Authors: Kate MacDougall & Emma Brierley from Edinburgh Agroecology Co-op

In 2024, Plant Health Centre Scotland funded a year-long community engagement project at Lauriston Agroecology Farm in Edinburgh. The farm has a productive market garden staffed by professional growers, but also has extensive community allotments and a large, active community of volunteers engaged with a shared veg garden, orchard, and wildlife habitat restoration. These were the people the Plant Health Centre wanted to reach with some key messages about plant health and biosecurity. 

Lauriston Farm and Agroecology 

Lauriston Farm lies in the northwest of Edinburgh, between residential neighbourhoods and the Cramond shoreline. In 2020, a small group of local residents formed a workers’ co-operative to take on the lease of the farm, with a vision to grow food for people and wildlife. Edinburgh Agroecology Co-op is transforming the farm from a depleted and disconnected 100-acres of pasture to a local response to climate change, biodiversity collapse and lack of access to healthy, fresh and affordable food, using agroecology. When the co-op took on the farm, there were no buildings, no infrastructure, no tools or machinery, and the food growing spaces had all been claimed by grass. Having started essentially from scratch, the farm is now a hive of activity with thriving community allotments, a productive market garden, teams of staff and volunteers working on tree planting and biodiversity restoration, and a year-round cultural engagement and informal education programme. 

This set up gave us the opportunity to develop community-focused plant health workshops with Scotland’s Plant Health Centre. 

How to Communicate Biosecurity Messages to Non-Commercial Growers? 

“I feel motivated and inspired to learn more” (participant feedback from Healthy Plant Communities event) 

We organised the plant health project around five interlinked themes: compost; community; soil; seeds; and ‘a warm welcome’. We wanted to associate plant health with community care, celebration, and resilience. 

Across the year, we ran 12 events at the farm on these themes, and also engaged an artist to co-create a mural on the cabin in the farm entrance with young people from local alternative education project The Art Offenders (part of Spartans Community Foundation

As we were into our third full year on the land, we had already established several successful formats for workshops and events, an actively engaged community, a large mailing list and other reliable ways to advertise our programme, and suitable contacts for partnerships. 

We offered a mix of free and sliding-scale-price events (using our solidarity pricing model, where those who choose to contribute more help us offer discounted places for those who need them). 

We had the benefit of being able to combine the Plant Health Centre project with our coordinator Emma Brierley’s Masters in Art and Social Practice. Emma used their Masters project to turn the first theme of ‘Compost & Castings’ into a series of workshops and a celebration day, which added multiple layers of interest and engagement for many more people. We also had the benefit of input from our land partners Rhyze Mushrooms and the wealth of knowledge and skills within our community. 

All the events included information and knowledge exchange, ecological arts, and participatory activity. This Flipbook details the contents of each session: 

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4c33b077e2.html 

Linking Plant Health to the Community 

Agroecological farmers understand the farm is part of an ecosystem. The lives of the plants, fungi and animals (including humans) are interconnected, and depend upon each other. The farmer’s job is to care for the health of that whole ecosystem. This means everything from running soil nutrient tests to fighting for seed sovereignty and addressing food poverty. 

Like the rest of Scotland and the UK, the north Edinburgh ecosystem is depleted and out of balance - for all species. At the farm, we have a highly simplified landscape with limited biodiversity, and many species missing. When we look specifically at the human community, we have some of Edinburgh’s wealthiest neighbourhoods on one side of the farm, and some in the lowest 10-20% of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD 2024) on the other - in food deserts where ultra-processed foods dominate shop shelves. These are all ecosystem health issues. 

Here in this urban farmland, we have a rare opportunity to rebuild people’s connection with food growing where that has largely been lost, to give more space for wildlife, and to show how humans have a positive role to play in the health of the local ecosystem. 

An Agroecological Approach to Biosecurity 

The agroecological approach harnesses and builds natural biodiversity to protect our environment. We believe our best chance for healthy plants and future harvests is to pack the farm with as much life as possible, to try to re-establish functioning ecosystems. With our tree planting programme, we have planted current native species for wildlife. Our food crops are a mix of heritage and modern, native and non-native varieties. We have African and Asian growers experimenting with growing staples and culturally significant veg at the farm. We run an ongoing seed sovereignty project ‘Our Seeds’ and the motto is: all seeds are migrants, every seed has a story. We participate in crowd breeding programmes for resilient varieties. It's not about one type being better than another. What matters is understanding your particular place - what plants will do well, what supports the health of this place, and what could damage or deplete this place. 

Having a biosecure approach means being aware of the risks associated with sourcing plants and seeds from outwith the area, and adopting practices that help safeguard from introducing pests and diseases that could threaten biodiversity and the wider environment. 

At Lauriston Farm it is really important to us that we do not pick up the hostile language and concepts of border control when we think about biosecurity. For us, biosecurity is about care for ecosystem health. We aspire to a decolonial world, and we know that resilience and adaptability comes from diversity. 

We know that in a changing climate, the food we grow, the way we grow it, and the species that thrive here, may all change. We will need to be as adaptive, creative and resilient as possible. This means building community, and treasuring life and living systems all in a biosecure way. 

Underneath the facts about soil, compost, plant disease, tool care, pruning etc. we hope people caught the spirit of agroecology’s life-affirming approach.

Photo credit: Lauren of Rhyze Mushrooms