Looking beyond the farm gate

We get many visitors to our farm, it is in fact the most visited part of the Hardwick Estate and has been for many decades. People come for many reasons, to buy our produce is a definite one, more than 100 every week do this. The food festivals we put on help to put us on the local food map and this can account for over 2000 people. Then there is the grower gatherings, looking to us for inspiration and knowledge, seminars, workshops and general getting-togetherness times. Farm walks we do almost weekly, and these bring people from a variety of backgrounds from many different countries.

In the past month we have had a large group of farmers and academics from Denmark. A group of Soil scientists from Oxford colleges. A group of post grad students from Imperial College London. A farm walk for customers and growers, from many parts of UK. A school party form Oxford. A group tour from a farmers support group. And we have many more to come in the next few weeks. For the most part these visitors come to see how it is that we are able to farm on relatively poor land, without resorting to importing fertility from other sources – ghost acres as we call it.

Perhaps the most interesting visitors are those from the scientific community, as they are especially interested in the rarity of our farm system and the way we can maintain our production with such limited inputs to the farm. We have had several visits now from a seismologist who is potentially working on an App to be able to measure soil life using the measurements of vibrations in soil generated by soil life. Our soil are of great interest to the scientists as previous soil studies into our carbon sequestration and eDNA populations have shown that we have very high levels of fungal activity. So advanced is the science of seismology (due to the technologies developed in search for oil and gas!) that it is now potentially possible to measure the tiniest movements in the soil beneath our feet with an app on a mobile phone!