Interview: Strete project - ‘Hawthorn Forest Farm’

Luke: Please would you tell us a little bit about the background to the Strete Project, its name and inception?

Jacopo: Yeah, so this project came about from a friendship that started at a course in Ireland led by Richard Perkins, a regenerative agriculture pioneer and teacher. Then, after moving to Schumacher, we formed a relationship with the Strete Estate and we dreamt of making an agroecological project there which we decided to call Hawthorn Forest Farm.

The dream is to to start reforesting this green desert that the South Devon coast is, in many ways, with the single species ryegrass dominating the landscape. We'd like to encourage  diverse agroforestry and animals .

Does this kind of activity come under the category of rewilding then?

Jacopo: Yes, rewilding intertwined with agroecology and Permaculture.

I love the name! We were just talking about the Postern hawthorn tree this morning in connection with Stephan Harding passing and the closing of the college all around the same time it died. It’s so nice that you have that thread of continuity with the Old Postern.

Dan:Yes and there's a small 20-centimeter-tall hawthorn tree just in front of the house now.

You mean you planted one or was it already there?

Dan:It was there, yes, cut and just beginning to reshoot. 

Going back to the rewilding question, there are parts that are already quite wild but we also want to focus on food production as well and so joining those two practices together. We want to prove you can actually feed a growing population with this kind of agriculture. So there’s a question there around striking the right balance between restoration and rewilding and the necessity of creating food production.

It sounds like you’re creating a model for demonstrating and living many fundamental societal strands, food production, the rewilding as well as being, I suppose, a healthy living community that can function well in its own right. I'm seeing eco-social regeneration and practice in what you're describing.

Dan: Yes, we aim to start answering these questions by collecting data on the activities we do and running them as scaled up models, like the research Transition Town Totnes has done with the “Can Totnes and District feed itself?” research experiment.

So, how's it been starting totally from scratch as you have?

Jacopo: Yeah, it felt very pioneering at first. We literally moved out onto the land with a tent for two months; we were camping and that was at the end of September, and yeah, it was great. It was very engaging and there was lots of learning in that time. We felt like we had lost our base at the Postern and we dreamed to recreate that.

That’s a lot of commitment to stay for two months in a tent from September!

Dan: Jacopo moved there first on his own for three weeks, and because I was still coming down to go to uni as a two-day-a-week thing I thought, yeah, I'll just move down with a tent as well and join him to see what happens. So we were cooking in a little barn and then going back out to the tent to camp. There was no shortage of challenges, like our tent collapsing in a storm and being quite isolated.

You did so well to stay there! It's like putting your flag down, saying that you’re staying here for good.  

What sort of vision and values  does your community work around and are there any key thinkers, teachers or philosophers that have guided your work and inspired you?

Jacopo: Richard Perkins definitely, but so, so many others. Where to start? For the farming side I think for me I've been looking a lot at Joel Salatin and looking at what he does with pigs. There's also other influences. From the forest garden world Robert  Hart. He was one of the first to write about and plant forest gardens in the UK as well as presenting a beautiful worldview for an age of Gaia. Also Martin Crawford, of course, his work at Dartington. This earth remains our biggest supporter and motivation shaping our values, we are learning to come back to this.

How has your training and experience at Schumacher informed and bled into how you set up and lived in your present community?

Jacopo: I feel like the experience at Schumacher is one of the main reasons as to why we are doing this project, to continue our learning and translate that into responsible action. This year we would have been doing our practical placement through the college, now we are actually doing it by setting up a CIC. We learned a lot of how these CIC’s work through our course when we visited Tamar Grow Local and the Apricot Centre among others.

We’ve been playing instruments and singing in the evenings by the fireplace, remembering last year’s song shares and fireside chats. We continue to have many conversations and discussions like we used to at the Postern about economy, ecology, philosophy and so on. We call them ‘small library’ chats.

Aside from this aspect that we are continuing, life at Schumacher changed my life forever in ways that I find hard to describe.

Well, you're really continuing the learning culture, and it's not just the project, is it? You're carrying forward the community within that. It somehow takes me back to the ancient notion of the  ‘academe’ as the original natural site of Plato’s academy, and the idea that you should be learning within a grove of trees. So then, forming a community, like doing sports together, physically cultivating the space where you are. This is all part of learning.

And it makes me wonder, have you sat down and tried to write a kind of manifesto or vision statement for what you want to do as a group?

Jacopo: Yes, we've been using a method called holistic management framework. And we have a statement of purpose that in two sentences sums up the purpose of the project. Primarily we aim to create a nourishing place to live and a good livelihood whilst regenerating the ecosystem. Secondly through experimentation and data collection we aim to demonstrate that agroecological production is a scalable, profitable and applicable practice  that can fulfill the needs of our growing population.

So what's the situation with regards to how long you can be there?

Jacopo: The project that we're starting is meant to be a lifelong project working with the seasons, with some people having seasonal presence, others having more permanent based presence. In the house that we're currently in, we can only stay until the end of May because it's getting restored afterwards, but we're looking at other types of accommodation like shepherd huts and cob houses or earthships in the future.

This relates to another question we have around this issue. In an area like this where property and land costs more and more each year, It seems very important that we carve out spaces for more enlightened and sustainable ways of being, as you are doing. How does it feel to have an insecure and uncertain tenancy in somewhere you are so invested in and have contributed so much to already?

Dan: Actually It feels like it's a massive blessing to have this place at all, especially in the UK where land is so restricted and expensive if you want to buy it. Through Jacopo’s relationship with Brendan, we've been invited to do our own thing. He's kind of said, 'I'm gonna leave this to you guys to organise.' He wanted to see how we would do it. So we took a few months to plan these projects - the pastured pigs, a tree nursery and a food forest which is a lifetime project.

That would mean creating food sovereignty, for ourselves, and also for offering the highest quality food for the local area in the South Hams. We're living in a house with a work-exchange agreement and we're looking to have minimal food costs as well through growing our own food, so we feel it's actually really a privilege to be in this position which has come out of the relationships we’ve formed. You can just really see all the connections at work here, how they're holding each other together and supporting each other.

Jacopo: Just to add something further, as Dan has said, we're very grateful for this opportunity and the fact that we continue living together in community and at the same time I am concerned about the lifespan of the project maybe I wouldn't have thought about this as much if it was the first project but coming from now seven years of starting different farming projects mainly in Mallorca and the South of Spain. I've suffered the changes of moving from place to place. Leaving a land with whom a vision and deep connection was shared has been painful. What happened to Schumacher is yet another example. It's very timely then, that this opportunity has come along. So we are aware that we want to find ways to have a more secure connection with the land long-term. We are starting on a trust basis and a yearly renewed tenancy, but we want to explore co-ownership land models, long-term leases or other ways to share land inspired by the commons. We don't know yet, but for example in Mallorca there is a project that I'm involved in where a landowner has set aside a third of their land to become a community food forest. And so that is what we want to move towards. I believe that land should not be owned but rather shared by people that live the land and not be monopolized.

And regeneration really can't happen without those severed relationships being restored in a sense. Because indigenous just means being of a place. Actually, indigene, you know, in the original sense literally means that.

Jacopo: Absolutely! Thanks so much for this and just one last thing to add is that we want to start doing open days every week with a theme of certain projects that we want to do with the community and share a meal and just have a good time together, so please come along!