FROM CRISIS TO KINSHIP: HEALING PEOPLE AND PLACE
Inspired by Fordhall Organic Farm in Shropshire // Photography by Aaron Schuman // Poetry by Jasmine Gardosi // Published with GRAIN Projects as an immersive book
Fordhall Organic Farm is the first community-owned farm in England. Ben and Charlotte Hollins inherited the tenancy from their father: organic pioneer, Arthur Hollins. In 2006, aged just 19 and 21, they led a campaign that inspired citizens the world over to save it from development. The 140-acre Shropshire site is now one of Britain’s longest-standing chemical-free farms, and the only one with 8000 landlords.
This act of encouraging the collective can be contrasted with industrial agriculture’s approach to producing food, which supresses other members of an ecosystem. Ben and Charlotte’s reimagining of ownership is a radical reflection of regenerative agriculture itself, empowering complex communities to self-organise towards greater interdependence, diversity and resilience.
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Our symbiotic relationship with the land and community produces an ever evolving, truly collaborative way of working“
Fordhall Organic Farm
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This work shows the importance of immersing oneself in, and cultivating an intimate connection to, the natural world, by being open and present within it.“
Aaron Schuman, photographer
As well as being a working livestock farm, Fordhall is also a trailblazing ‘care farm’. Vulnerable young people, those with learning disabilities and others seeking to reconnect with nature: Fordhall’s volunteers bring a plurality of perspectives to the work of planting trees, growing vegetables and seeding wildflowers.
Each person develops a relationship with place that is reciprocal; research has found that regenerative farmers undergo a transformative change in mindset, through an openness to learning from the land. The continual curiosity and adaption that’s required can free us from dominant norms, which so often marginalise diverse ways of seeing and being in the world. People and place become. Together.
Photography Gallery
