About Jess Dunlop

I grew up in England between West London and at my grandmother smallhoding in Cam, Gloucestershire. She bred native breed exmoor ponies to support their recovery as an endangered species at the time. She taught me about responsibility, diligence and attentiveness. I belong to that land. I am part of it, it is the interior map that describes me, as if my insides had been rolled out across the landscape. There is my kidney, there my heart, my spleen.

My parent’s became engaged in Ibiza in the sixties and fell in love with the island. They visited in the Summers bringing us with them and later building a home in the West, near the village of Sant Agusti D’Es Vedra. In this way I grew in affinity with the island, running around barefoot and swimming in the sea endlessly. As a teenager I explored the island’s caminos and coves on my Puig Condor motorbike, finding adventure and freedom whilst developing a sense of belonging with the island’s land and people.

I’ve lived here for large chapters of my adult life. I have always loved and related to the rural Eivissencan culture and landscape, finding simplicity and safety living in her remote casa payesas. I live here on the island again now because it is here that I find that Community is most accesible to me. I feel an ever growing responsibility towards the land here and respect for the Eivissencan traditional farming heritage.

I am concerned by the loss of biodiversity and fragility of the ecosystem and am working towards a future where the island’s biosphere is flourishing, resilient and in good health.

I started work in the environmental/ climate change not for profit sector in 2009 directing a world-wide online climate campaign “1minute to save the world”. This became a platform for cross cultural exchange on climate change and its impact regionally.

My antescendents on my father’s maternal side have been since the mid 1800’s women’s suffrage activists, humanists and social reformers, All of their legacies feel very much alive in me, they bring with them their strength and ethical guidance.

I then worked as director and fundraiser for the Ibiza Preservation Fund in its first start up years, supporting grass roots organisations on the island with funding, community engagement and officially launching and branding the foundation in its early years. My focus has slowly grown more and more land based. I now work entirely with farming, farmers and land stewardship.

I am a passionate defendant of small scale agriculture. Much of my work is about supporting farmers in their role as ecosystem managers. A farmer makes decisions every day and every one of those decisions shape our biosphere.

I believe that Access to Land is fundamental to the future of farming and that Land Justice in the form of secure tenured access to land for farmers and new models such as Land Commons are essential to ensure food security. The decommodification of land is something we need to be acting on as communities with intent, action and policy change.

We need to reframe the way we think about land, and talk about land stewardship, land use, land access. land sovereignty and land justice rather than land ownership.

I am a project builder, creating community, strategy, infrastructure and funding for ground up projects. I am currently working with APAEEF on their Custodia de Territorio programs. (Territory wide land stewardship for nature and conservation) and am a Vocal on their directorial board.

I am the founder and farm manager at Can Purtell. I founded Can Purtell after researching farmland abandonment on the island whilst reactivating the access to land project Banc De Terres D’Eivissa.

The majority of land in disuse on the island of Ibiza is rain fed farmland (25,000 hectares in the last 10 years). I started researching climate-adapted growing and drought resilient plants, to see if I could find a way to bring abandoned rain fed land back into financially viable production whilst improving soil health and sequestering carbon.

My aim is to create a financially viable pathway for others to follow or collaborate with. In this way more rain fed fields can be put back into production by local farmers in ways that bring resilience and regeneration to the island’s biome.

I am enabled by access to land through land stewardship agreements with land owners.

The future vision that I move towards is to see the island’s farmland planted again, providing good quality organic food and stewarded in a beneficial way for nature and conservation, and I would like to see more community participation in that process, we are active parts of the ecosystem how we interact affects the whole. The health of our ecosytem and our food production is a shared responsibilty.

I spent much of my twenties working as a gardener in London, perhaps this is why I took to growing at field scale like a duck to water? It is the most challenging work I have done and always keeps me on my toes and learning. My great great grandfather Andrew Dunlop moved his farming operation from Kintyre, Scotland to Hendon, London to grow hay for the working horses of the London Dairy milk floats from 1880-1920. He was farming 1000 acres. I hope and trust that I carry some of his experience with me.

Farming is a creative process, experimental and requires an adaptive and flexible mindset. I also find artistic expression in this work, sowing fields for me is like painting a giant living canvas.

Can Purtell is going from strength to strength and is currently 35 hectares. With it I have become a dedicated and passionate small- scale regenerative farmer. I call my farming system, ‘soil first, nature led farming’. Biodiversity underpins everything. The first question I ask myself is “what is my place in the ecosystem of a field?”