How Decisions About the Land Would Actually Get Made

People ask us a lot of practical questions about the proposed Rooted Common Ground Farms network — what you'd grow, who'd be welcome, how you'd learn. Fewer people ask the question underneath all of those: who decides?

It matters more than it sounds like it should. Most of us have been on land, or in a building, or in a project, where the answer to "who decides" was "someone we never meet, for reasons we're never told." A field gets fenced. A community garden gets closed for "health and safety" with no one able to say whose decision that was, or how to appeal it. You learn to stop asking, because the question doesn't lead anywhere. That's what happens when decisions about land sit miles away from the people actually using it.

We're trying to build something different, and we want to be honest that we're still working out exactly how, because the honest answer is more useful than a tidy one we haven't tested.

The starting point: land held in trust isn't just a funding structure

The plan is for land to be held in trust by Rooted Networks Ltd, working towards Community Interest Company status. That's not simply a legal box to tick — it changes what decisions are even possible. A CIC has an asset lock: the land and any surplus it generates can't be extracted for private profit, and if the organisation ever wound up, what's held would have to go to another body with a similar community purpose. That doesn't mean a committee makes every call in secret. It means the biggest decision of all — whether this land stays available to the people who grow on it — is taken off the table before anyone votes on anything else. What's held in trust can't be sold out from under the people who depend on it. That's the first and most important decision made about any plot: that it isn't really up for sale.

The everyday decisions sit closer to the ground

Below that, most of what actually needs deciding is small and local: what gets grown this season, how a shared tool shed gets organised, whether the Tuesday group and the Thursday group can share a polytunnel without tripping over each other, what happens to a plot when someone has to step back for a while. Those are the decisions that affect people's actual week, and they're the ones we think should sit with the people on site — not because it's a nice slogan, but because the people turning up are the ones who know whether the current arrangement is working.

That's part of why we talk about small and real beating large and managed. A masterplan drawn up somewhere else, with rules for every situation in advance, tends to produce exactly the kind of place nobody feels they belong to. A single plot with a handful of people who've actually agreed, out loud, how they're going to share the water butt — that's slower to set up and far more likely to still be working in two years.

Where it gets harder: conflict, and the limits of consensus

We're not going to pretend this is simple. Growing spaces are full of small frictions — someone's courgettes shading someone else's beds, disagreement over whether a space should be quiet or sociable, real tension over whether a site feels safe for everyone who uses it. Trauma-aware practice doesn't mean conflict disappears; it means how conflict gets handled matters as much as whether it gets avoided. A garden doesn't ask what's wrong with you before it lets you dig, but people still have to be able to tell each other, safely, when something isn't working.

Our working assumption, not yet tested at scale, is that each site will need its own ground-level agreement — not a rulebook imposed from outside, but something worked out by the people actually there, with support available when needed and a clear, low-stakes way to flag when something isn't okay. What that looks like will differ from plot to plot, and it should. A space that works for a group managing anxiety on a weekday morning won't necessarily look the same as one built around families at the weekend.

The thing we're not willing to compromise on

Underneath all of this sits one line we keep coming back to: you don't need to own land to belong to it. Decision-making structures can get complicated, and they should get worked out properly rather than guessed at. But the point of doing any of it — trusts, agreements, CIC status, all of it — is so that ordinary people, not a landlord and not a distant board, end up with a real say over a piece of ground. The Enclosure Acts took land that belonged to everyone and handed control of it to the few, along with the right to decide what happened on it. Every decision-making structure we build is a small attempt to reverse that — one plot, one agreement, one Tuesday-morning conversation at a time.

We don't have a finished governance model to hand over today, because there isn't one yet — there's no land yet either. What we do have is a clear sense of what we're protecting as we work it out: permanence at the top, so the land can't be pulled out from under anyone; real say close to the ground, for the people doing the growing; and an honest process for the hard bits, instead of a glossy one.

If that's the kind of thing you'd want a hand in shaping, that's useful to know now, before there's a committee structure or a constitution to react to. The land remembers patience. So do we.