Denmark has a grand tradition of cooperative farming - but Andelsgaarde wants to make it as easy as gym membership

We continue to draw a huge amount of inspiration from Danish traditions of egalitarian and cooperative politics - Alternativet, and their successor the Independent Greens, were exemplars of this tradition. Here’s a new project which combines some of those historic elements with new modes of consumption and participation.

It’s called Andelsgaarde - which means “cooperative gardens” in Danish. Its basic offer is that, for the price of a monthly gym membership, you will have access to, and voting rights in, a sustainable and regenerative farm. As they explain below:

Our goal is to buy, rebuild and lease farms to cultivate land regeneratively in a modern and sustainable way. We are doing our part to reduce the climate and biodiversity crisis and to produce more healthy food, while also giving nature more space…

As a member of Andelsgaarde, you are helping to rethink the original cooperative movement. In a nutshell, the cooperative idea is that we come together to solve problems that affect us all. The problem we want to tackle in Andelsgaarde is the climate and biodiversity crisis.

With your membership, you make a significant difference by contributing to the establishment of cooperative farms across the country. Together we take responsibility for ensuring a more sustainable future for our children and grandchildren.

Volunteer groups The volunteer groups provide volunteers to work on specific tasks. Right now we have an events group that gets ideas for and organises events, a biodiversity and nature group (Brinkholm) that initiates actions that help nature, a building group that helps with small and large building projects, and a panic group that responds quickly if the shit hits the fan on one of the farms.

In time, as we get more farms, the groups will probably become more locally anchored around a single farm.

For your monthly membership fee you, get the title of farm owner and a vote at the annual general meeting. At the same time you get the opportunity to actively participate in the work on the farms, take part in social activities such as talks, community dinners and harvest festivals. And you will have the chance to buy good vegetables from the skilled stewards at your farms – they sell both at the farms and markets.

Or you can simply become a paying member because you want to make a difference for nature and the climate.

…We have rethought the old cooperative model, where you typically paid DKK 10,000, 50,000 or 100,000 for a share. With us, the membership has replaced the cooperative certificate. We pay DKK 150 a month, and that way we are continuously saving up for a new farm and more land. Without pesticides and with the establishment of forest farming, biodiversity forest and much more.

We got the idea for a new scalable share model from the fitness industry. In Denmark, there are over 800,000 Danes who pay around DKK 150 per month [£17] for a fitness membership. We thought, why not supplement that with a membership of Andelsgaarde, so we can all become farm owners and tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis?

Naive? Perhaps, but if you had asked a scientist or a fortune-teller 30 years ago whether they thought over 800,000 Danes would venture into a gym, the answer would probably have been no. It is migration on the same scale as when women entered the labour market.

Its worth remembering that the Danish Cooperative movement is a long-standing tradition in the country, active since the late 18th century (see Wikipedia). So Andelsgaarde are invoking a refresh of cooperative farming which will have great resonance in the Danish context.

For our explorations into land politics at Alt.Global, see this tag.