This is an excerpt from ‘Common Treasures Book One: Land, Food and Farming’ (Little Toller Books, 2025) by Charlotte Hollins.

Fordhall Organic Farm stretches over 128 acres beside the River Tern in Shropshire, near the Welsh border. My family have been tenant farmers at Fordhall for centuries. My grandfather, Alfred Hollins, took on the farm when he married my grandmother, Lillian, who was born in the farmhouse in 1884. My brother Ben and I grew up on the farm. Everything about it was deeply familiar and, in that unexamined way of early childhood, ordinary. As children, Ben and I spent idyllic summers in fields and woods, and we got wet, dirty and freezing cold playing out till after dark in the winter. As children, we would sometimes go with Dad when he set off across the country to talk animatedly to one group or another about soil health and his particular passions, manure and worms. We would sit at the back and rock discontentedly on our community hall chairs: we had heard it all before.

My memories of the meals that were served in our farm restaurant are different: even as a small child, I knew something special was happening. Ben and I would sidle up to the warmth of a log fire while Dad held the diners’ rapt attention with anecdotes about his life on the farm and impromptu biology and ecology lessons. His enthusiasm was infectious, and good humour permeated the room. The table was piled with plates of whole food produced at Fordhall and cooked in our family kitchen. The room was full of laughter and grown-up conversation, and it was the warmest place in our draughty old farmhouse, where frost would sometimes form on the inside of the windows.

As a young adult, I spent time away from that farm studying, and during that time, I came to understand what an extraordinary place Fordhall Farm really is. Walking through the water meadows that reach down to the banks of the river or through the high sandy fields of permanent pasture, you can sense the density of life all around you. Pastures and hedges are full of plant life and buzzing with insects. The soil is spongy and soft and crumbles in your fingers, giving off that distinctive earthy smell that is so hard to capture and which seems to brim with both life and death.

For most of its history, Fordhall Farm had been managed as a traditional mixed farm. In the book that my father wrote about his life on the farm, The Farmer, The Plough and The Devil,¹ he describes Fordhall at the turn of the century as ‘a typical Welsh Marches mixed dairy farm. Much of the land was in permanent pasture to provide winter hay and summer grazing for a dozen cows, a small flock of sheep, some young stock and the few bullocks fattened for beef. The lowland by the river could only be used for grazing and some haymaking in summer when it had dried out sufficiently to carry the stock. Oats, barley, and turnips were grown to feed the animals during the winter, and the pigs were fed leftovers from the cheese-making process in the dairy.’

The soil was kept rich and fertile by a careful balance of clover and other herbal lays, crop rotations, and the introduction of manure and other leftovers from animal husbandry. At the outbreak of the First World War, lowland farmers were encouraged to reduce animal numbers and focus on a few essential crops, including wheat and potatoes. They were instructed to use large quantities of industrially produced fertilisers to increase yields. Initially, this significantly increased the profits made by many farms, including Fordhall, and there was an extraordinary feeling of prosperity. But this was short-lived. Under this new system, most of the fields were left bare during the winter. Fertilisers and continual planting of the same crops destroyed the soil structure and caused much of the topsoil to wash away. Yields began to collapse, and large areas succumbed rapidly to disease.

As the vitality of the farm was failing, my grandfather’s health was failing, too. The farm owed money to the bank, the landlord and the suppliers. Just over ten years after the end of the war, in 1929, my grandfather died. He was only 38, and after a period of uncertainty and struggle, my dad, Arthur Hollins, took on the management of the farm, aged only 13. He was convinced, perhaps as only a 13-year-old can be, that he could restore life to the fields. There were many false starts and difficult lessons, but the hard work had just begun to pay off when the Second World War broke out. Under the guidance of the War Agricultural Executive Committee (War Ag), Dad was forced to choose between agreeing to adopt intensive, monocultural farming methods or losing his tenancy. He adopted a mixed strategy, accepting the War Ag officer’s instructions where it couldn’t be avoided while secretly continuing with his efforts to rebuild the soil.

Still only a very young man, Dad started to read everything he could get his hands on. He worked through everything he was learning with his much older and experienced farm hand, Jim, who had been working at Fordhall since before my grandfather Alfred took charge. When the war ended, they finally had the freedom to farm as they wished, and together, they set about undertaking careful experiments with field management. Dad became increasingly interested in using pigs to add fertility to the soil. After many years of trial and error, he also worked out how to drain the water-logged fields along the river’s edge.

