Bwyd Sir Gâr Food Local Food Partnership

Bwyd Sir Gâr (Boyd Cigar Food) is the local food partnership for Carmarthenshire, a large rural county in West Wales. Established during the COVID-19 pandemic and operating for approximately four years, it is a member of the Sustainable Food Places network. The partnership works to co-create a diverse, relocalised, inclusive, and resilient food system through collaboration with public sector bodies, private sector actors, voluntary and community sector organisations, and citizens across the county. Its coordinator is hosted by Social Farms and Gardens, and core staffing — funded through the Shared Prosperity Fund and Welsh government grants — includes a project manager based at the county council, administrative support, and two full-time growing staff at a council-owned farm.

The partnership's primary body of work is structured around a Food System Development plan with three strands: a communications strand that builds a good food movement and promotes growing, cooking, and meal sharing, particularly in disadvantaged communities; a strategic land for public goods strand centred on a 103-acre county council-owned farm, where two acres of intensive organic market garden produce vegetables for public procurement pilots supplying schools, care homes, food banks, community kitchens, and third-sector organisations; and an enabling inclusive access strand, led by Public Health Wales and community health improvement dietitians, targeting wards with the highest levels of deprivation on the Wales Index of Multiple Deprivation to strengthen local access to healthy, seasonal fruit and vegetables.

The farm site includes a packhouse, polytunnels, a roundhouse capable of hosting groups of up to thirty people, and a community garden developed through ongoing co-design with local residents. The farm hosts a Welsh government-funded machinery ring — a shared equipment library bookable online — providing small-scale and field-scale market gardening tools to growers across Carmarthenshire and neighbouring counties. In its first growing season, the farm produced six and a half tonnes of food from approximately one third of an acre. Plans include converting the entire farm to certified organic status, scaling up to field-scale vegetable production, developing the packhouse into a food aggregation hub, and bidding for the farm tenancy within the next three to four years.

The partnership collaborates regularly with the county council, the local health board, Natural Resources Wales, third-sector umbrella bodies, private-sector food business incubators, and a regional logistics and distribution provider that supplies public sector, hospitality, and retail recipients across the county. Funding comes primarily from Welsh government through the Ministry of Social Justice, with additional support from Shared Prosperity and other short-term grant cycles. The principal structural challenge the partnership faces is year-to-year funding uncertainty, which constrains long-term planning. The partnership also delivers teacher training on food and nutrition and runs community workshops on growing, cooking, and eating across multiple community settings.