Farm as Community: Growing Belonging with Abel Pearson and Morag Gamble

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I sit down with Abel Pearson – permaculture educator, community food grower and co founder of Glasbren, an award winning community-supported agriculture project in rural Wales.

Glasbren began as a three acre permaculture designed market garden and has now moved to Lord’s Park Farm, a 134 acre National Trust property on the cliffs where the Taf and Tywi rivers meet the sea in Carmarthenshire.

Abel and his family are the first permaculture based tenants on a National Trust farm, creating a flagship project for nature friendly, community facing farming.

In our conversation we explore:

• Abel’s journey from woofing and natural building to discovering permaculture as “the origin” of everything he now does
• How Glasbren grew from a three acre CSA into a whole farm vision at Lord’s Park
• Designing a landscape and an organisation with permaculture ethics: earth care, people care, fair share
• Indigenous and historic food systems as deeply “permacultural” ways of living in reciprocity with land
• Beingof a place when you may not be from there – and how growing food together becomes daily practice in belonging
• Welsh language, culture and land 
• Community supported agriculture, food security and the fragility of our current food system
• Wales’ shift toward agroecology, social value payments for farms, and support for small scale growers
• The practicalities of funding and holding a diversified social enterprise farm
• Volunteering at Glasbren as a pathway into community, wellbeing and climate action
• Family life in the middle of a farm that is also a community hub

Abel’s reflections weave beautifully with the core of permaculture education – that we are learning a way of seeing and relating, not just a collection of techniques. This episode is an invitation to slow down, listen to place, and see farms and gardens as sites of cultural and ecological repair.

Glasbren website: https://www.glasbren.org.uk

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This podcast is hosted by Morag Gamble, founder of the Permaculture Education Institute - the leading-edge international online school for integrated permaculture design, education, leadership and [pr]activism.⁠

• Explore Morag Gamble's Permaculture Educators Program
• Talk with Morag here about this program.

Find more of Morag's conversations on the Our Permaculture Life YouTube and the Festival of Wild Ideas.

This podcast is broadcast from a solar powered studio in the midst of a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara & Gubbi Gubbi country.