The farm loses money. Everything else is why.
A thousand acres of Cotswold brash that made £144 in its first year. A farm shop legally capped at sixteen miles. A brewery turning over £21.3 million. A pub with no telephone. Forty chapters of doing it wrong in public — and this, which is Chapter 41.
What is actually happening out there this week.
Six businesses, one week. This band is the closest thing the estate has to a dashboard, and it is the same data the ledger pill in the header is reading.
Combining, weather permitting
The shop is full
- The fields Winter wheat in the ground at Bury Hill, spring barley off The drilling plandaily
- The shop Potatoes, eggs, Bee Juice, and whatever the polytunnel gave up The tilldaily
- The brewery Lagering tank four, twenty-eight days in, nine to go Bourton-on-the-Waterweekly
- The pub Next table release, the first of the month, 9am The booking bookmonthly
- The weather Cotswold brash over limestone drains fast and forgives nothing OX7hourly
15°C at the farm shop, and dry for now
Winter barley running at 4.1 tonnes the hectare
Chapter 41 is open. Forty came before it
Everything here is publicly observable from the farm, the shop, the brewery or the pub. Nothing on this page is scraped from anybody and no bulk extraction happens: all data is publicly accessible, and any bulk extraction would require consent and must respect robots.txt and terms of service.
Ten doors into one estate.
A farm, a shop, a brewery, a pub, an archive, a marketplace, a membership, a field you can take for a season, an academy and the paperwork. All of it in one account.
A thousand acres of Cotswold brash that has never once made money, documented in public.
An emporium of edible delights and potatoes. Everything made here, or within sixteen miles of here.
Hawkstone. Barley grown on this farm, brewed an hour up the road. Hard to make, easy to drink.
The Farmer's Dog. Everything on the menu is British. No cola, no avocado, no telephone.
Forty chapters of doing it wrong in public. The estate continues at Chapter 41.
The family marketplace. Over 1,300 farms, and the first £300 a farm earns is entirely free.
Four tiers. The first one is free and stays free. The top one comes with a field.
Take a field for the season. Fixed price, paid once, and what grows on it turns up at your door.
What six years of losing money taught us, written down so you can lose less of it.
Who does what, where the money goes, and every page on this site in one list.
Twenty-five pieces written from the field rather than the desk, and argued rather than announced.
Delivery, returns, cookies, age assurance and the fourteen system states, written to be read rather than survived.
Six years of doing it wrong, in public.
In 2019 a contractor retired and the man who owned the land decided to farm it himself. Year one made a profit of one hundred and forty-four pounds.
By 2020 there were roughly forty tonnes of potatoes and nobody to sell them to, so a shed was opened with a till in it. That shed is now the most profitable decision anybody has made here. In 2021 barley that would not pay as grain became a lager that now turns over twenty-one million pounds a year. In 2024 a derelict fifteenth-century barn became a pub employing more than a hundred and forty people.
None of it was a plan. All of it follows from one fact: on a thousand acres of thin soil over limestone, the farming does not pay, and everything downstream of the farming does.
- 2019
- he starts farming it
- 2020
- the shop opens
- £21.3m
- the brewery, by 2025
Six years, one row each.
The estate is not a brand extension. It is six consecutive years of one decision forcing the next.
He starts farming it himself
A contractor retires and a thousand acres of Cotswold brash goes in-hand for the first time. Year one returns a profit of £144.
Read the chapterThe shed with a till in it
Roughly forty tonnes of potatoes and nobody to sell them to. The farm shop opens, and becomes the most profitable decision anybody has made here.
Read the chapterBarley that would not pay as grain
The malting barley goes to a brewer an hour up the road instead of a merchant. That decision is now a £21.3m business.
Read the chapterThe restaurant that was refused
Planning says no. The lambing shed becomes the answer to a question nobody had asked, and the sixteen-mile radius becomes a fixed condition rather than a slogan.
Read the chapterA derelict fifteenth-century barn
The Farmer's Dog opens at Asthall Barrow with no telephone and everything on the menu British. It employs more than a hundred and forty people.
Read the chapterThe drought, published anyway
Wheat down thirty per cent, barley down forty. The numbers went out in the newsletter in the same fortnight they were counted.
Read the chapterWhat people actually buy.
