eggs & resilience

My home town is called Todmorden. It is located in the South Pennines of West Yorkshire and has just about 15000 inhabitants. We are working in the town on a project called the Incredible Edible Todmorden. http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.com/
Incredible Edible Todmorden aims to increase the amount of local food grown and eaten in the town. Businesses, schools, farmers and the community are all involved. Vegetables and fruit are springing up everywhere. Public flower beds being transformed into community herb gardens and vegetable patches. Local farm produce can now be found in shops cafes and market stalls, and the IET loyalty card is helping us fund our community orchards. Todmorden is preparing for climate change and marshalling our many human resources to fit us for a future where we need to be more self sufficient in food.

We are trying to change people's ways of thinking about food, so that bit by bit there is greater resilience through local food production. One new development is being explored through eggs - we want to be entirely self sufficient in eggs. It serves two goals - to demonstrate through a simple strategy that work on becoming more resilient is possible - its not just theory, and it begins to generate two examples of this in practice - diversity and modularity. We can utilise the many egg sources across the town, we can sell eggs in many outlets across the town, and we can can do this locally rather than bring in the eggs from other locations, this can generate jobs and develop new know-how.

Let's assume that 15000 people eat on average one egg per week. This = 15000 eggs. Each day we would need to generate 2142 eggs to meet average local demand.

We have many small scale egg producers in the town. One or two of these are able to generate together about 1500 eggs per day. Finding a further 642 eggs means exploring around town the possibility of using some of the spare open spaces and rearing hens, looking at other sources already available (there are many sole user producers) and involving schools and other sites to begin to generate local eggs.

It is just beginning to happen, six months down the road it will be a practical example and will lead to other initiatives using a similar template.