I read a fascinating article in the paper today about young growers in Wales producing food on small farms in Wales.  They’re enabled to do so by a charity called Our Food Trust, which provides land, affordable accommodation and routes to market for well-trained local growers.  Their ambitious mission is to create 100 small farms of this kind in Wales, to help reduce food insecurity and imports, increase resilience and provide a route to productive work for young people who are trained in horticulture but denied access to land by a market set by speculative forces rather than farming. They view themselves as a ‘laboratory’ – a project which will learn from experience and act as a model which could be scaled up across the United Kingdom.

It struck me that their aims are strikingly similar to ours – in fact, the parallels were there right from the beginning when we called the project Music Box – the idea of a musical version of a Vegetable Box was very much in our minds!

We too aspire to provide access to a local musical market to trained performers – of all ages!  We too aim to cut the music miles for audiences looking for musical experiences in their own back yards. We too would like to play a part in building a resilient and self-sustaining musical ecosystem in a culture increasingly dominated by highly marketed superstars. We too hope that our experience may encourage and inform others who want to experiment with similar models.

Long live homegrown food – and long live homegrown music!