Lovely Muck: Saving a Shropshire Farm

During our daily review of news sites for our digest, Dairy Queen discovered that two siblings are selling shares to save their father's organic farm in England. The farm is in north Shropshire, a county made famous by the poems of A. E. Housman, and it has followed organic practices for over 50 years. The late Arthur Hollins operated the farm for 76 years and is considered a pioneer of the British organic movement.

The movement to save the farm began in the 1990s, when the neighboring yogurt factory expressed an interest in expanding onto the land occupied by the farm. The Hollinses were tenant farmers and fought for a decade to avoid eviction, ultimately winning a reprieve in 2003 on the basis of Arthur Hollins' national reputation and because of the farm's historic standing as an example of organic farming. The Hollinses received an 18-month lease followed by a 1-year extension to prove that they could make a going concern of the farm. (Fighting legal battles had depleted their funds, and the national outbreak of hoof-and-mouth in 2001 didn't help either.)

Since their 2003 victory, Arthur Hollins died and his youngest children moved to the forefront to preserve the farm. They did not have the resources to buy the farm, so they took a different approach and founded the Fordhall Community Land Initiative. The goal of the Initiative is to secure the assets of Fordhall Farm, preserve community access to the farm, and promote sustainable organic farming methods. How can two people in their early 20s hope to raise £800,000 through the Initiative to purchase the farm? They are selling shares in the farm: the equivalent of 32 square meters for £50, or about US$90. As of today, they need only £71,000.

I bought my share Monday evening.

What in the hell prompted me to buy a share in a farm that is over 4,600 miles away from where I live? Why do I think that you lot should sacrifice a couple of pub dinners out with your sweetie or a wine-and-cheese shopping extravaganza at Whole Foods (or Andronico's for you Bay Area types)?

Two words: Community. Idealism.

Before I explain, I have to admit a small secret in regard to my nom de beurre on this blog. I have never read Cervantes' novel (though I own a leather-bound copy) nor Graham Greene's Man of La Mancha. (The Cohen brothers did not read The Odyssey before making O Brother, Where Art Thou, so I don't feel too bad.)

My sense of idealism comes not from one or two books but from a lifetime of influences. I rely on family, a community of friends, and the Butter Bitch to temper my idealism with practicality if I chuck practicality out the window. Sometimes, practicality is a bore, but other times practicality meshes nicely with idealism. Sometimes, idealism is just a form of practicality that others have not accepted.

The Hollinses chose organic practices when pesticides and artificial fertilizers were in vogue. Over five decades later, they have turned to the old standby — the community partnership — to preserve their farm, a nice mix of idealism and practicality. The old practice was to form a grange for community support. The new practice is to form a land trust to preserve the land.

This does not answer why I would take part in an attempt so far from my locality. Isn't the point of ethical eating to support local producers? Yes and no. Locality is not a zero-sum game, in which I must support my local farmers and force you and your local farmers to starve and die. Locality is about maintaining sustainable agriculture to avoid making the planet inhospitable to the human species, eating healthy foods to promote our own health and welfare, and helping people in other locales do the same.

Community is about membership in something larger than oneself. I, like many others, participate in the global community in certain ways. Part of my community is electronic, extended by the Internet, and part of my community belongs to the number of places I have lived or visited. I support food banks, arts programs, and community services in three states and another country because I have ties to those communities and because I think it is the right thing to do. And because I have resources that can be sent to those places.

Why did West England make an odd connection in my brain? Shropshire is bordered by Herefordshire, England and Powys, Wales, two places that we visited 18 months ago. The photo above is from the village of Deerhurst, in Gloucestershire, just south of Herefordshire. We visited the countryside in early January, and I remember being surprised at the verdant fields and hillsides. I had chosen the village because the church dates back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and because my Idaho grandmother's great-grandfather, John Cox, was born in the village. I mixed site-seeing with a bit of family history and brought back photographs for her and a sense of appreciation for the land that that part of the family had left behind.

Powys is the part of Wales bordering this part of England. We stayed just across the border in Hay-on-Wye, home to more than three dozen bookstores and a scant 1500 people. The rolling English countryside turns into Welsh mountains on the way to the Irish Sea. We walked outside the Welsh village along the Wye River and spotted a small sheep farm (and bed-and-breakfast, we later discovered). Before I looked at the pictures of Fordhall Farm, I could imagine what the land would look like, and I decided that I would like to join their community, too.

You might wonder why I would support a farm in England but not help a farm closer to home or in a country that could benefit greatly from organic farming methods. I thought about that, too, while writing this post, and made a donation to PCC Farmland Trust. I haven't found an organization that is preserving farmland or converting conventional farmland to organic methods in third-world countries, but I welcome the information. We'll just cook at home more often.

I can imagine what community means to the Hollins children, who at 24 and 21 are undertaking the fulfillment of a grander vision than that of most people I know. I saw the ghosts of that community when I visited my grandparents' farm site and the small towns in Idaho, and I hear that community echoed whenever my family talks of the farm.

Buying into the Fordhall Community Land Initiative is furthering the goals of a community that I hope to visit and the idealism that I think is important for us to embrace. What happens if they fail to raise the total amount needed? In my case, the money will be donated to a British wildlife fund, but you can choose to have the money refunded or donated to two other causes. I should add that one will gain no profit from shareholding, but that owning a share gives the owner an equal vote at the annual meeting.

Preserving land for organic methods is one way to undo the past century of unhealthy food production. Buying into land trusts may be a quixotic effort, a hopeless tilt at the windmill of Big Ag, no better than shopping at an organic store or a farmer's market.

If that is true, then why are you reading this site — for the recipes? Go ahead. Take a tilt at the windmill. It's fun.

Support Fordhall Farm.

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