When you buy locally grown food through the Bannau Acres network, you help amazing things happen.
Many fruit and veg start to lose nutrients as soon as they are harvested and even UK-grown produce can take several days to make its way through the supply chain and on to supermarket shelves.
But for locally grown fruit and veg sold direct to customers it’s a different story. Most of what you’ll find in your veg box will have been harvested just the day before – and sometimes fresh that morning. And it will have been picked at the peak of ripeness – the point when it is naturally at its most flavourful and nutritious.
There’s another bonus, too: stored properly, your produce will last longer, so you’ll have less food waste.
Our growers all farm regeneratively, actively restoring soil health, fixing carbon in the soil, building biodiversity, and returning more to the environment than they take out. We believe this approach is necessary to tackle the current climate and nature emergencies.
In addition, some of our farmers have taken the extra step to become certified Organic, through either the Soil Association or the Welsh Organic Scheme. And some are on their way to gaining Organic status. You can choose to filter your search results to show only Organic-certified growers.
And of course, because our farmers’ produce is all sold direct to their local communities, there’s less packaging, fewer food miles and less waste, which all adds up to cleaner, greener, more climate-friendly farming.
Until very recently, fruit and veg growing for local markets had all but disappeared in our region, making us over-reliant on imports and global food supply chains. Empty supermarket shelves and shortages over the past few years have revealed just how fragile that system is. But by supporting local growers you play a vital part in rebuilding local food supplies, creating a fairer food system and making our communities healthier and more resilient to future food shocks.
When you buy fruit and veg direct from local growers, they receive a much greater share of the profit than they would in the supermarket system. What’s more, that money tends to stay local. And when money circulates in the local economy something wonderful happens: it multiplies. So the more money that’s spent locally, the stronger the local economy grows. And that means more jobs, better facilities and more vibrant towns – better for everyone.
There’s a nifty bit of research by the New Economics Foundation that shows that every £1 spent on fruit and veg through box schemes or farmers’ markets generates a further £3.70 in social, economic and environmental benefits. We reckon that’s a pretty convincing message!