He wrote and lectured widely on the resultant system, which he called ‘Foggage Farming’. In this system, livestock are outside year-round and gain all their sustenance from grazing, moving in rotation from field to field. This allows a huge variety of grasses, herbs and wildflowers to become established, ensuring a rich and varied diet for livestock and a vibrant insect population. Rotation also ensures that no one pasture gets over-compacted or water-logged, and all the soil gets the benefit of regular manure. Foggage is based on ancestral practices used all over the world, but it was Dad who reintroduced it to the UK.

For many decades, Fordhall Farm thrived. There was a farmhouse restaurant, a small country club, the membership of which funded Dad’s research, and a wealth of visitors interested in organic farming, including everyone from the local Women’s Institute to busloads of children on school trips. But this prosperity wasn’t to last. The German Dairy giant Müller Dairy moved into a large plot next door in the 1990s. My brother Ben and I were still young children, and my father was already in his late seventies. From that moment onwards, there was always a risk, hovering in the background of our daily lives, that our landlord would try to sell to Müller.

Our tenancy was longstanding, however, and unlike many people who have taken on farm tenancies more recently, we were reasonably well protected through the Agricultural Holdings Act. As Ben and I progressed through primary and secondary school, our family moved into a dispiriting cycle. Our landlord would issue an eviction notice, my parents would fight it, and it would end up in the courts. This continued for over a decade. As time went on, more and more time and money had to be spent on the fight to keep the tenancy, and less and less was spent on the farm. By this stage, my father was in his early 80s, and this, combined with the protracted emotional and financial strain of constant legal battles, meant that the farm started to deteriorate.

This deterioration was a breach of tenancy, and so this last eviction notice was different from those which had come before. I am notoriously stubborn, not to mention optimistic, but even I had to admit that things looked pretty hopeless when I arrived home after graduating from university. Everything was a mess. My father was unwell, and my mother was struggling to cope with the unmanageable strain. The farm was in disorder, and the threat of eviction loomed over us. To demonstrate that we intended to make a fresh start, we set to work clearing up the farm. I was working full-time in a nursing home to help pay the bills and working on the farm before and after work. Ben was doing the same while studying full-time at an agricultural college.² In March 2004, with only two days before we were due to be evicted, my brother and I were granted a new short-term, eighteen-month lease, despite being only 21 and 19 years old at the time.

We were determined to use these 18 months to prove ourselves as farmers, and having grown up with the constant threat of eviction, if we were going to continue to pour all our energy into the farm, we knew that we needed to find a way to buy it. Sometimes, naivety works against you, and sometimes, it is on your side. As the first year of our 18-month tenancy was coming to an end, we felt energised. By opening the door to our community and asking for help, we made hundreds of new friends, opened a small farm shop in our shed, and made tremendous progress in cleaning up and clearing out the farm buildings and fixing the infrastructure. Thanks to a small low-interest loan from the Prince’s Trust, we started to rebuild the livestock levels that we knew from experience were crucial to maintaining the fertility of the land. We were confident we could bring the farm back to life. Now, we needed to secure it.

We organised a meeting of local people who all shared an interest in the future of Fordhall Farm. Their interests and experience varied significantly, from conserving the landscape and ecosystems and organic heritage to realising the farm’s potential as a community and educational resource. Working with friends and supporters in our community, we researched a range of different organisational set-ups that would be capable of protecting the land for organic farming in perpetuity, support our desire to give the local community access to land and enable us to farm without too much interference.

In the end, we set up a Charitable Community Benefit Society (CBS), which would own the land and offer us back a 100-year affordable agricultural tenancy whilst ensuring community access and accountability. The charitable status would help protect the farm’s mission and support any efforts to raise grant funding for community projects in the future. And, unlike a traditional charitable organisation, a CBS can raise money by selling non-profit-making shares. We called this new organisation Fordhall Community Land Initiative (FCLI). The idea was that the shareholders of FCLI would collectively own the land. We wanted the shares to be as affordable as possible, whilst still representing a meaningful contribution to our fundraising goal. We set the shares at £50, and they were non-tradable and non-profit-making, meaning the assets the CBS held would be safeguarded against private interests.

The conversations at that meeting made it clear just how many people were hungry for a new relationship to the land — one rooted not in ownership and control but in care, community, and stewardship. Although we weren’t focusing on it at the time, many people around us saw that what we were proposing didn’t just offer a lifeline to our farm but challenged the dominant assumptions around land tenure and value. Many who came forward had never imagined they could own farmland or invest in a farming business, but they were inspired by the idea of safeguarding a place they loved and the principles it stood for. There was something deeply emotional in that idea that many of the people who rallied around us really connected to: the sense that land, so often treated as a commodity, could be held in common for a shared purpose.

