On a blisteringly hot, full moon weekend in July, we at CFGN (Community Food Growers Network) travelled to the Somerset countryside for the 4th Land Skills Fair, hosted by the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA). Held annually, the Land Skills Fair is a national gathering for land-based workers, farmers, foresters, and organisers — a place to dig into everything from scything and sheep shearing to soil health, movement building, climate justice, and community care. LWA, a union of landworkers and food growers, focuses on agroecology, food sovereignty and the power of land-based organising.
This year, CFGN gathered in collaboration with LION (Land In Our Names), a Black-led collective organising for land justice and reparations for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) communities, and Pathways to Land, a project researching the structural barriers and alternative routes to land access for BPOC growers in the UK.
Together, we held a workshop titled Dreaming into Land Access, offering a taster of our previous Liberating Land for Collective Care workshop in November 2024. Our aim was to share some of our dreaming and learnings with the wider land justice movement in the UK, and make space for imagining new ways of being in relationship to land, rooted in justice, community and care while recognising and addressing barriers to land access.
Pathways to Land opened the session with findings from their year-long research, sharing four key recommendations for enabling BPOC communities to access farmland. LION offered their insights into land access through work on reparations, shared on their accountability panel work and led a participatory dreaming exercise to collectively envision liberated land futures. CFGN brought in a focus on Disability Justice, a framework for focussing on intersectionality and disability, not just in content but with the aim to bring it into the facilitation itself. We shared the 10 Disability Justice Principles and built in spaciousness, invitations to rest, body awareness, and moments to process information together throughout the session.
Further Musings from Nicola Scott from Pathways to Land
Among the workshop participants were two landowners — one connected to Plotgate Community Farm, a Somerset-based CSA project that established Plotgate Land Trust. The trust focuses on ecological stewardship and securing affordable land for future generations through community ownership. A few tenant farmers also joined the conversation, but the majority of attendees were looking for land, many at very different stages of their journey.
The dreaming activity surfaced important visions: like creating access to land for marginalised groups through community-led models. One participant shared about Malwen, a queer-led project building a land-based community that weaves together low-impact housing, regenerative agriculture and permaculture principles.
A recurring theme was complexity. Even for participants who were further along the path to land access, structural barriers remain – from legal and policy differences between Scotland and England, to the challenges of collective landholding, to simply finding available and suitable land.
Urban rural connections also played a role. Urban folks looking for land, in cities like London, are often fighting over small parcels of land, with structural barriers to securing tenure. In contrast, rural landseekers grappled more with questions of open access, infrastructure, and proximity to community.
One thread ran through it all: community. Whether people were seeking land to farm, to live, to regenerate, or to build with others, community, and the desire to use land as a community hub, came up multiple times. For one participant, being on land close to familial connections and community was crucial. For others, it was about fostering new communities of shared experience and struggle.
These reflections echoed the findings in Pathways to Land’s BPOC land access report, and in the online and in-person forums that followed. Themes of collective ownership, cultural resonance, and shared stewardship continue to be central to visions of land justice — as shared by @landinournames, @jokamal__ and @cola_gomez from Pathways to Land, and by @foodisms and @the.dancing.gardener from CFGN.
We’re grateful to everyone who joined the session with openness, clarity and vision, special thanks to Nicola for her notes and reflections on the workshop that formed this post, and to LWA, WEN and Just Fact for allowing these conversations to happen.