Transition Chesterfield

Transition Chesterfield is working to make the Chesterfield community more resilient in the face of peak oil and climate change – in other words, to decrease our usage of, and dependence on, fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels have worked their way into every aspect of our culture, from our homes and transport to our manufactured goods and food.

Before oil became such an important part of our lives, around one in ten people were employed in agriculture, and our diets were more limited than they are today (and probably healthier). Then, fertilisers made from oil, tractors and combine harvesters powered by oil, refrigerated storage, trucks, planes, ships, plastic packaging made from oil, and processing plants powered by oil made it possible for every kind of food to be available cheaply, anywhere in the world, at any time of year, in great quantities. We think nothing of eating food that can only be grown on the other side of the world, and so we think nothing of wasting it, too. Only one in a hundred people have anything to do with agriculture, and many of us have forgotten where our food comes from.

Decrease the supply of cheap oil, and things will begin to look very different.

Transition Chesterfield is working to:
teach people basic skills: growing, storing and preserving food, and keeping livestock;
increase the amount of land within the Borough that is used for food production.

We’ve done this already by:
organising skillshare workshops on chicken-keeping, wild food/fungi foraging, jam and marmalade making, home composting, bee keeping, Indian vegetarian cooking and bread baking;
running an annual Potato Day, supplying low-cost seed potatoes to growers, introducing many people to the idea of growing their own food, and distributing seed potatoes to schools;
campaigning for more allotment sites within the borough;
finding neglected fruit trees, harvesting their fruit and distributing it to the community;
planting fruit trees in public parks;
holding an annual Harvest Swap for people to exchange their produce.

We would like to do more:
skillshare workshops on fruit tree pruning, grafting, building apple storage racks and fruit presses;
set up our own propagation unit;
plant other edible plants in public spaces: gooseberries, blackcurrants, and nuts, in park boundaries, roadside verges, and unused corner plots;
local-food parties and banquets;
install composting toilets on allotment sites and public areas;
convert some of the 900 hectares that is planted to cereals within the borough to small-scale, labour-intensive horticulture, which would benefit from proximity to labour, markets, and domestic waste supply;
convert some of the 1700 hectares of non-farmed greenspace within the borough to allotments, community gardens, and public orchards.