The full build
We build the farm first.
Then the neighborhood around it.
An agrihood is a neighborhood designed around a working farm. It is the most complete thing Headland does, and the least of what we do by volume.
This page describes the ceiling. A full agrihood asks for the right ground, patient money, and a client who wants a place rather than a yield, and those three things do not arrive together often. Most of our year is brokerage, management, redevelopment and landscape work, and those pay the rent.
But every one of those services is a piece of this one, which is why we can do it at all. The land search is brokerage. The site is landscape design. The farm is management. The construction is the builder’s licence. An agrihood is what happens when a client needs all of it at once.
The model
Development-Supported Agriculture.
The model has a name. Planners call it Development-Supported Agriculture: the homes pay for the farm the way other developments pay for a golf course or a clubhouse, and in return the farm feeds the people who live there and gives the place its character.
The farm is not an amenity added at the end; it is the reason the development exists. A couple of hundred agrihoods exist across the country now, with more every year, and we would rather build a good one than count them.
Four things a Headland place has.
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01
The Farm
A working farm at the center, often certified organic, usually with a CSA or farm stand. Run by a real farmer, not kept up by a landscaping crew, and earning its place by growing food.
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02
The Land
Homes clustered so most of the acreage stays open: pasture, woodland, wetland and trails held as conserved land rather than carved into lots. Density in one place buys openness everywhere else.
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03
The Table
A weekly box, a farm stand, farm-to-table restaurants, shared kitchens and pick-your-own rows, putting the harvest within walking distance of the front door.
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04
The Commons
The farm gives the neighborhood a reason to gather: harvest days, markets, a teaching kitchen, a barn that doubles as a hall. The calendar is set by the season, not the amenity schedule.
“Eating is an agricultural act.”
Somewhere for the harvest to go.
A farm is a business, not a feature. It needs an operator whose job it is, a crop plan, and a market. Without those it reverts to mowing and the neighborhood loses the thing it was built around.
Fisher & Farmer, a sister company, works that side of things, growing and selling food, though the two firms are run as separate operations. The relationship is useful precisely because it is a real one.
Not theoretical
Places already doing it.
Six communities, built by other people, that show what the idea looks like once it is on the ground.
Serenbe
Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia
A thousand acres of hamlets and preserved land half an hour from Atlanta, arranged around Serenbe Farms, a 25-acre organic farm and CSA that supplies the community’s own restaurants.
Willowsford
Loudoun County, Virginia
One of the largest in the country. Roughly half its land is kept as open space; the rest is divided into four villages laced with trails, all built around a working farm and its stand.
Agritopia
Gilbert, Arizona
Suburban Phoenix, reimagined: 450 homes on 160 acres wrapped around an 11-acre certified-organic farm, with a coffee shop and eateries that cook from its rows.
Prairie Crossing
Grayslake, Illinois
A conservation community north of Chicago with a 100-acre organic farm at its core, plus a farmer-training program and an environmental charter school built in beside it.
Rancho Mission Viejo
Orange County, California
The developer credited with coining the word “agrihood.” A working-ranch inheritance turned into neighborhoods that keep agriculture and open range as the organizing idea.
The Cannery
Davis, California
Proof the model is not only for the exurbs: built on a former tomato cannery inside the city, with a working urban farm anchoring the neighborhood.
Tell us about the land.
A parcel you are thinking of buying or selling, ground you already own and are tired of worrying about, or a site that is not working. Tell us what it is and what you want from it.