The veg box keeping Lincolnshire’s wealth local

Lincolnshire is one of the nation's most productive food growing regions. With a long history of arable and pastoral farming, along with relatively flat and fertile land, the region grows 30% of the nation's vegetables. At the same time, many communities in the region struggle to eat well. Parts of Lincolnshire experience some of the highest levels of food insecurity and obesity in the country – and fast food chains and unhealthy food outlets dominate high streets and local areas.

Andrew Brown set up Eat Local Lincoln to tackle some of these problems – a vegetable box scheme that brings fresh, locally grown, and seasonal vegetables straight to the customer's door. "Currently [in Big Agriculture], food that's harvested in Lincolnshire is shipped out of Lincoln, ends up in Rotterdam, is packed in plastic in Warsaw, and is flown back to Leicester. [These are not the exact steps] but you understand the gist."

After many years working in education around the world, Andrew settled in Lincoln for the past decade and a half. He joined Climate Hope Lincoln, a group of local people dedicated to climate action grounded in positivity and optimism. In a campaign to encourage making local choices in Lincoln, with such great agricultural produce grown regionally, food was an intuitive place to start. 

Andrew delivers all the veg boxes himself on his cargo bike, bought from a bike delivery company that was closing in Oxford. The vegetables are organised by four recipes per week, allowing every customer to have everything they need to prepare healthy, easy-to-make meals.

For Andrew, there are endless benefits to having a shorter supply chain and more localised food networks. Compared to having produce grown, processed, packaged, and sold miles apart, partnered farms deliver their produce straight to Andrew, who drops his vegetables on his customers' doorsteps.

Andrew with Councillor Clare Smalley and Councillor Aiden Wells. 

Resilience is a key quality to his supply chain. As Andrew says: “if my carrots came from, let’s say, Dave from over there, this shorter food chain is more likely to be resilient – an alternative route to market which is more diverse and less dependent on external factors.” 

Andrew also points out that Eat Local Lincoln has great economic benefits for local producers: it is more "profitable per unit.” Cutting out middle players allows growers to be paid fairly for their produce. This is something the public cares about too, with recent polling from FFCC and The Food Foundation revealing how over 9 in 10 (93%) of the public agree that fair pay for farmers needs to be covered in our nation's food system. 

Andrew has always been keen to support creative farming practice. He understands just how many terms there are nowadays – and how difficult it sometimes can be to define each. If pressed to classify who he chooses to partner with, it is local producers "who are sensitive to the needs of the field, sensitive to nature... [growing] food [that] is messed around with as little as possible. It's as good for you as possible." 

Vegetable boxes ready for delivery. 

He notes that this extends beyond a textbook definition of "organic" - it's not just about minimising inputs, but also about championing farmers who are taking bold, innovative steps to adapt to the challenges of growing in a changing climate. 

"The thing that gives me hope is that farmers and market gardeners I have spoken to are all incredibly positive about changing where necessary, adapting, doing the right thing. The farmers have been absolutely brilliant. It takes time to change but they're all completely up to do something different, since the world is changing... None of it is telling people what to do. It's giving people options. And I think farmers have actually been really good at saying, yeah, let's give that a go."

Ultimately, Eat Local Lincoln tries to build a more regionally integrated food economy that keeps wealth in the same place to feed back into the farming and local community. There are plenty of outlets for vegetable boxes in adapted formats: hotels, retirement homes, school dinners – even university students: "The aim is that a lot of the food consumed in Lincoln will be as locally sourced as possible."

Andrew with Hamish Falconer, MP for Lincoln, on his cargo bike. 

Andrew's hope is for this community to flourish around the sharing of good, local food, with producers committed to good practice and citizens eating healthy and locally produced food. The goal is to build "a better, wider, more engaged, more self-aware community at all sorts of levels."

Scaling up the operation brings the prospect of new team members – and Andrew is open to shifting the project into a cooperative or community interest company. Whilst this direction depends on who comes on board, Andrew knows that when it is time for him to take a step back from such an active role in the project, he will be able to say to himself: "yeah, I did a good thing there."

As part of its partnerships with leaders across all four UK nations for more prosperous and resilient regional food economies, FFCC is working with the Greater Lincolnshire Food Partnership and the Lincoln and Witham Landscape Recovery Project. Through a network of land managers, farmers and community groups, this links food production at several scales to community access to healthy food, in the county most exposed to climate impacts on food production.