This writing aims to honestly communicate some of the ‘start up’ story of Middle Ground Growers, the ups and downs, whirlwinds and resistances, all the rich harvests and challenges involved in starting an enterprise and farm from scratch. I really can’t imagine any path more wild and exciting, any path that could teach such depth of lessons. This farming journey has been far more wildly alive than any of my travels (from middle east to south asia), any psychefelic experience, any life changing moment… There is much we stand to lose as we disconnect from the land, as society unplugs from the web of life and into the world wide web of internet, phones and AI. There is much to lose, and we must reclaim the land connection that roots right action and motivation. But we also have so much to improve if we are to get things right and restore a human-earth relationship in reciprocity. I write this account of starting a farming career from honest and raw personal experiences in order to both shine a light on the systemic, economic and cultural barriers, and to offer insight for new growers and land stewards. Neither a word of warning or a manifesto of blind idealism, but something that honestly weaves the immense joy of growing with its realistic challenges, its nitty gritty purpose and worldly richness - hope with its sleeves rolled up. I truly believe this is the most important and exciting moment to be entering farming, right livelihood and ecological regeneration – it’s what we’re here on earth to do at this time. And to make this accessible and attractive to a wider populace we need to confront, sit with and alchemise the current barriers that operate at macro and micro scales.
I went back to visit our old land site recently, the place where this all started – Dry Arch Growers. The lands which we and other stewards cared for and cultivated years before our now main growing site now at Weston Spring Farm. I walked into Dry Arch for the first time as a teenager, returning wild eyed from travelling and excited to get involved in growing projects and community building. I was amazed at the land’s beauty, abundance - the beautiful projects, people, community gardens and orchard volunteer groups operating from this 6 acre paradise. Much to learn from the land and the skilled custodians here. I also noticed a need, a call from both the land and the people here for more support, for helping their work, and I gladly answered the call and offered my physical energy, work and some limited farming experience every week for some years, whilst I also completed a degree and worked on other organic farms in the area, living on my tiny 20ft narrowboat next to the community allotment.
I reached a point of wanting/needing to make this a livelihood and a long-term form of activism. This came after the tough lessons of burning out from the typical environmental activism – amd a deep intention to be part of solutions on the ground as well as the necessary opposition on the streets. But this livelihood farming was seemingly at odds with the existing volunteer-based projects and also at odds with the economy that puts farmers at the bottom, creates barriers to new entrants and provides little training or support mechanisms. This forced a rather stretched and stressed approach to starting a farming career, but I was willing to give it a go for love of the land and the work, fuelled by witnessing the greater purpose of growing ecological food for community delivered by bike, bringing much joy and health to the area. I managed to gain some access to a couple of acres adjacent to the community allotment on which I volunteered. This was on a limited and insecure one year lease - costing me 10 times the average per acre agricultural lease, and with the responsibility of all the upkeep, maintenance, repair and costs. This is the way too often for tenant farmers and growers, at the mercy of an unfair power dynamic simply because they are desperate for access to land to grow food for community. Those that are driven to do this work are often not the same people who are endowed with the resources and land.
However, I made the most of it, started an abundant no-dig market garden on a shoestring budget of less than £7k initially. I remember the sheer joy and excitement to deliver the first box of produce, just some greens and beetroot to the local shop. I was so excited for Monday morning, I would rise hours before daybreak and prep the produce perfectly, totally mesmerised by the idea that this could be my livelihood, that I might just make it work against all the odds. Then it really took off when aligned friends joined the mission, giving their time to support, grow and learn together in this little paradise plot of land with abundant fruit trees, chickens, veg growing, beehives, bike delivered food boxes, on farm market stall, tree nursery and much more - largely thanks to the care of the existing community groups on the land. We had a shared wider vision of food system change and lots of these plots cropping up around the bioregion, but we started small and gave all our love to this small 2 acre plot.
