Request for a master student interested in product development and marketing for an organic farm and macro-distillery in Wales

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Glynhynod is an organic farm where artisan cheeses are produced, situated in west-Wales and managed by a Dutch family. The firm is highly innovative, applying sustainability guidelines to all their activities and producing food of high quality; several cheeses have received prices on national and international level. The family is now developing the first organic Welsh whisky and an orange liqueur at their newly established organic micro-distillery. They are looking for a master student- preferably one in food technology- who will be able to do an internship and/or thesis inWales. The student should be interested in organic, artisan food production. The student will be during his/her intership:.

  1. actively involved in developing, testing and trying out new liqueur and spirit recipes using organic ingredients and trial batches of different orange liqueurs using different ingredients and different amounts of ingredients. The student will be required to accurately measure the amounts of ingredients e.g. total weight, of oranges, orange peel amounts of sugar etc; ‘age’ the different liqueurs for 3 different periods e.g. 40, day, 50 day and 60 day infusions. The same method will be used to develop various recipes for spirits e.g. sloe gin and seaweed gin.
  2. Doing research on marketing aspects to try out the new recipes such as implementing a sensory evaluation in a real life situation where the public will be asked to judge the product. The student will be expected to develop a statistical sensory evaluation method that will determine which liqueur the public prefers and this liqueur will then proceed to bulk production.

 His/her master thesis can be focused on of the following themes:

  1. Marketing and/or gastronomy: how to enhance the supply of local artisan products in this rural area;
  2. Consumer demands towards locally produced speciality products in west-Wales;
  3. Develop guidelines for food quality and taste of new alcoholic local products
  4. Research on food safety of organic artisan products

 The student will start around the beginning of April 2012 and stay on the farm for 3-4 months in the beautiful setting of the Teifi Valley in Llandysul near Carmarthen, not far from the sea in west-Wales. The research will be supervised by a staff member of the relevant chair group and co-supervised by Ina Horlings (Rural Sociology Group). If you are interested please apply or ask for more information by sending a mail to (lummina.horlings@wur.nl) before the end of February, 2012.

2011 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 37,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Politics of place making in urban farming – an essay

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By Anke de Vrieze

Last trimester, I had the opportunity to join the Capita Selecta course `A Global Sense of Place´, taught by Joost Jongerden and Dirk Roep. From my current working experience in the field of urban agriculture, the subject of the course – place-based approaches for sustainable development- interested me and proved valuable. In the course, different approaches to ‘place’ were discussed and related to culture, politics, economics and leadership. As we were a small group of students, we met in a weekly reading group, to discuss the literature and our written assignments.

Personally, I was most inspired by the work of Doreen Massey. Her perspective on place and space is a relational one, as she describes places as ‘temporary constellations’ or ‘bundles of space-time trajectories’. In one of her articles, she connects this relational perspective to ‘geographies of responsibility’ and shows how the ‘global’ is embedded locally as well. Taking the example of the City of London, i.e. it’s financial district, she argues against generalised understandings of the local as a product of the global, and demonstrates that indeed much of what we call ‘the global’ stems from local areas, such as the City of London. This leads her to plea for alternative globalisations, based on ‘a challenge of place’. I think, Massey’s perspective can prove meaningful for anyone studying ‘place’, whether it be in urban or rural settings.

For the final essay, ‘Growing community? Urban agriculture in the context of place-based urban development’ of the course, I discussed the ‘politics of place-making’ in a case of urban farming. By drawing on the example of an neighbourhood-based urban agriculture project, I showed how the different perspectives on place, as employed by various actors involved, creates a dynamic fields of interests regarding the ability of UA to address urban issues, and to achieve sustainable community development. Based on this short analysis, I argued for the need of a relational perspective on place, taking into account place-frames and positionality of actors, in (future) cases of neighbourhood-based urban farming.

Anke de Vrieze, anthropologist and project coordinator of FARMING THE CITY (www.farmingthecity.net), contact: ftc@citiesthemagazine.com

Urban Ag – Stadslandbouw

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Grow your own is emerging as a trendy urban activity. Although allotment gardens often exists for over 50 years, their image is drastically changing. Until recently, these spaces were ignored by any city with promotional aspirations. Rather, they were tolerated at fringes or near railroad tracks. Quite different from the central place ‘community gardens’ are conquering now, increasingly heralded as ‘healthy’ spaces in and for neighborhoods. For a closer connection to nature, for the educational value of food growing, for the connection to better diets, for improvement of the social fabric of the ‘hood’.

What is policy aspiration and what is real in this? An interesting question for sociologists trying to understand contemporary society. Colleague Esther Veen is studying various forms of allotment/community gardens throughout the Netherlands. She is making her research accessible through the blog; www.onderzoekerstadslandbouw.wordpress.com. In Dutch.

Moreover, there are opportunities for students to study specific gardens in The Netherlands, recently a Master Thesis on an allotment garden in Ede was completed. A new research question comes from a garden in Sliedrecht (see blog in Dutch) and also the city of Rotterdam is interested in a city-wide study on the functioning of their community gardens.

For more information on Master Thesis possibilities in this field, please contact Els Hegger; Els.Hegger@wur.nl

5 DERREG films: Dresden (G), Roscommon (Irl), Comarca de Verin (Sp) and Westerkwartier (NL)

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Students from the University of Aberytswyth, assigned by DERREG coordinator Michael Woods and instructed by the respective partners, made video clips of four case study areas to highlight some of the particular developments in these rural regions. The video clips of Comarca de Verin (Spain), Roscommon (Ireland), the Westerkwartier (NL) and the two video clips of Regierungsbezirk Dresden Part 1 en Dresden Part 2 (Germany), are accessible at You Tube. Earlier Wiebke Wellbrock already posted a blog on the Westerkwartier film. Have a look at the DERREG Channel:

The DERREG project has come to an end. Results are published at the resource centre of the DERREG website www.derreg.eu. The online Journal European Countryside will soon publish two special issues on DERREG findings. Ashgate will publish a book based on the case study areas.