Tough decisions and lessons from Hedgerow: Helping aspiring farmers get access to land.

Hedgerow Farm is a simple idea to link people who want to farm with people with capital who want to support farmers. At every public forum discussing farming we hear again and again aspiring farmers frustration that they can’t get access to land. That the “only thing” holding them back from starting their farming operation is that they can’t access land. Why has a project and indeed a model that could link farmers and investors not working? Why has it not worked when there is such strong investor interest in supporting aspiring farmers get access to land generally and specifically for this project?

Hedgerow Farm was born out of my frustration. I’d spent years trying to find land to lease where I could get my farming operation Fish Farmers up and running. Many of you would have heard of Hedgerow Farm but for those that haven’t I’ll give you a quick run down. More details can be found at the Hedgerow Farm website. I’m writing this post to communicate what I’ve learnt from this process and to describe the reasons why we were not able to buy land in December, then in February and then again in March. This despite having people who said the “only thing stopping them was access to land” and investors and a lender willing to provide access to land.

The Hedgerow Project

Hedgerow Farm grew out of Fish Farmers need for a site. Standard practice for a business that has out grown the garage is to lease a shop front, warehouse or factory. You get a commercial lease and even though you don’t own the land or building people feel secure enough to invest in a fitout, plant and equipment and other fixed improvements because of the protection they are afforded by a commercial lease. Agriculture is different. Leasing land is relatively easy if you only want it to graze live stock or crop it for a season. Its very hard to get a lease on land much longer than a year or so. This means that a tenant farmers connection with the land is always very tenuous. The protections offered by a commercial lease on agricultural land are pretty much unheard of. This arrangement is fine if you just want to agist live stock or grow a crop. It certainly not suitable for a project like ours where we want to build a greenhouse. It is also not an arrangement that suits any farming operation that has a time scale of longer than one year. It also tends to cultivate a practice by the tenant farmer of extracting as much from the land as is possible in as short a period of time. Fences don’t get maintained, paddocks are dosed with instant delivery chemical fertilisers and soils and pastures are mined for as much as they can deliver. There is no culture of long term stewardship in standard agricultural tenant farming.

For years we searched for a farmer from whom we could lease land. We came close a couple of times but never clinched it. About 18 months ago a few ideas I’d been kicking around, a lot of frustration and a couple of chance conversations came together to give me the idea of Hedgerow Farm. The first conversation was with a guy called David who wanted to plant a cider orchard. The second was with a random encounter with a banker. The third was with an organic grower.

The first property we seriously made a play for. Scenic views towards Mount Alexander (in the haze) with Mount Franklin off to the right (out of shot) and looking down onto an excellent camping spot by Deep Creek. This shot shows the pretty. I’m standing on a basalt escarpment that drops away and reveals underlying heavy clay soils on the hill sides. About 50 acres out of 160 of serious goat country with a little bit of loam on the creek flats.

I met David at the Men’s Shed in Daylesford. To be honest I was going there for a sort of therapy. Spending hours working alone was getting lonely even for an introvert like me. The Men’s shed was a space where I could not only use my collection of hand tools but share the experience and feel useful helping out. David wanted to plant an English style cider orchard. Pretty much all the ciders produced in Australia are made from dessert or table fruit rather than traditional cider varieties. When I met David he had just finished digging up his orchard and had re planted them cheek by jowl in his Mum’s backyard. About 2 years prior he had leased land from a farmer, built fences, laid out irrigation and planted his trees. Then after 18 months the farmers health had turned and the farmers family had put the farm up for sale. David had had an agricultural (non secure) lease with the farmer so when the family asked him to leave he didn’t have a leg to stand on. I told David that if I found anything for me I’d see if I could also get him some land as well.

At a social event I was introduced to a banker and over coffee I talked to him about the struggle I’d been having trying to find land. After discussing various avenues he said that his bank might be prepared to lend on the strength of my business plan if there was enough security/equity in a loan to cover purchasing a block of land and building our first aquaponics system. On the spur of the moment and with David in mind I asked if I could find other people that needed land could the money they would pay for a lease be counted as part of the income that would service the loan. He said yes. In fact “the more of them you have the easier it would be because lease income would be more certain than income from a new business.

