Wow, guys, this is fantastic! I’ve had loads of interest in the community land trust idea with lots of people coming back to me with feedback, questions, offers of help, etc. What this tells me of course, is that this could really be a viable option for purchasing a farm and making the land available for allotments, keeping animals and not only for the GWM eco-project but other community projects as well. I’m so excited!

After chatting with Charlotte at Fordhall Farm last week, thinking some more about it and emailing a couple of people, I’ve decided to go for the community land trust idea and get feedback from the community - the people in Cheshire themselves. And what better place to start than the Landshare website I mentioned back in my blog a while ago. So far, I’ve only had one person contact me about land in Cheshire and from what I can see of the website, it appears there are far more would be growers out there than there are landowners coming forward. So, I need to start contacting the people who’ve got listings on the website to see what they think of my idea.

I paid a very interesting visit to Fordhall Farm this afternoon and with it being half term, my children came with me. Fordhall Farm (www.fordhallfarm.com) set up the Fordhall Community Land Initiative in order to raise money to buy their farm which the landlord was threatening to sell off for development. I had a lovely chat with Charlotte Hollins about how they went about it and I think a similar venture may be a viable option for GWM. Need to think about this a bit more.