Angus Food Growing Strategy

The Angus Food Growing Strategy is five-year plan designed to encourage and deliver local community food growing.

The food growing strategy and action plan have their roots firmly embedded in the Angus Community Planning Partnership. In fact, the community has been crucial to its development over the past year, with local growers and residents to the fore when it came to developing the strategy. Due to Covid restrictions public meetings couldn’t take place, therefore Shaping Angus Social Pinpoint community engagement platform was an ideal way to reach the community and find out about the variety of projects and activities happening in Angus.

This approach was captured perfectly by a member of the public who commented:

“I love the ideas of community growing and local produce, people need to feel connected to their food supply. I think if people become involved with growing their own, they will recognise the true worth of good food. We can reduce our carbon footprints, reduce the environmental impact by having local supplies and reducing waste and enhance community.”

Angus food and drink has a global reputation that is rightly celebrated and promoted worldwide. But the strategy aims to achieve far more than being a champion of the array of fine Angus produce, important as that is.

Delivering on the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, the strategy has a purpose to increase local food growing, tackle food poverty in Angus and to support local growers, across its three main themes of Food Poverty, Food Growing and Food Insecurity.

Working together in accordance with the Angus Food Growing Strategy, the Council and its community partners will:

• Identify land locally that can be used as allotment sites.
• Identify other land that can be used for the community to cultivate vegetables, herbs, fruit and flowers.
• Describe how we plan to increase allotment provision.
• Explore how we intend to make more land available in areas of socio-economic disadvantage.

The strategy will reflect local conditions and priorities. Improving health and wellbeing and addressing food poverty are established council priorities and this strategy provides fertile ground to work across the council and with communities to support community growing and, in so doing, increasing pride of place to live.

We are committed to support our citizens to develop projects that will bring wider health and wellbeing benefits to them, such as opportunities for outdoor learning. Producing more food locally will play an important role in supporting our effort to reduce our carbon footprint of our food system, while providing fresh and nutritious produce for the citizens of Angus.

The Food Growing Strategy, as part of our wider Community Planning Partnership work will establish a way to encourage and deliver local community food growing. It will provide the support needed to encourage people to increase or start their own projects, creating more locally grown, fresh produce, encouraging social interaction and support networks leading to a healthier population.

To find out more, check out the Angus Food Growing Strategy: https://www.angus.gov.uk/news/angus_food_growing_strategy