A thousand acres that has never made money.
Cotswold brash — thin soil, fifteen to forty-five centimetres of it over limestone — bought in 2008 and farmed by its owner since 2019. Year one made a profit of £144. The year to 2025 lost about five thousand pounds. Everything else on this estate exists because of that.
The most honest number on this estate is £144.
In the first year of farming this ground himself, the profit was one hundred and forty-four pounds. Not a hundred and forty-four thousand. A hundred and forty-four pounds, on a thousand acres.
It got better and then it got worse. Under fifteen thousand pounds in 2023–24. A loss of roughly five thousand in 2024–25, when a planned thirty-seven thousand pound profit was wiped out by drought — thirty per cent less wheat, forty per cent less barley, and durum coming in under two tonnes a hectare against an expected six.
None of that is unusual. Agriculture alone made a net loss of £27,400 on the average English cereals farm in 2024–25. What is unusual is publishing it. Most farms do not, which is precisely why nobody outside the industry understands the problem.
- £144
- year one
- <£15k
- 2023–24
- −£5k
- 2024–25
What is actually here.
Ten crops, six kinds of livestock, four seasons and a great deal of weather.
Named, mapped, and honest about which ones are any good.
Barley, wheat, rape, potatoes, durum, oats and some experiments.
Cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, bees and Goat 061.
Thin, alkaline, drought-prone and the cause of most problems here.
What actually happens, month by month.
And why a dry April matters more than anything else.
Six years of doing this in public.
Watch it happen.
Field cameras on the fields that matter, running all year. Lambing in the spring, harvest in the summer, and eleven months of a hedge doing very little in between.
It is the most honest thing on this website, because a camera pointed at a field cannot be edited into a better year than the one you actually had.
What is actually happening in the fields.
One email a fortnight from the farm: what got drilled, what got harvested, what the weather did to it, and what went wrong. Written by somebody who was standing in the field at the time.
- What is being drilled, and when
- Real yields, published whether they are good or not
- The failures, in as much detail as the successes
