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.
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
What 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…
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.
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…
Four numbers that explain everything here.
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.
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.
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
