Ten things we try to grow.
Some of them work. The oilseed rape is a gamble every single year and the durum wheat came in at under a third of expectation in 2025.
Everything in the rotation.
Barley
Roughly five hundred acres of it, and the single most important thing grown here — not because it is profitable…
Wheat
Winter wheat, targeted at ten tonnes a hectare and rarely getting there. In 2025 the drought took roughly thirty per…
Oilseed Rape
The bright yellow crop everybody photographs in May. Since the neonicotinoid ban, cabbage stem flea beetle has made it a…
Potatoes
The crop that accidentally created the entire retail business. Roughly forty tonnes of potatoes were produced with no obvious buyer,…
Durum Wheat
Hard wheat, grown for pasta. In 2025 it came in at under two tonnes a hectare in places against an…
Oats
Undemanding, useful in a rotation, and a genuinely good break crop on ground that struggles with blackgrass. Not glamorous and…
Echium
An unusual crop grown for its oil, and one of several attempts here to find something with a better margin…
Blackberries
They grow in the hedgerows without being asked, cost nothing to establish, and turn into jam at £4.80 a jar.…
Mushrooms
Chapter 22 was called Mushrooming, and this is what it was about. They end up in the Mushroom and Wild…
The Market Garden
A small area of intensive vegetable growing for the shop and the café. Not a commercial vegetable operation — an…
The rotation, and what it earns.
| Crop | Area | Becomes | The honest assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barley | ~500 acres | Hawkstone lager | The crop that pays for everything, as beer rather than as grain |
| Wheat | Variable | Flour, and commodity sale | Most exposed to a dry spring on this soil |
| Oilseed rape | Variable | Cold-pressed oil | A genuine gamble since the neonicotinoid ban |
| Potatoes | Small | The farm shop | Started the entire retail business by accident |
| Durum wheat | Small | Tractor pasta | Under 2t/ha in 2025 against an expected 6 |
| Oats | Rotation | Break crop | Unglamorous and genuinely useful against blackgrass |
| Blackberries | Hedgerows | Jam at £4.80 | Costs nothing, earns something |
On this soil — thin brash over limestone, alkaline, drought-prone, at 180 to 230 metres — spring barley genuinely outperforms second wheat. Which is convenient, because spring barley is exactly what the brewery wants and beer is worth twenty to forty times what the grain is.
The blackgrass problem, briefly.
Blackgrass resistance costs a mean of £155 a hectare on infested English wheat fields — roughly fourteen per cent of the potential gross margin, according to work published in Nature Sustainability by Rothamsted and ZSL across a hundred and thirty-eight fields.
Across the UK that is around four hundred million pounds and eight hundred thousand tonnes of wheat a year. Controlling it is the single biggest arable margin lever available here, and it is done with later drilling, glyphosate stacks before drilling, spring cropping and rotation — not with a new chemical, because the new chemical does not exist.
Take a field for the season.
Fixed price, paid once, and the crop delivered in kind.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
The farming does not. It made a hundred and forty-four pounds in its first year and has rarely done much better. Everything else on this site exists because of that.
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.
