FOR LOCALS AND LOCAL LEADERS
What can a community own together?
By Sam Marwood
The pub closes. The internet never gets better. Livestock gets trucked hours away to be processed. The farm next door could leave local hands.
A town has another option. It can own the thing together.
The ideas below come from No Better Place, a book about dreaming big where you are and backing yourself to make it happen. They're there as sparks, not a menu to copy from.
Each one is an illustration of what locals could try. None of them describes a real town.
A community owned farm
Locals can own a farm between them, run by a farming family. It's one way a town can keep farms in local hands.
Community Owned Farms, a free guide in this series, shows how.
A community solar farm
Picture a town that buys a paddock on the edge of the district and builds a community owned solar farm. Residents put in small amounts and get a return from the energy it generates.
The town's electricity costs drop. A handful of jobs maintain it. And the community owns an asset that earns income for decades.
A community pub
When the local pub closes, the community could buy it. Locals form a cooperative, raise the money in small shares, and reopen it as a community owned venue.
It becomes the social heart of the town again. It hosts events, stocks food and drinks from local producers, and puts any surplus back into the community.
A broadband cooperative
Frustrated by poor internet, a group of locals could form a cooperative and build their own fixed wireless broadband network, with reliable, fast internet for homes and businesses across the district.
Remote work becomes possible. Young families can stay, because they can work from home. The cooperative pays its own way from its subscribers.
A machinery sharing cooperative
Small farmers who can't afford modern equipment on their own could form a cooperative to share a harvester, a sprayer and a seeder, booked through a simple scheduling system.
Each farmer's costs come down, and the equipment is better than anything they could afford alone.
Aged care the community runs
Rather than sending elderly residents to facilities in distant towns, a community could set up its own service caring for people in their homes, with local people trained and employed as carers.
Elderly residents stay in their homes, in their community, surrounded by people they know. Government programs and community contributions could fund it together.
A local abattoir
Where livestock is trucked hours away to be processed, the cost, the animal welfare impact and the lost value bother everyone. A group of farmers and a local business owner could look into building a small-scale community abattoir.
It could cut transport costs, improve animal welfare, and let local producers sell branded, locally processed meat for the first time.
Where each one starts
Each of these would start the same way: with one person who has an idea and backs themselves to try it.
The full guide, No Better Place, is free at cultivatefarms.com/resources.
You can build your own plan at cultivatefarms.com/plan.