Not what we would like to be the best sellers — what genuinely leaves the building fastest.
Burger Sauce 250g
A thick, rebellious sauce for burgers from beef that definitely did not die of boredom. Ninety-five people have reviewed it,…
Bee Juice Honey 350g
Normal farms sell honey. We sell Bee Juice. Same substance, better name, and it comes from hives you can watch…
Hawkstone Premium Lager
The one that started it. Brewed with barley grown on this farm, lagered properly rather than hurried, and good enough…
Emma Bridgewater × Diddly Squat "Cow Juice" ½-Pint Mug
Sixty reviews. Sixty. For a mug. It is the single most reviewed thing in the shop and we still do…
What the ground is giving up right now.
A farm shop capped at sixteen miles cannot stock what is out of season, which is either a serious constraint or the entire point, depending on the month.
| What | J | F | M | A | M | J | J | A | S | O | N | D |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Potatoes — Melody and MarfonaThe field | Available in January | Available in February | Available in March | Not in April | Not in May | Not in June | Available in July | Available in August | At its best in | At its best in | At its best in | Available in December |
| Spring barley — for the lagerThe field | Not in January | Not in February | Not in March | Not in April | Not in May | Not in June | At its best in | At its best in | Not in September | Not in October | Not in November | Not in December |
| Winter wheat — milling and feedThe field | Not in January | Not in February | Not in March | Not in April | Not in May | Not in June | Not in July | At its best in | Available in September | Not in October | Not in November | Not in December |
| Rapeseed — pressed for the oilThe field | Not in January | Not in February | Not in March | Not in April | Not in May | Not in June | At its best in | Available in August | Not in September | Not in October | Not in November | Not in December |
| Honey — Bee Juice, from hives you can watchThe hives | Not in January | Not in February | Not in March | Not in April | Not in May | Available in June | Available in July | At its best in | Available in September | Not in October | Not in November | Not in December |
| Lamb — from the April lambingLivestock | Available in January | Available in February | Not in March | Not in April | Not in May | Not in June | Not in July | Available in August | Available in September | At its best in | At its best in | Available in December |
| Eggs — the Chicken RanchLivestock | Available in January | Available in February | Available in March | At its best in | At its best in | At its best in | Available in July | Available in August | Available in September | Available in October | Available in November | Available in December |
| Wildflower and hedgerow — the unfarmed acresThe margins | Not in January | Not in February | Not in March | Not in April | Available in May | At its best in | At its best in | Available in August | Not in September | Not in October | Not in November | Not in December |
At its best Available This month, October
Pick a crate, we knock 50% off a box of crisps.
Any crate from Diddly Drinks — lager, shandy or cider — and a twenty-four box of crisps comes in at half price.
Forty chapters. This is the forty-first.
Peepshow Studio, who made the titles, number their own asset files continuously — CF4_CH26_Pubbing, CF4_CH32_Landlording. The chapters do not reset per series. Series Four is chapters twenty-six to thirty-two. Series Five ends at forty.
So this is Chapter 41: not a shop with a farm theme, but a continuation of the same numbered work in a different medium. Every editorial piece here gets a real sequential number, logged permanently. It is either the best idea in the whole thing or considerable presumption, and it may well be both.
The ledger, most recent first.
Every editorial piece on this site takes the next number in the same sequence the television chapters use, and keeps it permanently.
Chapters 1 to 40 were televised. Chapter 41 onwards belong to this platform, and exactly one page owns each number. Where a page refers to a televised chapter it says so in those words.
Three things you can do here that you cannot do anywhere else.
Take a field for the season
A fixed price, paid once, and what grows on that ground delivered to you in kind. Not an investment, and…
Watch it happen
Cameras on the fields, running all year. Lambing in April, harvest in July, and eleven months of a hedge doing…
Belong to the place
Four tiers from Chapter 41 to Chapter 44. The first one is free and stays free, and it is a…
Twenty-eight quarter acres. Pick one.
Six of the twenty-eight cells, shown here. Pick one and you are buying a stated quantity of produce at a fixed price, delivered in kind, with your name attached to a numbered piece of ground you can watch being farmed.
Free to take Taken this season One cell is a quarter of an acre, except the hedgerow patches, which are twenty metres of hedge, and the potato and market-garden beds, which are an eighth. The plan is schematic, and deliberately so.
