Goonown Growers Eco-barn

Aim

A new community building in St Agnes: a space to share food, support those struggling with mental health, and bring people together.

About us

We are Goonown Growers, a Community Supported Agriculture CIC (community interest company) on the North Cornwall coast. We're a small group of people who care passionately about building a sense of community around local sustainable food production. We want to contribute positively to the St Agnes community by supporting and promoting local food in an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable way.

In these troubled times it is easy to feel overwhelmed, whether it’s our place in the world or the state of the world itself. We believe getting involved with where your food comes from and how it is produced is a great place to start to make a difference – and that’s exactly what you can do with us.

So join us on a journey to create a real local food revolution.

Goonown's Community Eco-barn

We are at the start of an exciting new chapter at Goonown Growers. We have planning permission to build a new community eco-barn for St Agnes in the middle of our bountiful 2 acre market garden.

We envision this barn being a place where local community groups can meet and engage with the land year round. With the challenges we all face at the moment - whether it's climate breakdown, financial difficulties, mental health - we feel one of the most positive solutions is to bring people together, to support, learn, work, and celebrate in all kinds of ways - and maybe best of all, share great food together.

We already do a lot of this at Goonown Growers, hosting volunteers and people who have been 'socially prescribed' to our site, and having seasonal celebrations around food. Every week we work together to grow veg, plant or look after trees, and improve the biodiversity in our fields, but at the moment we struggle to host people comfortably in the wonderful north coast weather that we get! 

So we really need the eco-barn as a dry wind-free space to cook food, store seeds, pack produce, have tea breaks, share meals and bring people together in these beautiful surroundings.

The barn would also be an essential piece of infrastructure for our business, providing a space to pack and store our produce away on-site and out of the elements, as well as allow us to better accommodate our volunteers and most importantly provide a dry sheltered area for the growers tea breaks.

Having done a consultation and surveys, we know there are lots of other groups in the community who need a new space for what they do, including forest school, theatre rehearsals, mental health groups, yoga & other well-being exercise, and cooking workshops. All of which will add so much to St Agnes and surrounding villages. The eco-barn will be accessible for all to use, and will be managed & maintained by our community interest company (CIC).

So this is our community eco-barn - please support us as we create an amazing new space built by and for our community.

What we will spend the money on?

Your support will enable us to create a beautiful space for Goonown Growers to host the local community and engage with them in local food production.

An 8m x 5m building:

• Including a kitchen, storage and multi-purpose open plan space
• Designed by Social Designs, a fantastic CIC that practice community-led architecture design
• Made from properly sustainable building materials - timber frame, rammed earth floor, natural insulation and (if we raise enough money) solar panels - not just the conventional concrete & steel that make up normal agricultural barns
• Built by Girls Assemble, a brilliant project that teaches construction skills to girls & young women aged 9-25 - aiming to address the gender imbalance in the construction industry and empower girls to be trailblazers

Our journey so far….

We started our veg boxes in 2020 (just as the pandemic began) on two beautiful but blank fields in Goonown, right on the edge of the St Agnes village. With the support of our brilliant members, volunteers and the local community we have been slowly expanding our business; increasing the number of vegetable beds, polytunnels, and even purchasing a tractor to meet demand. 

Our vision is to become a self-sustaining ecosystem, with the vast majority of inputs coming from our holding or the very near surrounding area. Working in harmony with nature, without pesticides or fertilizers, using green manures, cover crops, agroforestry, diverse cropping, minimal tillage and manual techniques we will keep those inputs to an absolute minimum.

At the started we planned to:

• Supply people with our own organically certified, locally grown veg in the most environmentally friendly way possible. 
• Enable Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members and local chefs collect veg on foot (or two wheels) from our beautiful fields set in the heart of St Agnes. 
• Sell our produce at the weekly Truro farmers market less than 10 miles away.
• Support other local growers by buying their produce as well as developing networks to help distribute their produce more widely. 
• Source affordable organic produce from further afield where it was not available locally to help grow the market for sustainably grown food. 
• Provide a friendly and inclusive volunteering experience to help support people prescribed by their GP’s. 
• Pay everyone involved the living wage for all the hours they put in.

We’ve made fantastic progress towards achieving most of these goals, but the lack of a barn is holding us back from expanding and meeting all of our goals.

So please support us as we create an amazing new space built by and for our community.

This project successfully funded on 11th December 2022