And when we went to visit, what we really loved was that there's all this experimentation going on all the time. So for instance, some of the members were really passionate about food forestry and wanted to start a little food forestry section on the farm. And so they were like, yeah, sure, it's yours, you know, here's a plot for that. You can grow those trees yourself, you can manage that side of it. And they did. And they've done tests to show that the soil in that particular part of the farm is the best than the whole rest of the farm. So the customers or the co-owners have real autonomy as well over the way that the land is managed. I think from memory, you can select the kind of food that you want. So you can choose vegetables, you can choose vegetables and meat, you can choose vegetables, meat and eggs and fruit. They do fruit as well. And they do grains. I think they do everything apart from dairy. That's right, Gareth, from memory. And yeah, there's just this real sense of community. So there's lots of community events that are put on that give people a real sense of belonging. Because that's something from the training that we did, that we realized, okay, for a who tub to be successful, you kind of have to be more than just a place that people go and get their food from. Like, what is it that the supermarket system doesn't give people? It doesn't give people a sense of belonging and connection, A to the land, B to their food and C to each other. And that's something that food hubs and these sorts of alternative models do give people. And this is something that they're hearable and model does really, really well. Little bit more detail. So you go every week. And there's like set days. There's like a Wednesday and a Saturday, I think, where you can go at a time and collect what you want. And you're just given what's in season. And then if there's anything else that you don't, if there's anything from what you're given that you don't like, you can take it and put it in like a swap area. So you can swap it with something that other people also don't like. And that's that's their way of doing things rather than going on and ordering. You just say, I want meat and vegetables and eggs. And then you go and you take what is in season. The meat is sold in bulk as well. So you buy all of your meat in one go in a couple of months, I think. And then you put it in the freezer. That was another 18 kilos a year per person. So it's like the average, I think, 16 or 17 kilos. And I think they were saying that they were going to reduce that as well for like carbon emissions reasons. What else did I want to say about this model? You can join as a trial member, I think. So you don't have to buy straight away. You don't have to invest straight away. And you join for 10 weeks and you pay 10 pounds a week for your food, which is very, very affordable. And 25 percent of their trial members then decide to join them. They spend 8 percent of their budget on rent. And the standard rental period is six years. And then after six years, the land owner needs to start paying back any of the investment that the farmer has paid, which assures that the land is secured for them into the future, which means that they can do things like plant trees and do more perennial food growing, which obviously takes quite some time to produce food. And you wouldn't do that if you were renting land because it's not a secure tenancy. And yeah, it's just a really incredible model, really. And it's working really well. So that's why we wanted to show you that one. I'm wondering, Gareth, did you want to add anything? Just interesting, again, in terms of, and again, this is not an academic research, but if you just do it loosely, just defeat 500 people on 20 hectares. So we were looking at that as part of the manual. So according to Euro stats, their EU farms use 157 million hectares of land for agricultural production in 2020. And at 38 percent of all the land that's in, you use the 20 hectares feeds 500 people. And then they say, sorry, there's 447.7 million living in the EU. So it's 447 million and using 157 million hectares. We use 20 hectares feeds 500 people using this regenerative model. Then the number of people would be fed on 894 hectares. So basically drastically reducing the amount of land used in agriculture that then could be rewilded or returned back to nature. And your usual practices are just let go. And somebody mentioned that there and the questions about the maths in the video that, yeah, using it as a way of more regeneratively, but more lower, like growing higher in the foods in smaller amounts and then returning the rest of it back to wider nature. Yeah, someone said it really busts the myth that the way that food is grown now industrially is done so because it's the most efficient, which I think a lot of us realise is not the case. Someone's asked the question, how many months of the year is food supplied? As far as I know, every month there's always something that they have because they don't just grow vegetables, you know, they grow vegetables, they meet eggs, fruit, grains. There's always something, whatever's in season is what and what is growing at the time is put in the kind of store, market-stool area of the farm where people go on a Wednesday or a Saturday to collect and they take whatever they want and then they swap out whatever they don't want with this one. The language that Europe is used for export oriented crops, yeah, it's an important question because the model is inherently flawed and then how much of that is then done from other markets because of trade policy, trade laws, all