The farming loses money. Everything else pays for it.
That is not a confession, it is the business model, and it is the single most useful thing this estate has to teach anybody else farming in Britain.
What each part earns.
| Business | Published position | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Diddly Squat farming | £144 profit year one; under £15,000 in 2023–24; a loss of about £5,000 in 2024–25 | Clarkson’s Sunday Times column |
| Hawkstone | £21.3m sales in the year to March 2025, up from £7.8m; 134% three-year growth | The Sunday Times 100, June 2025 |
| Hawkstone equity | Total equity rose from £432,512 to just over £3m in the year to 31 March 2025 | Companies House |
| The Farmer's Dog | Employs more than 140 people | Reported, one-year mark |
| The farm shop | Not separately disclosed | — |
| Only Farmers | No funding, no charges, no revenue figure published | Companies House, 17058134 |
| The average English cereals farm | A net loss of £27,400 on agriculture alone, 2024–25 | Defra Farm Business Income |
| The average English farm business income | £71,200, of which £21,100 from agri-environment | Defra |
Twenty to forty times.
Feed barley leaves a farm at somewhere around a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds a tonne. The same barley, malted, brewed, bottled and sold as Hawkstone, is worth roughly twenty to forty times that.
Wheat at about a hundred and seventy pounds a tonne is ten to seventeen pence of wheat in a loaf that sells for eight to twelve pounds. Potatoes with no buyer became a farm shop. Mushrooms that grow uninvited became a crisp sold only by the twenty-four box at £37.40.
That multiple is the whole thing. It is why the brewery exists, why the shop exists, why the pub exists, and why this website is an argument for owning the customer relationship rather than renting it from a supermarket.
- 20–40×
- barley to beer
- ~£180/t
- the grain
- £21.3m
- the beer
Four numbers.
The lesson is not that farming is hard, though it is. It is that the value in British agriculture has moved downstream — into processing, retail, hospitality and brand — and a farm that does not follow it there is selling raw material into a market that has already decided what it is worth.
Learn the arithmetic properly.
The Money Course: gross margins, cashflow and the value-add multiple.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
The words are ours. The brands are not, and nothing here is licensed.
The cast page names every person and what they are actually responsible for, which is not always what the programme implies.
