£144.
That was the profit in year one. Not a hundred and forty-four thousand — a hundred and forty-four pounds, on a thousand acres. Six years later the farming still loses money, and everything else on this estate exists because of it.
Six years of farming, published.
| Year | Result | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2019–20 | £144 profit | The first year of farming it himself |
| 2023–24 | Under £15,000 | A wet year — "it didn’t stop raining" |
| 2024–25 | A loss of about £5,000 | Drought. A planned £37,000 profit, wiped out |
| The average English cereals farm, 2024–25 | A net loss of £27,400 | Agriculture alone, before diversification and schemes |
| The average English farm business income | £71,200 | Still 32% below 2022–23 in real terms |
| Of which agri-environment | £21,100 | More than doubled, now ~30% of the total |
So where does the money actually come from?
Not from farming. It comes from what happens to the crop afterwards.
Barley leaves a farm at a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds a tonne. Brewed into Hawkstone it is worth twenty to forty times that, and Hawkstone turned over £21.3 million in the year to March 2025. Potatoes with no buyer became a farm shop. Mushrooms and wild garlic that grow uninvited became a crisp sold only by the twenty-four box.
That is the entire model, and it is not unique to this farm — it is the only model that works for almost any British farm under two thousand acres. The farming is the raw material. The margin is downstream, and the only way to capture it is to own the downstream.
- 20–40×
- barley to beer
- £21.3m
- Hawkstone, to Mar 2025
- £144
- the farming
The four numbers that explain this place.
The lesson of this farm is not that farming is hard, though it is. It is that the value in British agriculture has moved downstream — into processing, retail, hospitality and brand — and that a farm which does not follow it there is selling raw material into a market that has already decided what it is worth.
Read the six years properly.
Forty chapters, indexed, in order.
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.
