Guest post - Care Home Farm

I’m publishing below a guest post by Alice Holloway. Alice’s partner, Joel, is a regular commenter here and has mentioned the idea of a care home farm in a couple of his comments – here’s the full lowdown!

I don’t usually publish guest posts, but I’m short on time to keep writing this blog at the moment. Picking up on themes discussed under recent posts, I’m also interested in seeing how people flesh out their varied visions for agrarian local futures, and Alice’s post fits that bill admirably. I’m potentially up for publishing other guest posts along these lines, but only from existing regular commenters.

Hopefully, I’ll be back at my writing desk soon. In the meantime, over to Alice –

Care Home Farm

Alice Holloway

My partner and I are artist, designer, maker, and craftsman living in South London. We both studied craft based creative practices, and over the years since we graduated have run projects, had jobs, and made businesses in the urban art and design worlds.

This background is offered mainly to explain our particular context, with its insights and limitations. Art practice can often lead you deep into theory, and ours has been an exploration of ’embodiment’, the understanding of life experience as being primarily held ‘in’ the body, taken in through the senses, analysed through the gut, neuropathways and neurochemicals, and responded to with learned thought processes and movements (skills).

As a matter of personal self-development, stemming from how traditional creative practice was taught to us, we have sought inspiration in a broad selection of academic texts. However, it has often occurred to us that, as the popular criticism of Adam Smith goes, those writing on the subject of living are often well removed from the practice of living – more specifically the practices of creating the human lived experience. Whether it be the hidden labour of the women in their lives, or the modern way of letting the Global South do pretty much all the work, much contemporary thought lacks the practical understanding of objects that making things gives you.

From our perspective, the human project IS to make. On the most basic level, we could only survive in very few habitats without our objects of survival, particularly due to the helplessness we are born into as furless, immobile baby humans. Beyond that we are, amongst our animal cousins, uniquely physically adept to making, and emotionally attached to our objects.

As we mooch around the capital, drinking various overpriced lattes, chatting with various very important urbanite artists, and battling to produce various grassroots public spectacles to try and jolt our neighbours out of their gas guzzling malaise; we are constantly struck by one of the greatest confidence tricks of our society – all of us take part in the commercial world in order to earn the money that will meet our domestic needs, yet the domestic sphere is treated as peripheral to the commercial sphere. Professional activities like making spreadsheets, and pitching for marketing budgets carry status, feeding ourselves and keeping ourselves warm are just the lowly things we have to do to be able to turn up to our important (yet surprisingly abstract) jobs every day.

Our extensive reading and delving suggests to us that this is a post-enclosures perspective, although patriarchy (the idea that what men do is more important than anything else) has probably always existed with more or less seriousness attached to it. Pre-enclosures, work was very obviously focussed on perpetuating and building the domestic sphere. Most people were just getting on with it, day in day out, and the commercial sphere was very limited. But that way of life was deliberately destroyed. The enclosers were explicit (in their own pamphlets) that they were enclosing the commons in order to force the peasantry into reliance on the commercial sphere and working in the newly devised factories. Several hundred years later, most people are so embedded in the commercial sphere that they can’t imagine not being reliant on it for their every need. But Joel and I have been backstage, and it’s an absolute disaster behind the scenes.

It was during Uni at Central Saint Martins (I studied Jewellery Design which was a bench practice in 2006) that my Godmother gave me copy of The Ecologist magazine focussing on India’s cotton farmers, right when we were working on a fashion unit. The Ecologist dug deep into why Indian cotton farmers were committing suicide, citing the debts they incurred from buying GM modified seeds and pesticides, sold to them as wonder solutions by global north corporations, the lower prices they received at market due to competition from subsidised crops in North America, and the social shame of not being able to provide dowries for their daughters as they reached marrying age. I don’t know if I’m particularly, abnormally burdened with hysterical empathy, but I just can’t build a life or a business that tries to pretend that these issues don’t exist. I set out from the very beginning determined not to look away, and not to compromise on other people’s happiness. I set out determined to put CARE back to the front of what I was making.