this, etc. thing too. But again, if you use this model as imagined, like growing food, local food to grow as much as past being in, yeah, like again, it's not that we don't have, we don't claim that it's an exact calculation of all humans' needs made in a closed loop, but it's just an interesting thing to piece. But it's again, there's other issues with that. Video dare off, it's part of this because there was a couple of webinars, I'll put all the links to the treater from webinars, but ones with food, I'm talking about here, yeah, it's really interesting. What I really love to do at the farm, I guess like 60 grand, like in Ireland, certainly farmers are struggling to make a living and, you know, and it's kind of like to do it as a second job or as this is like an honourable profession, I mean, they're ones getting a fair wage for us. Yeah, interestingly though, to kind of play to push things to the other side of the seesaw, as I like to say, I was talking to another regenerative farm that is selling food via a hub, also in the Netherlands that we visited called Bodum Zicht, I'll put it in the chat, Bodum Zicht, which is now run by a man who was volunteering at the first ecosystem restoration camp in Spain when I was there. It's really nice to see him now running his own farm with his partner. And then what they were saying was that the Heroburen model is very, very community focused and the farmer grows what the community wants to grow. And therefore, the farmer doesn't have very much say or autonomy over what or creativity over how he farms. And that was their kind of point of view on it, which is also true, you know, so like, it's very subjective as to what makes the best model here, but that's just something to add in as well. Yeah. How important is organic production to the success of food hubs you've visited? You mentioned regenerative a couple of times, do you mean organic? Yes. None of the models that we visited use pesticides or fungicides. And what I mean by regenerative is that they are purposefully working on building up the fertility of the system all the time. So things like rotating animals so that their organic matter from their urine and their feces is like put back into the soil. They are experimenting with perennial systems like food forestry, etc, which is known to be very good for the soil as well and building back up that organic matter layer and increasing biodiversity. So I guess you'd call it regenerative organic. Not the certified, yeah. But they might not be after, but it might not protect you should be interested in getting the label organic. They often say too that like thinking about having a community model rather than having one accreditor certifier coming to visit you once a year, when you have all your customers coming you have the equivalent 500 certifiers coming every week. Yeah. Yeah, there is some feedback I hear as well from smaller scale growers that getting organic certification is quite expensive and it's something that they don't feel like they really need. You can still use certain different sprays in organic as well too. So Regener's more about how do you build the soil and then that too. So again Sarah's asking the same question. So they're practicing building ecosystems but they might not be labels organic. Yeah. So are we now at the point where we can open the floor to more general questions? Is that what we're doing now? Okay, cool. Yeah, so we've got a little bit of time left before we sign off and just for more kind of general questions and discussion if anyone wants to bring a point they want to talk about for a while to do this topic. Make the most of being a community here in the room today with lots of people interested in this sort of thing. I have a question. Great. I'm keen to know whether this is obviously that the farmers market concept is nothing new but the food hub and the move towards the online food hub movement. Is this a new movement? I mean you guys have been exploring it now through these workshops and all the research you've done you have to put in the handbook together but is this something that is it's becoming more embraced now? Has it been going for a while or has the online revolution which I really shouldn't say because things have been online for 30 years but has that aided or certainly the people becoming more accustomed to online shopping I guess? Has that really aided the movement? I wonder whether Yvonne wants to answer this. What do you think Gareth is seeing as she's working in this field? I was thinking that too. Yeah, thanks very much for putting me on the spot everyone. Well I guess my own involvement is quite new in the space and it was absolutely prompted by the pandemic and the need to pivot to an online solution when our face-to-face market locally was shut down and that was certainly the experience in the OFN world. Sales through existing shop fronts and hubs just multiple, they exploded really through COVID and it felt like something that might stick but that hasn't been the experience unfortunately in a lot of cases we've seen the volumes slip back to almost pre-COVID levels and that coupled with the challenges now of the cost of living crisis around you know just the cost of energy and so on has meant that actually a lot of the hubs that we see or a lot of hubs in different parts of the world are struggling because their margins are tight and yeah so the question is whether it's a new thing and I don't know I don't know whether it's a thing even yet to be honest with you it certainly has experienced that roller coaster in the recent past with the pandemic and stuff where it's