A Landworkers Co-op

Building Community. Inspired by Permaculture

Who are we?

We are Luke & Rebecca - 4 years ago we moved to this beautiful 6 acre smallholding on the western edge of Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park in a village called Gwynfe. We’re passionate about all things food - how to grow, produce, preserve and serve delicious, nutritious meals.

We are both mid 30s, and have an entrepreneurial mindset - having worked in start-ups & founded companies in our pre farming lives! We are now bringing our drive & resourcefulness to the thing we are most passionate about: food production and community resilience.

Our Vision:

A land based community, vibrant home, and a hub of permaculture, that creates & provides abundant lives and livelihoods for residents, and acts as a nucleus for community resilience and food sovereignty in Gwynfe.

We envision a number of complementary, cross pollinating enterprises, run as a workers co-op, that demonstrates innovative, small scale regenerative farming models to the wider world, while feeding our local community.

What we've done so far...

We’ve set up a 1/3 acre market garden, growing organic, no-dig fruit and vegetables - we’re almost fully self-sufficient in fruit and veg, and have established a supportive customer base selling on the farm, at local markets, and through local shops and businesses.

We’ve helped kick off community food projects - regular farm to fork feasts, community crop swaps, and a village potato field that feeds 25 households (including us) with more potatoes than we know what to do with!

We’ve planted thousands of trees - setting fields up for future livestock management following holistic grazing techniques, and starting coppices for both firewood and wood crafting.

We’ve restored an old orchard, and planted a new one based on syntropic agroforestry principles, integrating berries, herbs and beneficial support species.

We’ve kept pigs, and a flock of chickens mostly raised from eggs we hatched. The chickens provide us with an abundance of eggs, and are integral to our composting systems.

We’ve started an annual music festival, and built a stage / outdoor shelter out of roundwood timber harvested from a neighbours woodland.

We've been able to do all of this thanks to the amazing help from our neighbours, friends, WWOOFers, and folks who've stayed here for a week, a year and anything in between!

Land based businesses & workers co-op

We believe we need to be earning meaningful livelihoods from the land, so that we can simultaneously support a wider movement towards food sovereignty in the community. The plan is for a workers co-op model, where responsibility and decision making is shared, and everyone’s time is valued equally. We’ll decide mutually how to manage finances, and all be paid the same hourly rate.

The market garden is foundational to our plans. We’ll be launching a share of harvest CSA in 2026, starting small (20-30 shares), but with potential to expand quickly. We want to grow year round, develop winter storage capacity, and bring members and volunteers onto the farm.

We’re going to be starting a programme of on-site permaculture / horticulture training courses, and are working on a “ferments for gut health” subscription. There's a really exciting opportunity to stack further functions and enterprises - a plant nursery, seed production, processing & preserving, grazing, micro-dairy are some of the ideas so far, so if there's a land project that you've always wanted to launch, here's a potential avenue for you!

It’s important that we continue to run and support community food events - crop swaps, “Farm to Fork” feasts, harvest celebrations and so on. These are so important for showcasing local, delicious food, and inspiring people to get on board with our mission for local food sovereignty.

We are also really keen to look for opportunities to collaborate with other local smallholders and farmers, as we did when launching the village potato field. We have projects in mind involving integrating tree crops into pasture, and restoring neglected orchards.

We have identified opportunities for grant funding to support many of our efforts, and we’re keen to use this as a way to accelerate and kick start what we’re doing.

Co-housing & living here

We’ve been working on setting up the large farmhouse as a communal space with private bedrooms so that others can join us here. There’s a big kitchen & utility room, plus dining/living room with a lovely wood burning fireplace.

There are three good sized double rooms of between 11.5-12.5 sqm. A 1 bedroom annexe adjoins the main house, with a private living room, bathroom and patio garden, suitable for a single person or a couple.

We believe it’s important that everyone has sufficient personal space, so each person moving here will have their own room. Couples are welcome, but are expected to rent a room each, or the annexe - we hope that costs are low enough that this is reasonable.

Unfortunately, we are unable to accommodate pets at this time.

Costs:

Bedroom in main house: £375 per month including bills

Annexe: £725 per month (single person), £800 (couple) including bills.

Helping on the land:

It's important to us that everyone shares in the responsibility of tending to the land, maintaining buildings, and producing our own food. As such we ask that everyone living here spends the equivalent of 1 day a week helping with the holding.

This might entail growing food, cleaning gutters, chopping firewood, repairing tools, trimming hedges, looking after the chickens, canning excess harvests, or a whole bunch of other stuff! This could be a full day (maybe all together?), an hour every evening, or however suits you best.

Communal living

We're interested in exploring bulk purchasing of community things together (like loo roll, dish soap etc), and have an account with Suma (the organic wholesaler) which could help minimise costs. We're also keen to have some communal dinners together, where we each take it in turns to cook.

Our goal for "Land Ownership"

We never want to see this place treated as an “asset” to be bought and sold. As soon as we are able to, we intend to set up a “Land Trust” to take ownership of the house and the land. In the worst case, this will be once the mortgage is paid off - but we are always looking for options that would make this happen sooner (grant funding, community purchase etc).

Our Inspirations

Farms & farming approaches:

Josh Sparkes at Birch Firm
Mark Shepard, Restoration Agriculture
Richard Perkins at Ridgedale / Matt Swarbrick at Henbant
Permaculture Du Bec Hellouin
Martin Crawford
Daniel Mays at Frith Farm
The Living Soil Handbook

Models of collaboration:

Agricola Co-operative Farm (Quebec)
Baddaford Farm Collective
Wales Seed Hub

Writings:

Masanobu Fukuoka
Chris Smaje
Carwyn Graves

About you:

You're a motivated self-starter, who brings positive energy to their own work and to working collaboratively. You're hard working, determined and organised, with a real passion for our mission. You hold yourself to a high standard, and give a shit about doing things well.

Perhaps you're an experienced grower, who wants to help launch & grow the CSA in 2026 and beyond. Perhaps you've got an idea for an enterprise that would stack well with everything else we're doing here. Or perhaps you just love our mission, and want to throw yourself in at the deep end and learn as you go. Experience and skill are highly valued, but the right attitude and mindset is priceless.

We'd like to get better at documenting and sharing what we're doing with the wider world, and securing grant funding for our community projects, so if those things excite you then that's a bonus!

Get in touch!

If all of this sounds like it might be a fit for you, then please get in touch! There’s a link to a form below where you can tell us a bit about yourself, and we can take the conversation from there!

https://forms.gle/11PksfPuZER7njnG7

Luke & Rebecca

Click here for form!