The very heart of the holding, both in terms of management and practical production, is a group of facilities whose close and reciprocal relationship with one another effectively makes them one single integrated unit.
This group is best viewed as a single entity which has identifiable consituent elements, all of which provide an essential role, or create essential materials, for the use of its neighbouring elements in order that the integrated farmyard, and therefore the farm as a whole, can function.
This reciprocal arrangement of inextricably linked facets within the production system epitomises, in a nutshell, the metabolic approach that informs the farms aims and objectives, and the closely allied relationship of its production system to that of the natural systems within which it operates.
The individual elements within this integrated farmyard system comprise, at its centre, the two most intensive horticultural production units, these are the ‘commercial greenhouse’ and the ‘mobile polytunnel area’. These together provide a flexible intensity range of highly productive growing spaces from fulled heated and winter lighted through undersoil heated and protected, to cooler hardening off areas, which gives all of the necessary options required for year round intensive production of high value horticultutral produce within the farms transplant based husbandry system.
Clustered around this two part core are the other essential facilities that allow it to function. These are the ‘pig finishing yards’ which use the final fattening stage of the farm’s pork enterprise to provide fuel for heating the greenhose and a constituent part of the essential soil block production system. The ‘compost making building’ which converts soiled bedding from the finishing yards, vegetative waste from the horticultural enterprise as well as other on-site organic matter, into the other constituent part of ther soil blocks, for greenhouse and polytunnel use.
The ‘seed growing and saving area’ adjacent to the dwelling which provides a huge range of open pollinated and non hybrid seeds as the bassi for all grown production, and finally the intensive, ‘field scale bed area’, which is where part grown crops are transpalnted in order to provide harvestable produce from the polytunnel area, which itself provides animal fodder, marketable produce and also vegetative waste for the compost bays, therefore completing the cycle of production.
As can be seen from a graphic representation of the way this area functions, it provides for its own needs in various metabolisable forms, and draws profitable market production in the form of vegetables and pork as a by product of the sytems successfull functioning, therefore doing so at significantly reduced cost and secure margins.
This is the ethos of our whole, environmentally and economically sustainable model.