01 Aug BBC Countryfile visit Hampen

On the third week of May when the farm was looking glorious, green and lushness everywhere, we played host to the BBC Countryfile team for three days of filming.

Everything went according to plan, the sun came out at last, the lambs looked super cute and gambled for the cameras, the bi-cropped cereals looked terrific and the veggies in the market garden promised much. The programme set out to cover farm diversification, diversity of cropping and working with nature, soil health and a circular, no waste approach to farming.

Charlotte Smith and Matt Baker were the two presenters and both were keen to understand whether our system of mixed enterprise farming was viable financially and therefore truly sustainable. We were keen to point out that everything we do is interconnected and therefore makes sense in a way that a stand-alone enterprise wouldn’t necessarily do so.  

We hope that the programme showed that although much of what we do is experimental and is in its infancy and still dependant on Government subsidies, the habitats we have created and infrastructure put in place will increase biodiversity to support our low input low output system and to produce food for our local community.

Matt Baker very much enjoyed his time dyeing wool with apple leaves and then weaving the dyed yarn as well as baking bread using our heritage wheat.

Charlotte was amused to find herself concocting biological amendments from buried rice on the market garden and looking for beetles in the beetle banks before putting up kestrel boxes in trees on the farm! All in a day’s work!

You can watch the BBC Countryfile episode on BBC iPlayer here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001mp16/countryfile-lower-hampen-farm

All images featured in this blog post are screenshots taken from the BBC Countryfile episode.