Community Ownership at top of Organic Farms’ Agenda

News of community buy-outs in Scotland has become more common in recent years, as land from Assynt to Eigg and Knoydart to Gigha and South Uist has been taken into local ownership with the help of the Scottish Government in a bid to give control of the land to the people who live on it.

Now Scotland could soon have its first community-owned farm – and one of the largest community-supported agricultural schemes in the UK. Heather Anderson and Pete Ritchie, who own Whitmuir Organic Farm at West Linton in the Scottish Borders, are already almost half-way to their goal of handing ownership of their carefully nurtured 130-acre organic farm land to hundreds of individual shareholders.

The couple, who bought the farm in 2000 and became fully organic in 2005, launched the Whitmuir Community Farm Ltd Benefit Society last December and the first shares were issued in March. In just two months they have created 90 new shareholders who between them hold 2000 shares at £50 each. With pledges from around 40 other potential shareholders for a further £66,000, this means they have raised £176,000 of the first target of £400,000 to complete the land deal.

Now they are looking to find hundreds of new shareholders, because they want more people to own their land than the 608 private rural landowners who own half of Scotland, a statistic which they say is one of the greatest barriers to food production in Scotland.

The scheme is also the first share issue in the UK to involve people aged under 16: Whitmuir’s youngest shareholder is just five.

It is, explains Ms Anderson, all about “citizenship farming”.

She said: “The way farming is done on a large scale with artificial fertilisers and pesticides is destroying the soil and creating a terrible legacy for young people. It has totally divorced them from the land and from how food is grown. So involving them in the food system is crucially important.