Food Week:
Drover's Hill Farm
Mark and Nicola met in the first year of Agricultural College in Cheshire in the 1980’s. By year three they were married. “It was love at first sight for me” says Mark. Although she might not favour the comparison, he felt pretty much the same about the two fields of arable land that the couple now works in Saunderton near Princes Risborough. They looked all over the Aylesbury area, but couldn’t afford to buy a whole farm. Eventually part of a holding from a retiring farmer came up.
Heat Lamps
They went into farming on leaving college but then both pursued careers still related to agriculture but not on the land. Now they’re back. Drovers Hill Farm has been built up from scratch over 6 years and Mark is very proud of their achievements. He definitely believes in sustainability: the farm isn’t even on the national grid! They survive on generators and are currently installing a bigger battery bank to store energy from solar panels with the help of a grant from the Chilterns Fund. “It makes running the heat lamps for lambing a bit of a challenge” says Mark.
The ethos of Drovers Hill is to supply organic food at conventional prices. They are trying to educate people with a meat box scheme where you get all the cuts and ‘do the whole animal justice’. Instead of buying the same joints every week this way you get a variety and get to use the ‘lesser’ cuts. It means that the consumer can buy beautifully reared organic meat at comparable prices to buying the same single cut week in and week out from a supermarket. They have just been selling lamb up to now, which they can supply all year round, but will be adding organic free range pork at the end of this month.
Rich Pastures
20 years working in the animal feed industry inspired Mark. “Organic is far healthier in my view for the animals and the consumer and it’s also about putting something back into the land. I believe in rich pastures for my ‘animal feed’!”
Drovers Hill is now also supplying organic apple juices and ciders. The first part of the orchard was planted six years ago and Mark and Nicola now have a thousand trees. They were pressing in September and this is the first season. The bottles are clear and that enables you to see the different colours from the different varieties of apples: amazingly the juice varies from bright red to colourless.
Everything is produced on the farm and Mark is starting to look at outlets for the produce. The apple juice is sold by a stallholder at Princes Risborough market on a Thursday morning and is ‘going well’. You can also order off the internet www.drovershillfarm.co.uk
It’s not easy starting anything from scratch. It takes a lot of time and investment: financial and emotional. It sounds to me like a journey well worth making.
Did You Know?
There are up to nine different cuts of lamb.
