Small scale farming in the UK is facing many challenges: mercurial policymaking, high input costs, climate instability, global market uncertainty, and biodiversity loss.

The opportunity
Despite the numerous challenges, we are also living in a technological golden age where renewable energy, robotics, and computing power are rapidly falling in cost and increasing in efficiency. Formerly unthinkable levels of small scale energy generation and innovation are now available to almost anyone.

Our small farm of 11acres is an opportunity to put into practice some of the things we think can see off some of the challenges above.

Our goals will almost certainly change as we come up against reality, but our current plan is broadly as follows:

Pasture restoration
Take low grade, high in phosphate, weedy, grazing and return it to lowland meadow pasture. Lowland meadow pasture is better for animals and better for biodiversity. Harvest and bale the pasture late summer/early autumn.

Indoor cultivation
We are constructing a small industrial grade greenhouse for growing commercial produce. The growing season will be extended by using the harvested bales as a heat source. Lower Beeny Farm’s annual bale count contains roughly 34MWh of useable heat energy - enough to heat a greenhouse during a cold snap in a closed carbon-cycle.

Pasture maintenance
Combat weeds with low impact, low cost, robotics that we are developing specifically for pasture maintenance.

Instrumentation
Develop a long term monitoring system to measure the gains or losses of the key indicators of biodiversity.