Save Lovebrook!
The South Downs National Park Authority (SDNPA) have made a decision that threatens to close down our thriving ecological community farm.
While the Government is looking to encourage more home building, and the Labour party has said it will build more affordable homes, one local planning authority is going in the other direction. The South Downs National Park (SDNPA) is forcing our family to demolish our home - making a thriving ecological community farm unviable in the process. This decision is supported by Lewes District Council who are now threatening us with prosecution.
We can't let this amazing farm project disappear.
1) Please tell the SDNPA and Lewes District Council that it is not in the public interest to remove our home and prosecute our family.
2) Demand that these authorities start to use their planning powers to encourage ecological community farms rather than close them down.
Thank you.
Rich, Hannah, Max and Bella x
You can email CEO of SDNPA: trevor.beattie@southdowns.gov.uk
and the leader of Lewes District Council: Zoe.Nicholson@lewes.gov.uk.
Background
A farm for planet and people
Lovebrook Farm is an innovative example of the kind of farm diversification that can respond to social crises and the nature emergency.
We provide food for the local community through a farm shop (the village's only shop), local markets, veg box scheme, and we supply local food banks.
We run a year long course to train the next generation of agroecological farmers
Over a hundred people a week benefit from the various community projects we run on the farm.
We have a packed program of community wellbeing sessions for participants such as patients referred by local GPs, people experiencing food insecurity, people with refugee backgrounds, people previously imprisoned, local schools, and others - with many positive mental health outcomes for local people.
We have an amazing community of volunteers helping to transform the land and support the project, including over forty from Kingston village itself!
Our work has attracted funders and many collaborators including local GP surgeries, the Probation Service, The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, many local and regional charities, food partnerships, and Brighton University Hospital who are collaborating on a research project.
We are bringing orchards back to the village after an absence of nearly a hundred years
We're establishing the return of native species and a huge increase in biodiversity across thirty three acres of the Downs - through wildlife ponds, rare chalk grassland, tree planting and rewilding.
We are sequestering thousands of tons of carbon over the next ten years through regenerative farming.
We open up the land to the public every Saturday for visits to Sussex's only standing stone.
We run a campsite, and have plans for a carbon-neutral 'no-car guesthouse' for walkers and cyclists - a first for the South Downs. This application is currently with SDNPA.
Our thriving farm is now at risk of closing since the SDNPA turned down a planning application to extend the three year permission granted for our temporary housing structure. With the right to live in our home taken away from us, our family would be faced with the unexpected and substantial extra cost of renting a house elsewhere. An extra cost we can't afford.
The most affordable home in the village
We've been living on our farm for two years now – a lifetime for our young kids, and it's hard not to point out the obvious irony: that in the midst of a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis, soaring rents and a lack of affordable housing - issues prioritised by both the SDNPA and Lewes District Council, these two authorities want to force a young family to demolish their own home, and remove the most affordable home in a village where the average house price is £782k.
We established the project in 2021 when we sold up our house in Hove and used the proceeds to set up this Community Interest Company. All profits go back into our ecological and community work.
The farm had been on the market for five years before we bought it - nobody wanted it, and now it's thriving. The income from our markets and veg bag scheme already allow us to employ four part time growers and we expect to earn a minimum wage ourselves by the end of the year. But we need a home to live in to keep it going.
Is there a need for us to continue to live on our farm?
It is one of the SDNPA's priorities to keep farms 'farmhouse free' wherever they can - whatever the consequences. They have now decided that we don't have an ‘essential need’ to be on our farm. This is despite the fact that we really do need to continue to be here so that the farm can function. As you can imagine this is for lots of reasons, large and small: being on call for all sorts of tasks and emergencies, winds, frosts, animal welfare, security, the late night tasks, the weekends and early mornings and of course a duty of care for our overnight guests.
We have had to battle with the SDNPA from the beginning. In response to a pre-planning application which set out all our plans, we were advised that converting a brick barn into a permanent farm house for our family would not be permissible. (Confusingly this is despite the fact that the SDNPA would allow us to convert our barns into a hotel complex via permitted development!).
