Farming - What Would Your Dream Farm Be?

I heard it was a couple of tennis courts worth.


Christ, how small is an acre? I doubt it's as small as an allotment though, I mean, least not as small as any of the patches of allotment I've seen, unless, you mean, if I buy that and farmed it, I won't get £18k plus seeds and tools and labour costs and paper work admin costs out of it because it's too small to make a profit to farm or something?

How much does the government currently give you per hectare, and how many hectares you got in that £18, 000 acre?

 

An acre is a chain (22yds) by a furlong (220yds). Roughly one and a half football pitches.
That plot is only 0.099 acres though or a tenth of an acre. Roughly two tennis courts. In hectares it is 0.04.
A hectare receives an EU subsidy of around £300.

A hectare is about 2.5 acres.
375 Euros divided by 2.5 and then divided by 10 equals 15 Euros for a tenth of an acre. It wouldn't even buy you a spade.

 

The British government guaranteed to match the EU subsidy for 5 years after Brexit after which it is expected to replace it with something smaller. This will be a big story by around 2025 when the EU payment will no longer be matched.

 

You need at least an acre for a cow. May have to buy hay. You need less for a pig but all the food has to be brought to it. Strong fences ....horse high, pig tight, cattle strong. And pigs need stronger. You are looking at a tremendous investment with no guarantee of success.

 

That being said, everyone should have a place for a garden and a few chickens. Not so much a place to make money, but a place to do stuff. I have fish, flowers, goats, garden, and woods. Not a big place, 6 acres or so. But it is plenty for me.

 

I guess I have my ideal farm.

 

Maggot farming for use as fishing bait can be quite lucrative but the smell of rotting meat can be quite off putting.
A tenth of an acre would be large enough for a start up but you'd need to get planning permission to put up a shed and you may get a lot of local opposition.
Equipment outlay would be minimum though once you'd built the shed.
A pint of maggots sells for around £3.

 

It isn't an acre. The property you linked to is 1/10th of an acre so you are talking about around 4,300 square feet, which is about 100 sq. ft more than a doubles tennis court

 

On Jeremy Clarkson's 1000 acre farm, he planted around 452 acres of barley in a couple of fields and his farm had 42 fields on it or something.
He also rewilded, planted trees, fish farmed, honey farmed, did a farm shop raised lambs, sold spring water and grew other crops too.

I'd like to do that in Bromley, if I could, I'd buy that linked land (no matter how big it is) and buy out everything too to make room for my 1000 acre farm right there in Bromley as it said it was close enough to a place in Bromley I've heard of and I'd want to to be close enough to my house and home borough of Croydon, if we're talking about realms of fantasy farming to establish.

I guess Bromley Council will hold the keys to that happiness making me do all sorts of things if I have to shut down any public housing there, but it looks open enough full of adjacent fields and maybe a few lone houses; but other than that, it has a major selling point of; Layhams Road is just a mile away from West Wickham, Bromley it says, and, I know West Wickham isn't far/on the nearside of that vast London Borough for me, so if I could have my 1000 acres there and fan out from West Wickham, I could have my farm in Bromley and still be close enough to Croydon.
I see no shortage of open land in Bromley either, so if I could fit (and found) a 1000 acre farm there, I would.

 

You see all this push to insect farming; well, one my incentives was to pull back from that a grow my own eggs, chips, bacon; so if I ever did any farming with an insect, it'll be bees for honey. I'm not about to start eating insects just yet, personally.

 

Around London your best chance of making money would be providing stables and livery for horses.

 

If I could get fresh quality produce to the packers markets every morning or meat markets in City of London and around there with a short commute for farm to plate, that'll be good enough for me (as well as a farmers market on the farm out in Bromley where I'd be farming because Jeremy Clarkson had one and those look fun and a lot of people in South London go in for all of that and even the wider London area so maybe my farmer's market on the farm could be yet another thing to do in London like Camden Market is to alt. fashion, my market could be to farmers market in the capital, maybe, if word got out and I started a 1000 acre working farm and tried to run it with expert help).
Also, a lot of restaurants in the London area for niche crops maybe.

 

Insects provide much better rates for converting feed to protein.
You don't have to eat them directly, you can use them for chicken feed and then eat the eggs.
Or you can sell them to anglers.

 

Isn't there a rule that chickens must eat mealworms or something in order to be food and not a pet?
Like, if you feed your chicken wrong, the government won't let you eat it or sell it as food. Or something.

 

I'd want eggs...

I'd want Potatoes....

I'd want Pigs.

I want Apples

I want Barley

I want Black Currant

I want Turkey

I want Chicken

I want Duck, become a duck farmer s' it.


I want Sweetcorn

Pumpkin Patch

Petit Pois (form of garden pea, French for small pea, we have them in England, hope we can grow them).

Strawberry

Cherry Tomatoes

Cooking Onions

Catnip (gotta show the cats some love, their vice is legal, why not).

Garlic if UK can, why not?

Spring Onion

Plums

Ginger

Carrot

Celery


etc... probably a ton of crops I want and could grow in Bromley that I'm just not thinking of and isting too, tbh.

I want a fast tractor to keep up with road speeds in South London that's also small, so no massive Lambo' like JC had because I do want to drive my tractor to my house here in Thornton Heath and run 2 houses being my farm and farm house and real life house in this escapism on my dream farm, so I'd want my tractor to fit in the roads of South London too - if such a fast small tractor doesn't exist, f' it, I'd leave it on the farm, buy big enough sheds and buy a Lamborghini I'd just get a Land Rover or modify a Bentley and drive that to Croydon instead of my tractor, but if I could have a fast tractor that wasn't a giant... Hmmm....

Do tractors have seat belts in those cabs?

Farmer's Market.

Leisure and tourism.

Public access and rewilding.


...

I just hope I could find my own water source if I bought up a chunk of Bromley so I didn't have to use Thames Water/the local water companies and take everyones drinking water.

I really want a place with its own water and this idea'll be luck if it has any.

 

Yes, peas and garlic grow well in England.
Garlic grows in the wild and petit pois are just normal green peas picked before they reach maturity.

 

is there anything we can grow now in our new hotter climate that we couldn't before in this country and what's the new normal for British weather with rain and sun?

 

Vineyards are flourishing in our new climate. Fewer frosts and hotter summers are producing some fine wines now and failures are less common.

 

So that trend is more because of the weather all this British wine then.
I see...

 

Do you need to do crop rotation on an orchard?
I'm thinking for apple trees (for cider brewing and for making applesauce and apple juice with as well as for eating fresh).

Maybe even fructose too and bake my own apple pies and sweeten my apple juice with fructose from the apples and plums I'd want to grow.
Rather than growing sugar beet, try and make fructose to sweeten up my food for my farmer's market food shelves.

 

We have a warm climate here in Alabama but the only grapes that do well is muscadine. It makes a good wine but not a table grape. Onions in December, potatoes in February , Cole crops in March etc. You can keep something in the ground year round. We have 2 cows for every three people. I love it here.

 

No, but new trees take several years to harvest.

 

Strictly speaking British wine is made in the UK using imported grapes.
English wine is the correct term for wine made with homegrown grapes.
In the past vineyards would lose a whole year's crop due to frosts in the Spring fairly regularly. It is far less common now and yields are up due to the hotter summers.

 

So that's a tree to take care of still with legal sprays and maintenance before the first yield?
Or can you plant, more or less kick back and let it do its own thing while attending other crops?
Like 10 years or less?

 

This goes without saying, but, straight up no to citrus fruits, correct?
Won't be any good if grown in the UK?
Like Lemons and Oranges.

Guess I can't have it all, but I'd love to grow those in England.