You choose the crop. We grow it. That way round.
Community-supported agriculture normally runs one way: the farm grows what suits the farm and members take what turns up. This is the reverse. Members vote on one niche crop for four acres of the Brash Tops, and the farm then grows it to order.
The vote for the 2027 season.
One vote per account, closing on the last day of September, because the drilling plan for the following autumn has to be set in the first week of October.
Which niche crop should take the four acres on the Brash Tops in 2027?
Pick one. It costs nothing and wins nothing but points.
And what should the market garden put in the polytunnel?
Pick one. It costs nothing and wins nothing but points.
Should the hedgerow programme extend before the crop programme does?
Pick one. It costs nothing and wins nothing but points.
Voting is free, open to anybody with an account, and worth nothing. There is no stake, no prize and no points balance attached — it is a poll about what to plant, and the result is binding on us rather than on you.
Why reversing it is harder than it sounds.
A farm grows what it grows for reasons: rotation, soil type, machinery width, drying capacity, and what the merchant will take. Handing the choice to a few thousand people who do not know the rotation is, on the face of it, a terrible idea.
It works only inside a fence. Four acres of the worst ground on the farm, one crop, one season, and a shortlist drawn up by the agronomist rather than by the vote. Members choose between five things that will all more or less work here. They do not get to choose avocados.
That constraint is the product. An unconstrained vote produces a crop failure and a lot of apologising. A constrained one produces four acres of heritage wheat that would never otherwise have been drilled, and about three thousand people who feel responsible for it.
The five on this year’s shortlist.
| Crop | Why it might work here | Why it might not | What it becomes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heritage wheat | Deep-rooted, tolerates thin ground, and mills into a flour people will pay for | Yields about half of a modern variety and goes flat in a wet June | Bread flour, sold through the shop | |
| Naked oats | No hulling required, good in low-input systems, and the shop sells oats already | Prone to lodging and fussy about harvest timing | Porridge oats and oatcakes | |
| Camelina | Fast, cheap, drought-tolerant, and useful as a cover as well as a crop | Tiny seed, tricky to combine, and a market that barely exists | Cold-pressed oil | |
| Chickpeas | Newly viable in southern England, and a fixed nitrogen crop | Wants a dry August and this is not Spain | Dried, and a hummus line nobody asked for | |
| Linseed | Reliable, undemanding, and blue for a fortnight | Slow to ripen, and desiccation is increasingly awkward | Oil, and seed for the bakery |
What happened the last three times.
Three votes, one triumph, one disaster and one deliberate act of caution.
Beating linseed by about four hundred votes. It yielded badly, the oil was extraordinary, and it is now a permanent quarter-acre on the grid.
By a considerable margin, on the strength of the pasta. Then the drought came and it made under two tonnes a hectare against an expected six. Every voter got the substitution.
The dull option, chosen immediately after the durum year, which tells you something about how a community learns.
Heritage wheat is leading on thirty-four per cent, which suggests the memory of the durum has faded.
What a vote does not buy you
Voting is free and confers nothing. It is not a share, not a membership right, and not a claim on the crop. If you want the produce from the crop you voted for, you take a patch in it like everybody else, at the same fixed price as everybody else.
Take a patch in whatever wins.
The niche crops sit on the Brash Tops, in row D of the grid.
