Our Story

'The measure of intelligence is the ability to change' -Albert Einstein

So here I am, navigating the realms of the REALLY BIG World Wide Web. I am not at all techy. In fact, I am still a paper and pencil kinda girl.  I am much more au fait with getting my hands in the dirt or a hand inside a ewe than trying to work out what this is all about.

Still, I will try.

So a little about me/us/them.

I am a mum in her late forties who has been smallholding for the last 18 years in more or less a conventional style of smallholding; set stocked or long rotation grazing, chickens in runs or free ranging 'wherever' and a passion for living the good life and using quality, well-cared for, respected foodstuffs, grown on the land, in the diets of her family.

Finally, 3 1/2 years ago, after 15 years of renting small parcels of land, I managed to buy my own plot. A small plot by many standards but still, it was mine to do with what I wanted. 6.2 acres of lovely, secure land. My land. A raw field, used for silage cuts and the odd bit of Winter grazing for local shepherds. Full of docks and some thistles from years of conventional farming practices. Never been ploughed but has had applications of herbicides for a number of years, it seems.

And so we finally had what I wanted; a field for the sheep although in not much time at all, my focus changed and instead of having a field for the sheep, I wanted the sheep for the field; to graze underneath the orchard trees we have put in, to prune back the hedges and help build the soils and living soil life. The focus was no longer on my beloved flock but on the nature that surrounded us and not just in our field or the neighbouring field but in the whole area and all it's joined up wonderfulness.

We had also, literally since buying this land, endured a number of extended drought like conditions causing us to chase the grass and constantly be either praying for rain or praying for it to stop. Our hay cuts were getting delayed due to rain, when we did get hay weather we were spending 6 weeks of daily (sometimes twice daily right into dark) sessions of hand removing dock seed heads in order to have clean hay. The sheep were getting through gallon after gallon of water and our water pressure was, at best, poor and our irrigation dodgy. in 2022 we fed hay non-stop from June til April 2023 due to the ground just not recovering from livestock pressure and weather conditions. Avian flu meant that keeping the chickens and geese in was miserable and the times the animals were housed seemed to get longer and longer each time. We had a few high Faecal Egg Count results despite best practice, a case of lung worm and some sheep with cases of foot scald each year.

Enough was enough. I read, researched and watched everything I could until eventually I happened across Gabe Brown talking on a documentary called 'Kiss The Ground' and I was hooked. It all made so much sense. How had I been looking at things so wrong all this time?

And so it began; my journey into regenerative (or restorative) agriculture on our little holding which is in its infancy and we hope you will join us in our journey; the good, the bad and the ugly.