Our next farm, and the people who'll work it

For the past eight weeks, our whole focus has been on one thing: securing our next farm. It begins, as these things must, with the funding to make it real, and quietly, steadily, that foundation has been taking shape. Founder after founder has stepped in to join us, each taking a lasting stake in the ground and helping bring the next farm into being.

Securing the ground.

Our first priority has always been clear: to find our next farm, and to raise the funding that lets us hold it. It is the foundation everything else is built on. Over the past eight weeks that foundation has begun to take shape, one conversation at a time, as founders have stepped forward to take a permanent, inheritable stake in the land. It has been genuinely moving to witness, and it is thanks to people stepping in that the vision is becoming real ground beneath our feet.

But a farm is more than the sum of those who fund it.

A farm is not only bought. It is lived, worked, and loved.

Places sponsored, not bought.

So alongside the founding places people take, we are ready to open a small number of places that are sponsored rather than bought. Ten founding places, carrying the same depth of belonging as our Smallholder tier, the deepest stake we offer, given in return for the skills and service someone brings to the farm, and the chance to live and work on the land itself.

And these are not only for farmers and growers. A living farm needs many kinds of hands. There are the growers and land workers, hands in the soil, tending the beds, the orchard and the animals through the turning year. There is someone to lead our farm school, passing the knowledge of the land to the children who will inherit it. And there is a maker of healing remedies and therapies, alongside others who bring the crafts, care and services a community needs.

The intention is simple. We don't want a farm that only wealth can enter, or one that empties once the work is done. We want a place genuinely lived in, worked with love, and rich with the skills that make a community whole. These ten places are how we make sure the people who give their lives to the land can belong to it as deeply as anyone who buys a stake.

Farm by farm, hand by hand, this is how a farm becomes a village.