I’ve found the BBC series Edwardian Farm has successfully combined cheery comfort viewing with a backbone of solid research, which is interesting in the context of the food security analysis we’ve done. This is something we urgently need to continue if there’s to be any chance of planning ahead for a time when transporting overseas produce becomes unaffordable, and we’re still pursuing funding opportunities with our research partners.
Edwardian Farm is set in the Tamar Valley which divides Cornwall and Devon, a few navigable miles upriver north of Plymouth. The particular topography of this land, sheltered from north winds and offering a series of south-facing slopes (some very steep), together with the river and later the railway, enabled a specialist market gardening industry to develop.
The conditions meant local growers here could cash in on earlier fruit and flower crops than other areas, and long before road haulage was a reality growers here were daily serving markets as far afield as Glasgow and London. The valley also supported a growers’ association which ran a factory producing the pine baskets used to transport the produce.
River transport served local markets, but the railway was the key to this scale of operation. Reading an account by John Snell, a previous railway employee, we find a quote from the Southern Railway staff magazine of September 1949:
‘The Tamar Valley growers have had a most successful season, both fruit and flowers being heavy. The following dispatched from Gunnislake, Calstock, Bere Alston, Bere Ferrers and Tamerton Foliot.
Number of boxes of flowers sent 138,228
Number of boxes of fruit sent 240,564
Passenger Vans dispatched 590
Number of special trains run 29
All traffic had good transit and those concerned are to be congratulated on the successful result of the efforts to get this highly perishable traffic to the markets in prime condition’.
For communities and regions considering how they will feed themselves in an energy crisis, it’s heartening how quickly local Tamar growers originally responded to this opportunity, organising, employing thousands, creating efficient operational structures, and cross-breeding to develop suitable fruit varieties, and how the railway was able to design timetables and commercially viable transit fees around growers’ needs.
Equally, we could view what happened as an early analogue of fossil-fuelled long-distance food distribution, and take note how the whole valley’s economy came to a shuddering halt as soon as the branch line succumbed to Beeching’s axe in the 1960s.
If the Tamar market gardeners had only been supplying more local markets, might more of them have survived? Do you need a food transport system with the clunky reliability of a railway for hundreds of small producers to organise around? And in the absence of cheap overseas food imports, can we imagine local food production economies like this taking shape once again?
Ruth Keily
