As we come to the end of May, and the end of our JustGiving Crowdfunder we’d like to put out a huge thank-you to everyone who has donated or shared our posts. Nearly 300 people have come together to contribute to our target of £5,000 which will be an enormous help in the coming weeks and months.

Here are a few numbers around how this pandemic is affecting Wellgate Community Farm, our community and a brief insight into what we’ve been doing since we’ve had to close our gates.

Donations will help to support the 187 animals which need to be fed and cared for. Maintenance to our buildings, fences, facilities and vehicles and those pesky bills that we have been unable to set-aside.

The estimated loss of income from being closed until the end of July 2020 is over £67,000 – we still have an awful lot to do but £5,000 is a huge step in the right direction. If we look again in human terms, since we closed our gates just before the school Easter holidays, to the end of the Summer term, Wellgate Community Farm would normally have shared our farm with…

• 45 Young Farmers
• 10 Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme students
• 20 Work Experience students from local schools and colleges
• 40 Teenage students from our Hands-On alternative education programme
• 8 Gardeners
• 15 Young adults who were not in education, employment, or training
• 20 eleven-to-seventeen year-olds committing a total of 300 hours volunteering to our Jack Petchey Foundation funded ‘Give Something Back’ project
• 3,000 visitors who would have attended our ‘spring babies’ and ‘open-day’ events
• 120 children who would have attended ‘Farmer for a day’, ‘Herbies!‘ and ‘Beaks and Squeaks’ activities
• 7,000 local school children have missed out on visits to the farm, hatch-packs, and visits to schools

While we hope to re-arrange school visits for next term, this represents a huge impact on our community.

For those who come to us as a place of support, we’ve maintained contact with 17 vulnerable volunteers with a weekly ‘Wellgate Chat’ with picture and video updates from the farm. We have contacted all of our 278 regular volunteers, introduced ‘Wellgate Walks’ by taking Madge the pony out into the local community, and ramped up our social media and website updates.

For schools with hatch-packs, we’ve posted weekly videos of the first few weeks of chicks growth and development.

A skeleton crew of just over a dozen volunteers have been looking after our animals and market garden. We’ve been able to care for our animals and have crops which we hope to harvest later this year.

Coming soon! We are working on a “click and collect” system for our eggs, farm produce, and manure. We hope to have this running in the next few days – watch this space!