A1 · Spring barley
The block that made the argument for the brewery in the first place. South-facing, thin over limestone, and the reason the grain went to a brewer instead of a merchant.
- Size
- A quarter of an acre
- Drilled
- Late March
- Harvest window
- Late July
- You receive
- 48 bottles of lager, brewed from that block
£180paid once, up front, fixed
Taken for this season. The waiting list opens when the next drilling plan is set.
Join the waiting listYou are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. No cash return, no profit share, no resale market, and no interest in the land itself.
A2 · Spring barley
The next cell along, and the same soil. You get the drilling date, the emergence photographs, the harvest date and a case at the end of it.
- Size
- A quarter of an acre
- Drilled
- Late March
- Harvest window
- Late July
- You receive
- 48 bottles of lager, brewed from that block
£180paid once, up front, fixed
Take this patchYou are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. No cash return, no profit share, no resale market, and no interest in the land itself.
B3 · Maincrop potatoes
Heavier ground at the bottom of the slope that holds water when the brash above it will not. It is the reason there were forty tonnes of potatoes and nowhere to sell them in 2020.
- Size
- An eighth of an acre
- Drilled
- Late April
- Harvest window
- September onwards
- You receive
- 60kg of Melody and Marfona, in three drops
£120paid once, up front, fixed
Take this patchYou are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. No cash return, no profit share, no resale market, and no interest in the land itself.
C2 · Hedgerow
Twenty metres of hedge that will do almost nothing all year, which is exactly what it is for. The honest patch: you are buying the record, not the produce.
- Size
- Twenty metres of hedge
- Drilled
- Planted, not drilled
- Harvest window
- Cut on rotation, every third winter
- You receive
- Two photographs a season and nothing edible whatsoever
£90paid once, up front, fixed
Take this patchYou are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. No cash return, no profit share, no resale market, and no interest in the land itself.
D1 · Mixed vegetables
The most labour per square metre on the whole farm and the only patch that sends you something every month it is running.
- Size
- An eighth of an acre
- Drilled
- Successional, from March
- Harvest window
- June to October
- You receive
- Eight boxes across the season
£240paid once, up front, fixed
Taken for this season. The waiting list opens when the next drilling plan is set.
Join the waiting listYou are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. No cash return, no profit share, no resale market, and no interest in the land itself.
D4 · Wildflower margin
Unfarmed on purpose. It carries the hives, it carries the bees, and it is the single best idea anybody has had on this farm.
- Size
- A quarter of an acre
- Drilled
- Sown once, left alone
- Harvest window
- Never
- You receive
- A jar of Bee Juice from the hives that work it
£110paid once, up front, fixed
Take this patchYou are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. No cash return, no profit share, no resale market, and no interest in the land itself.
What renting a patch is, and what it very deliberately is not.
You are buying a crop forward at a fixed price and receiving produce in kind. You are not buying a share of the harvest, a share of the profit, a tradeable interest, or any interest in the land itself.
That distinction is the whole design. The moment a return depends on how the crop does and is pooled with other people, the arrangement starts to look like a collective investment scheme under section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, and the case law — FCA v Capital Alternatives, Asset Land v FCA, FCA v Forster — is unkind to schemes that got there by accident. A fixed quantity, fixed at purchase, delivered as goods, is a forward sale of produce and nothing else.
It is also not a tenancy. You get no exclusive possession of the ground, no key, and no right to turn up and work it, which is what keeps Street v Mountford out of this.
Seed to harvest, and what you are told at each stage.
-
Late March
Drilled
The seed goes in, the cell is marked on the plan and your name goes against it.
A photograph, the date, the variety and the seed rate.
-
Two to three weeks later
Emerged
The rows become visible from the gate, which is the first point at which anything is provable.
A photograph from the same fixed point, every fortnight from here.
-
May to JuneNow
Standing
The crop does most of its growing and most of its worrying. This is when the weather stops being conversation.
The rainfall figure and an honest note when it is going badly.
-
Late July
Harvested
The combine goes through. The yield off the cell is recorded whether it is good or embarrassing.
The date, the moisture, the tonnage and what it means for your allocation.
