Ninety pounds to two hundred and forty, and here is every line of it.
A patch price is not a valuation of a quarter acre. It is the cost of growing a stated quantity of produce, processing it, packing it, posting it, and running the record that makes the whole thing worth having — plus a margin that is stated rather than buried.
Patch B2, winter wheat, £220, broken down.
Growing it
- Seed
- £4.10Certified seed at 352 seeds/m² on a quarter acre
- Fertiliser
- £19.40Nitrogen, phosphate and potash, at 2026 prices
- Agrochemicals
- £13.80Two fungicides, a herbicide stack and a growth regulator
- Machinery and labour
- £21.00Drilling, four passes, harvest and carting
- Land, at the rent it would let for
- £12.50Because ignoring this is how farms lose money quietly
Turning it into flour
- Drying and storage
- £3.20
- Milling
- £17.50Stoneground, at a mill within the sixteen miles
- Bags and packing
- £8.90Three postings, so three lots of packaging
- Postage
- £24.60Three tracked parcels, which is the biggest single line here
The part that is not farming
- The record and the tracker
- £18.00Cameras, hosting, the ledger and somebody writing the updates
- Payment processing
- £4.30Card fees, at the published rate
- Shared-risk provision
- £15.00Set aside against substitution in a failure year
- Margin
- £57.70Twenty-six per cent, stated openly, and the reason this exists
Those figures are illustrative of a real cost structure rather than an audited account of one. The point of publishing them is the shape: postage and the record together cost more than growing the wheat does.
The uncomfortable ratio.
Growing the wheat on that quarter acre costs about seventy pounds. Getting it to you as flour, with a record attached, costs about ninety-two. The margin is fifty-eight.
That ratio is the entire reason this estate exists in the shape it does. The farming is the least valuable part of the farming business, which is a sentence that sounds like a joke and is the central economic fact of British agriculture.
The same barley that leaves this farm at around a hundred and eighty pounds a tonne comes back through the brewery worth twenty to forty times that. A patch is a small, honest version of the same arithmetic, with the difference that we are showing you the working.
Why one crop costs more than another.
| Cost driver | Cheapest crop | Dearest crop | The difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inputs | Hedgerow — none at all | Winter wheat — £37 of fertiliser and chemistry | A hedge asks for labour, not nitrogen |
| Processing | Potatoes — washed and sacked | Durum — milled, extruded, dried, cut | Pasta is four operations. A potato is one |
| Packaging and postage | Honey — two jars | Potatoes — thirty-six kilos | Weight is the whole story here |
| Failure risk | Wildflower — nothing to fail | Durum — under a third of expectation in 2025 | The provision on durum is three times the one on oats |
| Labour | Winter oats — four passes | Market garden — continuous, by hand | One is machinery, the other is people |
What we do not do with the price.
We do not raise it during a broadcast window. We do not raise it when a patch is nearly sold out. We do not run a countdown, an artificial allocation, or a price that moves with demand.
The seasonal ladder moves — earlier is cheaper, because earlier is riskier — and it moves on a published schedule that is the same every year. That is the only movement there is.
Dynamic pricing on a product like this would probably work, in the sense that it would extract more money. It would also turn a thing people are fond of into a thing people feel wary of, and that trade has never once been worth making.
The price, questioned.
Four questions about a price we have published in full.
It is roughly a specialist food retailer’s gross margin and considerably less than a supermarket takes on a premium ambient line. We are publishing it, which is the unusual part.
Because three tracked parcels cost about twenty-five pounds and a quarter acre of nitrogen costs about nineteen. That comparison is the most instructive number on the page.
Considerably. A supermarket will sell you twenty-five kilos of wholemeal for about a third of this. You are not buying flour at a good price; you are buying eleven months of a field.
No. It is fixed at purchase and it stays fixed, which is the whole reason the shared-risk provision exists as a line in the costing.
The seasonal ladder.
The same patch at four points in the year, and why the earliest is cheapest.
