Diversified huh

To finish the Contemporary Scholars tour off we visited a couple rather interesting farms that have had a novel approach to making the best of their resources. Both are interesting for different reasons but a common theme between the two was the desire of the managers to both engage the broader community in agriculture. One through setting up what is “Open farm Sunday” the other has set up an amusement park. The first business I will touch on was difficult to keep track of whilst driving around the 1800acre operation we tried to keep track of what we had seen the list was extensive and I suspect we missed a few things. Here goes any way

Theme park
This humble park which is pitched at children aged under 10 sees 500,000 visitors a year. I tried to put this in a context, would the farm at home have had 500,000 visitors since the aboriginals settled Australia? The theme was agriculture and they did a great job of introducing farming to children. There was a lot of fun to be had though and a few scholars may have tried out a couple of the amusements. This was combined with a farm shop that had a rather extensive range from food to wrought iron. But this was just the beginning of what was to come on the farm tour.

Rental
If you need space for a business with an hour of the London CBD this is the place to go the diversity of businesses housed on this farm was amazing and now that it has been a couple of weeks I will have forgotten a few things, please forgive me but here’s a start.
Composting
Machinery rental
Private school
Portable building storage
Storage for equipment from freeway upgrade
Desanding and graveling of soil (this was amazing whole paddocks are lifted, sifted and laid back down)
Police dog training

Cropping
I think this was just a sideline, it was certainly a very small proportion of the business turnover. There were certainly challenges to cropping in this environment the soils where not pretty. But they were problems I’d have gladly taken off them if I could average 2.5-3t/acre (6.25-7.5t/ha)

Recreation
The other side of the business was the letting out of area for recreational usage thus was also quite extensive and encompassed most things barring the big English country past time of pheasant shooting, which the estate owner still held.
Horse cross country riding
2 gun clubs
Model aircraft club
Ultralight aircraft club
Aircraft museum

I’m sure I’ve missed a few here but he even relayed a story of the previous manager charging a Ferrari owner £50 to use the farm roads to test his new brakes so he could get a road worthiness certificate.

It did alter your sense of what you could do with the resources at your disposal but it had to be put in context. The business had 3-4 million people within 30min and 8million within an hours drive. To pick up the same population bases at home you need to drive 5hours in the first instance and over 9hours for the larger group. I don’t think I’ll be putting in an amusement park anytime soon but it certainly was interesting.

The second business of the day was in many regards your typical if what slightly larger than average midlands arable farm, growing wheat, barley and oilseed rape. The first thing that struck me was the rockiness of the soil and the compaction. A set of cultivation points would last 3/4 of day it is little wonder the owner was keen on minimum tillage. The compaction really stood out on the end of a paddock where the previous year it had been put down to crop for pheasants so had missed most of the machinery passes for just one year. The farmer is aware of the shortcomings of his present system but there seems to be a lack of understanding of control traffic (which seems like it would have a good fit) in the UK.

The quirk to this farm was the rental of office space to local businesses. The key factor they had was the lower cost to town
and city rentals. The farm buildings had been sitting idle and this offered a very handy income stream to the business. It feels as if this is now a major part of the business and offers more enjoyment to the manager than the farming operation.

The composting facility the screen is used to remove the the plastic contaminants

Rather abrasive midlands soil