Cambridge CropShare

See here for upcoming CropShare days and our blog for what we've been up to recently,

Everyone is welcome to join in on the farm in our bigger, better 2015 season! To get involved, please email us, and sign up via this form if you would like to come along. We can then send you more info and help arrange lift shares or group cycling to the farm.

Check out our blog to see more pictures, get an idea of what we get up to on the farm and the up to date story straight from the field!

A brief overview

What is it?

See a summary presentation here

Transition Cambridge CropShare is a small-scale community-supported agriculture (CSA) scheme in Cambridge.

It experiments with ‘crop-sharing,’ which we define as an exchange of use of land for access to labour - creating opportunities for farm-community collaboration.

How does it work?

In early 2011, we teamed up with local farm Waterland Organics. We brought groups of volunteers to the farm over the season to help with planting, weeding and harvesting their onion crop- which had a bumper yield of 6.5 tonnes in total from 2000 sq m! After harvest celebrations, committed core CropShare members received 10 kg of onions each, and decided as a group what to do with our agreed 1/2 a tonne share of the onion harvest. We donated onions to local charities Foodcycle, Emmaus, Jimmy's Night Shelter and Winter Comfort, onions were braided at the Cambridge Food and Garden Festival and our core members enjoyed an exclusive chutney-making session.

The 2012 season brought even more volunteers and we were able to increase our work days to help farm all the crops on the farm. We also helped to set up a polytunnel, introduced bees to the farm, held a jam-making workshop, had more fun with some of our favourite food charities and even saw our own chutney on the shelves!

In 2013 we introduced HenShare, had a group of young filmmakers visit the farm (see the resulting short film here), made links with like-minded CSAs in the region at the CSA Eastern Region Gathering, held our biggest harvest party to date and helped launch the Community Supported Agriculture Network UK. You can find out more about what it is, and why you should support it here.

How to get involved in the 2016 season?

Find out about upcoming farm days here, sign up to our newsletter for up-to-date info and get yourself signed up to a farm day through our online form on our website.

Photos: Axel Minet, Ben Damet, Anne Lally

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