Barley.
Roughly five hundred acres of it, and the single most important thing grown here — not because it is profitable as a commodity, but because it becomes Hawkstone. Feed barley leaves a farm at a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds a tonne. The same barley, brewed, is worth twenty to forty times that.
- Area
- ~500 acres
- Becomes
- Hawkstone lager
- Yield
- ~6t/ha in a good year
What actually happens with it.
Roughly five hundred acres of it, and the single most important thing grown here — not because it is profitable as a commodity, but because it becomes Hawkstone. Feed barley leaves a farm at a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds a tonne. The same barley, brewed, is worth twenty to forty times that.
This is the crop the entire estate is built on, and it is the clearest example of the principle that runs through all of it: the farming does not make money, the value-adding does.
- Area: ~500 acres
- Becomes: Hawkstone lager
- Yield: ~6t/ha in a good year
- Multiple: 20–40× as beer
Drilled
Autumn or spring, depending on the year.
Grown
On Cotswold brash over limestone.
Harvested
Weather permitting, which is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Sold
As something worth more than the raw crop.
The field this comes out of, in the season it looks best. It does not look like this in February.
Watch it grow.
The field cameras run all year, including the eleven months when nothing happens.
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.
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