Down on the farm

In the middle of Grimsby’s Nunsthorpe estate there’s a little slice of the countryside - complete with tractor, hay bales and animals of all shapes and sizes.

Nunny’s Farm is home to Penelope the pig, Bob the lamb, Amelia the goat and many other creatures including chickens, ducks and turkeys, goats, donkeys, sheep, guinea pigs and rabbits.

The land they call home is in the middle of Centre4 – a vibrant community hub on Wootton Road, which provides a huge array of services to the local area.

Neil Campbell and Jo Holbrook-Morris came up with the idea of Nunny’s Farm as a way of addressing a disconnect between youngsters living in an urban environment and nature.

After talking to the team at Centre4, the idea became a reality and now the farm provides volunteering opportunities for local people as well as a mobile farm service, taking the animals out to local schools, youth groups and other community venues.

In the future, plans include developing a community orchard, fruit and veg patches and an after-school club for children.

And money raised by our Community Champions scheme will go towards those new initiatives – shoppers in the area have been supporting Nunny’s Farm since June.

Neil said: “Myself and Jo have a background in the prison service we’ve seen that often, kids growing up in an urban setting have something missing that’s really beneficial in childhood – that’s interaction with animals. We bring the animals out and sometimes there’s kids there who haven’t ever seen a chicken.

“We’re focussing on animals at the moment, but we want to move onto food as well. It’s amazing the satisfaction you can get from growing your own – it teaches a sense of responsibility too.

“Nunny’s Farm is about teaching people and widening their horizons.”

The current Community Champions fundraising isn’t Lincolnshire Co-op’s only connection with the Nunny’s Farm project.

A team of volunteers cleared the land where the farm is as part of a Big Co-op Clean project in 2017 – and Centre4 itself was a previous Community Champion, using some of the money raised to remove old temporary buildings from the site.

Centre4 CEO Linda Dellow said: “When they approached us and said: ‘Can we use your field to create a farm in the middle of the Nunny?’ I was unsure what the local reaction would be. But the community have really taken it to their heart.

“It’s taken longer than we expected but it’s all coming together - It was meant to be.”