Cultivating Resilience through Collaborative Farming

Reflections from a summer of heat and drought, and from sharing our story at the Growers Gathering: why resilience is grown in relationships, on farms and between them.

This summer the earth spoke devastatingly loud and clear. Six heatwaves came one after another, and the soil hardened into something closer to brick than living ground. Our leaves wilted at midday, and the watering duties stretched from dawn into dusk and beyond. By late July, southern England had received just 1% of its expected monthly rainfall, and the Environment Agency declared a "flash drought" across a large swathe of the country. Wales saw its driest July for 190 years. Across the country growers counted their losses: some crops ripened early and bolted while others, like brassicas and greens slowed down or stopped growing altogether as the heat pushed them into dormancy. Early data suggests the 2026 arable harvest may be one of the worst on record, with stunted vegetables, poor grass growth, and heat-stressed cows giving millions fewer pints of milk. (2026 United Kingdom heatwaves)

Its been a sobering year, one of re-confronting some ecological realities of how far we have pushed the Earth, and how vulnerable we are. And yet its also been affirming, seeing how much better we have fared and how much (relatively) greener our lands are because of agroecological, organic and regenerative practices on site – such as minimising tillage, adding compost, integrating trees/perennials, and sowing cover crops. Our cyclical spring water systems, which we put in place as a long term climate resilience investment, have been needed immediately, and probably made the difference to keep us afloat this year, just.

It is tempting to treat a summer like this as an anomaly, a bad year to endure and then forget. But extreme is the new normal, so much so that I cant remember a normal year now. climate is no longer a future threat for UK farming, it’s a reality we face in the now and we have to adapt whilst continuing to play a part in the solution , the mitigating, the soil carbon storage and earth cooling role that farmers can play. A drought exposes weaknesses that were already there. A food system built on long, thin supply chains, monocultures, and isolated farmers carrying all the risk alone is a brittle one. It works until it doesn't, and then it breaks all at once.

So the question for our times is not only how we farm the land, but how we build resilience internally and externally, and how do we do this together? This question, for me, boils down to how much we feel we belong with the land and each other while we farm. Through relationships, trust and rooting amidst the storms, its possible to build a resilience that holds up through the dry years, the flood years, and the years when we are on the edges of burnout.

Resilience is relational

In Collaborative Agroecologies (Part 1), I wrote that collaboration and agroecology are two sides of the same coin, because the very basis of agroecology is relationships: reciprocal relationships to earth, to biology, to growers and to community. This summer made that less of a philosophy and more of a practical truth, to live, learn and trial in imperfect ways. Soil that has been cared for holds water like a sponge. A hedgerow gives shade and shelter. A pond gives back in August what it gathered in February. The same is true of people. A team that trusts each other and shares the load can absorb a crisis, and even find some joy through the tough times.

Resilience, then, is not a hardy fortress we build around ourselves. It is a web we weave outward: roots between plants, trust between people, and threads between farms. An opening rather than a closing. These crisis points, be they weather, family, relational or internal, can be a similar opening, if we are open to the changes they invite.

Head, Heart & Hands: lessons from scaling together

At the Growers Gathering this autumn, Sammy and I shared the story of Middle Ground Growers: the successes, the blind naivety, and the mistakes of growing from a half-acre market garden into a co-owned organic farm of 18 acres, soon to be 58 acres. We framed it around three mindsets that every collaborative farm needs, and that each of us our founders and team lean towards differently: the Hands (land regeneration, making it happen day to day), the Head (food systems renewal, the finances, cashflow and planning), and the Heart (people care, relationships, governance and roles). The strength is in difference, and unless one person can magically bring a balance of all these perspectives, a solo farm will fail in one way or another. Likewise a collaborative farm that is skewed towards one of these perspectives will fail. I’ve done farm consulting in winters over the last few years to support new entrants and scaling up (or rooting down) farm enterprises. The growing and farming is very rarely the issue, usually there is an imbalance and there is too much of one perspective.. too much of the practical (Hands) without the business mind (Head) or relational tending (Heart) will lead a farm to burnout and lose soul. Likewise too much thinking/reflecting without cracking on will lead to similar burnout cycles and always being behind, lacking the purpose and sense of achievement together. And too much focus on the relational, conflicts, heart matters can spiral a farm into forgetting the root of it all, the land and livelihoods that need equal tending.

