Awareness, and concern, is growing about the interrelated issues of food insecurity, climate change, food miles, carbon footprints, and the dominance of supermarket chains with a ‘just- in-time’ distribution system. There is also increasing awarenss of the importance of locally and sustainably produced agriculture in helping to create a resilent food economy.
Crofting, if properly regulated, supported and encouraged, is a system ideally designed to play a part in the solutions to these problems and therefore to be ecologically and socially beneficial to our wider society. Crofting provides each crofter with a home and the ability to produce food for their own consumption or sale. It is an agriculture that is respectful to the land, to the environment and to a sense of place.
It is also about community. Crofting has in the past, and if supported and protected still can in the future, play a central role in retaining and encouraging vibrant, hard-working, enterprising and resilient rural communities. It is on the land that crofters come together, whether in gathering cattle, shearing sheep, planting potatoes or making hay. By doing so they maintain the distinctive sense of identity that crofting has in the Scottish psyche.
Excerpt from section 8.2, “The State of Crofting in Camuscross”, a report by Iain MacKinnon & Susan Walker
http://archive.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/rae/bills/Crofting%20Reform%20Bill/documents/TheStateofCroftinginCamuscrossReport.27.08.09.pdf
For me this just epitomises crofting and how Rob and I were unexplainably drawn to it as a way of life. When I started to research crofting it was like I had found my roots, like I had found a community that understood how important and inextricable the environment and agriculture are. It’s taken on a totally different dimension for me now, the strength of the community we entered has amazed me, coming from a background with a very weak community feeling.
When anyone asks me “what is a croft” I find it hard to explain that terroir feeling, the community bonds, how it’s like a farm but small and with more regulation to protect it.. But Iain puts it perfectly here. The beauty of the social network and unassuming ingenuousness of crofters.. It’s totally different to the consumer mentality of owning, because almost all crofters are tenants of landlords. Crofting has been doing, unassumingly, what the best, most well meaning communes have been championing and crofting has been doing it for hundreds of years! (It’s a little ironic coming from me, an incomer owner occupier, but the spirit is here! In the same report he shows how young incoming families revitalise the community in Camuscross.)
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