Cultivate Farms with Sam Marwood

Title: Cultivate Farms - Rebuilding the Pathway to Farm Ownership Guest: Sam MarwoodRecorded: April 2026My guest today is Sam Marwood, founder of Cultivate Farms — an Australian farm transition organisation attempting to solve one of the deepest structural problems in modern agriculture: How do you keep farms alive, productive, and locally stewarded when the traditional pathway into ownership has almost completely collapsed?Cultivate Farms sits somewhere between a farm succession platform, an ownership innovation project, a transition advisory group, and a farm matchmaking network. Sam and his team work to connect retiring farmers, aspiring farmers, investors, and regional communities in order to create viable new pathways into agriculture through shared ownership models, succession planning, community investment, and long-term transition structures.Importantly, Sam is not advocating nostalgia or simply telling people to “go back to the land.” He is trying to engineer entirely new ownership pathways under modern conditions: rising land prices, ageing farmers, succession collapse, investor capital, and a generation increasingly locked out of entry.This conversation also touches on the philosophy of Wendell Berry, whose work has deeply influenced my thinking. Berry once wrote that “eating is an agricultural act,” meaning that no matter how abstract modern life becomes, we are never truly disconnected from the land and systems that sustain us.Modern economies are remarkably efficient at hiding those systems. Food appears from nowhere. Ownership concentrates elsewhere. Communities quietly decline. Productive life becomes something many people observe rather than participate in directly.What makes Cultivate Farms so compelling is that it attempts to rebuild a pathway back into stewardship, continuity, responsibility, and participation in something tangible and deeply real — not through nostalgia, but through institutional invention and out-of-the-box thinking.Sam has spent more than 20 years working at the intersection of agriculture and conservation. He is the author of six books, including You Can Own a Farm, Ageing on Farm, Community Owned Farms, The Cultivate Farms Succession Guide, Your Farm Your Legacy, and No Better Place.Links and interview references:Cultivate Farmswww.cultivatefarms.com Cultivate Farms Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cultivatefarms/ Cultivate Farms YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/@CultivateFarms NFSA Film Australia