ESC: Organic Vegetable Garden

The ecovillage Gemeinschaft Sonnenwald Schernbach e.G. was founded in 2019 in Germany's Black Forest. The property of our cooperative is divided in 'Upper Farm' where the 60 grown-ups, including one handicapped young woman, and 11 children live and 'Lower Farm', including the workshop, silos, hay barn, cow barn, vegetable gardens, three greenhouses and about 60 ha agricultural land. Our vision is to establish a campus for lifelong-learning and a laboratory for research in sustainability, solidarity and regeneration, not only in agriculture but also in our work, lives and business endeavors.
 We understand sustainability, solidarity and regeneration in their broadest senses. We consider all of them in choosing what we give away and what we give up and in appreciating what we receive and what we enjoy in return. As a young, still developing community, we are always learning and want to pass along what we have already learned. Our goal is not to live in a bubble apart from the world but to integrate our energies with the vast forces of change already at play in the world. Thus, we hope to serve as a model for young people, to encourage them to start their own projects and to be faithful to their dreams. We want to share our well-being; we know that in sharing our plenty with people less privileged than we are we enrich ourselves. What goes around comes around. Using a variety of holistic, practical methods of working and communicating, we dive into transforming learning. This means developing creative responses to problems, empathic skills and practical competence. Personal change leads to community change, community change to regional change. All of this, we believe, is part of meeting global challenges. With this in mind, we are building both a seminar center and a holistic health center to offer a variety of approaches to physical, emotional and spiritual health. On our organic farm, we practice regenerative agriculture and feed ourselves with the produce. We also practice welfare oriented animal husbandry with dairy cattle, pigs and chickens. Our agroforestry project has begun to attract attention in the region and in Germany at large. Our goal is to foster liveliness, soil fertility and biodiversity, as well as to cultivate a profitable organic farm that is oriented towards and embedded in natural cycles. Our activities, we hope, will not just serve ourselves, but also make a decisive contribution to sustainable transformation on a local, regional and global level.