Commune Schafhof – A place of change: community, nature and regionality

The Schafhof near Freiburg is home to a group of people of all ages who organise their lives and work together as a political community. They have been successfully implementing their vision of an open and lively place for three years.

The Schafhof has been run as an ecologically certified farm since the 1990s and comprises 60 hectares of permanent grassland and 25 hectares of forest in a low mountain range location. Farming is done collectively to develop regenerative and sustainable practices. This includes the development of agroforestry systems, sophisticated pasture management and smart water use. Conservation and agriculture are seen as a symbiotic unit to contribute to biodiversity. The focal points of the farm include suckler cow husbandry, mixed fruit, horse boarding, sheep husbandry for landscape maintenance and dual-purpose chickens in a mobile barn. The products are produced according to Bioland guidelines and marketed regionally.

“So we try to live and work together here without hierarchies and to question typical gender roles and also to do things differently and to teach each other our skills so that not everyone always just does what they have perhaps already been socialised to do.”

The collective management is part of the “Kommune Schafhof”, which enables cooperative use of the farm and promotes socially compatible agriculture. In cooperation with the Kulturland Genossenschaft, the land of the Schafhof is to be transferred in the long term to a form oriented towards the common good and de-privatised in order to preserve and further develop the diversity of small-scale farming.