You cannot post a swede to Sydney.
About one in six people who ask about a patch is not in the United Kingdom, and for them the produce is the problem rather than the point. So the overseas version delivers everything except the perishables, and says so before anybody pays rather than at the customs declaration.
What actually travels, and what does not.
Since 2021 the rules on moving food out of Great Britain have been unrecognisable from what they were. Meat, dairy and most fresh produce cannot enter the European Union in personal consignments at all. Alcohol carries duty, excise documentation and age verification in the destination country. Fresh vegetables carry phytosanitary requirements that cost more than the vegetables.
Dry goods travel. Flour, rolled oats, pasta, oatcakes, honey to most destinations, sealed preserves to many, cold-pressed oil to some. That is not a small list, and it is an honest one.
So an overseas patch is a dry-goods patch. You choose from the crops whose output is shippable, you get the same tracker and the same record, and the value that would have gone into a sack of potatoes goes into the part that survives a container.
What we will and will not send, by destination.
| What | To the EU | To the US | To Australia | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flour, oats, oatcakes | Yes | Yes | Yes, declared | Dry, ambient, low risk, well understood |
| Pasta, from your own durum | Yes | Yes | Yes, declared | Same |
| Cold-pressed oil | Yes | Yes | Case by case | Volume and leakage, more than regulation |
| Honey | No | Yes | No | Bee-product import rules, which are strict and vary wildly |
| Preserves and jam | Case by case | Yes | Case by case | Sugar content and fruit origin decide it |
| Beer | No | No | No | Excise, age verification and carrier policy. Take the credit instead |
| Potatoes, vegetables | No | No | No | Phytosanitary, and they would arrive as soup |
How an overseas patch works.
Choose a dry-goods crop
Wheat, durum, oats, or a hedgerow stretch. The grid greys out what cannot travel to your address.
Pay the same fixed price
The patch costs the same. Shipping is separate, quoted before you pay, and it is not cheap.
Follow it exactly as anybody else does
The tracker, the camera stills, the provenance record. None of that has a border.
Choose what happens to the untravellable half
Estate credit, a donation to the parish fund, or a UK address of your choosing.
It ships once, in one consignment
After harvest, with the paperwork done properly, tracked, and with the duties stated up front.
Why this is not a worse product.
The thing overseas members say they want, over and over, is the following of it. The photographs from the same fence post, the February tiller count, the six hours of notice before the combine moves.
None of that requires a parcel. The parcel is the receipt at the end, and if the receipt has to be flour rather than potatoes then it is flour.
What we will not do is sell an overseas patch that quietly delivers nothing, or one where the value is a certificate. A certificate is what you sell when you have not thought about it.
Taking a patch from another country, questioned.
Four questions, and the first one is always about duty.
You do, and the checkout tells you roughly what it will be before you pay rather than leaving the courier to ambush you with a handling fee at the door.
Yes, and for the perishable crops it is much the better answer. Nominate any UK address and the whole thing ships normally.
Entirely. Push, email and the photographs have no border, and the combine notification will reach you at whatever hour it happens to be where you are.
Because customs decides by destroying it, and then we have taken your money for a sack of composted potatoes. Refusing the order is the honest option.
The grid.
With the crops your address can actually receive.