We tended this land for years as best we could, stretched with the pressures of making organic growing commercially viable and struggling to pay people properly for the first 2 years, let alone invest in the set-up, land and equipment needed to run an operation efficiently, tidily and aligned to values. But towards the end of the second year, thanks to great community support and an abundance of produce from our ecological growing methods (no-till organic agroforestry), we managed to make enough income to begin developing livelihoods and enterprise by year 3. We cleared bramble monocultures of land, took dozens of trailer loads to the skip from previous land-user waste, tidied and cared for the land as if it were our own. The land gave back, abundantly, we grew incredible yields of fresh organic produce in no-dig beds between rows of mature fruit trees, ponds and food forests. It was a place of great beauty, with deafening dawn chorus, nearly year-round fruit, diverse food production and a hive of sub-projects and activities from beekeeping to tree nurseries to forest schools. I remember hosting each generation of new bird chicks each year, the wrens in particular stand out as they nested on my boat for 3 years in a row, and then the next generation of chicks nested in the farm cabin and orchard, and before we knew it there was the breathtaking loud call of the tiny wren surrounding us wherever we worked around the plot. The day was interspersed with these moments of wonder, from murmurations of birds to the slither of snakes under the woodchip pile, to the gentle sound of frogs coming in from the pond to keep the slugs in check. The call of the snowy owl marked the end of the day, along with neighbour Brian’s guitar on his front doorstep, and laughter and hugs between those working the land together. And special days were marked by a celebratory sip of Tim & Keith’s & orchardshare’s homemade orchard cider and sozzled damsons!
The energy of growing obsessed us all, as friends and other growers joined in support, giving us resource to launch a veg box scheme (delivering 30 boxes by bike), a weekly on-farm market and delivering to many local shop and restaurant outlets in Bath. We then doubled numbers and growing each year for 3 years, reaching 180 veg boxes by 2024 managed by 7 living wage employees and now thankfully on more secure land with long term visions unfolding. Due to both the collaborative nature of our project, good planning/organisation and the wide community support and momentum, the project took off and became economically viable, our innovative and inspiring model hitting mainstream national news even! I’ve written about the success factors and we run workshops on this to support new entrant growers to learn from our mistakes and successes to make it work for them. I’ve also written about some of our challenges as we grew, hitting the broken systems of planning policy, economics and entitlement culture. This post aims to weave both sides of the coin together, and draw the lessons we can harvest in order to support new entrants better.
I funded myself and the business in the early years by a safety cushion. Not the usual cushion of previous wealth or endowments, but a more unusual cushion of a largely self-sufficient lifestyle and a permaculture lens on living. I lived on a tiny solar powered narrowboat and grew most of my own food, with very few living costs (less than £300 per month total) and a student loan payment coming in each month - this was largely used to start the business (in my unique absence of the usual student costs of halls, bills and alcohol). Even with this input of £3500 per year, the business was largely started from scratch, from an economics of thrift, upcycling materials, minimising inputs and a lot of enthusiastic manual labour from myself and incredible friends, volunteers and community. So I learned the possibility of starting out from near nothing, and the potential of this is huge given the impact of our projects now. If finance could be redirected to provide a small start up provision of £3-10k for new growers and market gardens (althouhg ideally more), we could really create local food systems from the ground up, in a short period of time. And hopefully with this small injection of capital combined with food choice shifts and weakening of barriers, new growers will experience less of the stress and stretched-ness that we were forced into for the start up years. It has also been an incredibly joyful and pursposeful journey, and the best leap i've ever taken in my life.
