Our Story

Home Grown Here was formed in September 2021 as part of Zero Carbon Cumbria Partnership’s ambitious target to make Cumbria Carbon neutral by 2037 and is funded by the National Lottery Climate Change Fund until 2025.

Home Grown Here is a grower owner co-operative of local producers and a singly marketplace for high-quality, Cumbrian-grown fruit and vegetables, both organic and conventionally grown. It allows local growers to trade directly with Cumbria-based wholesalers, retailers, restaurants, hotels, cafes, farm shops, and veg box schemes.

We aim to transform the local food system and supply chain by providing local families and businesses with fresh fruit and vegetables year-round in line with seasonal availability, selling only against orders and thereby reducing waste in the supply chain.

Our goal is to scale-up veg and fruit production across Cumbria to bring benefits for the county’s health and rural economy, reducing reliance on imports and helping to address climate change. Keeping Cumbria’s home-grown produce here in the county reduces food miles, helps us eat seasonally and is brilliant for Cumbria’s carbon footprint.

Our Solution

To its growers, Home Grown Here offers a support package of horticultural advice, skills-sharing and networking opportunities, access to investment and grants through working together, an equipment/machinery share scheme, bulk purchasing of seed/plants/soil-testing, access to a seasonal picking team and personalised branding for each farm as part of the generic Home Grown Here brand.

But most importantly, we have created a local route to market for the crops that are being grown. The farmers and growers involved in Home Grown Here are part of it because it diversified their income and increases their financial resiliance through and beyond the Agricultural Transition period 2021-2024 (the shift in UK farming from Government subsidy to stand alone financial viability).

It also augments and enhances other aspects of their day-to-day farming practices (i.e., as part of a rotation) and it contributes to wider environmental goals, such as addressing climate change.

Given the success our grower co-operative model has had across Cheshire, we’ve started thinking about franchising this in other counties or support the set-up of a similar model, aiming to create a vast local produce marketplace.

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