The next week I was in my local, the Radio Springs Hotel in Lyonville, when one of the guys I was chatting with said that a local organic farmer needed to lease more land. As it was explained to me the farmer was worried that a lot of much bigger producers were beginning to move into the organic market. He faced the decision that he either had to return to niche market production or he had to drastically increase his scale. The problem though was that he couldn’t afford to buy more land and try as he might he couldn’t find any where to lease more land. The next day I went and had a chat with this farmer and he confirmed what I’d been told about him needing more land. Whats more he added that he needed a minimum of a 5 year lease so that he could feel free to invest in the soil and be confident of reaping the rewards three, four and five years later.

This is what the other 110 acres looked like of the first property. Awesome red volcanic soils about 75% free of rock. Great pastures, excellent fencing and flat to slightly sloped. These well draining soils will grow almost anything and even in these high rain fall areas drain well and don’t become waterlogged but unlike a sandy soil the moisture is retained for later use.

After that I said first to myself then to the guys above and then to a whole stack of people at the first Deepwinter Agrarian Gathering in 2015:

“All of us have been looking for a land lord from whom we can lease land and none of us have had much luck. Instead of continuing to look in vain why don’t we just make one?”

The common response was:

“Make what?”

To which I replied:

“Let’s work together and make a landlord.”

The idea was very well received because as you hear again and again and again in small scale, alternative, organic and regenerative farming groups the number one thing stopping aspiring farmers from getting started is their inability to access land.

Since almost no one buys a farm with cash to buy a farm you generally need to three things.

• 40% deposit (at least);
• loan to cover the balance; and
• evidence of your ability to repay the loan.

All of the many people looking to lease land didn’t have enough money to buy land on their own but many didn’t even have money to buy land as part of a group. Therefore to make this happen we needed to coordinate investors to provide the deposit, a lender to provide the loan and the tenants or co-farmers to provide the income to pay the loan. The entity to do this would be a company that investors (who could also be co-farmers) would invest in the company. The company would then get a loan for the balance of the required capital and buy the farm. The the co-farmers would then lease the land from the company and there would even be a pathway to ownership for those people or co-farmers that could not afford to invest in the land holding company upfront.

The farm would be just like a co-working space or office building in the city except that instead of tenants leasing a floor, office or work space they would be leasing a portion of a larger farm. Hence the term co-farmer. Everyone would have their own space to run their own business but in addition to getting access to land there are a stack of other synergies as well.

To keep it simple the emphasis was that first and foremost Hedgerow Farm would facilitate affordable and secure access to land. This is something that all the potential tenants had said THEY COULD NOT DO. There are many benefits that you can get from joining a co-working space not just the affordability of it and if you don’t know anything about co-working spaces have a read of this article. There are extra benefits specific to farming though. Farming can be a very lonely profession and individual people if they can afford to buy their own land spend much of their time working alone. This is an obvious OH&S issue but its also a major mental health issue, especially when times get tough which of course they do from time to time. Another is that having a bunch of interesting, vibrant and diverse farming operations on the same property provides an excellent collective marketing opportunity. Even the farmers just looking for land to expand and that had zero interest in any sort of co-operative endeavor could see the logic of a co-operative farm shop. These synergies were discussed but not emphasised. The mission was to provide affordable and secure access to land. Anything else would be cream.

This is the Burumbeet property we looked at. Much drier and warmer being further north and off the great dividing range. It was much closer to Ballarat and seemed like a pretty good deal. 300ac for $1,500/ac. The black volcanic soils are very fertile and drain well as this attempt at a dam shows. However they are prone to drying out because the clay they contain is very reactive and shrinks when it dries. We almost put an offer in on this property but we prayed about it and half an hour later the real estate agent called to tell us it was sold. Some things are not meant to be.

