As reported by Bloomberg:
“This is a working farm,” boasts a sign at Rushett Farm. At first glance, the scene appears to be just that: A tractor is parked by stacks of hay bales while rapeseed grows in a field. It’s a quintessential image of working, rural England, at a spot just inside London’s orbital highway, where the city sprawl dissolves into the countryside.Yet things aren’t entirely what they seem. A barn is now a Pilates studio; a path leads down to a café hut overlooking the crops; fields are dedicated to glamping stays and occasionally a corporate event tent. An old hangar now houses a gym and wellness classes, including meditative “sound baths.” Rushett offers a different world of adventures to the theme park up the road; whatever it is, it’s not just a working farm.
Rushett is in fact one of a growing number of English farms diversifying away from agriculture as making a living through traditional means gets harder and more unpredictable. The farming industry has — like that of many other countries — been squeezed by higher input costs in recent years...More than 70% of England’s farms now top up their earnings through non-conventional activities, up from 50% less than two decades ago, government data show. Those side-hustles range from the fairly traditional — camp sites, Airbnb rentals and farm shops — to solar power installations, ice rinks and facilities for business team-bonding sessions.
More details and discussion at the link. The best gift I ever gave to a relative was funding an opportunity for a tween-age niece to spend a week on a working farm, camping in a tent at night while doing chores in the daytime, including milking the goats and mucking out the horse stalls. She absolutely loved it. If you an find similar opportunities, please consider doing the same. Good for the children, good for the farms.
I'm not a great fan of Jeremy Clarkson's (of Top Gear/Fifth Gear fame). He's a typical English gammon with old fashioned notions, and proud of it, but I have been a fan of Clarkson's Farm where he shows the trials and tribulations of trying to make a profit on a farm, fighting the English weather and government regulations, both of which are equally destructive and fickle.
ReplyDeleteThe new season just dropped the first four episodes this week and they went to Holland to see how the Dutch do it and the comparison was stark. UK small farmers are using barns and fields to effectively run jumble sales, like they were fund-raising for an awayday for the local Primary School. In Holland they take the same size farms and run them with using modern methods and integrated planning to get multiple amounts of food grown fare more efficiently.
Meanwhile the UK Labour government simultaneously wants food security, while taxing farmers for all sorts, but controversially they wanted to increase the tax on FERTILISER. However those plans may be scrapped. Three months of the Iran war and they were holding firm. New episodes of Clarkson's farm broadcast and it's suddenly a hot potato policy.