Kesoberi Community Farm
Kesoberi Community Farm occupies 20 acres of former agricultural land on the edge of Newlyn, near Penzance, held cooperatively through Kesoberi Housing Cooperative, incorporated in 2012. The land had been farmed industrially for decades - potato monoculture, sprayed before harvest, left bare. Fi Garrard, who has driven the project alongside her partner Richie since the mid-2000s, describes the land’s condition on first encountering it as visibly depleted.
The current site was bought in August 2023, after an earlier proposed site nearby fell through following several years of preparatory work, for reasons outside the group’s control. Within the first winter, the new owners planted 3,600 trees. The land’s recovery since has been rapid: ground that had been bare gave way within a year to a field of flowering chamomile.
The project’s roots go back further still - to a flyer Fi made in 2005 asking whether anyone wanted to live in an eco-village, and a series of earlier groups and sites across nearly two decades before this one held.
Structure
Kesoberi runs on sociocratic principles: defined circles for housing and planning, finance, land management, the campsite, and the community garden, each with clear decision-making authority and a formal process for resolving conflict. The group also draws on a framework of practices - referred to internally as “the cornerstones,” developed by researcher John Young from work with intentional and indigenous communities - built around gratitude, welcoming, and shared culture.
This structure exists because an earlier core group, working together for several years, dissolved under sustained strain in early 2024. Long-running tension surfaced under the physical and financial pressure of the project’s early stages, and the group came close to ending entirely; several members left, and land was nearly sold off to cover what was owed. Fi describes a period of deciding to let go of the project altogether, followed by an unexpected investment that allowed the remaining members to buy out those who wished to leave and continue. The current sociocratic structure was put in place specifically to prevent a repeat.
[DROPBOX AUDIO LINK TBC - format: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/…/filename_128kbps.mp3?rlkey=…&raw=1]
Fi Garrard, Kesoberi Community Farm
What’s being built
Plans have shifted in scale and structure several times - between nine and sixteen affordable homes, and between two different planning routes. One path, requiring borrowing in the millions through a registered social housing provider, would have meant relinquishing direct control of the site to that provider; Fi and Richie have moved away from this, toward a smaller self-build model using ecological construction methods - straw bale, cob, timber frame - accepting slower progress in exchange for keeping the project in the cooperative’s hands.
The current plan is to apply for nine homes, with two or three built first. Alongside the housing, there’s an intention to build some form of community hub on-site - a space open to the wider, pre-existing local community around the farm, not just to cooperative members.
Fi trained formally in horticulture, with a thesis on biodynamics, before training as a psychotherapist - work she now combines, taking clients outdoors rather than running sessions indoors. “Being a gardener, it is becoming resilient,” she says, “because you have so many losses, so much that is not in your control.”
Asked whether this is the future she was dreaming of: “It’s never how you think it’s gonna be… The reality is so much harder than I could have imagined, and so much more incredible.” She points to a recurring sense of synchronicity through the project’s hardest moments - land appearing at the right time, support arriving from unexpected places - as something she has come to trust.
Her closing reference is to the Shambhala warrior prophecy, recorded by Joanna Macy: a prediction that the weapons threatening the world are made of mind, and because they are made of mind, they can be unmade - by insight and by compassion, working together.
I stayed in the camper at the bottom of the site. No water on the camper itself, but two compost toilets and a hot shower a short walk up the field, and water for washing up there too. The camper’s great - cosy, something I can’t quite place about it, retro-futurist, somehow seventies even the ones built decades later. No electricity, no signal. A very first-world problem to call it that, and genuinely refreshing. It was misty the entire time I was there - the kind of mist that doesn’t lift, sitting low between the sea and the inland rise toward the tip of Cornwall. One morning I noticed the gate wasn’t fastened the way I’d left it, and walked up to find a white van and someone I didn’t recognise working in the far field. I never found out who.
Further reading
Kesoberi Housing Cooperative, near Newlyn, Cornwall.