-
Six to ten weeks after harvest
Delivered
Malting, brewing, packing or grading, depending on what you took.
A dispatch note and a tracking number, and the thing itself.
Your allocation is fixed at purchase and does not move with the yield. The yield is published anyway, because a record that only appears in good years is not a record.
Four numbers that explain everything here.
The published numbers, in one table.
Every number used anywhere on this site, with the period it belongs to and where it came from. If a figure is estimated rather than published, the page carrying it says so.
| What | Figure | Period | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Farming profit, year one | £144 | 2019–20 | Stated on the programme and in print, repeatedly |
| Hawkstone sales | £21.3m | Year to March 2025 | The Sunday Times 100, June 2025 |
| Hawkstone sales, three years earlier | £7.8m | Year to March 2022 | Filed accounts, as reported |
| Three-year growth | 134% | To March 2025 | Derived from the two rows above |
| Sourcing radius on the farm shop | 16 miles | Standing condition | A planning condition, not a marketing promise |
| People employed at the pub | 140+ | 2024 onwards | Stated at opening |
| Farms on Only Farmers | 1,300+ | Current | Stated by the venture |
| Wheat yield, drought year | Down 30% | 2025 harvest | Published in the estate letter that fortnight |
| Barley yield, drought year | Down 40% | 2025 harvest | Published in the estate letter that fortnight |
The cameras, running whether anything is happening or not.
Eleven months of a hedge doing very little, and one month of lambing. Both are the point.
Live
Wide
The wheat at Bury Hill
Last frame
Interior
The lambing shed
Live
Close
The hives on the wildflower ground
Live
Wide
The shop yard
The cameras look at fields, animals and the outside of buildings. They do not look at customers or staff, and what they record and for how long is set out in Gawping — the cameras.
The rest of it.
The Farmer's Dog
Everything British. No telephone. Tables release on the first of the month and go in minutes.
Only Farmers
Lisa and Wolfe Bentinck’s marketplace. Over 1,300 farms, and the first £300 a farm earns is free.
Schooling
What six years of losing money taught us, arranged so you lose less of it. The failure archive is free.
The Journal
What the numbers actually were, and what went wrong. Including the strategies we rejected and why.
Four tiers, and the first one is not a trial.
Named as chapters because they continue the same sequence as everything else here. Chapter 41 is also this page, which is either elegant or confusing, and we have decided to live with it.
Chapter 41 — Loitering
Free, and it stays free. The chapter archive, the failure archive, the cameras, the newsletter and a name on the parish list. There is no card, no countdown and nothing that expires.
Chapter 42 — Mucking In
The first paid tier. Early sight of every drop, the members-only ordering window, ten per cent off the shop and the quarterly printed chapter.
Chapter 43 — Ploughing On
Everything above, plus a case allocation from the brewery, the harvest report in full, and a vote on one real decision a year that we then actually take.
Chapter 44 — Landlording
Everything above, plus a patch of the field in your name for the season, delivered in kind, and two seats at the long table when the harvest is in.
Where the people already are.
A parish is the group of members nearest to you, and the only thing it does is decide where the next walk happens.
Where to find the beer, without ordering anything.
- Diddly Squat Farm Shop Chipping Norton, OX7 3PE The whole range, and the queue The shop
- The Farmer's Dog Asthall Barrow, Burford, OX18 4HJ On draught, and everything on the menu British The pub
- Cotswold Brew Co Bourton-on-the-Water, GL54 2HN Where it is actually lagered The brewery
- The sixteen-mile ring Around OX7 3PE Every producer the shop is allowed to stock The radius
- Free-trade pubs 1,500+ across the UK Hawkstone Lager, Cider and IPA On trade
A schematic, not a map. Nothing here is drawn to scale and nothing on it is a navigation aid.
What actually happens when you order something.
You put something in the basket
The basket is a placeholder. This is an unsolicited demonstration build and the checkout takes no payment of any kind, from anybody, ever.
Anything with alcohol in it triggers an age check
Not a tick box. Challenge 25 applies at the door and an age-assurance step applies online, and the beer will not move without it.
It is picked where it is made
Shop goods from Chipping Norton, beer from Bourton-on-the-Water, and never from a third warehouse in the Midlands that nobody has visited.
