A regenerative farm in the Vale of Glamorgan is bringing families and local food producers together around an unusual question: what should today’s community leave behind for the people who join it twenty years from now?
On Saturday 22 August, members, farmers, food producers and guests gathered beneath a stretch tent at Celtic Roots Farm & Gardens in Pendoylan for an evening of locally produced food, original music and stories about the people behind it.
But founder Dean Loury-Jenkins says the evening was about much more than bringing people onto the farm. It was about showing what Celtic Roots is trying to build for the future.
Around 100 people have now joined the Celtic Roots community, which is developing a model designed to connect local families more directly with the farm and other trusted Welsh farmers, growers and food producers.
At the heart of that vision is an idea called Dear Member 2046. The concept asks today’s members to think beyond what they receive from the farm now and consider what their involvement could leave behind for somebody joining Celtic Roots twenty years into the future.
“I don’t want someone joining Celtic Roots in 2046 to have to start again,” Dean said. “I want them to inherit healthier land, relationships with local producers, a community that understands why local food matters and infrastructure that the people before them helped to build. We spend so much time asking what we can get from something. I wanted to turn that around and ask what we can leave behind.”
The Dear Member 2046 letter now sits on the front page of the Celtic Roots website, where visitors can open it and read about the longer-term thinking behind the farm.
Celtic Roots is a 44-acre regenerative farm, but its ambitions increasingly extend beyond producing food from its own land. Dean is developing technology to make it easier for families to access food from Celtic Roots alongside other local producers, creating a shared route to market rather than expecting every small farm or food business to independently build its own customer base, ordering system and infrastructure.
“The question for me used to be how we make Celtic Roots successful,” Dean said. “That’s changed. Now I think much more about how the things we build here can help other local farmers and producers succeed as well. I don’t want Celtic Roots to grow by simply taking a bigger piece of a small local market. I want us to help make the local market bigger by getting more families buying food produced around them.”
Celtic Roots has also been working with five Vale of Glamorgan schools, delivering practical growing and food education designed to help children understand soil, seasonality, farming and where their food comes from.
The August gathering brought many of those different strands together in one place. Guests ate together around long tables while local producers and their stories were introduced. Original music formed part of the evening, with Dean asking the audience at the beginning to put everything else aside for a few minutes and simply listen.
“We could have stood there and demonstrated a platform,” Dean said. “But that’s not really what Celtic Roots is about. The technology is useful, but the important bit is the relationships between the person growing the food, the person eating it and the place it came from. That evening allowed people to actually feel that.”
Celtic Roots is now preparing its next stage of development. A physical farm shop is being built on a converted trailer at the farm, while the digital platform continues to develop as a way for members to access Celtic Roots produce and food from other local producers.
“Twenty years from now I hope we’re measuring more than how much one farm sold,” Dean said. “I’d like to know how many families are buying locally, how many producers have a reliable route to market, how many children understand where their food comes from and whether we’ve left the land and the community stronger than we found them. That’s what Dear Member 2046 is really about.”
