‘The Field’ in Dunkeld is a place to grow vegetables by the community, for the community.They grow along organic principles and supply the village.
In this post, Martha Smart from Bioregioning Tayside spoke with David Bee to find out more about their story.
Martha
Welcome! Tell me about yourself David and what’s going on at the wonderful Field in Dunkeld?!
David
I am a retired general practitioner who worked in Kirkcaldy Fife. I’ve been interested in holistic care for some time, particularly how to improve communication skills and how you change behaviour. Towards the end of my clinical work I started doing teaching with undergraduates and trainers based in Dunkeld. We used the natural environment as a sort of facilitator. Woodland, rivers, metaphors to learn more about ourselves and our patients. The more I was here, the more I became rooted and attached to the trees, hills and rivers. Having lived near the sea for 34 years I thought it would be quite nice to come and stay in Perthshire so we built a small house using local materials and local people.
The Field was a relatively new project in Dunkeld that began around 2011 and I just started volunteering thinking one morning a week I might dig some soil and learn something. It was good way of meeting people too. When you’re a GP in a place you have a sort of notoriety, people know you, but I didn’t know many people in Dunkeld. So that was it really, and to be fair I was probably slightly uncertain about organic food methods and stuff like that but over time (I have been involved since 2016 now) I’ve learned far more than I could have expected. I have got a deeper understanding of place, soil, climate, and the processes of growing, rather than just the outcomes. The story of The Field really aligned with the story of how I like to teach and how I like to learn.
Photo, The Field
Martha
So, you have been there around five years now that’s brilliant! I read it was originally gifted by the Soil Association, is that right?
David
Well, the actual story is of a lady who had a house and who was always interested in horticulture, especially organic food and growing methods. She was involved in the Soil Association & had a six acre field which she used for grazing horses. It is a very attractive field with a beautiful setting, and one day a developer came to her saying, “you know, you could be quite rich, and I could also greatly benefit from building houses on this plot”. The more she thought about it the more decisive she got and so she said, “there’s no way that anyone’s going to build on that plot ever again. I want it to remain for organic pursuits!”. So, she donated it to the Soil Association. It’s a large area of land and Dunkeld is an attractive place, so it would have been an amazing place to build. It is surrounded by woodlands, good views, and gets the sun all year round. The Soil Association didn’t really know what to do with it and coincidently in previous years a group of four people had been looking for a community space to grow food. They had looked at various sites, but none were available. Then suddenly this plot came up. We now have a lifelong lease from the Soil Association for this piece of land. It has six acres, but three acres are occupied by horses.
Martha
What a lovely story. It’s interesting you came from a health background, how much of that experience crosses over into your work at The Field?
David
It just aligns completely, the ways of thinking, of learning, the methods that we use, the ways of dealing with people, interplaying with other organisations. It’s really about being connected with other things and about the processes with people and growing. It’s quite a different concept from allotments too. For most places in UK or even in community supported agriculture here it’s very often allotments where each person in the garden will have a designated area. We don’t have any personal growing spaces, we all just volunteer and share the growing space and the produce. If there’s excess, we sell it at a reasonable price at our gate stall or twice weekly local markets in Birnam & Dunkeld or give some away to the local food bank and elsewhere.
Martha
Since you’ve been involved in the project how much have you seen it grow? Has there been tangible positive effects on the community?
David
Yes, it has definitely developed and grown. Growth is an interesting area because people talk about growth in commercial terms, but it doesn’t need to get bigger and we don’t need to produce more and more. We just need to get better at what we’re doing. It’s not the number of cabbages or the number of organic bits of broccoli or kale, it’s about getting better, growing the membership and the number of volunteers, growing the ethos of it and trying to spread the word…and having fun too! COVID has been really challenging because we haven’t been open to the public. We’ve only been able to have two people in the field working at any one time and overall, the government guidelines have not been clear or easy for us. However, we have managed to keep it going and it has been a huge source of mental wellbeing, social connection, and physical activity this last year for many people.
Photo, The Field
Martha
It’s just lovely to see how places like The Field have been holding the community together despite the horrible stuff that’s been going on with COVID, it sounds as though it has still very much been a hub for people?
David
Yes, and there’s various hubs in the village that have been linking together. We’ve been included in a service for the cathedral online and various other zoom things just telling our story. It’s been a good opportunity. Very often resilience and togetherness come in times of adversity.
Martha
What kind of expertise or skills did you bring to the project and what have you learned along the way since volunteering?
David
I think I came to the project without baggage or knowledge, just a keenness to learn and find out about growing in a community. I had curiosity really and an openness to learning. People have been teaching me all sorts, I have learned about the processes of growing, community, soil, water, and organic methods. I did some gardening before, but it wasn’t food growing. I’m keen on hill walking and the natural world so that aligned with me too.
Martha
How would you describe your relationship to place and to the natural world you are living and working in?
David
It’s incredibly important. I think it gives you continuity, it gives you social contact and a sense of belonging too. I’ve watched people being physically unwell for many years and a lot of people lose that sense of belonging. When you lose that you become ill at ease (hence dis-ease). I’m quite interested in how the National Health Service has become a disease service, but it wasn’t set up to be like that.
