cofarm Cambridge, barnwell road, cambridge

ANNOUNCEMENT

With heavy hearts, the directors of CoFarm Cambridge and Trustees of its parent charity CoFarm Foundation resolved on 14 July to begin an orderly wind up of CoFarm Cambridge with immediate effect. This followed a short cessation of CoFarming activities while the staff team and boards reviewed our operating policies, procedures and capacity against a backdrop of increasing demand for our services and decreasing resources.

In the weeks preceding this decision the boards explored a number of other potential options before concluding that winding up CoFarm Cambridge was the only course of action open to them, having determined that the charity’s trading subsidiary is no longer a going concern.

Alternative future delivery arrangements for the farm are already being explored with the landowner and local organisations. In the meantime, our partners and friends at Abbey People CIO and Cambridge Sustainable Food CIC will be collaborating to harvest and water the crops at the farm and distribute them to the city’s network of food justice organisations.

Organisations with aligned vision, purpose and values and the capacity to pick up the baton from CoFarm Cambridge should email Gavin Shelton in the first instance, to arrange an exploratory meeting.

In the meantime, we offer our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has played a role in co-creating the farm together over the last six years - our amazing CoFarmers (over 2,000 of you!) , donors, grant makers, partners, contractors and, of course, the farm team. It has been an amazing journey and one that we hope and believe will continue under alternative delivery arrangements.

We will, of course, keep our e-newsletter subscribers informed of any significant developments over the coming weeks and months.

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CoFarm Cambridge is a company limited by guarantee (with company number 12268102) and a wholly-owned subsidiary of CoFarm Foundation, established by the Foundation to co-create and run Cambridge city’s first community farm with and for the community. 

The farm is being developed off Barnwell Road, in Abbey, on 7-acres of agricultural land in the Green Belt and right next to Coldhams Common - a very special green space in Cambridge.

Work to establish the farm followed an extensive community consultation and co-design process, conducted over the course of a year. The first phase of consultation, launched in March 2019, was to ask the local community whether they wanted a community farm for Cambridge and, if so, what it should look and feel like and how they would like to engage with it. 

Following an overwhelmingly positive response from the community, the second phase of the consultation was to work with award-winning architects RH Partnership to translate the community’s ideas, dreams and aspirations for their farm into workable designs for the site. These were presented back to the community for their feedback in early March 2020, just before the first coronavirus lock-down.

Full details of the public consultation process, including reports from both phases of community consultation and the Design Brief for Cambridge city’s first community farm, can all be found here.

Implementation of the community’s co-created farm design got underway at the end of May 2020, with the installation of rabbit-proof fencing around the core 2-acre organic market garden zone of the farm.

The farm, now in its sixth growing season, has so far donated over 36 tonnes of premium quality fresh fruit and vegetables worth over £125,000 to 8 community food hubs which were established across Cambridge to support people experiencing food insecurity, as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. We work very closely with Cambridge Sustainable Food Partnership, who coordinate the network of food hubs across the city. The short film below, shot during the pandemic, gives a flavour of this work.

volunteer at cofarm cambridge

To find out more about volunteering at CoFarm Cambridge, and to book a co-farming session with us, please visit the booking page.