A thousand acres, named.
The former Sarsden estate, including Curdle Hill Farm, bought in 2008 and contract-farmed by a villager until his retirement in 2019. Every field has a name, a soil type and an opinion about what it will grow.
What a thousand acres actually looks like.
It is not one field. It is dozens, at between a hundred and eighty and two hundred and thirty metres, on soil that changes from sandy loam to blackgrass-loving clay within a single headland.
That variability is the whole agronomic problem here. A blanket approach — one seed rate, one nitrogen rate, one drilling date — wastes money on the good ground and fails on the bad.
- The valley bottoms
Heavier, wetter, and where the drainage work pays for itself.
- The mid slopes
The best ground on the farm and the reason it is worth farming at all.
- The brash tops
Thin over limestone, drought-prone, and the first to fail in a dry spring.
- The hedgerows and margins
Farming the unfarmed — blackberries, wildlife, and agri-environment income.
- The wildflower ground
Taken deliberately out of production and paid for by scheme income.
What the ground is actually like.
| Characteristic | Reality | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Soil depth | 15–45cm of brash over limestone | Very little water-holding capacity |
| pH | Alkaline | Precision liming, not blanket liming |
| Altitude | 180–230 metres | Later, colder springs |
| Variability | Sandy loam to clay within one field | Variable-rate everything, or waste money |
| Drought risk | High | The defining constraint, and what took 2025 |
| Blackgrass | Present on the heavier ground | ~£155/ha where resistant |
The named fields.
Eight of them, and an honest assessment of which are any good.
Curdle Hill
Part of the original Sarsden estate holding, and the field the whole farm is measured against. Mid-slope, deeper than the…
The Brash Tops
The high ground, where there is fifteen centimetres of stony soil over limestone and nothing to hold water. In a…
The Bottoms
The valley ground. Heavier, wetter and the one place on this farm where drainage work genuinely pays for itself rather…
Blackgrass Corner
The heavier ground where blackgrass took hold years ago and has never fully let go. Later drilling, spring cropping and…
The Wildflower Ground
Taken out of production on purpose and sown with wildflowers. It produces nothing you can eat and is, on the…
The Barley Block
Roughly five hundred acres across several parcels, and the reason the brewery exists. Enough barley for about one and a…
The Hedged Margins
The strips the combine cannot reach and the hedges that bound them. Blackberries, habitat, scheme income, and Gerald’s life’s work…
The Market Garden Plot
A small area of intensive vegetable growing for the shop and the café. High value per square metre, which is…
Farming the unfarmed.
Chapter 17 was called Unfarming. It was about the parts of the holding that produce nothing under conventional arable management: the margins, the hedges, the woodland edges, the awkward corners the combine cannot reach.
Those areas now produce blackberries for jam, mushrooms and wild garlic for crisps, honey from hives, and — most importantly — agri-environment scheme income, which now accounts for around thirty per cent of the average farm business income in England.
It is the single best-returning thing done on this farm, and it involves growing almost nothing.
Take one for a season.
Plotting: a fixed price, paid once, and what grows on it delivered in kind.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Because the worst ground costs more to crop than it returns, and because hedgerow, scrub and margin do measurable work that a combine never will.
The seasonal state at the top of every page is the short answer, and the farming year is the long one.