So with a great deal of excitement I set out to bring the pieces together. The initial banker I talked to couldn’t help because his boss couldn’t get his head around the idea but eventually we found a lender who, bonus of bonus, said that we only needed a 25% deposit and lease income equal to the mortgage payments to get started with the first period of the loan being interest only. We collected the names and requirements of a bunch of aspiring and expanding farmers. We also started getting expressions of interest from a number of investors interested in the prospect of a return much greater than that offered by a bank on term deposit yet their capital was still quite secure being tied to the title of the farm. Many of these investors were very interested in supporting farmers. It was about in October I managed to find enough expressions of interest from investors and enough from potential co-farmers that we could seriously look at land. In December all the pieces were in place to buy a 160 acre property.

That is when things started to come unstuck. All these people that had said that the only thing holding them back, the only thing stopping them from farming was access to land suddenly started to back away. Why, why not jump in when it was being handed to them on a plate? Why not when they didn’t have another option? One of the principle potential investors reassured me that this sort of thing was normal and that it happened all the time in commercial real estate deals. So I regrouped found some more potential co-farmers and the same thing happened in February. In March I was at a regional farming and food forum where one of the speakers on the panel was talking about their experiences as an organic tenant farmer. In particular they spoke about the risk of investing in land on which you may not have a long term lease and they spoke of the trap they were in personally. They needed to expand but hadn’t managed to save enough or develop a big enough cash flow to buy their own land. They had tried to find more land to lease without any luck at all.

At that point one of the other panelists spoke up and said from the stage “you need to speak to Stuart!”

Well she did and so did two other people. At the time I was trying to bring a group together to purchase a ~200 acre property between Crewswick and Daylesford. Excellent water, excellent water infrastructure, amazing soil, fabulous shedding and from my prospective no unnecessary infrastructure or contentious infrastructure (like a house. Who gets to live in it?) that would add to the price of the property without adding value that we would appreciate. I was proceeding mostly on hope but not much of that.

One of the people that came to speak to me at that forum said that they were “desperate for land”. They had been looking “for ages”, they had “all but given up hope” because “they had no way they could afford to buy the land they needed.” They needed 50 acres and with them on board we would have had enough people and more importantly enough lease income to go ahead. With some excitement I sent them an outline of the way it would work stressing that the details of the deal had to be a win for the farmers and a win for the investors. However, since the investors wanted to support the farmers they were very willing to structure the deal in a way that worked well for the farmers. This included not needing a huge return on their investment but also willing to offer a pathway to ownership for the farmers.

I never heard from them again. The property was for sale by tender, the tender date passed and it sold.

What went wrong.

Some months have passed now but its only been in the last week or so that I’ve really been able to reflect on just what went wrong and why.

When we first started talking about the idea it was so well received. Not just by all these people who said “the only thing holding us back is access to land” but also by the general public. Everyone said variants of “what a great idea” or “what an awesome project”. I knew it would be a lot of work even with such enthusiasm. However, with so many expressions of interest I thought that all that was needed was to coordinate everyone and bring them together. The thing is from the very beginning, the project didn’t get a lot of actual support. At the time I wasn’t too surprised by this because there are a lot of things competing for peoples head space and time nor was I concerned. I had a few people giving some very valuable support but I didn’t have anyone join the project as a partner, no-one seemed to buy into the project emotionally. Support came from a number of the investors and several members of the public who wanted to support the farmers or friends that wanted to support me. Organisations like Employment Ownership Australia and New Zealand (EOA), the Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals (BCCM) offered a lot of moral support and pro bono legal support. Damien Goode an internet friend from the Backyard Aquaponics forum offered ongoing web support and hosting through his business which was an invaluable material concrete support. Similarly when the BCCM offered me space on their stall at the Sustainable Living Festival 2016 another friend organised graphic designer and architect Imm Chew to prepare promotional posters so that we would have something to put on the stall. I was very grateful to the few members of the public that actively supported the project by telling people about it in person and sharing information about the idea on social media. The thing is though that it never got to any sort of critical mass.

