LEAP - Real funding for real food and farming businesses

In 2024, having moved to our new site, the 134-acre National Trust farm, Lords Park, we set about raising the money we needed to bring our vision for the farm to life. One crucial part of that picture was securing the support of the Real Farming Trust, and their LEAP (Loans for Enlightened Agriculture) programme. LEAP offers funding and mentoring to small agroecological businesses which are producing good food for their local communities.

Not only has their financial support in the form of a low-interest loan allowed us to buy a tractor (hear about how that has helped us in the video below), but their business mentoring helped us dial-in and stress test our business plan and an accompanying social impact grant has supported a new transport service for volunteers to the farm. Back in the Summer, LEAP sent filmmaker and photographer Jason Taylor of The Source Image to find out how their support had made a difference in our first operating year at the new farm.

Video Transcript

Just like it's really important for us to be in relationship with the people that eat our food. And in relationship with the land, it's also really helpful for us to be in relationship and in community with our funders and the organizations that support us. And I think that's what's really striking about leap, is they understand the realities, the challenges of agroecological farming, producing food with nature, and they really understand the spirit of community supported agriculture and the social impact that that can have for people as well as for the land and for biodiversity and ecology.

So that's a really striking thing about working with leap is their understanding of what we're trying to do and their flexibility to support us in the way that we need it. So we started as a project on a much smaller site six years ago With just a three acre market garden and started feeding our community through the pandemic. We established solidarity, veg box schemes, work with local food banks, and in 2023 we secured this incredible opportunity for us as a project, which was to become the new tenants of this 134 acre national trust farm with a mandate to work for nature people and planet, uh, and a vision for a sort of diverse nature rich community facing farm. Uh, where we could bring people together in meaningful ways where we could grow an affordable and accessible supply of agroecological food for our community and really unleash the potential of this new chapter that the National Trust were offering us.

And so securing the finance to actually step into that potential to unlock that potential was really key to the first year of our time here. Um, and really bringing in the, the capital that we needed to kickstart this new chapter to really, um, yeah, grow what we were doing, increase what we were doing, bring in the people that we needed to, um, to really bring that vision to life. So working with LEAP over the course of maybe a year and a half has been a unique experience when it comes to working with lenders or finance providers in the sense that first of all, the support they've given us through the whole business planning, support and mentorship, we had the chance to really fine tune, really dial in and stress test our business plan to make sure that, you know, our vision we had for this farm

looked good on paper when it came to the actual finances to make sure we had, you know, resilience built into our financial model to look at risk factors, to look at the things that could potentially be challenges. You know, one of those was really striking for me was, was looking at burnout in our team, factoring that into our business plan, which is I think is a pretty  rare thing for a funder to be thinking about. So initially we applied for LEAP to pay for at the conversion of a listed building as a community fee space and commercial kitchen. But it became clear to us earlier in the year that due to delays with planning permission and en listed building consent, that that wasn't gonna be possible within the LEAP timeline.

And we really needed to get a tractor, um, to help kickstart our horticultural operation, our growing for our CSA scheme to really start producing vegetables and selling vegetables. So we had a really understanding conversation and we were able to divert that money to a different purpose.

CREDIT: Jason Taylor, The Source Image

CREDIT: Jason Taylor, The Source Image

And that's what I really love about working with leap is their flexibility, their adaptability, their understanding of the reality of agroecological farming. It's really allowed us in a year where we were slightly behind due to other delays to really hit the ground running, really get a lot of food growing happening on the farm very quickly. It's really resourced our team of growers to do their job well. It's facilitated all of the infrastructure building. It's really just helped us. Yeah. And it's a rare thing to see from lenders is, is that flexibility, is that willingness to move, um, with the changing tides, with the way that the project moves, um, which allows us to be more dynamic too.