settling I'm not entirely sure where the trend is going but certainly the broader trends in terms of you know everything moving online and you know e-commerce and all of that would suggest that this should be a good bet but there's so many other factors that impact how people how people purchase their food and I think convenience is such a huge it's such a huge thing it's a huge challenge to you know compete with the supermarkets and I think it brings us back to the comment that Ash made earlier around you know how we can differentiate food hubs from supermarkets and what can we offer that the supermarket doesn't offer if 10247 opening which it generally won't be and what are all those other value-added pieces that we can offer to our communities and indeed our farmers so yeah that's I know not a definitive answer but maybe a little bit flavor of what we're seeing in the OFN world anyway thank you everyone I I ran a food hub myself 10 years ago now that was an online model we ordered online and then you've collected in person and that's the food assembly model that I've written about in the manual which wasn't a huge success well it was a success at first when it was like a kind of novel thing you know I think people really do care about where their food comes from but often not enough to kind of put an evening aside every week to go and pick their food up so that was where their their model kind of slipped seeing as we were in London and people in London have extremely busy extremely busy lives and going to collect their food from a cafe rather than from the supermarket and having to do it at a fixed day of the week didn't give them enough of an alternative that was appealing enough so I think what's interesting about the Healerborder model and the Bodomzik model that I posted about in the chat is that they offer people real connection to a place and to to a community and to the land and to nature because that is something that people living in cities especially do really crave is having somewhere to go that is beautiful and regulates their nervous systems and makes them feel good and they get to meet new friends and they get to be together and there's so much more to it than just getting better food and I think that's one of the main learnings that we've taken away from this this whole experience really um yeah. Nicole just asked a question there too about the structures of food hubs too again that would be like are they is it tend to be non-profit or for-profit companies again it would depend on the context and so that's why in a villain maybe you could talk about this again but OFN that's why we're more interested in Shieldcrete towards OFN because it's open source so we're a non-profit but the problem with if it's for-profit again the food assembly one they were they were running in the reached amount of the UK but they weren't making enough profit so they just closed it so if you were supplying a community through that platform at that time you just closed down so that I mean that's the very um yeah whereas open food out that couldn't happen too so I think a lot I would imagine most of the if you're set up in terms of the manual we said who's it for it's either for for for communities and families possibly if you were coming from that angle you'd be in probably a non-for-profit structure but you could I could imagine being a for-profit structure too but again um that would be a context I mean there is the question that comes up a lot too should food be traded upon like just from an ethical and from like a from a build one view should we be taking food as a way of food as a way of making profit like obviously livelihoods and fair livelihoods are important but so yeah I don't know if I really answered your question but the event we've gone or actually I think that's supposed to come in and answer more yeah I mean I just I suppose by virtue of our our own ethos and that you know the platform users for OFN would tend I suppose to be not for profits community interest companies or cooperatives but they don't have to be there are also um plenty of shop fronts that are that are run by by farmers themselves and also some who act as hubs so they would be maybe offering their own facilities as an an aggregation site so they they sell their own produce and they also sell produce of a number of their their neighbor farmers or whatever on their own location so and it's quite flexible in that regard and obviously there are a lot of e-commerce platforms out there that that have a lot more money behind them and resources behind them and they're they're all singing all dancing and so enterprises that would have that would have you know space and and resources on their own side to be able to invest might be attracted more to to those but certainly um I'd say the bulk of I don't know the stats the bulk of our users um would probably be aligned in terms of their operation and legal structure but there's the we we absolutely um serve farmers and enterprises as well that you know there's no restrictions in terms of the the profit structure okay so we're going to close off in a minute um I'm wondering if anyone else wants to share anything and I hope that this has been yeah useful and stimulating for everyone it's a very important topic in my opinion and it feels very nice to be here with everybody who cares so much about this sort of thing all right cool I think that's probably it then so lovely to meet you all and see some familiar faces etc and if you are creating your own food hubs more power to you the world needs us let's go I hope the sun's shining for you today and yeah see you soon