Things were just a tad fraught when I visited Five Penny Farm for the second time in a few days. I’d moved the couple of miles down the road from Monkton Wyld Court and the water supply was down with a fault to the UV sanitizing unit. So things were running behind with phone calls to water engineers needed, visiting neighbours needing redirection when then had come to use the facilities of the shared barn, cider still to be stashed away for storage from filling the previous days….and the two cows needing milking or no milk either!

There in the midst of it all directing operations though was the usual smiling Jyoti!  Suffice to say that after a couple of hours of cool thinking and a plumbers visit things were back on track.

What Jytoti packs into a day is just awesome. When she is not busy on the farm she is a key mover in the Land Workers Alliance. In fact she is chair for the current twelve months, but prior to that was campaigns co-ordinator – which I guess could be more demanding than the chair! If the Alliance is anything it is a grass roots activist movement campaigning for a level playing field across the agricultural world rather than a subsidy system which supports large, environmentally destructive factory farms. The protest they held outside British Sugar in St Edmonds last year encapsulates it all – a factory churning out sugar on a mega scale from beet grown under subsidy by mega farms…….whilst the NHS creaks under the strain of weight (i.e. sugar) related diseases!

Jyoti is also one of a number of LWA members ensuring the Alliance has strong links to La Via Campensina, the international peasants movement. LVC comprises some 160 or so local and national organizations in 73 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Altogether, it represents about 200 million farmers. It is an autonomous, pluralist and multicultural movement, independent from any political, economic or other type of affiliation. Moreover, over 70% of the world’s food is produced by such people giving the proof to the fallacy of thinking that we need factory farming in order to feed the world. Sorry, these people just need the freedom to carry on what they are doing rather than be hounded by large scale farming interests, whilst the rest of us, with over 70% of raw food production currently wasted in the developed world, just need to reduce that appalling wastage.

Sorry, rant over! Let the pictures speak…….

For more on Five Penny Farm see the account of my first visit

[Double clicking on any of the images below will open up that image up in a slideshow format. You can then run the slide show using ‘left’ and ‘right’ buttons.  Personally I prefer to go also to full screen having opened the slide show – F11 on my PC, don’t forget to get out of full screen is the same button , not ESC!]