Environment / Shetland organic veg producers say climate crisis still not taken seriously enough
FOOD producers Transition Turriefield say they are “tired of fighting to get enough” funding from the Scottish Government to keep going.
The community enterprise group, based in Sandness, aims to increase food security in Shetland by encouraging people to grow their own, while also reducing the carbon footprint.
But despite climate change approaching “crunch time”, in the words of co-founder Penny Armstrong, she said national support was still virtually non-existent.
“We have been fighting for years to get a voice, even at local authority level, but nationally especially,” she said.
“Small producers like us are not getting much back from them. They’re still focusing on profit-driven businesses.”
With climate change and its effects looming large on the horizon, and at the top of the Scottish Government’s list of priorities, you could be forgiven for thinking enterprises like Turriefield would be championed nationally.
Penny said, however, that it was “not getting easier” to secure any funding.
“I’m tired of it, she said. “We’ll never be financially viable.
“We know that we can’t make money off of it – if we could, we would surely have found a way by now.”
Turriefield, in so many ways, is a labour of love for co-founders and growers Alan Robertson and Penny.
As well as growing fresh fruit and vegetables from their array of polytunnels in the field of their Sandness home, they also deliver workshops to other groups about how they can join in and grow their own produce.
The pair started out in 2011, three years later securing funding for the first time to go out in to the community and spread their message of sustainability.
Caring for their crops is not just a two-person endeavour. Volunteers arrive almost every weekend to help out, a share of some of the fruits (and vegetables) of the land their reward.
“It’s never been difficult to find volunteers,” Penny said.
“It’s maybe been difficult to find enough.
“We couldn’t do what we do without our volunteers.”
“We’ve never made any advertisements, it’s all been spread through word of mouth,” Alan added.
Interest in growing your own “definitely has increased” over the years, Penny said, fuelled further by the Covid lockdown.
“Covid definitely spurred a lot of folk on,” Alan agreed.
“But for a lot of people, they went back to work and it all fell apart again.”
The workshops started in 2014, with the pair feeling they had become comfortable with growing produce during the harsh and unpredictable Shetland seasons.
Alan said delivering talks to others was “fairly new” for him, but not for Penny – who had a background in community development.
They found there was one aspect of their talks that people were mostly uninterested in hearing.
“We had a bit about climate change in our workshops, and we found that was the part most people weren’t interested in,” Alan said.
“Until relatively recently folk haven’t wanted to hear about climate change. I think people are a bit more accepting of it now.
“Back over 10 years ago it was a bit of a left field idea, but really we started too late in doing anything about it. We should have started in the 1970s.
“I think a lot of people have been almost forced to acknowledge it.”
While Turriefield is best known for its quality produce, grown carefully without chemical fertilisers or pesticides, its co-founders are particularly passionate about helping Shetlanders to reduce their carbon footprint.
They are careful not to preach about what people are doing wrong – and admit it is difficult for people to do the right thing all the time.
“We don’t travel as much, we don’t fly, we use the van as little as we can do,” Penny said.
“But there’s some things we have no choice over, and as a society it’s really difficult to make positive climate choices all the time.
“And at some times you don’t know what the right decision is – people think ‘I could pick this over this, but is it better to buy organic or to buy local?’
“There’s almost nothing we can do that is right sometimes. There’s almost no correct choices.”
Alan is well placed to comment on the Shetland weather, spending most of his time outside in it.
He said he can see that the winter’s have been becoming wetter over the years.
“What we need really, in terms of climate change, is a massive global recession because that would reduce the carbon footprint,” he said.
“The year of Covid, when everyone stopped doing everything, we saw a huge reduction in carbon.
“But really you would need that to happen year on year to make any meaningful effect.
“What all of the governments are trying to do is to encourage growth, while reducing climate change, but the two things don’t really balance out.”
The pair flit from being passionate about the work they do, and its importance, to being despondent about the state of the world and the lack of backing they get.
Penny explained that neither of them make a liveable wage out of the job – and says that, if they do take a yearly salary, they would earn £6,000 each.
Alan joked this was “exploitation”, adding: “Am I being exploited?”
While its clear the pair do it for the love rather than the money, they admit that can only take you so far. “
There have been two times “we’ve been really close to stopping, and plenty more where we’ve thought about it,” Penny said.
She said the issue for them was about handing Turriefield over to the next willing leaders.
“I’m thinking now, ‘how long can we keep doing this’,” Penny said.
“The issue for us is succession planning, but we still haven’t found a solution to that.”
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