Meanwhile...

While all that in the last blog post was happening, the strange world of land ownership was occupying us elsewhere.

We won’t linger on most of the sites that drifted through our radar, or where we’ve stored ourselves over the last year. Instead, we’ll highlight a few moments to give you a flavour.
Each location had been given a code name to keep our interest secret while negotiating, we use them as titles for each section, but we see no reason why now you shouldn’t know where most are.


To begin with though, you should understand a few requirements we have for possible sites. There seems like quite a few, but when one is dealt with others usually follow.

• Easy road access. Building roads is an expensive business, and we'd rather not have to do it.
  
• Realistic chance of negotiating land use. In Northampton, with most of it already earmarked and priced, this would usually mean some kind of block to any development, or very high levels of local support.
• It should be within an urban/developed area. There seems little point in providing a small example of a farm to visit when there’s the real deal next door.
• The land should be derelict. Part of our company articles states that we should bring back into use unused sites, so taking on land that was already viable farmland isn’t suitable. Having said that, we might look into expanding on an additional site outside the town later. We certainly would not be interested in taking on land in support of development on viable farmland, nor development unsuitable for Northamptons housing or employment needs.
• The ground shouldn’t be polluted. We’ll need to grow a great deal for sale, and raised agriponicos beds aren’t practical at that scale, with scarce funds.
• The site should be possible to secure. The boundary does need to be sealable, not only to protect from theft, but also if DeFRA include us in an exclusion zone, or there’s a health and safety risk - we have to able to prohibit visitors to the site as we see fit. Also, the risk of dogs running onto the site or near the animals has to be considered.
• There must be at least six and a half acres, mostly comprised of grazing. This is purely so the animals you’d expect to see can graze as you’d expect to see, and also cuts the cost of bought-in feed. Additional land would obviously be welcome to give us more scope and opportunities for side-projects – all of which make the project more financially viable.
• At least one school must be within a 10 minute walk distance. This isn’t written in stone, but a school that can regularly use us as a teaching resource would be of enormous benefit to them, and also to us.
• At least four schools within a mile. This is harder to ignore. Cutting out the cost of transportation to our farm for as many schools as possible will mean they can afford to use us as a regular resource.
• Lack of provision for outdoor learning for those schools. There are several groups offering experiences in parks and on private land around the town, and it would be nice to be in an area lacking in those options nearby.
• A bus service passing nearby, a decent view across the site, and numerous other minor points would be helpful - but they merely add or subtract from the desirability of a site.
  

And so, understanding some of what we need, the next post will venture onto our first possibility…