Most crucially none of the potential co-farmers jumped on board and helped to promote the project. While some people repeatedly expressed their hope for the project I often felt that there were many people waiting on the side lines. Waiting for the land to be actually purchased before they truly decided to jump on board. Of course if that’s true then it means that the farmers made for themselves a classic chicken and egg scenario. There was no way the investors were going to buy a property on the mere hope that the farmers would then sign up after the fact.

Mount Prospect. This was the third property we took a go at. 218 acres of highly productive red to gray volcanic soils. 6" water mains to deliver water from the 60ML (20L/s) bore to anywhere it was needed on the farm. Plus a connection to Newlyn Resivoir. 18 acres was taken by the hill with 200 acres of gently sloped to flat ground spreading out from the base. The hill was along one edge of the property with the central shed area of a massive barn (pictured), smaller blue stone barn, decrepit house, brick well, shearing shed and other outbuildings in a about 5 acres of parkland of mature cedars, cypress, oaks, elms and other established old world trees. The farm was kind of divided into separate “rooms” which could have provided great seperation between activities such as the more industrial greenhouse and smaller scale market gardening and activities with a greater tourism focus.

What did I do wrong

Oh so many things.

I’m not a natural people person. I’ve worked very hard to get good at public speaking and am now quite a confident speaker, or at least I look like a confident speaker. Talking individually to people on the other hand is another matter. I’ve worked very hard to be able to “network” but still today few things scare me more than walking up to a stranger or even people I know and saying hello. I know that such shyness isn’t unusual and lots of people have similar challenges but it is what it is. Naturally I’m more of a numbers and process person so getting on with “the work” is easier than building relationships that would have been invaluable to the success of the project. A while ago I made the mistake of taking part in a research survey assessing “normal” peoples place on the Austism spectrum. Let’s just say the results were not pleasant even though in hindsight they were not a surprise. Being only too human I took the easy route and threw myself at the work rather than building a team first.

I didn’t actively market the project beyond the first contact. I took people at face value that when they said they “had no other way of affording land” and the “only thing” holding people back was access to land. Believing that this was in fact true and a primary motivating factor was very much coloured by my own experience and my own desperate desire to get back onto the land after searching for years. Which isn’t to say that people lied or anything but together we found that there were actually a significant number of other things holding people back. Not just access to land. I failed to appreciate that peoples circumstances were so radically different from mine. Not engaging with people more, not building a regular flow of information and communication, not testing their readiness meant that these other issues remained undiscovered and therefore undealt with until we were ready to buy the land. By which time it was too late to remedy the situation.

I didn’t ask for enough help and I offered to do and provide too much. Given the initial support for the idea I thought that all I needed to do was arrange the finance and coordinate the investment and enough people would jump on board. I was actually worried about disappointing people for whom we wouldn’t have had room. In hind sight this was naive. From the very beginning I should have said that for the project to work I would need help. That I would need people on the team, that peoples engagement was crucial for the project to go ahead. At various times I did try and communicate this but even to me even in the early days people didn’t seem to be getting that part of the message. Instead of soldiering on at that point I should have pulled back and stated firmly that this was not my project. While I did say that I was going to be a co-farmer along with everyone else I believe that everyone saw this as my project when in fact Fish Farmers was and is my project and Hedgerow Farm is a means to get Fish Farmers and a bunch of other people access to land.

I didn’t really emphasise all the extra benefits that would come from joining the farm. I mentioned them but because I didn’t get that engagement with various potential co-farmers the extra benefits didn’t get discussed as much as they should have. Therefore I’m not sure that people truly understood. I explained that Hedgerow Farm would be like a co-working space in the city except for farmers instead of office workers but I don’t think people did more than intellectually understand that that would be “a good” thing. Therefore I believe that the awesome benefits of co-locating from such things as shared marketing, processing and distribution, improved OH&S (in particular mental health), opportunities for collaboration, availability of mentors and an on farm labour pool and the potential for on farm additional employment were not truly appreciated. Similarly for people who wanted to buy their own land Hedgerow was a compromise. I thought that their inability to do so would be enough motivation for them to make the compromise. Therefore I didn’t emphasise how Hedgerow Farm could facilitate people eventually buying their own land. I don’t think that they appreciated how much more accessible a bank loan would be once they had developed an enterprise with an established cash flow, established market and a healthy financial history.

