Wood Advent Farm - Agroforestry Open Weekend 2024

We are delighted to be taking part in Agroforestry Open Weekend 2024

Our farm

When we took over at Wood Advent farm in early 2022 after working alongside our family for a decade, we were the latest generation in a 300-year-old lineage to work with this land. Our job is to pass on that legacy in the best possible health, even as climate change alters everything. And that requires something radical.

The farm is currently being transformed from a conventional mixed operation into an holistic system comprising 150 acres of agroforestry as well as another 150 acres of new broadleaf woodland creation. Regeneration is the foundation of everything we do here – from the soil up.

There’s no doubt we’ve jumped in at the deep end, determined to prove that a regenerative and organic system with agroforestry at its heart is not just possible, but sustainable in every way – including as a robust, profitable farming model independent of subsidies.

Every decision we make at Wood Advent is now based on improving soil health, fighting climate change, boosting biodiversity and producing the best, nutritionally dense, food we possibly can.

Our agroforestry

150 acres of agroforestry creation is a big project – one that has to be broken down into more manageable chunks. The first 1,000 trees are now a year into establishment – a mix of walnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts planted in an alley cropping pattern. This formation will allow us to mob graze a mixed flerd between the trees, leaving an undisturbed six metre pollinator margin in each strip. Our crop rotation is over 4 years with 2 years of diverse herbal leys followed by 2 years of cereal cash cropping (with a clover understorey to keep the soil covered – a crucial part of the battle to reduce agricultural carbon emissions, a major contributor to climate change). In fact, our trees are planted 36 metres apart with 3 metre buffers as the 24 metres works well for all our machines and the combine harvester!

As the final piece of the rotation jigsaw, the space between the trees will then be occupied by trailers mounted with solar panels in a bid to deliver our plan to be an entirely off grid, carbon positive, commercial farming operation.

There’s no doubt it has already been quite a ride, and we’re only just getting started!

Here are some photos of what we do: