We’re now on the River Cottage website where the People Fund It project is being promoted. Take a look here.
To meet our target we need to raise £500 a day over the next 50 days – please do your bit to help and pledge anything from £10. Thanks for your support!
The Community Farm’s share offer is open until 29th February 2012.
For as little as £50 you could become a co-owner of a farm for the future. You can invest anything from £50 to £20,000 and will have a say in how the farm runs and priority bookings on Community Farmer Days and special events.
We already have over 450 members who have raised £170,000 through community shares enabling us to take over an existing growing and box scheme business. We now want to be able to offer more access to the farm through volunteer days, education and training and providing shelter, hot water and basic facilities. We also really, really need a new tractor to help with efficiency and a further £50,000 will help us on our way to doing all of these things. Please help if you can.
We have signed up to fundraise through the People Fund It website where you can make a donation of anything from £10 to support The Community Farm. The three minute video has been put together by Gabriel Gilson who volunteered his time to do this for the Farm and also includes some video clips from Jez Toogood. Have a watch and let us know what you think. Please share this information as far and wide as you can – it would be fantastic to reach the target we’ve set!
Backers so far:
Anna-Louise Batchelor; Chewmoos-Ice-Cream; Kath Dalmeny; John Dawson, Farmer Bass; Luke Hasell; Phil Haughton; David Hunter; Nick James; Justin L.A. Kirby; Hugh Knowles; Jake Lea-Wilson; Jeanette Longfield, Mel, David Ransom, Shines, Spettifer, Suzanne.
Today, a beautiful crisp winter’s day, Helen Taylor and Paul Sergeant from Ecotricity visited the farm along with Lorna Knapman from Love Food. Andy told them all about the land and the growing. It was great to be able to show them our lovely little piece of the Chew Valley and the pigs made us very welcome!
Luke recently spoke at the Oxford Real Food Conference. Here’s a short write up from him:
“An obvious title to a very interesting Conference. The urgency behind a complete re-think to our agricultural systems has never been more important and we need the public to work alongside the producers in changing the way in which we consume. I was invited along to talk about my experiences in developing producer-consumer relationships and how local communities can come together for mutual benefit. It was interesting to listen to other enterprises that have carried out similar initiatives because it made me realise that there is also a long, long way to go to make a more diverse farming system more prevalent.