Intro

Have you ever wanted to produce your own food, vegetables, fruit and/or meat, eggs, milk etc? or know someone who would? If you’re interested in this there are many blogs, websites and groups etc explaining how, using just one acre or even less, you can farm on a small scale to provide food for your family and even run a farming business. However, I have found that although the method to do this might seem easy, finding the land to start is almost impossible.

Background

For many years I have been looking for a way to start a smallholding to farm on a small scale providing food for my family in a sustainable way, raising animals ethically and working towards being more independently sufficient. Although I have had an allotment for many years, the range of produce that can be grown and animals that can be raised are severely limited by the restrictions placed upon the tenants.

The issues

Like many people with this dream, I began searching for a plot of land to rent or buy to progress to small scale farming, which seems an easy task to complete. However, I found a number of difficulties, the biggest being that there are very few small plots of land except for building plots costing nearly the price of a built house.

Of the handful of plots of an acre I have seen, the prices have been over £15,000, which is a huge outlay to find for what will (at least in the beginning) be a hobby/learning curve. I have not found any land locally to rent, except for summer grazing, which is not suitable for year round small scale farming, and again there are restrictions limiting the animals that can be raised, for example you cannot have pigs.

The solution?

While searching for land, I came across information about smallholding collectives or communities where a block of land (typically 10 acres or more) is divided into a number of smaller holdings eg one to five acres, each farmed by a different person/family. Facilities such as water, electric, barns, tools and equipment are shared and the community supports its members eg with training or helping each other with harvests etc.

Communities/collectives can be set up and develop individually in many ways, but the central point is the shared use of the larger block of land. From what I have seen, farmland is rarely sold in blocks of less than 6 acres and is usually in blocks of 10 to 20 acres or more.

The costs vary but typically a block of 10 acres costs in the region of £75,000 upwards, which although far less per acre than a single acre is a huge amount of money to find. Such a block could, however, be used by a community/collective to create several smallholdings, for example 4 x 1 acre starter/hobby plots, and 2 x 3 acre progression/business plots, enabling six people/families to get started with small scale farming.

Purpose of this funding page – The Dream!

To raise funds to purchase a block of land for use by a smallholding community/collective to enable a number of people/families to start small scale farming with support from each other without the financial burden of funding land purchase, or the trauma and frustration of looking for a needle in a haystack!!

Please help us start growing our dreams………