We had to cut corners, do things imperfectly, make mistakes, take compromises and ultimately make decisions from a place of scarcity rather than our ideal values. Second lesson, after the ‘economics of thrift’ lesson, came the ‘mindset of compromise’. As non-ideal as it sounds, this mindset shift allowed me to move from idealistic dogmas and ‘stuckness’ to a more pragmatic movement in the direction of our goals. Still informed by values and doing our best, but able to operate in today’s world. Small things like dropping the ineffective compostable packaging meant the quality of our produce increased, and allowed us to reach a stage of now investing in better quality materials and cyclical resource flows within our business, ultimately reducing the alternative of mass single use plastic from supermarkets. Don’t let perfect become the enemy of progress. And don’t take this too far, for it can then become its own dogma with its own dangers, thus leading to mission drift. Allow a level of compromise to keep moving, but don’t compromise too much on the why or water down your mission beyond repair. Staying rooted in our why was critical, and created a critical mass of support for our project eventually enabling us to raise £100k to start a larger farm on our co-owned and secure land. We review and come back to the mission and vision as a team on a seasonal basis, and the very collaborative nature of the project now means that we can stick to our mission, vision and values more than ever before. But it took some compromise in the early years, and some imperfectness on the road towards meaningful change.
Beyond the economic struggles, the more nuanced and insidious cultural forces of resistance were perhaps greater barriers, but more difficult to put into words. These operate from the personal (zone 1) to the systemic (zone 5) levels, and are often the greatest barriers I have witnessed in new growers and start ups. At zone 1, at the personal level exists our own inner cultural resistances, growing up in a western culture that sees work as negative, manual labour as backwards, farming as something for the less intelligent at school… and other inner cultural tendencies towards individualism, separation from nature, and not trusting our intuition (the number one skill in growing). Compounded by the culture of perfectionism, neatness, simplicity and linearity that is at largely at odds with the complex beauty and resilient diversity of natural farming. The most powerful zone 1 barriers are the limits we put on ourselves, the dumbing down reinforced by top-down schooling, the lack of self-belief and the inner critique that is goes unchallenged too often.
In zone 2, the interpersonal level, similar and new cultural differences bought healthy challenges and growth curves, through dynamic tensions that come with any deeply embedded team and collaboration; differences in privilege and upbringing, approach to labour, pace of work, ways of communicating, ideologies of anarchy and consensus, lifestyle vs livelihood farming and many more creative tensions are lived and explored in collaboration - yielding much learning and insight that we do not discover on an individual path. Then, in wider spheres, zone 3 of cultural inertia, we faced wider challenges in our own circles and communities of stakeholders. Tensions between neighbouring volunteer-based projects and the necessary pace and upscaling of our own livelihood-based operation. At the heart of many challenges, learning how to communicate better, clearer, without assumptions. The miscommunications, often from myself, often in rushed non-consideration of other perspectives, is perhaps the greatest lesson of all (lesson 4: overcommunicating is always better than under communicating! And never assume). There’s a difficult truth that all meaningful change comes with great resistance, letting go and shifts. This pattern plays out on so many levels, and there will always be gatekeepers of the old, midwives of new, creative disruptors, tricksters and ‘villains’ in each story.
The ecosystem of change does not lend itself to good/bad or right/wrong, but instead requires a diversity of perspectives, drives and inputs in order to be transformational, and to minimise harm in its process. And it won’t happen perfectly, we are human, navigating difficult times – so we need to stick together in our diversity, not put walls up and discourage each other. Lesson 5; we need to allow ourselves and each other the grace of mistakes, and space to create and experiment. Especially for young people, learning to grow and breaking into farming; for those wanting to do things differently to some previous models of destructive agriculture, we need to cultivate space for this, and not reject young people’s passion as naivety or blind rashness, or expect perfectness. I had to overcome and transform so much cynicism, criticism, rejection, failure (from my own internal critique and from others). Too much to count, some of it incredibly useful and pivotal offered lovingly by mentors and friends – and some of it communicated through spite or cynicism, based on other people’s insecurities, fear of change and sometimes envy. Lesson 6 ; develop a skin thick enough to move through cynicism, but thin enough to really feel feedback and harvest the lessons, face up to consequences with accountability, and move/grow through it. And perhaps the most important skill to cultivate through this: Discernment. Knowing the true teachers, allies and friends on this path and surrounding yourself by them in mutual collaboration.