This focus on care had unexpected consequences for product development. Of course, sourcing materials was an absolute nightmare, but it wasn’t just that. A lot of brands never deal directly with their customers, but I invited criticism, believing as Lean Startup had told me, that I could make the perfect product if I got enough input from the people who were using it. But all that happened was I encountered unique perspective after unique perspective, what worked for one person didn’t work for the next, I went round and round in circles before I accepted that to really meet someone’s needs I had to tailor my product just to them. I had to take the time to listen to their frustrations with the mass-produced options they’d struggled with, and work with them – taking into account their experience of their own body, their taste (the way colour, texture, and shape interacted with their particular senses), their aspirations (to be more comfortable, to be more sexy, to be more feminine, or more powerful) and using my talent and expertise to sew those threads into a garment.

I love doing it, but I hate doing it within the capitalist context. At every turn I would take a hit. To do the right thing, I would have to pay multiple times what my contemporaries would pay to continue with the ‘cotton farmers commit suicide’ way of doing things. And in the end I couldn’t afford to. Just like everyone else I had rent and bills, and debts and all the side effects of my ancestors getting forced off their land and into the city.

But the other thing we see backstage is that this theatre is crumbling. It’s fragile, it’s a couple of pence on a barrel of oil short of being unfeasible. Maybe there will always be a plastic bag of carrots in Aldi, the main issue is whether your labour will be worth enough to buy them. The debt economy has us all locked into a squeeze, the shareholders have got to get their increased profits by whatever means necessary, and recent world events are proving that it really is by whatever means necessary. It’s getting harder and harder to make this thing work, to make our money do what we want it to do – provide care for ourselves and those we love.

Care isn’t just about meeting a calorie quota. It has all the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions embedded in it. It’s about a subjective experience of beauty, and fun, and fulfilment. A business advisor confirmed my own experience (from various sustainable business accelerators) that investors aren’t looking for physical products to support anymore. They’ve shifted to the digital world. If you want to change how a snuggly woolly jumper is actually made in real life, don’t expect that anyone will back you. If you want to draw a picture of something that an avatar could wear, then sure, that sounds profitable. I don’t think we should be under any illusions that many wealthy individuals are looking for opportunities to put their money into a just transition.

So what options do we have? We have the option to utterly divest, and build CARE based opportunities outside the current system. Which is what CARE-HOME-FARM is. It’s a model, which we hope to test and explore in real life, for an inter-sufficient community. The model aspires to be independent of any global supply chains, because they are all unfortunately tainted by neo-colonialism, prone to opacity and corruption. The model aspires to be just in the resources it requires, i.e. it tests the quality of life possible if each individual doesn’t take more than they need. It’s a model for humans who know that they experience the most joy when their hands are completely dirty and they just failed at something a million times before finally nailing it.

We propose a village centred around a Care Home because we aspire to internalise all systems of care, including care of the elderly and care of disabled community members. All the research suggests that the Care Home and the school should be in the same space, share the same playground/garden and can be served by the same canteen where everyone can eat together when they want.

As you walk down the path from the Care Home you are flanked by ten or so ‘unretirement’ cottages, probably with competitively beautiful cottage gardens, where elders have bought the right to invest their boomer gains and contribute their wisdom. Here you come to a number of beautiful community spaces – a pub for rowdy discussions and roast dinners, a library with a log fire for being bohemian in, a laundry run on pedal power, a barn for weddings and young people music events which are both encouraged and frowned upon, a studio for, let’s face it, yoga, but hopefully also less serious exercise. Circling the town centre are a number of workshop spaces – a spinning and weaving mill/studio, a tailors, a cobblers, a bakers, a papermakers, a brewers, a coffee roasters, a foundry, a furniture maker, a tannery, a pottery, a creamery and a butcher etc.