Keeping the pastoral look of the Downs - at any cost
Regenerative community farms are not welcome in the South Downs. Lovebrook has met strong resistance to any changes away from intensive livestock farming (the farm's previous use). In our meetings with the SDNPA the Development management lead officer and Landscape officer told us that they want to see pasture and grazing animals on our land, rather than rewilding and horticulture.
The officers said they didn't want to support our agroecology plans because they would be "visually unappealing”. Indeed in their planning advice document they state that “(It is) felt that the uses proposed and introduction of features atypical of a pastoral landscape are likely to generate both negative changes to landscape character and potentially negative visual impacts”.
In the midst of a climate and nature emergency we found this pretty shocking.
And there isn't even any historical basis for the SDNPA's policies on keeping this pastoral look. Sadly the SDNPA landscape officer seemed to be completely unaware of the historic land use in our village - that evidence shows that for most of the last thousand years, every single acre of Lovebrook farmland was used to supply the village with organic cereals, fruit and vegetables. It is this historic land use that inspired us to set up our community veg box scheme in the first place - a return to local fruit and veg for Kingston people as an alternative to unsustainable global food systems and the damaging intensive meat production preferred by the SDNPA.
What's more, for some unspecified reason the advice of our highly respected farming consultant Ian Tolhurst MBE was completely ignored by the planning officers in this application process. According to Ian the reason why nobody wanted to buy the farm for five years until we came along is clear: “(this) pastoral livestock unit falls far below any possibility of financial viability due to its small land area”.
Behind the times
In two short years we have managed to have a substantial ecological and social impact already. This is despite the SDNPA and Lewes District Council putting themselves in our way. The decisions by these authorities go against a growing movement across the UK towards policy and planning decisions that support agroecological farming and multifunctional land use like that in action at Lovebrook Farm. With finite land resources, we need land to do more than one thing at one time. We think that our project shows how this principle works.
Ecologically minded authorities in other parts of the UK have begun to support projects like Lovebrook that need housing to operate. The One Planet legislation in Wales encourages people to sustainably build a home on their land with a net-zero impact. Cornwall Council has followed suit. As the climate and nature emergencies deepen, planning decisions that threaten agroecological farms, like those imposed on Lovebrook Farm, seem further out of step with the reality facing farmers (and all of us) today.
Who will support a farm like ours?
Although we are receiving amazing support from our collaborators, supporters and fellow village residents many of whom volunteer with us, support is absent from those in power.
When we were deciding to buy the farm the SDNPA had just recognised a climate emergency and had released their climate change strategy report. This states that it is 'essential for the SDNPA to use its planning powers and policies to best effect' - for projects like ours. Encouraged by this we decided to go ahead with the farm purchase and were looking forward to working with the authority. However after buying the land and meeting with the SDNPA to explain our plans, we found that this statement was just empty words and our plans were not welcome at all. In fact when the lead planning officer told us that we 'should have known this is the wrong site when you bought the farm' - we almost felt like giving up.
And this is despite the national park's proudly publicised ten priorities for managing the park - diverse social and ecological priorities that left us feeling pretty confused when we read them. This is because it looks like we genuinely tick the box for every one of these priorities - yet the SDNPA are happy to watch Lovebrook Farm close down.
Unfortunately support has not been forthcoming from elsewhere either: our local MP Maria Caulfield said that she can't intervene to help, and the same was said to us by a cabinet member of Lewes District Council. Although the council have become more responsive as a result of this petition, they still hang the threat of prosecution over our family in support of the SDNPA planning decision. We just can't understand it.
We think projects like Lovebrook provide solutions at grassroots level to many of the crises that our societies are currently facing. We have to save and support projects like these.
Please sign this petition and let these authorities know that removing our home and prosecuting our family is not in the public interest.
Rich, Hannah, Max and Bella x