“We have a lot of people with dis-ease but we don’t look at what actually makes people well. In the medical profession there’s an approach called salutogenesis where rather than looking at pathogenesis (what makes people ill) you look at what makes people thrive and survive, what makes people resilient. I’m very interested in that and I see The Field as microcosm of it really”.
Photo, The Field
Martha
That sense of belonging to place is so key, isn’t it? And as you’ve just pointed out, to actually foster wellness!
David
For me individually it has done that, and it’s also helped others who have experienced loss & significant life events. It’s amazing. I spent lots of time teaching communication skills and we’d talk about eye contact or personal space but in fact when I was teaching in Dunkeld I used to walk with people along the river and you could have the best conversations but you weren’t looking them in the eye at all! You’re just focused on walking together along the same path so there’s no pressure to respond to anything and things just come up naturally. It’s similar to when you’re doing a task like weeding or something else which you might think is terribly mind numbing, but actually things bubble up and people start to talk about loss or other important things in their life, it can be therapeutic.
Martha
That really speaks truth to the old saying that gardening is good for the soul! Gardening alongside other people must add an extra soulful dimension! We have spoken a little about Covid, but we are also having to try and deal with the climate and biodiversity crisis, how much does that inform the work that people are doing at the field?
David
Our constitution states the purposes of the project really well:
‘To advance citizenship and community development by encouraging cooperation and mutual support to produce food organically for local consumption in a changing economic and physical environment. To achieve this by managing a sustainable and environmentally responsible growing project for the benefit of all. To promote education within the community in organic food growing, care, harvest and distribution and ensure a better understanding of the connections between what we eat and how it is produced, delivered, and prepared.”
It’s a thread that weaves through everything we do. Some people are incredibly strict in the organic sense and know all about the history of it and how it developed, it’s incredibly interesting. Others less so. But the people that started the project in 2011 did soil analyses and when we look at it now since using compost, green manure, no fertiliser & no pesticides, -the soil is so so so much better. We’re now doing new things like no dig or minimal till and again getting very good results.
Photo, The Field
Martha
Thinking about the climate and biodiversity crisis do you think there’s top priorities that everybody should be focusing on?
David
I think the focus on degrees centigrade and mitigation is becoming too specialised and too pessimistic, it’s not holistic enough. If humans all just went into extinction the rest of the world would thrive. We are the elephant in the room, the problem. The world is not going to end without us, it would just change. Realistically the world, as far as humans go, will someday some year end, it won’t go on forever. So, we can eke it out for thousands of years and not have any more babies or use any more power or fuel, but you’ve got to live. Being human is still to have art, to cook, and have fires. There is a balance to be had- you’ve got to live and be alive to experience nature, food, art and relationships! I think the climate message is really important, but I would be a bit more encouraging about things we can do. I think for people in your generation and younger it’s really difficult to know what to eat, how to travel, how to use your holidays, how to make relationships. It is just such a challenge and you’ll feel guilty if you have children, travel and about everything you buy in the supermarket!
“We tend to have a very gloomy story about what can’t be done, and I think we need more enthusiasm, enabling, empowering, encouraging, all these “E” for energy words are much better than being didactic and dismissive or directing.”
Martha
Absolutely and given that, how do you feel about the future in light of these crises? In a more general sense, I am interested in how you think about time, especially when you’re working in The Field. I was speaking to someone from another community growing project in Dundee called the MAXwell Centre and she said something simple but true – “when you’re in the garden, it takes time, you can’t rush a plant”!
David
I spent my life telling people in medicine that time is a healer and it’s true! If you cut your finger and you’re getting married in two days ten million pounds won’t make it heal faster. All you can do is set nature at its optimum. That’s all medicine does and that’s all we’re doing in horticulture-setting nature at its optimum, not just for the present but for the future. We might be very critical of people in the 1940s or 50s and all they did with pesticides for example, but they didn’t really know, and they were just coming out of a war and had to feed millions of people. We need to bounce back from that to become more resilient and learn from it. You can’t go back, we can only go forward. I work voluntarily for an organisation called IFF, the International Futures Forum, which is really looking at complexity as a concept. The natural world copes with complexity whereas humans like to have specialists in boxes, either you’re a biologist or you’re a biochemist, but it all has to come together to work. Synergy and interconnection.
Photo, The Field
Martha
What does community mean for what you do?
David
It means cooperation, cohesiveness, continuity, collaboration, communication, interdependence, all those things. There is a very strong community here in Dunkeld which was present before The Field but obviously there was a lack of community growing space and with more people retired and more people interested in food, plant-based food, food security, and environmental concerns, the project’s gained a much higher profile. “Home is where your food comes from.”
Martha
Do you think that community extends to the natural world too?
David
Well, we’re interdependent so definitely. People are very interested in that. We have a whiteboard up which is all about biodiversity. If we see oystercatchers and wildlife it’s all written and logged which helps raise our awareness. We’re increasingly interested in mycorrhizal agents and the different kinds of worms. It’s incredible that we’re spending billions on Mars, but we don’t really understand what is at the bottom of our compost heap!
