Thirty pages, free.
What a thousand acres actually costs, what it grows, what it earns, and why the farming part loses money every single year. Genuinely quite funny in places, which was not entirely intentional.
What is in it.
The ground
A thousand acres of Cotswold brash, fifteen to forty-five centimetres over limestone, and what that means in practice.
The rotation
Ten crops, what each one costs to grow and what it returns.
The livestock
Six kinds of animal and an honest account of which of them earn their keep.
The numbers
£144 in year one, under £15,000 in 2023–24, a loss of about £5,000 in 2024–25.
The schemes
Agri-environment income, now roughly thirty per cent of average farm income.
The value-add
Barley at £180 a tonne against beer at twenty to forty times that.
The failures
Everything that did not work, and what each one cost.
What we would do differently
Which is a longer list than the successes.
Have it sent over.
One email with the guide attached. No account required and nothing to cancel.
- Thirty pages, free
- The real numbers, published
- And the fortnightly newsletter, if you want it
Why we give this away.
Because the single most useful thing this estate has is not a technique or a product — it is six years of published, unglamorous financial reality about what farming a thousand acres actually returns.
That information is almost entirely absent from public life. Farms do not publish it. Agricultural colleges teach agronomy rather than accounts. The result is that people enter farming with a completely wrong picture of the economics, and find out the expensive way.
So it is free. If it stops one person making a very costly mistake it has done more good than any course we could sell.
Then take a course.
Six of them, from eighty-nine pounds.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
No. Every course starts from the assumption that you have never held a soil auger, because most people have not.
It is not. It is what six years of expensive mistakes taught us, written down so you can make cheaper ones.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/schooling/failures/
/schooling/glossary/
/schooling/ask-kaleb/