It goes out on a tracked service
Free over £40. Alcohol needs an adult signature, which is a legal requirement and not an upsell.
You get told when it went wrong
Because it does. A short-dated batch, a broken bottle, a crop that failed — the estate letter publishes it either way.
What has been said.
Hats off. They have created something really rather special.
Almost tripled its sales to £21.3 million in the year to March 2025.
His show has really resonated with the public, brought alive the ups and downs of our industry to a huge new audience.
Why any of this needs to exist.
Four steps, in order, each one following from the one above it.
-
The farming does not pay, and everyone knows it except the public
A thousand acres of Cotswold brash returned £144 in its first year. That is not a scandal and it is not unusual — it is roughly what a farm of this size and soil returns when the weather is unkind and the contractor has gone.
What is unusual is that the number was published. Farms do not publish their accounts, agricultural colleges teach agronomy rather than bookkeeping, and the result is a national conversation about food prices conducted almost entirely without figures.
The most useful thing this estate owns is not a product. It is six years of published, unglamorous financial reality.
-
Everything downstream of the farming is what actually pays
The shop, the beer, the pub and the marketplace exist because the field does not pay. Each one is a step further from the soil and a step closer to a margin, and each one was built out of a problem rather than a plan.
Forty tonnes of unsold potatoes became a shop. Barley that would not pay as grain became a lager turning over £21.3 million. A refused restaurant application became a pub in a derelict barn.
-
Six businesses in six places is a bad experience for the person buying
Right now the farm shop, the brewery, the pub, the marketplace and the archive are five separate places with five separate accounts, five baskets and five newsletters.
One estate, one account, one basket, one letter. That is the entire product argument, and it is why this build exists at all.
-
And the numbers are the moat, not the branding
Customer acquisition cost here is close to zero, which is the number every direct-to-consumer business in the country would trade its brand for. Most spend twenty to forty per cent of revenue getting a customer.
That advantage decays the moment the attention has nowhere to land. A platform that holds the archive, the record and the account is where it lands.
What people actually ask about this site.
The six questions this build gets most, answered without a support ticket.
No. This is an unsolicited third-party demonstration build. It is not affiliated with, authorised or endorsed by Jeremy Clarkson, Lisa Hogan, Wolfe Bentinck, Diddly Squat, Hawkstone, The Farmer's Dog, Only Farmers Limited, Expectation Entertainment, Ledbury Productions, Amazon, Penguin, ITV or Peepshow Studio. None of the branding on it is licensed and nothing on it has been legally reviewed.
No. Every commerce component here is a working placeholder. The basket adds up, the checkout renders, the age gate triggers — and no payment is taken from anybody at any point, because there is nothing behind it to take payment.
Public sources: what has been said on the programme and in print, filed accounts as reported, and press coverage. The record table further up this page lists every figure with its period and its source. Where something is estimated rather than published, the page carrying it says so.
No, and the structure is built specifically so that it is not one. You buy a fixed quantity of produce at a fixed price and receive it in kind. There is no cash return, no share of profit, no resale market and no interest in the land. The reasoning, including the case law it is designed around, is set out in full on Not an Investment.
Because the televised chapters run to forty and do not reset per series — the production asset filenames prove it. This is a continuation of the same numbered work in a different medium rather than a shop with a farm theme. Whether that is a good idea or considerable presumption is a fair question.
All of it is publicly accessible. Any bulk extraction would require consent and must respect robots.txt and terms of service, so none was performed.
The most useful thing this estate has is not a product. It is six years of published, unglamorous financial reality about what farming a thousand acres actually returns — information that is almost entirely absent from public life, because farms do not publish it and colleges teach agronomy rather than accounts.
One email a fortnight. Including the parts that went wrong.
All six businesses in one letter — what got drilled, what got harvested, what is back in stock, what the pub is doing, and what we cocked up. Written by somebody who was standing there at the time.
- Roughly one email a fortnight
- The real numbers, published whether they are good or not
- First sight of every restock and drop
- One click out, always, and nothing sold to anybody
The paperwork, written to be read.
/lawyering/terms/
/lawyering/privacy/
/lawyering/cookies/
/lawyering/carding-you/
/lawyering/trundling/
/lawyering/backing-out/
/lawyering/plot-terms/
/lawyering/contact/
