Visitors to Hockerton come expecting a tour of our homes, but the first stop – whether the visitors are permaculture pioneers or planning professionals – is our orchard and allotment area.

We are often asked why we haven’t just focused on low energy housing but we were clear from the beginning, 20 years ago, that a sustainable lifestyle has to balance social, environmental and economic factors. This cannot be delivered by architecture alone.

In 1997 the Building Research Establishment published a General Information Report GIR53 which was entitled “Building a Sustainable Future-Homes for an Autonomous Community”. Within this report it was pointed out that at that time  the average family produced about 4 tonnes of CO2 through car transport, 4 tonnes of CO2 in heating the family house-yet twice that amount of CO2-8 tonnes was associated with food consumed by such a family each year.

This is because food is often the product of intensive farming which uses fossil fuel based fertilisers and is then transported thousands of miles  to our shops where it is stored until it is transported to our homes, usually by car.

So by focussing on heating costs and transport alone without addressing food production we would miss out on impacting half the CO2 emissions we could potentially address.

Hockerton thus incorporated a land management plan in its design, which as well as providing an environment for wildlife to flourish would contain an organic growing area.

Over the years our food production has added to our organic allotment. We now have and orchard with fruit trees, bee hives, chickens and a flock of sheep.

The added bonus of all this is that we are kept in touch with the natural cycles of nature, spend time outside in our green gym and benefit from food produced to high standards and on our own doorstep.

So if you are thinking about your own sustainability projects, don’t forget the opportunities for food production which could outweigh the reductions in CO2 from household energy saving measures that you take.