The Apricot Centre is lucky enough to have wonderful funders, sponsors, and friends who have/are helping us to achieve our mission. We are also aware of the many individuals who have donated time and money to our farm and we thank them all as this would not be possible without them. The Biodynamic Land Trust has 150 investors in the farm land itself. 

Power to Change

Power to Change is an independent charitable trust that aims to support community businesses in England. The trust has a £150 million endowment from the National Lottery Community Fund. Power to Change works directly with local communities, including local funding and targeted programmes.

Leader

Leader funding is available to local business, communities, farmers, foresters,  and land managers. Projects are managed by local action groups. Leader is a development method aimed at rural areas; it is implemented under the national and regional Rural Development Programme for each member state of the European Union (EU). The funding comes from an EU initiative to develop rural areas in the countries of the EU.

National Lottery

The Apricot Centre was awarded the Awards for All fund for our social forestry. Social forestry is part of our wellbeing services.

Devon Environmental Foundation

The Devon Environmental Foundation seeks to protect areas of natural beauty in the Devon region by funding local nature regeneration projects. The foundation aims to protect and restore at least 30% of Devon’s land and water by 2030.

We are doing two projects funded by DEF. 

  1. Research Project

The BDLT and the Permaculture Association asked the APricot centre to carry out some simple research to gather information on how effective Biodynamic and Permaculture systems are.  

We aim to gather information on our;

  • Carbon sequestration using the Farm carbon toolkit

  • Biodiversity changes on the farm

  • The social impact of our food in partnership with CAWR Coventry University

  • The yields of our crops

  • The economic status of the business 

5 years into the farm funding from DEF has allowed us to collate these figures and create reports, and run farm walks to encourage other farmers to convert to regenerative farming systems. We will also report back to our shareholders on what their investment has achieved. 

  1. Apprenticeship feasibility study (2021) 

There is a chronic lack of training for growers, farmers in Regenerative Agriculture and this is one of the limiting factors in the uptake and conversion to these systems by mainstream farmers. 

We are exploring the possibility of creating an “Apprentice Academy” for Regenerative Agriculture and horticulture in Devon, This aims to  train people up to level 3 and 4 in Regenerative agriculture systems including Permaculture, Agroforestry and Biodynamic farming. It would be work based on farms with one day per week training. This would be due to be launched in 2021. It would support farms converting to regenerative systems.