Everything that went wrong, and what it cost.
Nobody markets failure. Agronomy content is aspirational and sponsor-safe. This farm’s entire brand is honest failure — Diddly Squat literally means nothing — so this archive is free and detailed.
The record.
A profit of £144
On a thousand acres. Not a hundred and forty-four thousand. A hundred and forty-four pounds.
The first batch of lager
Failed a blind taste test. It was, by every account, fine — and fine is not good enough, so it was thrown away and rebrewed.
The enforcement notice
West Oxfordshire District Council served it. The restaurant was refused on appeal, the barn ordered restored, and the shop limited to a sixteen-mile sourcing radius.
The cider recall
A batch over-fermented. It was recalled with a public statement beginning "we completely cocked up". Sales went up afterwards.
Hawkstone Black and Spa Lager
Recalled over undeclared gluten from wheat. Reported to the Food Standards Agency, and stated here rather than buried.
The wet year
Under £15,000 profit. "It didn’t stop raining."
The drought year
A loss of about £5,000. Wheat down thirty per cent, barley down forty, durum under two tonnes a hectare against an expected six. A planned £37,000 profit, gone.
Oilseed rape
A gamble every year since the neonicotinoid ban. A field can look perfect in September and be gone by November.
Under-supplying the soft toys
Four of the five named-beast plush toys are permanently out of stock. Richard Ham has fourteen reviews on a £19 item. We keep getting this wrong.
Why publishing this is the most valuable thing here.
A farm that publishes only its successes teaches nothing, because everybody already knows what success looks like. The useful information is in the failures — what specifically went wrong, at what point, and what it cost.
The cider recall is the clearest case. A batch over-fermented. The statement said, in plain English, that we had completely cocked it up. Sales rose afterwards, and every drinks brand that has studied it has drawn the same conclusion: an honest recall builds more trust than a flawless record, because a flawless record is not believable and everybody knows it.
The most expensive lesson on this list is the 2024–25 drought, which cost about £42,000 against plan. The most useful one is the first batch of lager, which cost a few thousand pounds and established a standard that has held for five years.
Learn it properly.
The courses, with the honest chapter in every one.
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/