There are probably a bunch of other things I did wrong that I haven’t mentioned such as our social media strategy and effort but the biggest one was that I fundamentally failed to appreciate how big a job the whole project was.

In addition to all the amazingly productive land there was this two storey blue stone barn. Not sure what we would have used it for but it was a gem. Solid as a rock, hand hewn timber beams and vaulted upper chamber.

But why didn’t it work?

While I did many things wrong that is not the reason why the project hasn’t gone ahead.

Fundamentally the reason the project hasn’t gone ahead is because it didn’t serve the needs of the potential co-farmers. It didn’t solve the problem that truly was what was ultimately holding people back. By solving the obvious problem of access to land we revealed that there were in fact other issues, other things that people needed to overcome in order to realise their dreams of becoming farmers. I believe that ultimately that what people needed to overcome was their emotions.

Starting any business is scary and there are a whole host of things you need to learn and characters you need to posses or cultivate. Personal fortitude and emotional resilience not being least among those things. With farming though there are a mass of extra overlying issues in addition to the normal fears and trepidations of starting any sort of business. Once we solved the physical and financial problem of access to land I believe the following three emotional barriers came into play:

1. A dream is perfect, reality has warts.

For many of the potential co-farmers as long as their farming dream was a dream it was perfect. As soon as it became a reality on a particular piece of land it got real and scary. From my perspecitive it seemed that their commitment was to an ideal, a literal dream not an actual thing that they wanted to do with life starting right the hell now. Many of the aspiring farmers were actually pretty comfortable working as labourers or at city jobs and so as soon as the idea of getting started became uncomfortable they drew back from the dream.

2. Leasing land was never the dream.

For almost everyone I talked to it wasn’t merely farming that was the dream but the lifestyle of living, working and raising a family on the farm that was the dream. That means that all Hedegrow Farm offered was the chance to work but not actually reliase the dream. Intellectually I have no doubt that they could see that Hedgerow Farm could be a stepping stone to that dream but emotionally I believe they could not. Even when looking at properties with multiple titles which under the Victorian planing scheme would allow the prospect of two dwellings per title the lack of certainty about being able to live on the property seemed to be a serious negative for people. Again intellectually people agreed with the sentiment of farming in a more European manner where its common for people to work on the farm but live in the village but emotionally this did not resonate. Interestingly not even with people who where fans of such endeavors or cooperatives like Mondragon in Spain. I’m nor sure if this was because Hedgerow wasn’t a cooperative or if it was that as much as they liked the idea of cooperatives they still wanted their own farm.

This may be why most of the potential co-farmers or tenants who stuck were those people that wanted to run non farming businesses or wanted to expand farming business on to land where they had no expectation of living. These were the people that remained committed to the project. Sadly though there wasn’t enough of them.

3. Lack of business planning.

This might seem like an educational barrier but the way it appeared to play out revealed it to be an emotional barrier. Talking with various successful small scale farmers you often hear that they fall into two different groups.

The first group consists of those people who have conducted exhaustive research and planning. Not that they have thought of everything or even know half of what they need to know to farm successfully. The only way to do that is to get started. The point is that they have gone through an extensive planning process. What this mean emotionally is that they have invested a huge amount of work into their farming business before they get anywhere near ready to start. That means that when something happens that challenges their emotions there is a lot of weight pushing them through their fear. There is also a system that they have developed to deal with that fear. More research, more study, more planning. Ultimately such people still have to master their emotions overcome their fear and get started otherwise they are perpetual planners. However, if someone invests a significant amount of time and effort into business planning its actually quite rare that they don’t get started sooner of later.

