Lower Blakemere Farm

24/09/2026

The more I look at our food system, the more I think we’re doing this all wrong.

Farmers are told what their cattle are worth. Customers are told what their beef costs. And in between sits a huge system of processors, distributors, supermarkets, margins and marketing — all taking a slice.

Meanwhile, the farmer takes the risk.
We pay the rent, buy the machinery, look after the land, rear the cattle and deal with droughts, floods, feed bills and everything else farming throws at us.

And after all that, someone else can still decide what our beef is worth.

It’s madness.
What really gets me is that we’ve created a system where highly processed food, made from cheap ingredients and wrapped in clever marketing, has become completely normal.

We eat more and more of it, we have an obesity crisis, and somehow proper meat — real food, reared on a farm by real people — is considered too expensive.

Surely something has gone wrong.

So at Lower Blakemere, we’re trying something different.

Not fixing the system. Bypassing it.

We rear our cattle here, finish them with our mate Will, farm in a way we believe in and have the beef butchered locally. We work out what we need to charge to make it worthwhile — and you decide whether you want to buy it.

Farm → Family.
You know where your food came from, how it was produced and who your money is supporting.

We get a fair price and a reason to keep farming this way. Soon, we’ll be doing the same with our Oxford Sandy & Black pigs. Born here, reared here, rooting about in our fields — then going directly from our farm to your family.

A food system should do two simple things: feed people properly and enable farmers to keep farming.

We’re not going to change the whole food system from a farm in Herefordshire. But we can change our bit.

Every Beefy Box — and soon every Piggy Box — helps us sell directly to you, farm the way we believe is right and make sure you know exactly where your food has come from.

And you can do the same. Buy from us, or another farm near you. Buy local. Cook proper food. Eat good meat, perhaps less of it. Know your farmer if you can.

Because every time we spend money on food, we’re choosing the food system we want.

Maybe we don’t need to wait for someone else to fix it.
Maybe we need to take our food system back — one farm, one family and one bloody good meal at a time.

20/09/2026

This is what buying birdseed direct from a farm actually looks like. 🌱🐦

Farmer Phil is harvesting our linseed — one of five seeds we've grown here at Lower Blakemere for this year's Wiggly Field Club birdseed.

And linseed is rather wonderful stuff.

It's a small, naturally oil-rich seed, containing roughly 35–40% oil and around 20–25% protein. And one of the birds particularly associated with it is the Linnet — so much so that the RSPB says the bird's name comes from its love of linseed.

But growing it matters for the farm too.

Our whole regenerative approach is about diversity rather than endless monoculture — more crops in the rotation, less soil disturbance, keeping living roots in the ground where we can and creating a farm with more food and habitat for wildlife.

Growing five different birdseed crops is part of that.

The slightly less cheerful bit is the drought.

Like farms across much of the country, we've had a very dry growing season and yields are well down. We haven't got anything like the volume we'd hoped for.

So Field Club really matters.

When you order, you're not buying anonymous birdseed through a chain of processors, wholesalers and distribution centres.

You're buying this crop.
From this field.
From this farmer.

We'll harvest it, clean it, mix it and bag it here on the farm.

And every Field Club order gives us another reason to grow more crops like this next year.

🌾 Join the Wiggly Field Club and secure some of this year's harvest.
https://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/products/the-field-club-birdseed-by-the-field?variant=55871285789057

Buy birdseed differently. Buy it from the field.

20/09/2026

Regenerative farming isn’t just about the soil – it’s about building a resilient farm business too.

For us, stacking enterprises is a big part of that. UK Mini Trucks now sits alongside the farming, Wiggly Wigglers, our Harvest Project and school visits.

Three years ago Monty started with one little truck from Japan. Today he’s built a proper business alongside the farm – and we’re incredibly proud of what he’s achieved.

There are certainly rather more Japanese mini trucks around Lower Blakemere than we ever expected… 😂🛻🇯🇵

Well done Monty. Here’s to the next three.

Three years of UK Mini Trucks 🇯🇵🇬🇧

This month marks three years since we bought our very first mini truck from Japan.

At the time, I honestly had no idea where it would lead.

Farming has always been my passion, and it still is. But I wanted to build something alongside the farm — something I could grow, get stuck into and hopefully make a success of.

