The parts that produce nothing, and earn the most.
Hedgerows, margins, woodland edges and wildflower ground. Under conventional arable management they are waste. Under agri-environment schemes they are the most reliable income on the farm.
The best-returning thing done here involves growing almost nothing.
Agri-environment income more than doubled to £21,100 on the average English farm and now accounts for roughly thirty per cent of total farm business income. On this ground — thin, drought-prone, marginal in places — that proportion is if anything higher.
The Sustainable Farming Incentive pays for arable and horticultural soils standards, overwinter stubble, cover crops and management. An arable farm layering cover crops, no-till and variable-rate nutrients has been estimated at £45,000 a year in scheme income alone.
Set against a farming enterprise that made £144 in its first year, that is not a supplementary income. That is the income.
Scheme terms have shifted repeatedly and the mainstream SFI application route was paused to new entrants in March 2025 pending a reformed offer. Anybody planning around these figures should confirm the live rates at the point of application rather than trusting a website.
What lives in the margins.
Hedgerows
Blackberries for jam, shelter for everything else, and Gerald’s life’s work.
Woodland
Where the mushrooms and the wild garlic come from.
Wildflower ground
Deliberately, and paid for by scheme income.
Badgers
An entire chapter, and a considerable amount of trouble.
Bees
Which produce Bee Juice, at £12.20 a jar.
Dry-stone walls
Habitat, boundary and a genuine craft.
Under conventional accounting, the unfarmed parts of this holding are waste ground. Under the actual accounts, they are the most reliable income it has. That inversion is the single most important thing British farming has learned in a decade, and almost nobody outside the industry knows it.
Sponsor some of it.
Hedgerow metres and soil-health plots, at a granularity nobody else retails.
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.
Elsewhere on the estate.
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