The landowner offered us a first refusal option, gave us 12 months and named their price — £800,000. This is an awful lot of money for a new organisation to raise, and after incorporating our CBS, we were left with only six months to raise the £800,000 before the first refusal deadline. Initially, Ben and I were doggedly fixed on saving Fordhall, but it soon became clear that people saw what we were doing as an opportunity to build a replicable approach that others could use, improve, and adapt. As the media coverage increased, people from all over the UK, and further afield started to get in touch, and to buy shares. The idea that a movement started by two young people struggling to save a small farm in Shropshire might offer a different way of doing things struck a chord. In the rare moments that we had time to take a breath, we were amazed that the campaign to save our home had enabled many people to make such a powerful leap of the imagination, envisioning how a different relationship to land might allow rural communities to shape their own futures.

The last two months of our tenancy were exhausting and exhilarating. The idea caught hold of people’s imaginations, and between the shares and a £100,000 mortgage we secured from Triodos Bank, we made it past the £800,000 mark with 24 hours to spare! Today, we are almost two decades into life as a charitable CBS. I manage FCLI and all the associated community and educational activities, including a care farm, a youth project supporting vulnerable young people, on-site glamping, school visits, free public access through our walking trails and even a cafe, Arthur’s Farm Kitchen, named in Dad’s memory. The CBS collects rent from my brother, Ben, who is the tenant farmer. Ben lives on the farm with his family and manages the farm shop and event catering vans as independent commercial businesses. He has long-term security through his 100-year lease, which includes succession rights for his children.

We work independently yet symbiotically, supporting each other on projects such as conservation and providing a shared resource for our community. The farm as a whole, because of community ownership, has continued to grow from strength to strength, with a myriad of eco-buildings on site and activities that evolve with the needs of our community. In the summer months, our site can employ over 100 local people. Yet, at our heart, it remains a working organic farm, still practising Dad’s foggage system — nurturing the worms, providing homes for the birds and creating a place where over 70 different plants and grasses can nourish our livestock.

Listening to both the community and to Ben is critical to our success. We are using the knowledge gained over the past two decades to support others on their journey into community ownership. Enabling more land to be in the hands of local communities provides opportunities for human-scale farming for those who really want to have their hands in the soil. Our work refocuses the value of land away from pounds and pence and sees its value instead for health, community and planetary good.

Over the last few years, I have been increasingly involved with We Are Right Here, a campaign to introduce a Community Power Act in England. The idea behind the proposal is to fundamentally shift the balance of power so that communities can have more influence over what happens to the land and places where they live. The core aim of the project is to introduce three new, connected rights: a community right to buy, a community right to shape public services and a community right to control investment in our local neighbourhoods. The proposal includes the formation of community covenants, which would bring local people, community groups and local authorities together and give us shared decision-making power, with the appointment of a Community Power Commissioner to oversee it all.

As things currently stand, the most important decisions that shape our communities are made by a handful of people with no long-term stake in the outcome. Farmland is being lost every single day to purchasers who are not interested in the inherent value of the land but are speculating on its potential as a site for future development. Some farmers may be asset-rich, but most are cash-poor. When land comes to market, a farmer will struggle to outcompete a developer. At the moment, stories like ours are few and far between. They depend on people with energy, enthusiasm, and little else on the line to be in the right place at the right time.

The Community Power Act could help change this. It could give the next generation legal rights to make the decisions that will benefit their communities and neighbourhoods the most, so that others in situations similar to ours don’t have to fight so hard.

The most important thing that Ben and I have learnt over the last twenty years is the power of collective positive action to overcome what may seem insurmountable odds. When we all do our bit, and especially when we work together, there is hope for land and for our planet.

Book

Common Treasures Book One: Land, Food and Farming (Little Toller Books, 2025) is the first anthology in the Common Treasures project, edited by James Binning, Amica Dall, Sara Pereira and Giles Smith. It brings together writing from people who are engaged in practical, hands-on work to transform land, food and farming systems in the UK at grassroots level.

Their narratives are bound together by a passion for understanding how land use and ownership shape not only agriculture but also the character of rural communities and the country at large. Many have first-hand experience of the challenges inherent in mainstream farming, food production and resource management, and the difficulties faced by those who seek to do things differently. These are hopeful stories, offering a credible and compelling vision.

Bio

Charlotte Hollins is the co-founder and manager of Fordhall Community Land Initiative (FCLI) and a consultant and campaigner for We Are Right Here, an organisation that is fighting for a new community power act in the UK. With FCLI, Charlotte delivers education, youth and community projects at Fordhall Organic Farm.

Notes

1 Arthur Hollins, The Farmer, the Plough and the Devil: The Story of Fordhall Farm—Pioneer of Organic Farming, Ashgrove Press, 1984.

2 Ben and Charlotte Hollins, The Fight for Fordhall Farm, Hodder & Stoughton, 2007.