A packed year of projects – 2021 in review
2021 proved another busy year for the Farm Urban team; we worked on a range of projects with partners as diverse as the Welsh Government, RIBA and community groups across Birkenhead. Here’s a taster – pun intended – of some of the things we worked on.
Crop Cycle
The Welsh Government’s Crop Cycle project brought together community organisations across Wales and organisations working with Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA).
Farm Urban worked alongside LettUs Grow, Digital Farming and GrowStack, connecting after the first COVID lockdown to develop new relationships, build networks and share ideas. We installed Edible Walls in communities across Wales, allowing us to develop our approach to managing our technologies and sharing that information, building a user guide to train local staff, make the Edible Wall more accessible and empowering partners to take control of the systems.
We also visited primary schools local to our partners to deliver aquaponics workshops. We trained our partners to deliver the workshop, increasing the number of young people who can learn about sustainable food solutions through hands-on experience of building their own Produce Pod.
We worked with community organisations across the country, including Green Meadow Community Farm in Cwmbran, Welcome to our Woods in Treherbert, Xplore! Science Discovery Centre in Wrexham, Cultivate and the Neath Port Talbot College’s Community Growing Space in Newton.
Community Edible Walls: Make Hamilton
Residents from across Birkenhead built and operated one of Farm Urban’s innovative hydroponic Edible Wall systems at Make Hamilton. Participants took the lead – guided by our team – to build skills, while growing their own food and experiment with hydroponics. It also gave them the opportunity to learn about global food systems – and make healthier and more sustainable food choices.
Funded by Liverpool City Region’s Community Environment Fund, the Community Edible Walls had numerous positive impacts, including:
Friendships that strengthen community connections, building relationships for people through shared experiences and interests.
Learning about food growing and the systems led to behaviour change. Participants were more conscious about what they were eating, where it came from, and its environmental impacts.
New skills meant that participants were able to grow food at home, take over the maintenance of the Edible Wall, and gain transferable technical and team working skills.
We delivered Community Edible Walls in partnership with Make CIC, the good people of Birkenhead and LCR’s Community Environment Fund.
The Heath – promo video
We began work with SOG, owner of Runcorn’s The Heath Business Park (you can read the case study here). A RIBA call for designs for the project saw an eye-catching entry feature a vertical farm at its centre and Paul Myers, Farm Urban’s managing director, was brought in as a consultant, to advise on creating a vertical farm for the development.
As a result of the collaboration, a Greens for Good-serviced Edible Wall has been installed in the cafeteria, giving users of the park access to fresh greens every day. The Heath shares its location with the North West Hydrogen Alliance, which means we’ve been able to conduct a pilot project to test powering a vertical farm using electricity from hydrogen fuel cells, making this power-intensive process carbon neutral. These new developments are incredibly exciting, offering huge potential for new technologies and ways of living to be tested. A mini-city, with a vertical farm at its heart, gives us a place to test the scalability of these technologies to whole cities, putting vertical farms at the heart of daily urban life.
Key support has been offered by Liverpool City Region Combined Authority: Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram says the project ‘must happen’.
Sustainable Steps
We developed and designed an online interactive platform for Liverpool John Moores University. Sustainable Steps will give learners access to knowledge that is key to making effective change. This collection of mini courses provides an accessible introduction to the science of climate change, the underlying causes and its effects on the natural world and our personal wellbeing. It includes actionable elements of environmental science and sustainability that every single one of us can employ.
Future Food Challenge
Our aquaponics experience saw us launch a new competition for school students in autumn 2021.
Future Food Challenge is an extra-curricular programme for Year 9 secondary school pupils in Liverpool City Region, funded by the Royal Academy of Engineers (RAE), that sees us working in partnership with University of Liverpool’s School of Engineering.
Teams of between 12 and 15 young people have been challenged to develop a business idea and prototype system to bring aquaponic food growing into their local community. Each school has been paired with a professional engineer and a student engineer from the university who will mentor and inspire the young people involved throughout the challenge.
Future Food Heroes
We also put together Future Food Heroes for Year 5 pupils across Liverpool, helping them explore zero-waste food and a circular economy.
We worked in partnership with Merseyside Waste and Recycling Authority and Patagonia to see each school buddied with a student mentor. The mentors come from a group of young people who’re passionate about sustainability and community-building, who will support teachers and pupils to develop project ideas to bring sustainable food growing into their own communities.
