Growers & Makers Collective Looking for a Home, South West

Meet Kezia Hoffman, her vision is to expand her creative arts business into a sustainable ‘live, work, grow, create’ model by collaborating with other artisans and land workers. Kezia has teamed up with Gaz Hoj, a blacksmith, mechanic and tools repair artist and together they form the core team. They are looking to expand their educational offering to include coppicing and charcoal making which they will also use to run the forge. Gaz makes and fires bio char kilns using brushwood, which contributes to local land management while the biochar itself enhances the soil. The intention is to create a market garden, drawing in expertise from a network of growers who are already keen to join them. Exactly who that will be depends on where they eventually find land.

Between them Gaz and Kezia have 56 years experience in rural crafts and community engagement. Kezia has been running Granary Creative Arts CIC from an old granary in rural Hampshire for 9 years and has established a social enterprise which delivers workshops in stone carving and copper sculpting for adults and arts GCSE for home educated teenagers. These workshops are in high demand and people travel across the country to come to them. Recently they have set up a Community Benefit Society called Hands and Land to incorporate their wider vision and are networked with growers, creative educators and artisans across the country.

Their main requirement would be two barns to house their businesses and space for some shepherd huts to live onsite and accommodate visitors to their workshops. They are aiming for a total of five acres for the market garden and ideally there would be some woodland for coppicing or space to plant hazel and willow. They have the funds to get set up straight away and, if all goes well, would like to find a long term opportunity to really embed their traditional land based practice. They are looking to set up their project anywhere from the the Welsh borders to Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset and Devon.

This is an unusual and valuable opportunity for any landowner looking to create enterprise stacking or a collectively run organisation on their land. With relationships already established and a business plan ready to go, what can sometimes take years to develop is already being offered here in a neat package. Their Hands and Land website can be found here.

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