And finally there is zone 4 - the wider systems we operate in (economic, political, social) and zone 5 - the meta-systems that design them (worldviews, cosmology, stories). I have borrowed the zones concept from Permaculture, and applied to this path of new entrant farmers (and wider workers for a more beautiful future) starting from the level of the personal which we encounter every day and zooming out to the wider meta-systems we operate within. All the zones are connected and we are probably influenced by all of them much of the time. But starting with zone 1 and noticing our own inner culture, be it resistance to change, fear, inner critic or individualism bias, we can examine and transform this over time which reaps the most reward for our day to day life-work and being. As we move out to the wider zones, we can transform how we relate and overcome barriers together in the interpersonal levels, alchemising these into synergies and mutual understanding, again and again. Then further out into the systemic, to which we must engage also, for these structures are often the most limiting factor or barrier, and likewise with great potential to be transformed into leverage points and possibilities for new entrant growers to thrive. For all regenerative work to thrive, and to give us a chance to save this sinking ship from the precipice of ecological and social collapse. We can do it, if we work on these different levels, and live the lessons, then support the next iteration to perhaps be more supported, more harmonious, more aligned. We may not fully change ‘the system’ or see the full fruits of this labour in our lifetimes, but we may cultivate better soil and healthier conditions so that the next generations can grow and thrive. This is what it means to be tomorrow’s ancestor, and to ‘plant the trees under whose shade we may never sit’. Just as we have been blessed with fruits, freedoms and potentialities that our ancestors made possible.
I feel this cycle on our micro-dance with land and growing. We had the chance to work and steward land at dry arch which got us going, albeit imperfectly, and under whose fruits we fed and grew a fertile business which now supports many people. I may not have started with any money or resource, but the fertile soils, skilled people and the abundant fruits of that orchard and people at dry arch were food for the soul, and lessons that cannot be learnt in books. We sat under many a tree planted by the ancestors of the family who owned the land, and we now plant seeds and trees for tomorrow on other lands.
The land never ceases to give. The land at dry arch was my greatest teacher, and still teaches me lessons. I visited recently to pick up some materials I had ashamedly left un-tidied upon leaving last year. It was saddening and moving to see that without our care, after being removed from the lands, parts of the land appeared sick. The trees diseased, the brambles overtaken in monoculture, the flowers and diversity that we sowed all but gone, the quietness of the nature, and the lack of people moving through the land each day – pathways once walked regularly by all ages 0-100 now inaccessible. There is still great beauty here of course, and nature will likely regenerate herself over time, and the neighbouring community allotment still flourishes. The land here that has been my greatest teacher, friend, companion – it was painfully illuminating to see after separation the deterioration, like seeing a sick family member in hospital after they were in such good health and vitality not so long ago.
The land still teaching me lessons, like love does in absence as well as presence, a lesson so powerful that it may direct the rest of my life and work – that we can be good custodians of place, and we can be good ancestors, passing on a more vibrant nature than we found. This was something I knew intellectually and had tasted to an extent from our ecological farming work, and the changes witnessed at Weston Spring Farm. Now with some more land care experience I can see the patterns unfolding on our land, with results from soil health, ecology, carbon sequestration and biodiversity indicating an immense regeneration, all the while we grow weekly food for hundreds of people. This hopeful reality hits home in miraculous and painful ways, when we see the beauty of regeneration but also when we see the sad state of destruction and ecological grief playing out in the world. This is a theme across the UK and the globe as traditional custodians are pushed off their land by corporate buy outs, developers and investors. But from engaging in the work and seeing the results and improvements, the greatest lesson through all of this is really hitting home in an embodied way: we, as humans, can be a beautiful force on earth. If we partner with life, listen to land and each other, we can regenerate and restore lands. This lived experience, and countless others around the world from earth-based cultures to ecological farmers, counters the arguments that humans are inevitable parasites on earth, or the indifference and apathy that denies any human-earth relationship. Instead, the lives experience of land custodians points to a different narrative and future, one of humans as regenerators of place, dancing with our imperfectness towards a paradise on earth.
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