Letter 21 — To Adam Ogilvie, Meanwood Valley Urban Farm

Land, food, and resilience in a changing climate

Context

The sixth letter of Week 3 of One Letter a Day turns to Adam Ogilvie, Chief Executive of Meanwood Valley Urban Farm.

Founded in 1980, the farm has spent four decades reconnecting Leeds residents with land, food, and nature through education, volunteering and community-supported agriculture.

As the climate crisis threatens food stability and accelerates pressure on urban land, its market-garden and vegetable-share schemes offer a working example of regenerative adaptation — restoring soil, skills and community resilience.
This letter asks what lessons from the farm’s work could help Leeds build local food security and integrate regenerative growers into its wider adaptation plans.

Letter

Dear Adam,

I am writing as part of One Letter a Day: a year-long civic experiment to reopen grounded conversations about the climate emergency, starting here in Leeds. Each day I write to someone whose work shapes how we think and act on this crisis, and publish both letters and replies to encourage wider dialogue.

This week turns to the neighbourhood organisations that make resilience tangible. Meanwood Valley Urban Farm has done that for more than forty years: showing how a city can keep its connection to land, learning and food. My family subscribed to your veggie-share for a while, and it was a small but steady reminder that what nourishes us is still grown close by.

As climate change intensifies, that connection feels increasingly precious. We are likely to see disruptions in food supply, price shocks, and growing pressure on land from competing needs. Against that backdrop, your market garden and teaching farm offer more than produce: they model a way of farming that restores soil, skills and community at once.

So my question is this:

What lessons from your work could help Leeds build genuine resilience in its food systems, ensuring that community farms and regenerative growers form part of the city’s adaptation plan? And how can such projects help people grasp, in practice, how fragile and interdependent our sustenance has become?

I ask because food security is often discussed in abstract terms, as logistics or trade. Yet resilience begins locally: in the health of soils, in the confidence of growers, and in citizens who know where their food comes from. The work you lead already hints at how that future might look: collaborative, restorative, rooted in place. Understanding how to strengthen and replicate it feels urgent.

With gratitude for your work and the continuity it represents,

– Vivien
Founder, One Letter a Day

📨 Reply from Adam Ogilvie / Meanwood Valley Urban Farm

No reply has yet been received.

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Tomorrow’s letter opens Week 4. From community energy and local initiatives, it will explore the institutions charged with making climate action work at scale. It will follow the thread from Leeds City Council’s delivery teams through West Yorkshire’s regional governance, asking how commitments become coordination.