What started with one truck has grown into something I’m incredibly proud of. We’ve imported, prepared and sold trucks to people all over the country, learnt an unbelievable amount along the way and, most importantly, met some absolutely brilliant people.

There have been plenty of challenges, plenty of long days and probably more than a few moments where I wondered what on earth I was doing 😂 — but looking back at how far we’ve come in three years makes it all worthwhile.

One of the best things about this business has been the people we’ve met along the way. Customers who have become friends, suppliers who have gone the extra mile, other businesses we’ve worked alongside and so many people who have supported us from the very beginning.

I’m still a farmer first and foremost, but having found something that can run alongside the farm and that I genuinely enjoy has been pretty incredible.

Three years, one truck to start with, and a lot of miles in between.

Here’s to seeing where the next three take us. 🛻🇯🇵🇬🇧

Thank you to everyone who has been part of it so far. ❤️

17/09/2026

Is a Beefy Box Good Value?

The Truth About Buying Beef in Bulk

People often assume buying direct from a farm costs more.

In reality, a Beefy Box gives you a mixture of premium steaks, roasting joints, mince and everyday family favourites that usually works out cheaper per kilo than buying the same quality cuts individually.

Fill your freezer once.

Enjoy exceptional beef for weeks.

That's proper value. (Lower Blakemere Farm)

14/09/2026

This is the first of the five different seeds we’ve grown for our Field Club birdseed mix this year — and we’re starting with canary seed.

I’m not going to pretend it’s been a bumper harvest.

Five acres, a very dry growing season, virtually no straw and considerably less seed than we had hoped for. There will be no dramatic footage of trailers overflowing with grain from this field.

But there is a crop.

Some of it will now be cleaned, mixed and bagged here on the farm and end up in our Field Club birdseed — and for me that makes these five acres very worthwhile.

Because the Field Club isn’t simply about producing another bag of bird food.

It’s about trying to connect the bird feeder back to the field.

We’ve watched this crop growing all summer and seen birds, insects and other wildlife using it long before the combine arrived. We’ve added another crop into our rotation, learnt a huge amount about growing it, and worked out several things we’ll do differently next time — earlier drilling, better rolling after planting and, ideally, considerably more rain.

We may have to work on the last one.

And there’s another important part of this experiment.

For us to grow more birdseed crops here, people have to want to buy them.

That isn’t a plea for sympathy. It’s simply how we make a different way of farming stack up commercially.

In return, you get seed with real provenance — grown by us, harvested by us, cleaned, mixed and bagged by us — rather than relying entirely on ingredients that may have travelled thousands of miles before they reach your garden.

So if that sounds like the sort of birdseed you’d like to buy, the best way you can help is very simple:

Order the Field Club mix.
https://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/products/the-field-club-birdseed-by-the-field

The more we sell, the more confidence we have to put acres into these crops again next year.

And hopefully next time the trailer will look slightly more impressive.

Canary seed: harvested. Seed 1 of 5. 🌾🐦

11/09/2026

Harvest Update: Bringing in the Peas

Growing with the weather. Farming with nature.

Farmer Phil is out in the field as we harvest our vining peas, grown here at Lower Blakemere Farm as a seed crop.

Peas are a fiddly crop to combine. They grow incredibly close to the ground, so we're using a flex header and telescopic lifters to follow the contours of the field and lift the crop as carefully as possible.

The plants themselves look great — even and healthy — but unfortunately the dry conditions and drought have severely affected the yield, meaning there simply aren't as many peas in the pods as we'd hoped.

Still, farming is about working with what the season gives us. And as the sun goes down, Phil carries on into the night to get the last of the field safely harvested.

It's not always about the harvest you hoped for. It's about making the most of the season you've been given.

Lower Blakemere Farm — farming for the future, one field at a time.

08/09/2026

We supplied the piggies with a perfectly good field and woodland…

Plenty of grass and blackberries

Plenty of space.

Plenty of things to scratch on.

But no…

They wanted a Mini Truck. 🐷

Apparently Japanese engineering also makes an excellent pig backscratcher. 🐷🚚

There is absolutely no point trying to run a sensible business around here….

LowerBlakemereFarm

07/09/2026

🌱 ZERO WASTE WEEK IS HERE!