The second group of people are those that got into farming because of passion. Such people may have done a bit of WWOOFing, may have done a farm internship or two but many of them haven’t even done that. Certainly they haven’t done much if any business planning. They are excited and acting purely on their emotions. Many of our best small scale and regenerative farmers that are kicking major goals fall into this group. They got started on enthusiasm and succeeded by perseverance and quickly learning what they needed to know on the job. Tammi Jonas of Jonai Farms tells the story that they decided to buy a farm and become farmers after going to see Joel Salatin speak. Having bought a farm they soon realised that they needed to build and repair some fences. The first time they walked their local farm supplier and saw the array of fencing materials and tools they didn’t even have the first clue what to ask for let alone what to do with them. They have gone on to become one of the leaders of the small scale farming movement in Australia but their leap into farming was driven by their passion.

One of the most common questions I was asked was

“how much does the land cost?”

My response was to explain that the process was that we were putting together a deal. Until all the pieces were in place things were fluid and open to negotiation. We needed a deal that would work for both farmers and investors. Therefore there was a great scope and ability to tailor costs and returns to suit both parties. The ultimate costs would ultimately be dependent on the farm purchased but to give an indicative idea I said:

“I’m building a greenhouse which once we get going will be very productive so I can afford about $3000/acre but I only need about 5 acres. The broad acre organic farmer has told me that he can afford $200-$500/acre but he needs a minimum of 50 acres.”

So far so good…..

“What does your business plan tell you you can afford per acre?”

And now we have a problem. Very, very few people could answer that question. Those that could are still on the list of potential tenants or co-farmers. Those that couldn’t have disappeared. What I believe happened was that they were suddenly confronted with the fact that they didn’t know something they needed to know. That laid a seed of fear which made them uncomfortable and when people are uncomfortable they tend to run away. Rather than deal with this issue and solve it by solving the knowledge gap, they left. Rather than pushing through the emotions of embarrassment and fear they ran away. On the grape vine (Face Book) one of these people is still saying that the only thing holding them back is access to land yet they have never spoken to me since the day I asked them about their business plan.

Emotional Intelligence is a crucial

Now I’m a very rational person. I’m a scientist by training I’m probably more accurately described as an agricultural engineer these days but regardless I’m heavily influenced by my emtions. As much as I am a numbers person, a process person, a logical person. Yet I know without any shadow of a doubt that more often than not if I’m not ruled by my emotions then I’m certainly strongly influenced by them. Having studied some psychology I know this for a fact. Anyone that thinks that their emotions are not influencing their decisions on a daily basis needs to talk scientists that research marketing methods. Its truly scary sometimes. This is of course why very intelligent companies spend such a large amount of money on advertising. Even those companies that are marketing products to “well educated and intelligent” customers. They do it because it works. Unless you pay a lot of attention to how and why you are responding and thinking the way you are, you are often being led into decisions by your emotions.

Even knowing this it wasn’t until I faced my own unconformable emotional responses that I suddenly had the insight to why so many people were not following through on their farming dreams. When the tilt at a farm in March fell apart I had a bit of a rant and vent on Face Book. In response a number of people contacted me offering me land. Or at least offering a chance to talk to them about land. Some I said no to just because of the terms, others because the land wasn’t suitable. One of them though I thought would work. However, as soon as I thought that I started to come up with reasons why to say no. Good reasons. Logical reasons. It wasn’t until I examined what my emotions were doing that I realised why I was coming up with all these objections. At that point I realised the principal reason why Hedgerow Farm had failed to get off the ground. I’d spent all my efforts solving the physical and financial problems when what I should have been doing is building relationships to help people overcome their fear.

In addition to the blue stone barn there was also this timber frame barn that was much larger at over 1,000 m2 with a concrete floor through out. It would have been amazing and useful for so many things. From providing a covered space for major events and workshops to general farm use. Unlike a steel frame shed the timber frame was stunning. In addition to the excellent sheds we also saw about another 5 bores and two wells in addition to the two bores that were equipped with pumps.

