The Community Farm's position on fracking

The Community Farm is about connecting people with the land. We grow food organically, working with nature to create an environment that can provide nutritious food for local consumption. We use farming techniques based on knowledge that has evolved down the years and which ensure the future productivity of the land. We aim to address some of the essential needs of our community, in terms of their health and wellbeing, through the food we produce and through the experiences available working and being at the farm, creating in the process a legacy for future generations.

Fracking is, in so many ways, the antithesis of what The Community Farm represents. We are nurturing a mutually sustaining relationship with our planet. Fracking uses violent processes that degrade our natural resources through extraction and exploitation. We believe there are other, renewable sources of energy that are more appropriate and desirable means of addressing our future needs. Fracking feeds our addiction to fossil fuels.

The Community Farm exists because a group of local people came together for a shared purpose, to create something that has the potential to deliver social, environmental and economic benefits. It comes from a recognition that the current economic system, based on ever increasing consumption funded by interest bearing debt created by private banks, is fundamentally unsustainable.

Fracking will prop up the current system a little longer by creating new ways of temporarily exploiting the planets resources, allowing people to carry on thoughtlessly consuming and leaving the consequences of this for future generations to deal with. It offers the opportunity for a few to make significant sums of money, a few who have little or nothing to do with the community where the fracking takes place and who will be less affected by any environmental damage that is caused. It uses vast quantities of water, notwithstanding we are faced with chronic water shortages and threatens to pollute the local water supply. It is licensed by and to those with little or no connection to our community.

We are fundamentally and philosophically opposed to fracking. We shall actively resist any attempt to drill beneath the boundaries of the farm site and will support others in the locality and beyond that do the same.

Dave Hunter, Chair, The Community Farm, Chew Valley, Somerset