Last week I was speaking to an estate manager who said when he was at college, he thought soil was just the most boring thing but now he reads articles and buys books about it. He is a conventional farmer but really pays attention to soil and his local environment.
Martha
Does it feel like there’s a bit of a step change in the way people are thinking about these things then?
David
I think so yeah. Again, it’s about stories. Even this chap who is a commercial farmer said, “if I can sell my grain to someone local then it’s got a story and people will want to buy that”. When you go out for a meal it’s nice to know that it came from Dunkeld, the Tay or somewhere local to you. Home really is where your food comes from.
Martha
Yes, the story behind what’s on your plate is important.
David
I think so.
“In medicine we were told to take a history, that’s the first thing you do. When you think of that word “history”, it’s really his-story or her-story. If you just listen attentively without interrupting sometimes an individual doesn’t need any medicine or tests, they just need to talk aloud. Sometimes The Field allows people to do just that- to tell their story”.
Photo, The Field
Martha
What are the networks that support you in what you do?
David
Lots of formal organisations. Perth and Kinross Council are one. Recently we took part in a climate change feedback survey and won a prize, so they are donating one thousand pounds to us which we will spend on a sustainable project. There is also a local resident who’s specialised area is sustainable development in global finance. He wants to use our project as an example so he’s giving us a sum of money and we’ll use that towards developing more sustainable and ethical practices. Obviously, there’s the Soil Association who play a big role, though they are not interventionists, they’re there for advice not to dictate and they give us a very free rein which is what you need. There’s also Nourish Scotland and the Community Supported Agriculture Scheme. The local people in general are also very supportive. Most important however is our volunteers and trustees who contribute massive practical assistance, valuable skills and crucial decision making.
Martha
Are you linked up with any other groups that are doing similar projects to yours?
David
We were on BBC TV Beechgrove Garden so we’ve been connected with a few others through that. There are another two or three community agricultural projects linking in with us now who are really just starting out. Though I don’t think we should be giving people a template on how to do it, it’s important to come from the ground up. It needs to come from the community and out of a need rather than people saying “this is how The Field do it so we’ll just do it like that” because it wouldn’t necessarily work. There needs to be a spark for the fire to grow. I don’t think you should just import a template- though it may be useful.
Martha
How is what you do affected or informed by the current political system? Do you think there needs to be more encouragement and support for projects like yours
David
I think local growing of plant-based foods could be encouraged more. I think that might happen but it’s best for it to evolve naturally rather than to be imposed. Things like Covid might be a catalyst and children are now having more nature-based education, raising awareness of nature and soil might naturally just lead them towards growing in the playground or on school grounds.
When it comes to growing your own food, we need to think of it not as an urban or rural thing, not as a social class thing, but instead ask how we can facilitate and enable people to do it in multiple places, multiple environments, and with all age groups? We need to have it in prisons, hospitals, care homes, and in ways that are accessible for everyone.
“Everyone deserves the fulfillment of growing a lettuce, or the wonderment of seeing a carrot coming out of the ground and smelling it! Fresh carrots smell better than any cup of coffee you can buy! You see the wonderment it creates for children and we all need that wonderment”.
Photo, The Field
Martha
Absolutely! Are there things you would love to do at The Field if resources were unconstrained, or even if they were managed definitely?
David
Well, we are trying to move away from fossil fuels and onto electrical or battery-operated things. We use well designed manual tools. We’re doing surveys asking people to think about small turbines or solar panels, so different sustainable things like that.
For me personally I’d like to learn and teach more using The Field as example of learning by “doing”. We’re producing things too, we have fun, drink coffee, and chat about life in general but in the end you’ve got carrots and parsnips! I’d like to spread that “process to produce” ethos around more.
Martha
I’m very interested in process philosophy and that is something you have spoken about a lot. We have become so accustomed to products without the process, haven’t we?
David
Absolutely! We need to think holistically and beyond Dunkeld. There is a real danger we’re becoming so insular, especially around the whole Brexit or Scottish independence thing. We’re interdependent, not independent, none of us are independent, you’re not independent, I’m not independent- we depend on each other. Not only that but we depend on the natural world as well. We need children to become aware of that. If you’re aware of that then you respect it and then the climate thing could actually solve itself. Behaviour will change by evolution, organically rather than through finger wagging or fear. Otherwise, the danger is that people for the rest of their lives will just be ambivalent and stressed about it all. Paralysed by fear.
Martha
Since you started volunteering at The Field in 2016 is there a particular moment or a memory that sparked something in you? Perhaps it made you realise the value of the project or the value of being involved in the project?
David
A couple of years ago we had a reflection meeting where we encouraged people to come along and ask questions or give feedback. We had been thinking and thinking about what sorts of things might come up, but then we had a class of primary school children who came along and asked the most amazing questions, you know, they just cut through the muddle and went straight into “how do you decide what to grow?” and “who’s the boss here anyway?”. They were questions that trustees just wouldn’t ask but they actually went to the core of the project. They got to the real nub of what interested them and what is important. Later on last year a very elderly guy who has recently been quite ill turned to me and said, “you know, this has just been such an amazing place for me, I really value it”. I found that very touching & telling.