From 100 Boxes to 1,000 Families

This was our first full week working shoulder-to-shoulder with Crops Not Shops. Chay and the team hosted volunteer days and effortless progress happened. On Tuesday, people arrived from all directions; by mid-afternoon the frame of our members’ cabin stood beside the forest garden. Many hands, one rhythm. Thank you all.

Next we’ll turn the frame into a lived space: a small kitchen for shared lunches, simple seating, and a wood burner for winter warmth. Toilets and showers will sit alongside so days on the land stay easy. The updated site plan shows how this new heart links to the walled garden, ponds, tracks, barns, and future gathering spaces.

Alongside the build we finished mapping the path from ~100 weekly boxes to 1,000 over the next five years. It’s practical and phased. The maths is grounding: allow about one acre per family to produce fruit and veg, eggs, milk, meat, and honey, at our standards. As we complete the pilot farm, the next step is to secure a new 100+ acre estate that lets our larger animal enterprises rotate across bigger pasture blocks and gives us room to scale toward 1,000 acres.

That shift frees the pilot farm to deepen into a community “secret garden.” Productive veg and forest gardens will remain; around 150 hens will keep an acre paddock busy; 100 ducks will settle into their own paddock with an islanded pond; a few sheep will keep the sward honest. It also opens space for rest and learning - a sauna, swimming pond, walled garden, and, subject to planning - overnight cabins so you can stay close to smallholder life and learn by doing.

For 2026 our target is clear: improve our management of ~100 acres to feed 100 families year-round, with a 50% planned surplus for resilience and an allocation for 20 families most in need through Crops Not Shops. To reach that, we’ll bring 200 × 20-metre beds into rotation and plant 2.5 acres of field crops (onions, leeks, squash, brassicas, potatoes, beets). We'll raise a new laying flock of 600 hens and rotate them across seven acres. The dairy will sit at twenty cows (about seven milking at any time) moving over twenty-five acres of herbal pasture. Meat birds will run year-round in two flocks of 150 on six acres, staggered in weekly groups of thirty-five for steady supply. Pigs will continue through five acres of pasture and woodland with one breeding round per sow per year so mothers rest and land recovers. Our Hebridean ewes will rise to sixty on twenty-five acres; the Galloway herd to twenty-five on another twenty-five acres. We’ll harvest raw honey from our sixteen hives. The forest garden will expand to 2.5 acres for fruit, nuts, herbs, and medicinal plants, to create jars, tinctures, and elixirs through the year.

From there, numbers scale tenfold. Over five years we aim for 1,000 managed acres feeding 1,000 families year-round, still with a ~50% surplus for stability and an outreach line that feeds 200 families who need it most. Same standards. Same sovereignty. Same member-owned backbone.

What this means for you is simple. The pilot farm leans into intimacy, connection, and learning while the new estate carries the heavier production and larger scale gatherings. Reliability improves as acres, rotations, and cold-chain tighten. And the promise we made of members first, standards held, impact with dignity, stays at the centre of every decision.

If you’d like to help physically on the land over the coming days and weeks, reply and we’ll loop you in. We’ll also walk the roadmap in detail on the next community call and answer anything on your mind.