And we're starting with one of the easiest environmental changes you can make at home...

Stop throwing your soil ingredients away.

Potato peelings. Coffee grounds. Fruit scraps. Leftovers. Eggshells.

So much of what we call "waste" is actually full of valuable nutrients and organic matter.

With a Bokashi bin or wormery, you can turn yesterday's kitchen scraps into something useful for tomorrow's garden. 🌿

You don't have to be perfectly zero waste. You don't need to fit a year's rubbish into a tiny jar.

Just get one more thing out of the bin and back into the soil.

🌱 15% OFF Composting Starter Kits
📅 6th–13th September
🏷️ Use code: ZEROWASTE15

👉 https://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/collections/zero-waste-week

Because food waste isn't rubbish.

It's nutrients in the wrong place. ♻️🪱

05/09/2026

Different crops handle a dry summer differently, and that's rather the point of growing five of them together instead of betting the whole field on one.

White millet is the toughest customer of the three in a drought. It's related to the millets grown across Africa and India precisely because they cope with almost no rain — proso millet and its relatives are extremely drought tolerant and are the crop farmers rely on in the driest, most marginal growing conditions in the world.

Linseed is the one we're watching more nervously. It's got a deep taproot, but flax is known to be more sensitive to drought than most other oil crops, and prolonged dry spells can genuinely knock back both yield and seed quality.

Canary seed sits in between — traditionally grown on the Canadian prairies where summers are short, hot and often dry, so it's no stranger to tough conditions, though nobody's bred it for a Herefordshire hilltop specifically.

Between the five crops on Flat Square and Stockley Hill, the birds who'll benefit from a Field Club bag include: blue t**s, great t**s, coal t**s, long-tailed t**s, chaffinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, siskins, bullfinches, house sparrows, tree sparrows, dunnocks, robins, nuthatches, woodpeckers, collared doves, blackbirds, starlings, and — for anyone near open farmland rather than a town garden — reed buntings and yellowhammers too.

So by the time Phil brings the combine in and the seed goes off to be cleaned and bagged, this field's already done half its job. Birds have nested in it, fed round it, and likely fledged chicks out of it — all before a single Field Club bag exists. Then the harvested seed goes on to feed a different set of birds entirely, in gardens miles away, through the winter. Same field, same crop, wildlife benefit twice over.

You've seen the field now. You know it's a thousand feet up, you know it's had next to no rain, and you know Phil genuinely doesn't know yet how it's going to turn out. That's not a sales pitch — that's just farming, done honestly, in front of you. https://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/products/the-field-club-birdseed-by-the-field

04/09/2026

That's Phil, up on Stockley Hill, giving it to you straight rather than dressed up — because that's the only way we know how to do this. It's about 1,000 feet above sea level up there, we've planted it with buckwheat, black sunflowers, linseed, canary seed and white millet, and since it went in the ground it's had basically no rain at all. We don't know yet whether that crop is going to come good. Neither does Phil. That's not a marketing line, that's just where we are right now.

Here's what we do know. If it works, this will be the UK's first birdseed grown, harvested, cleaned and bagged from a named field, start to finish, by the people who grew it. Phil's aiming to bring it in with the combine in September or October, depending on what the weather decides to do between now and then. From there it goes through our own cleaning plant, gets mixed together properly, and lands in a bag with your name on it. Nobody else is doing this — not because it's a clever gap in the market, but because most people would look at that weather forecast and plant something safer.

That's where the Field Club comes in. Sign up now and you're not buying a finished product off a shelf — you're backing a crop that's still out there in a dry field on top of a hill, hoping for rain. There's no risk to you in that: if you sign up today, you pay nothing until it ships, and we do all the worrying between now and September. But there's something in it for you too — you get to say you were part of this from the start, not just a customer who turned up once it was safely in a bag.

It isn't the cheapest birdseed you'll find. It was never going to be — a whole field, grown for one purpose, cleaned and mixed and bagged specially, costs more than a warehouse blend does. But we'd argue it's worth every penny of the difference, and if you join now as one of our Founding Flock, you lock in a proper saving on top of getting there first.

We don't know exactly how this field's going to turn out. We'd love you to find out with us.

https://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/products/the-field-club-birdseed-by-the-field?variant=55871285789057