This central acre is circled by  one-acre homesteads You can grow whatever you want for your own family, autonomy is important, but many of us work out pretty soon that it’s probably simpler to just work together in the market garden and chat while we’re doing it. The homesteads are non-traditional, some of them cottages with parent and child families, some of them single parents with kids co-living with other single parents, some of them studio flats with big central living rooms and kitchens for housemates.

Outside the homesteads is a ring of managed grazing pastures and coppiced woodlands. Silvopastures that provide food, fuel and fibre for the community. We stack enterprises like we’re building the pyramids. The sawdust from our sawmill is the bedding in the hatchery, the mulberry trees feed the silkworms in the summer and provide tree hay for the goats in the winter. Every member is a grower and a maker, we all match our work to our physical aptitudes and our passion, but we also all dabble and muck in to process gluts or the sock rush just before the weather turns.

As I divulged at the beginning, my partner and I have only ever lived urban lives, and while we’ve grown small amounts of veg here and there, and kept chickens etc, we have limited experience of producing on this scale. To bridge this gap we have been visiting farms, learning from farmers and market gardeners, and spending our holidays volunteering in market gardens. We see our theories backed up by the experience of those going ahead of us. The combination of high buy-in costs and low food prices make commercial market gardening very difficult to sustain, added to which most farmers we meet are wearing plastic fleeces, which I’m not judging, but is exactly the kind of compromise (on both style and substance, lol) that I’m keen to design out.

On farms we have visited we see both the insecurity of volunteers who are keen to be of service but have no secure living arrangements, and the missed opportunities for enterprises that could make the land so much more productive, if only someone could input the labour and expertise needed to, for instance, make valuable herbal tinctures, or coppice the willow and make baskets, or manage the forest and turn desirable wooden bowls.

Of course, the major sticking point is our combined trauma. Generations of doing what we might in the future consider to be quite evil business, usually driven by our best intentions in providing our children with sustenance and opportunity, have left their mark on our psychology. Many people cannot fathom the relaxed mindset, ability to calmly take risks on others’ intuition, and sense of humour required to collaborate as deeply as our plan would require. Certainly, the idea of a busybody sneaking into the fold and asking thirty thousand questions at every meeting fills me with utter dread, but I also see that if we don’t start practising these new ‘technologies’ of communication and active learning now we’ll never have them.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been blessed to take part in a coaching collaboration with an inspiring wise woman in my Brixton community. I am utterly convinced of the power of targeted resilience-building and self-exploration to nurture the necessary qualities of patience, letting go, not taking it personally and not taking yourself too seriously, among my future fellow Care Home Farmers. I also believe in having a good time, not martyring yourself to the cause, not denying yourself out of misplaced righteousness.

In our respective fields we are up there with some pretty skilled makers currently working, the products we make are luxury items. An aesthetic of low-power luxury is, in my opinion, crucial to making Care Home Farm a future vision that can compete with what we have now. Beauty, warmth, and flavour nourish us, they carry us through trials. That’s exactly how capitalism is creating so many advocates, because it promises a nirvana if you work hard, and sacrifice enough. Well, I intend to grow, and process, and whittle and sew that nirvana for myself (and those around me). I intend to eat organic vegetables, and boujie ferments, and craft beer, and single barrel whiskey from my own pantry while I’m wearing cashmere underwear, and smelling fresh cut flowers in my timber framed cottage. These things are available to the craftsman, if they can be bothered… Otherwise they can happily decide to just lounge by the swimming pond and make do.

How do we finance it? Well, we have to have some secrets – we don’t want to prejudice our chances by showing our full hand! For now, that’s between us and our spreadsheet, unless you have a farm that you’d like to sell us – in which case, please get in touch. We’re not looking for freebies, we are realistic that money is going to change hands, we are pay to play people, but we hope that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren won’t have to be.

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