How Teaching People to Grow Food Will Help Change the World
Feral originally started life as a company to offer creative technology services to planet-first brands, and while I have worked with some great clients and provided mostly web design services, I have struggled to source work from brands with purposes that align with Feral’s. As a production partner, my clients tended not to worry too much about what Feral stood for, but mostly if it could do the job on time and on budget. While that was conducive to making money for the company, it was not conducive to making a difference. So, this year I have decided to take Feral in a new direction — one that seeks to apply my skills in strategy, design and tech to developing projects that are regenerative. As I seek to understand this landscape, I am looking for opportunities to learn, and I recently attended a conference bluntly titled “Extinction or Regeneration”.
During one of the talks at that conference, I wrote a note to myself to think of ways I could inspire youth to want to grow food. The very next day I received a message from an old friend and Parent-Teachers Association member of a school at the end of the street on which I grew up asking if I’d want to get involved in helping the children there with a food growing project. Not wanting to ignore what felt like a synergistic signal I arranged to meet the head teacher at All Saints RC School in Ebbw Vale. I found Mr Price to be leading with ideas far more progressive than you might expect to see in such a downtrodden area. There’s a parliament for the pupils to propose and steer projects of their own, societies and clubs (including an eco club), a desire to run more intergenerational projects between kids, parents and grandparents and aspirations to do even more for the local community. I received a tour of the modest school grounds and saw that it already has a small set of vegetable planters, a wildlife pond filled with frogs and newts and space to create a garden of significant scale. Finally, despite all this positivity, I also learned that it is Wales’ most economically deprived school — 76% of pupils there are entitled to free school meals and some pupils have parents and grandparents that have never worked. This school and its children aged between 2–11 years old is one very much deserving of help.
As we all know and feel, these children are growing up into an increasingly volatile and distressed world — the reasons are complex and systemic but ultimately stem from the old story that while every other living thing on this planet must co-exist in harmony, humans are somehow separate. This world-view, deeply entrenched within society and all its mythology, has created and forced us to participate in systems that extract resources from the natural world and process them with human labour to generate profits that keep the economy growing. This is measured using a metric called GDP, and it is one that has wrongly been valued as an indicator of progress for many years. It’s complicated but here’s a vignette that succinctly describes it:
A forest has no value until it is cut down.
With nature simply being viewed as a resource, societies driven by the motivation to always increase GDP have consumed the natural world around them, decimating once-thriving ecosystems. As forced participants in these societies we are relentlessly whipped by the ‘cost of living’ motivating us to play our part. Unlike animals (non-humans), the only way for us to exist is to make money and as we struggle to do this, the system also absorbs our free time, makes us compete for work and makes those that cannot find it feel useless. These systems not only separate us from the natural world but from our communities and tragically, the chance to discover our own values, desires and curiosities. Managing to mesh the constant need to make money with what we believe in is a privilege many of us will never get to experience — as mentioned, I have yet to resolve this with my company, Feral. It’s no surprise then, that world-wide mental health is worsening — people have become disenchanted, disengaged, depressed and often dependent on any substance that can bring a little change to their lived realities.
With the polycrisis of ecological and societal breakdown unfolding, it’s obvious that we need to begin to live a new story — one where we once again become part of nature, part of our communities and find ways to reconnect to our own individual sense of purpose.
These are complex issues that I wouldn’t expect to be taught to children but I do believe that we can begin to engage with them by doing something that fundamentally benefits us. Simply starting to grow our own food is a powerful way in to this new story.
The minute you put a plant in the ground you create a relationship with that land. And by caring for that plant you’ll observe the ecosystem around it; the ladybirds and hover flies that eat the aphids off your tomatoes. The frogs that gobble the slugs that have been munching on your lettuce. The blackbirds that dig at your vegetable beds as the worms beneath that enriched soil multiply. You’ll see how by growing food you are helping this web of life flourish and begin to feel your place within it — as a steward. A curious mind will start to ask questions that reveal cracks in the old story and gradually create the desire to move into the new.
So after a presentation to the school, a green-light from Mr Price (the head teacher) and with a site chosen, that’s what we have set out to do here. Among many other positive side effects, the core mission of this project is to inspire these young minds to live a new story of connection, rather than separation, through the act of growing food and participating in the flourishing of life. We want them to step outside the domesticated human world that values the financial and into the world of nature that values relationship. We want them to become a little “feral”.
Personally it’s also a chance for me to evolve — being a prototype/web developer up ‘til now I am more familiar with wrangling code than children. I have never taught a single child let alone run projects that involve an entire school and its surrounding community. I have never looked at various funding models outside selling my time for money. I have never motivated a group of volunteers.
As you may have noticed, there’s already photos from the first workshop. I have already collected donations of plants and materials from the local community. I’ve sown seeds of my own which are now in the ground at All Saints, bought in compost and fronted any financial costs from Feral’s bank account. Until now I have mostly been a lone-wolf and so telling the story of this project might be a little out of sync while I do the heavy lifting of getting the project up and running and building a network of support around it.
If you resonate with what we are doing, believe that the world will be better for it and would like to contribute, we are running a campaign to help pay for some project materials.
Your contribution will have a direct impact —we are being very lean in our approach so a donation of quite a little can help make a big difference:
Please stay tuned — this publication will serve as a project log to document the progress and show that behind the seemingly simple idea of growing veg there is a strategy to do more for this community and a desire to find a scalable model that helps others move into a more connected, joyful world.
