CIPI Cornucopia Community
There are three layers to the Cornucopia Project 'cake' and ofcourse they all feed into one another.
The peoplecare spoke of the Cornucopia wheel is the CIPI volunteers who become creators, resourcerers or drop-in helpers in an evolving team consisting of humans, chickens, ducks, goats and sheep. We yield our focused time and energy in exchange for the ever increasing variety of goods and services available. For example; sailing, kayaking, surfing lessons, veg boxes, campfires, courses, yoga, mulch, biochar, plants, goat therapy, gourmet mushrooms, eggs, wild garlic or many other diverse yields from the Cornucopia project. Never seen a surfing goat? It could happen... If you are a business which is open to this exchange and would like to offer goods and/or services to Cornucopia then please get in-touch via email: cornucopia.guernsey@gmail.com
The Earthcare spoke of the Cornucopia project wheel involves a wider Guernsey community outreach. We offer a community chop and drop for goat friendly branches which can be popped over the fences to our eagerly awaiting volunteer goats to be stripped and turned into useful building materials for dead-hedging and compost. We offer a community compost scheme where people can bring greenwaste, providing no chemicals have been on it for fertilisation, pest control or weed control. We accept deliveries of excess woodchip from tree surgeons. We harvest local seaweed to be used in composting and mulches.
Fairshare. The business support layer works by allowing and supporting micro ecological businesses to thrive on CIPI stewarded land in a 50/50 exchange for goods or services. So if you are a grower and would like to have a private space you must plant twice as much as you wish to take home! The other 50% feeds into the CIPI exchange. This may sound scary but it's honest and upfront and when contrasted to 'a job' in which an employer will take 50% as a bare minimum, often many times this amount, it's actually an honest, open and fair way to coexist within the capitalist system and our private businesses are thriving.
Things have been working so well at the Cornucopia home base, Belmont Vinery, that we're very happy to be able to offer a land design and steward service throughout the Islands by taking challenging land back to basics using the CIPI Conservation herd of goats and sheep, followed up with implementing food forests or syntropic silvo-pastures. This is long term stewardship of challenging sites lending themselves to food forests using syntropic agroforestry methods, with the produce being fed back into the CIPI exchange. If you own land that you feel might be better managed in this way and would like to support this emerging permanent culture in the Channel Islands then please email cipiguernsey@yahoo.com
The Cornucopian Conservation Herd is also available to browse through your property short or long term, all you have to do is fence off the required area and supply suitable feed with windproof shelter.
We have two Royal Golden Guernsey billy goats which are studs for breeding.