Our deepest lesson is that resilience comes from these three moving together. When one races ahead of the others, things go outta whack, and we’ve learnt this fist hand in all the times when we have unconsciously allowed one perspective to dominate, be it the Head, Heart or Hands.

The Hands. In our eagerness to scale, we once planted up whole fields of veg (acres by hand, without transplanters or mechanical support) with no weeding or irrigation systems in place to look after them. The crops came up with great enthusiasm, and so did the weeds, and then the dry spells arrived. The Hands had scaled, but the kit, the systems and the capacity of the team hadn't. It's a lesson that feels sharper after this summer. Water infrastructure is not a luxury you add later, once you can afford it. Our solar-powered pumping and pond restoration were not prioritised projects in early years, but they are the necessary hidden half of scaling. Infrastructural planning is where resilience is built pre-emptively and properly, before it is needed.

The Head. Growing from 30 veg boxes to 180 in three years meant moving from notebook scribbles to spreadsheets to proper software and systems rapidly. It meant word of mouth snowball ‘marketing’, and a crowdfunder that turned hundreds of supporters into a community with a real stake in the farm. The economics of small-scale agroecology are tight. A resilient business is one with diverse income streams: veg boxes, markets, wholesale to local shops and restaurants, and sliding-scale and solidarity boxes so that good food reaches people whatever their income. Diversity in the field and diversity in the business follow the same principle. Don't put all your seeds in one bed.

The Heart. This is where our growing pains taught us the most. We learnt to better design roles around people rather than squeezing people into roles. We started from personal visions and a shared holistic context, and only then built the farm design and roadmap. We learnt to move at the pace of trust. Today we are gradually getting better to ensue each role has a lead who is trusted with real autonomy and a support person who can cover in busy times or illness. We do have a slightly more spread out team across the week, and this is less simple than one person having it all in their head and holding the continuity through all the days. But this model rarely works for the individual who takes on such responsibility, or for the team who are not empowered by the information flows , trus and autonomy to lead in the way they have so much potential for. We have a fairly free flowing decision making system with autonomy within roles for most things, the more the better. But bigger strategic or directional shifts that affect whole business, or non-routine purchases over £400, come to the whole team. Every January, when the land is resting, we review mandates and allow some flexibility to co-design roles if their gifts and energy have shifted. Of course this too needs balance from the Head and has to align with budgets and focusing our energy on obtaining a yield, renewing and sustaining our livelihoods each week in a difficult sector.

As I wrote in The Tools of Collaborative Agroecology, structures need to be clear enough, but flexible enough. Too rigid and they dehumanise. Too loose and they breed confusion, burnout and quiet disempowerment. Organisations are complex, but they need not be complicated. Years on, I would add that a good structure is itself a form of drought resilience. When the heat comes and everyone is stretched thin, clear roles and trusted decision-making mean the team bends rather than breaks. And overcommunicating in these times is always a safe bet as too often the important things get missed and resentments or tensions can harbour if left untended, or unbalanced with the lifting up of each other too. This is an important concept in regenerative and collaborative leadership ontologies, whereby all are empowered to be leaders in their own ways, and this means taking responsibility for their communications, feedback, diligence and owning up to mistakes, celebrating successes of themselves and others. Leadership styles take numerous forms, just like on a big group walk, some will lead from the front, some will lead from the back and be looking out for everyone, others will quietly lead in other ways no less important.

Finding strength in difference

One of the gifts of farming collaboratively is that you are constantly confronted with difference: different temperaments, rhythms and ways of seeing the same field. The optimist and the pessimist. The practical and the romantic. The planner who wants the cashflow forecast and crop profitability before sowing a single seed, and the spontaneous, intuitive grower who wants to get their hands in the soil now.

