The Unfarmed.
Margins, hedges, woodland edge and the corners a combine cannot reach. Under conventional management this is waste ground. On the actual accounts it is the most reliable income the farm has.
- At
- 2.2 miles
- Chapter
- 17 — Unfarming
- Scheme income
- ~30% of farm income
What is here.
Chapter 17 was called Unfarming. It was about deciding to take the unproductive parts of a holding seriously rather than treating them as the bits between the useful bits.
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 thin, drought-prone ground like this, the proportion is if anything higher.
The important part is that it arrives whether or not it rains. On a farm that lost five thousand pounds to a dry spring, an income that ignores the weather is worth considerably more than its face value suggests.
What happened here.
For most of the twentieth century a good farmer maximised the productive area. Hedges came out, margins were ploughed, and every square metre was made to grow something.
On marginal ground that is now, straightforwardly, wrong. The margin out-earns the middle. Any farm accountant who has run the numbers will tell you the same thing, and almost none of them say it loudly enough.
- At
- 2.2 miles
- Chapter
- 17 — Unfarming
- Scheme income
- ~30% of farm income
What it costs to keep.
The Unfarmed
- Hedge laying, per metre
- £12 to £18Skilled, seasonal, and worth every penny.
- Scheme income, average English farm
- £21,100More than doubled, and now ~30% of income.
- Blackberries
- FreeThe only cost is scratched forearms.
- What it grows
- Almost nothing you can combineWhich is rather the point.
Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.
What to look at, while you are here.
The laid section
Cut, bent and pegged. It thickens from the base and lasts fifty years.
The six-metre margin
Uncropped, deliberately, and paid for.
The pollinators
Which are here because the wildflower ground is two fields away.
The arithmetic
This strip earns more per acre than the field beside it. That is not a metaphor.
The Unfarmed, in the season it looks best. It does not look like this in February, and the walk changes plates when the real season at OX7 does.
Further along.
The Spring
A spring line where the limestone meets the clay, a stone trough, and the only reliable water on the holding…
The Bees
Six hives on the south edge of the wildflower ground. They produce honey which is sold as Bee Juice at…
The Lambing Shed
Four pens, a creep, a heat lamp and a camera. For six weeks in spring it is the most watched…
The Brewery
The walk cheats here. The brewery is not on this farm and never has been. We have stitched it on…
Watch this bit live instead.
There is a camera on or near this stop, running all year, with no audio and no zoom.
