Helping develop a resilient food system for the East of England

• Purpose: Feed Humanity
  • Peak Oil and Gas
  • Climate Change
  • Economic Shocks
  • Water
  • Phosphate
• Principles: Resilient Food Systems
  • Reducing Meat and Dairy
  • Urban/Peri-urban Horticulture
  • Resilient Bread
  • Low-Input Agriculture
  • Nutrient Recycling
  • Community Supported
  • Seasonal & unprocessed
  • Reducing Waste
• Potential Red Herrings
  • Local Food
  • Supermarkets
• What EAFL is doing
  • Who We Are
  • What We Do
  • Contact our Team
  • Our Board
• What You Can Do
  • Consumers
  • Business Opportunities
  • Local Authorities

Updated March 2010

Business Opportunities

We have identified several business opportunities that are consistent with the principles outlined on this site:

1. Become a Box Scheme Distributor. Some organic growers deliver their own boxes, but some can produce more food than they have time to sell. Distributors can help by recruiting customers and delivering boxes in return for a share of the profit. This can easily be built into quite a reasonably-paid full-time job. But do try to ensure that you are supporting the smaller, local growers who will be needed in a post-oil food system, as opposed to large commodity-scale growers or schemes that make unnecessary use of imports. There is also the opportunity to sell wholefoods at the same time.
2. Become an organic vegetable producer. In Canada and the United States a growing number of people are using the SPIN Farming model to earn a reasonable income from a small urban plot. For example, they claim that a turnover of $50,000 is possible from a half-acre plot.
3. As noted elsewhere, in a post-oil world essential processing like milling, baking, brewing and butchery will need to be undertaken as close to the consumer as possible. You might want to consider learning to be a craft baker and opening a high-street bakers' shop (specialising in healthy organic bread, of course!). The baker's shop could include a small electric mill so that you can buy wheat rather than flour. As for microbreweries, there are plenty of those opening all the time - but you might want to be the next.

East Anglia Food Link will be very happy to advise anyone in the East of England who is interested in any of the above opportunities - do Contact Us and have a chat.