Unfarming.
Chapter 17. The parts of a holding that produce nothing under conventional management, and what happens when you decide to take them seriously.
What the unfarmed produces.
Blackberries
Free to grow, £4.80 a jar as jam.
Mushrooms
Into the crisps, at £37.40 a box of twenty-four.
Wild garlic
The other half of the mushroom crisp.
Honey
Bee Juice, £12.20, and 27 reviews.
Nature units
Roughly 30% of average farm income now.
Wildflower ground
Paid for, deliberately, and worth more idle.
The inversion at the heart of modern British farming.
For most of the twentieth century, a good farmer maximised the productive area. Hedges came out. Margins were ploughed. Every square metre was made to grow something.
That is now, on marginal ground, economically wrong. Agri-environment income on the unproductive margins is more reliable than the crop on the productive middle, and it arrives regardless of the weather. On a farm that lost five thousand pounds to a dry spring, the significance of an income that does not depend on rainfall is difficult to overstate.
Unfarming is not a lifestyle choice or a gesture towards the environment. On this soil it is the higher-return use of the ground, and any farm accountant who has looked at the numbers will tell you the same thing.
Sponsor a hedgerow.
By the metre, which is a granularity nobody else sells.
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.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/gawping/
/farming/the-numbers/
/wandering/
