SOIL IS THE STRATEGY.
YES, IT'S THIS FIELD
If you've just scanned a QR Code in a 30 acre field on top of Stockley Hill, congratulations — you're standing in the birdseed. Or near it, depending on the season and how carefully you read "keep off crops" signs.
This is the Flat Square. It is not flat. It is not square. Nobody currently working here can tell you why it's called that, and honestly we've stopped asking, in case the answer is boring.
What it is doing, right now, under your feet, is growing five crops at once — black sunflowers, white millet, canary seed, linseed and buckwheat — sown in five panels on purpose, harvested here, cleaned here, mixed here, and bagged here. Then sold as a birdseed subscription called the Field Club, which is the whole reason you're reading this instead of just admiring a field.
Five steps, one postcode: grown, harvested, cleaned, mixed, bagged — all on this farm, by us. Nobody trucking seed in from three countries and blending it in a shed you'll never see. If another UK birdseed brand does all five steps on one farm, we haven't found them, and we've genuinely looked.
This year's harvest from this exact field will produce 1,500–1,600 bags. That's the whole year's supply. Once it's gone, it's gone until next autumn — which is either scarcity marketing or just how a 30-acre field works, depending on how cynical you're feeling.
WHAT'S ACTUALLY IN THE BAG
Black Sunflower Seeds — thin-shelled, high in oil, the seed equivalent of a main course. Tits and finches will still fight over it like it's rationed.
White Millet — for birds that eat off the ground rather than queue at a feeder. Sparrows, doves and buntings, mostly, hoovering it up while everyone else is still arguing about the sunflowers.
Canary Seed — small, unremarkable, weirdly adored by finches and dunnocks. The seed that doesn't need to show off and isn't about to start now.
Linseed — silvery-blue, full of Omega-3, treated by goldfinches like it's a delicacy, which nutritionally it more or less is.
Buckwheat — bulks out the mix, feeds pigeons and doves, and while it's still growing is one of the best things going for pollinators. Does twice the work, gets a fraction of the credit. We see you, buckwheat.
WHY THIS FIELD LOOKS LIKE THIS (ON PURPOSE)
We've farmed this land as a family since 1983, and for most of that time "resilience" wasn't a word we used — you just farmed, and dealt with whatever turned up. That doesn't cut it anymore. Weather's less predictable, costs don't sit still, and a farm that leans on one crop and one good year is a farm one bad year away from a very awkward conversation with the bank.
So we've spent the last few years on a regenerative farming mission. Soil covered year-round instead of left bare. Livestock back in the rotation doing the job the fertiliser bag used to do. (In our case we have cattle, 6 piggies and bring in sheep on cover crops over winter. Fewer things bought in, more things grown by the land actually doing its job.
We're doing this because there's a difference between dirt and soil — dirt is just what's left once you've stripped the life out of it, and soil is a living system, full of fungi and bacteria and roots doing work you can't see, and we'd rather spend the next twenty years farming the second one than pretending the first one will keep giving forever..
WE'LL ADMIT THIS WASN'T A SAFE BET
Swapping a system you understand for one you're still learning is, a challenging way to run a business. Leaving field edges rough instead of tidy gets you funny looks from passing traffic. Trusting soil biology you can't see over inputs you can buy with total confidence is a hard sell when your own family farmed a different way and made it work very well indeed.
There's real risk in this, and we won't pretend otherwise. Yields can dip while the ground catches up, and nobody guarantees a field will do what the theory says it should. We went ahead — not because we were confident, but because carrying on as we always had, and just hoping it would work, felt like the bigger gamble. It just wouldn't have looked like one.
THE BIRDS SEEM TO THINK IT'S WORKING
Birds are unimpressed by marketing, loyal to nobody, and leave the second a place stops working for them. They haven't left here.
63 species recorded on this farm, including two on the UK Red List — Yellowhammer and Song Thrush, birds whose numbers have dropped badly enough nationally to earn that status. And the count isn't just holding, it's climbing, as the hedges thicken and the margins stay scruffy on purpose.
Right here in the Flat Square: Skylarks nesting in open ground. Yellowhammers working the hedgelines. Five crops sown together and left a bit wild feed more mouths than one tidy crop ever could — by the time your bag turns up, this field's already fed a whole summer of wild birds. Yours are next in the queue, not first.
OUR CARBON IS DOWN 40%
We measure this the way we measure yield, because we think it matters just as much, even if it makes for a less exciting harvest photo.
Farm carbon is down 40% — from soil that stays covered and holds carbon instead of losing it, far less synthetic fertiliser now livestock and cover crops do that job, and a lot less diesel burnt turning ground over that no longer needs it.
We're not going to tell you it's solved, because it isn't, and we don't trust anyone who says theirs is. But a real 40% drop, happening at the same time as bird numbers go up rather than down, tells us the two aren't fighting each other. Turns out you can farm for the planet and biodiversity all at once…
MONTY'S LEADING ON THIS
None of this came from a consultant with a laptop and a keen interest in buzzwords. It came from inside the family, with Monty leading the actual work of making "regenerative farming" mean something on this ground, rather than just sounding good on a website.
We didn't invent any of it ourselves. We've been learning from people who were doing this properly long before we worked up the nerve — Jake Freestone, Ben Taylor Davies, Tim Parton, John Joseph and our own agronomist Chris Taylor. If you've spent any time in regen circles, you'll know the names. If you haven't, just know they are well ahead and keen to help.
That learning turned into something more official when we were accepted onto King's Countryside Trust and Herefordshire Hub's regenerative farming programme — one of just seven Duchy focus farms taking this on properly, with people actually watching to see if it works. Being a focus farm doesn't let you skim over the results. You share the ups and the downs and no doubt learn more from the mistakes than the successes.
In practice, that means: disturbing the soil as little as possible instead of out of habit, keeping the ground covered every season, putting real diversity back into fields and margins, bringing livestock back to build fertility instead of buying it in, and judging success by birds, carbon and soil health rather than just what comes off in the trailer.
Monty's had to make the case for it inside the family, take the risk of trying it on fields that actually matter to the farm's income, and we’ve had to hold nerve through seasons that didn't behave the way the theory promised. This field, and the seed in your bag, is what that looks like once it's actually working – fingers crossed.
Lower Blakemere Farm, farmed by the same family since 1983. Bird numbers, carbon figures and harvest estimates get updated here as they change — up or down — because pretending otherwise would undercut the whole point of putting a QR code in a field in the first place.