Being organic does mean a lot of paperwork and keeping records, as everything is scrutinised to check that we maintain the strict standards to keep our organic certification. But in terms of cost, the investment is our labour and patience. You can’t solve a problem by spending money on chemicals, but you can solve it with a long term sustainable plan, manual labour, working with the natural cycles of animals and our land. Being organic for us doesn’t just mean jumping through some regulatory hoops in order to get a certificate then carrying on farming with a ‘conventional’ mindset, it means trying to farm with nature in a way that is more natural to the plants and animals. Most organic food sold in the UK is produced by large scale organic agriculture which shares many problems with large scale conventional agriculture. There is nothing organic about using ‘approved’ routine drugs, using lots of ‘permitted’ additives in your food or having a chicken house with 5,000 hens in it. That’s why we do it differently, on a small scale, without routine chemicals or drugs or huge mechanisation, which is more like what people think of when they explain what organic farming means to them.
We are certified by the Soil Association. Our license number is AB27218 and below is our current certificate of compliance.