The Cultivated Place explores what happens to our relationship with land when we depend upon it to feed us. Bringing together growers, farmers, researchers, community organisations, educators and the wider public, the project investigates cultivation as a relationship between people, soil, plants, animals, seasons and place.

For growers and food producers, it provides a space to exchange practical knowledge and reflect on the ecological and ethical relationships underlying different approaches to cultivation. For researchers and universities, it offers a living field site for exploring food systems, agroecology, land ethics and ecological knowledge through practice. For community organisations and educators, it provides practical experiments, stories and resources that can support place-based food and environmental learning. For the wider public, it offers a way to reconnect food with the landscapes, seasons, labour and ecological processes that sustain it.

A small Ethnoecological Food Plot could become the project's living laboratory, alongside experiments in sourcing food locally.

Ultimately, the project asks: can cultivation become a practice through which people learn not merely how to use land, but how to belong to it?