KNOWLEDGE SHARING IS CARING 💚😀

Thanks Good Small Farms for showing us around your wonderful farm for Agroforestry Weekend.

The team has been very busy in the last three years building up this wonderful farm business. They are working to show how it’s possible to create a viable mixed regenerative farm. 

They grow what they can on 100 acres, they are certified organic and Pasture for Life. But it’s more than just the food, it’s about biodiversity, ecology and their social impact too. This is why they are a BCorp (not easy to achieve!).

To work out what they wanted to grow they thought about the ideal climate friendly diet, which as we know is extremely complex. Balancing this with what this land can actually grow, was the next part of that challenge. The team believe that legumes and nuts should feature more in this diet, and that animal products can be part of a healthy diet. So they started here. 

It was refreshing to get a really honest insight into the business. Their most profitable element is the farmhouse rental / Airbnb side of things. But they also profit from a market garden, beef herd, agroforestry and are developing a tree nursery. 

Their market garden is a low input no-dig system, meaning that they try not to disturb the soil too much and use wood chip as pathways to help reduce the weed burden and to feed the nutrients to the soil. They use shallow rotovations when it comes to planting seeds, so no heavy machinery is used. 

They openly admit this is great at this scale, but if it were to operate at field scale it would be really hard to make a profit from. You’d need a lot of wood chip and man power (£££). Good Small Farms currently have a spot at Stroud market and sell to other producers and retailers locally, and they are about to start a local veg box scheme. The challenges they experience are seasonality and people’s expectations to what can be produced like this - it isn’t bananas and strawberries year round 

Eric (founder) was telling us that previously, the farm’s arable land had been sprayed a fair bit. So it’s very compact and the soils weren’t in great condition. The abundance of moss showing just how compact it is. To help move away from this, they are going to use a bio stimulant to provide a catalyst for what’s already in the soil to encourage diverse growth. As well, to slow the flow of water off the land the have created a small bund (ridge) with a hedge to accompany it to act as a windbreak and biodiverse nature corridor too. It provides food for the cows (elder, blackthorn and hazel to name a few). Whilst it takes a while to grow, it provides so many benefits. It also is good for separating the public footpath (dogs) from the livestock too, so that everyone is kept happy and healthy. 

Good Small Farms is also now home to a mixed herd of cows that they rear for beef. Calves are at foot, which means they stay with their mothers until slaughter. They started with 5 Herefords as they are low maintenance and out wintered. Also good for beginners!  They mob graze small areas at a time so each section has a lot of time to recover. In theory this means more grass per area in the long term, and the land can eventually take more stock. 

The farm’s agroforestry effort is a low input system without heavy pruning. They don’t expect high yields from it. The decision to take this approach was based on it being an asset to the farm in terms of biodiversity and an extra offering for the customers from their key enterprises (market garden and beef). If it was an enterprise of its own, then this wouldn’t have been a wise decision due to its location on the farm (harder to get to). 

They chose to plant hazelnuts and walnuts as they grow well in the UK, as well as fruit such as plums and cobnuts (a type of hazelnut). There are pears, apples and walnuts of different varieties and in between each tree there is a different fruit bush (raspberries, blackcurrants and others!). It’s a complicated and fairly clunky approach but works for this farm and their set up. 

Interestingly,  they knew from pics of the farm long ago that elms were once a feature on this farm. So they’ve also planted species that are hopefully more resistant to elm lime disease, as many have now died out. Lastly, we learnt that they are also working to develop wood pasture for the livestock too. 

All in all a wonderful and interesting visit! Worth keeping on your radar as we can learn so much from these guys.