About Our Farm

We are a modern, urban farm in Greenwich, London. We grow vegetables and flowers using organic, regenerative, and no-dig principles and sell direct to our local community, to chefs, and to florists. Through our farming and events, courses and community volunteering, we reconnect people to the soil, the joy of good food and flowers, and to each other.

Our beautiful two acre farm is based on Woodlands Farm who have generously loaned us the land.

What we stand for

Our vision is a world where the food we eat nourishes both people and planet.

We live in a world shaped by food, a Sitopia. At the moment, we live in a bad Sitopia. Our food system is broken. The world is in the grip of multiple crises: the climate emergency; food poverty; diet-related mental and physical disease and many of us feel totally disconnected from the natural world. We're on a mission to change this. Good food is our religion. From our farm in South East London, we are creating a better Sitopia, where we reconnect people to the soil, to the joy of good food and flowers and to each other.

How do we do that?

We grow
We grow delicious vegetables, fruit and flowers using organic, agro-ecological and regenerative farming methods and sell locally.
We share
We share our love of growing and skill-up a wide range of volunteers and partners.
We connect
We build community and bring people together around food growing for social benefit.

Our Growing Philosophy

We are Soil Association certified organic

We believe food can and should enhance biodiversity and human health.

So we don't use any pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilisers to grow our crops. Instead we use compost and plants called 'green manures' to build the fertility of our soil and control pests by covering crops.

We protect the life and structure of the soil

Healthy, nutritious food depends on healthy soil that is teaming with life; a web of tiny soil microorganisms, fungi and insects.

We farm in ways that protect and enhance that life in the soil by farming 'No Dig'. That means we leave the soil structure well alone - we don't dig, turn or plough the soil. Instead we add nutrition by putting compost on top of the soil and growing 'green manures' - plants known to add nutrients to the soil.

We are biodiverse

No monocultures here! We grow a diverse varity of crops on our two acre site. That not only means we can provide a wide range of tasty produce for you, but also maximises resilience, productivity and biodiversity on our farm.

We are local

We believe we need more small, local farms.

We supply food to the people of South East London which means we can deliver food that's been harvested the day before and doesn't come with loads of food miles.

Meet Our Farm Team

Chloë Dunnett
Chloë is our Founder and Chief Growing Officer. Ever since she pulled up her first home-grown bright orange carrots as a little girl, she secretly dreamed of being a farmer. For a long time she did other things: working in rural Tanzania with an international development charity, and then managing significant policies and programmes in central government as a senior civil servant, sneaking in bits of volunteering on other people’s farms in her holidays. But the dream persisted and so she completed an MSc in food policy at London’s City University as well as an urban food growing traineeship with Growing Communities. She then worked at Fern Verrow, a biodynamic farm in Herefordshire, before returning to London in 2020 to set up Sitopia Farm.
Sarah Alun-Jones
Sarah is our Head of Growth. She has worked in nature friendly food growing for the last 11 years. She grew up in a small village in the Midlands amongst many farms with green fingered parents and grandparents. After moving to London for university, she had a short career in film before she found her way back to the outdoors. She retrained through the Growing Communities traineeship in urban food growing and has since worked at a variety of sites of different shapes and sizes. She has grown on rooftops in Holborn, in churchyards and parks in Hackney, in school gardens, and on larger scale organic and biodynamic farms. Before working at Sitopia Farm, she was one of the founding members at GROW, where she set up and ran a 6 acre farm and educational hub for 5 years. Sarah is obsessed with all things to do with plants and the outdoors and is driven by a desire to share this knowledge to help people feel a sense of purpose and connection in the world.
Ximena Ransom
Ximena is our Grower. She started growing tomatoes and salad leaves on the roof of her boat in Hackney in 2009. After wanting to gain more experience but giving up on the local allotment waiting list, she started volunteering at a nearby Growing Communities market garden. In those months she fell in love with organic food growing, and decided to re- train in horticulture. This led to the amazing opportunity to grow salad commercially on a beautiful plot in Hackney Marshes for ten years. She has also worked on two peri-urban farms in London, a farm in Chile, and taught cookery at the local community kitchen. She loves cooking up tasty dishes made from local, fresh, organic veg and sharing a big pot of something delicious with others.

Our Wider Team and Volunteers

The Farm Team is supported by an incredible wider group of talented individuals who work for us on an ad hoc freelance basis including Lucy Bromwich, Katie Christer, Cat Salt and Oksana Kobenko. We also have a brilliant community of regular volunteers who bring graft and humour and inspiration to us each week.

Meet Our Board

Dan Hill
Dan works with residents, businesses, partners and colleagues on a range of projects seeking to make fairer and more resilient communities and neighbourhoods. His work focuses on people and nature-centred neighbourhoods, new and better homes, resilient high streets and local food. He has undertaken senior roles in regeneration and economic development at the London Borough of Newham and for Peabody at Thamesmead amongst other projects. Dan loves how food can bring together people from all backgrounds.
Milton Ogakgole
Milton is an owner and director of Catherine Tough, an ethical knitwear business operating from Hackney, and brings important marketing and business expertise to Sitopia Farm. A long-term Hackney resident, Milton is originally from Tanzania, hailing from the glorious, biodiverse Usambara Mountains where he set up an orphanage (now a school) and plans to do oral histories to preserve the incredible indigenous botanical knowledge and agricultural know-how. He was a volunteer at one of Sitopia’s pilot sites in Hackney, loved buying its produce, and is a passionate advocate for local community action.
Anna Kirkpatrick
Anna is a senior lawyer at Clifford Chance with over 10 years' experience in international arbitration, international law and dispute resolution. She is also an expert in the emerging field of business and human rights law. She is a long-serving honorary legal adviser at the Royal Courts of Justice Citizens Advice Bureau and is a trustee of Lawyers against Poverty. She frequently presents and publishes on business and human rights and most recently has been an integral part of educational programmes for Advocates for International Development in London, Kenya and Rwanda. She is strongly committed to Sitopia Farm, volunteering at one of the farm's initial sites in Hackney from its inception.
Alice Holden
Alice is our Farmitect and has helped design and implement our farm. She has worked on organic farms of various types and scales over the past 20 years. In 2012, she became Head Grower at Growing Communities’ Dagenham farm and led the transformation of a disused ex-council nursery site into a productive peri-urban, organic farm. Alice continues to work with Growing Communities, an organisation that works with local farmers to feed urban populations in a fair and sustainable way. Her work demonstrates that organic farming can successfully combine benefits to the environment and community and offers solutions to urgent climate problems. Alice is the author of Do Grow, a book to encourage and enable more people to grow their own food.
Carolyn Steel
Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities. An award-winning writer, architect and academic, she is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia, or food-place, has gained international recognition across a broad range of fields in design, ecology, academia and the arts. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, Carolyn studied architecture at Cambridge University and subsequently taught at Cambridge, London Metropolitan and Wageningen Universities and at the London School of Economics, where she was the inaugural director of the Cities programme.