Six businesses.
A farm, a shop, a brewery, a pub, a marketplace and a media operation. One of those loses money reliably, and the other five exist because of it.
All six.
Diddly Squat Farm
Roughly a thousand acres of the former Sarsden estate, including Curdle Hill Farm, bought in 2008 and farmed by its…
Diddly Squat Farm Shop
Opened in 2020 after roughly forty tonnes of potatoes needed a buyer. Now sells around 132 lines and is legally…
Hawkstone
Launched mid-2021, brewed by The Cotswold Brewing Company (05252279) at Bourton-on-the-Water. Sales of £21.3 million in the year to March…
The Farmer's Dog
A fifteenth-century barn on five acres near Burford, bought in 2024 for a reported less than a million pounds and…
Only Farmers
Lisa and Wolfe Bentinck’s marketplace for farm experiences and farmer-to-farmer trade. Incorporated February 2026, launched in May, over 1,300 farms…
The Media
Forty chapters across five series on Amazon Prime Video, with a sixth commissioned in January 2026. Five Diddly Squat books…
The six, compared.
| Business | What it is | The key number | The constraint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diddly Squat Farm | Roughly 1,000 acres of arable and livestock | £144 profit in year one | Thin soil, drought, and weather |
| The Farm Shop | Retail, ~132 lines | Opened 2020 on 40 tonnes of potatoes | 16-mile sourcing radius, by planning condition |
| Hawkstone | Beer, cider and spirits | £21.3m sales to March 2025 | Wholesale margins, and a competitive category |
| The Farmer's Dog | A pub near Burford | 140+ employees | Eighty covers and a national audience |
| Only Farmers | A farm-experience marketplace | 1,300+ farms | No published demand-side number at all |
| The Media | 40 chapters, 5 books, 3 columns | Most-watched Prime original in the UK | Commissioning dependency and key-person risk |
Which of these actually makes money.
Hawkstone, comfortably and by a distance. £21.3 million in the year to March 2025, almost tripled from £7.8 million, with a three-year average growth rate of 134 per cent and twenty-third place on the Sunday Times 100.
The shop and the pub are real businesses with real margins and real constraints. The media generates licence fees and, far more importantly, the audience that makes everything else possible.
The farming loses money. It has lost money in most documented years and will probably lose money again. It is not a profit centre. It is the raw material, the location, the reason and the story, and treating it as anything else is a category error that a great many people make when they look at this estate.
Where the money goes.
Which business subsidises which, and by how much.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Public filings, published rankings and press reporting, each labelled on the page as a verified record, a founder claim or a third-party estimate.
The words are ours. The brands are not, and nothing here is licensed.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/estate/the-money/
/estate/recording/
/estate/sitemap/