What Next

Well the land option I said yes to is still a work in progress it may be an option but it hasn’t worked out yet. So I’m still looking for land. As of writing this I’ve just spent the last couple of days at the National Community Food Hubs Conference. Met some great people and some new offers of land are coming out of those connections. The best/soonest one to pan out I’ll probably have to take. Which means that the vision of Hedgerow Farm may have to be changed or cast adrift. When I first came up with the idea of Hedgerow I didn’t have an investor for Fish Farmers. Therefore the plan was that if I could get Hedgerow up and running I would then have a solid fixed point on which to stand, move forward and get Fish Farmers started even if I just had to boot strap it. Something I could do if I had a secure lease.

Now I do have an investor. Well I’ve got an investor telling me he wants to invest. I’m not holding my breath because I’ve been in this situation before but its looking very promising. It does add a certain urgency to the need to find land though. This investor is talking about the possibility of buying land as well but it would be a property to suit Fish Farmers and his needs. There may be opportunities for others to join us on this piece of land but there may not.

The vision as I originally saw it of Hedgerow Farm providing a means for me and a whole stack of others to access land is still possible. Indeed the largest potential investor in Hedgerow Farm form the very first meeting started saying Hedgerow FARMS not Farm. If enough people where to come together we could still pull it off but…….

As of right now its not my project. If other people want to join me then we can do it together but I am not going to be taking it forward by myself. If I don’t get any volunteers and I still want to support the idea of helping people get access to land then Ill offer my services to one of the other programs with similar aims that are trying to get off the ground.

The guys at the Farmer Incubator are doing great work and I’ve spoken to them previously about the possibility of their graduates finding a home at Hedgerow. Similarly Sam Marwood of Cultivate farms is doing great work and we have spoken a number of times about how I was starting at the bottom of this problem while he was starting at the top. It may be possible for Hedgerow to be a Cultivate Farm farm or it may be more appropriate for me to just join another farm that Sam is trying to get setup.

Just the day before I met Rob Fenton who has already setup a farm as an educational farm teaching the kinds of farming that I wanted to see grow on Hedgerow. The problem is his students learn all these great methods and then many of them don’t have a place to go to get started. So maybe we can work together. I don’t know I haven’t even spoken to him yet beyond a 5 minute conversation.

A lot of people have also asked me why don’t I just shelve it for a while. Come back to Hedgerow once Fish Farmers is making money. Well I could and I probably will but it won’t be the same. One of the enduring disappointments in my life is that I wasn’t able to share my family farm. My brother and I had very different ideas on what we wanted to do with the land and ultimately the succession plan we worked out was that he would get the land while I would get access to the equity to but my own place. Unfortunately the banks had other ideas so that didn’t work. But one of the things that has always been very important to me about farming was sharing the farm with other people.

The thing that got me excited about Hedgerow was that it wouldn’t be my farm. It would be a farm that I would share. Not just with friends and family but with a community made up of visitors, eaters and other farmers. I wanted my own space to do my own thing but right next door I wanted other people doing their thing which I could celebrate and share. If we get Hedgerow off the ground in the next while then all the co-farmers that get started together will form a family. Even those crusty already established individualistic farmers that just want their own space to expand and not need nor want to talk to anyone else on the next plot will form part of that family or community. I might have started this idea but I would just be one of many co-farmers giving it a go. If I come back to Hedgerow when I’m in a position to just buy a farm and then open it up to people it’ll be different. It will still be cool and I’ll still be helping people but I won’t be part of the gang.

I’ll be their land lord.

I’m going to give Hedgerow a good crack till after the Farm Co-operatives and Collaboration Forum at the end of the month. So about mid September I think I’ll make the call.

So over to you. If you would like to join me on this adventure that would be great but in the mean time I’ve got work on Fish Farmers that needs to be done.

God bless and happy farming either now or in the future.

Stuart

If you would like to take part in making this dream happen as a farmer or as a supporter then please click on the survey monkey link and complete the survey that it will take you to.