For a long time we experienced these differences as friction, which can be easy to do in early stages of relationships or partnerships. Increasingly we understand them as the source of our resilience. A monoculture of mindsets is as fragile as a monoculture of crops; a single pest, or a single blind spot, can wipe it out. Just as a polyculture spreads risk across many species, a team that holds Head, Heart and Hands between its members can face a crisis from several angles at once. The work is not to erase difference but to hold it well, through check-ins, honest feedback, sharing circles, non-violent communication, and a culture that celebrates each other's gifts.

Collaborative farming isn't perfect, and it isn't for everyone. There are many models that can suit a particular holistic context.  And sometimes, especially for small farms that don’t require a whole team, can work best in a simple owner operated model or family farm model. But there are many contexts where collaborative farming is overlooked and yet holds the keys to a more functioning, joyful and resilient operation. At its best, collaboration becomes a resilience tool both inward (for the wellbeing and staying power of the people doing the work) and outward (for the farm, the community, and the land).

Beyond the farm gate: resilience between farms

If the heatwaves taught us anything, it is that no single farm can be resilient on its own. When one field fails, a neighbour's may not. When one grower's irrigation runs dry, another may have water to share, or a spare pair of hands, or seedlings to replace a lost sowing. When devons entire onion crop fails, that tiny window of rain somerset got in June has allowed us to have a crop to trade. The industrial food system has taught us to see neighbouring farms as competitors in a race for shrinking margins. An agroecological food system asks us to see them as part of the same watershed, the same soil web, the same bioregion.

This is where the next chapter of collaborative agroecology lies: in weaving resilience between farms. That means farm clusters working across a landscape, producer co-operatives pooling distribution and sharing machinery, shared seed saving and knowledge exchange, and collective approaches to water, from ponds and wetlands to catchment-scale restoration that slows the flow in winter and holds it for summer. It means community land ownership that keeps land in common hands and out of speculative markets. Here in the Avon catchment, the rivers already show us how connected we are: what happens upstream reaches everyone downstream.

The heat and drought of this summer are, in a strange way, an invitation. They show us, starkly, the vulnerability of a system built on separation. Agroecological farms are, in part, aiming to overcome a system of separation, whereby humans have been separated from land and earth care ethics, and separated from each other too in exploitative supply chain power dynamics. And yet, agroecological farms can fall into a trap; to reproduce the pattern of separation, through trying to do everything alone, or feeling too busy to engage in the wider world beyond farm gate or local community. Agroecological farms have huge potential to integrate collaboration and unity (the opposite of separation culture), into the heart of their operation, enterprises and ecologies. This is not only an ideology, but a practical tool for resilience and greater profitability, security and mental health. Every decision on farm and off can help us move towards the alternative food systems that serve people and life together, this is not something new but a homecoming: land cared for by communities, farms held in webs of mutual aid, and food grown by people who are in it together.

Finding a middle way

Middle Ground Growers was named for a reason. It may sound corny, but again and again, we find through lived experience of challenges that the path forward has been a middle way: between the ideal and the real, between leadership and self-organisation, between staying true to our mission and being practical enough to obtain a yield. The permaculture principle of obtaining a yield matters here. A farm that burns out its people or runs out of money is not resilient, however beautiful its vision.

So as the autumn composts this year's fruits and we turn towards root energy, a time for reflection, review and letting go, I offer these seeds to anyone growing food, or wanting to:

· Scale the systems and the people alongside the crops, not after them or in reaction.

· Invest in water and soil before you are forced to from crisis or issues.- just like organic farmers aim for a holistic & preventative approach to pests and diseases rather than a reactive approach to individual issues, apply this to the whole business & farm.

· Balance Head, Heart and Hands in every decision, and in your vision. Even assign roles or hats to this in your team, or in yourself at different times.

· Seek out difference, and learn to work with it rather than around it.

· Reach beyond your own farm gate. Resilience is a shared harvest.

It is still, as it was in the early years, our love for each other and for this land that sustains us through the dark nights and dry summers. That love, made practical through good tools, clear structures and honest relationships, is perhaps the most drought-resistant crop we can grow.