David Olivier is 'son of a Herefordshire fruit grower', and grandson of a French peasant farming family. He augmented his rural wisdom - in the blood, by going off to study science at university ending up at Cambridge on his Phd - changing track back into more practical applications, so, yet to complete, however has dedicated all his life to understanding the hard science of certain aspects of farming and energy saving in domestic housing and small business.
We do speak "farmer". One of the team, Heath, was also brought up on a "real" farm as he often jests with locals, one where the sheep roamed at the top of high N. Welsh mountains.
Please visit the Images page (links at top of homepage) where the summer 2015 fruit crop is visible in its glory.
We would like to collaborate with others to campaign on behalf of smaller farms which are nowadays for various reasons suffering terribly at the hands of the economics of Globalisation, sharp practices at the supermarket,s and a complete failure of politicians to create simple effective economic and legal regimes which prioritise our smaller farms so fundamental to our society. Heritage - not a heritage of aspic farms but a heritage of only smaller farms can steward the environment with care and even put back a little of that love we perhaps have left aside at our peril.
Keeping our many generation smaller farmer viable is in accord with the issue at the other end of the scale - planetary science. Not many people are aware that in terms of our legal environmental/ Climate Change obligations the land may hold the key to the fastest compliance and smaller farms can adapt more quickly to new practices.
Drive around Herefordshire, or maybe better take a bicycle ride as the ploughs are wheeled out: Some fields are alive with a red clay hue, others quiet in their darker brown hue. The latter, mainly by dint of the muck, are in fact the very best carbon sink we have available to us and it is for almost all cultivation a win-win route. In fact the land - various simple practices that could be employed, may hold the fastest key to complying with legal emissions target obligations.
As the house and gardens becomes a visitor feature and we have it running itself, we will be offering consultation to local farms who may be interested in a cheap visit as overview of some practices they employ. We are not in this for the money. Furthermore developing some ideas which can be turned into a simple campaign may reap rewards.
For example, though early days on this one, the cheapest way for UK to meet Co2 legal obligations may indeed be to create some kind of farm payments scheme based on farmers sequestering carbon into their soil.
Genocide in the fields:
A second more problematic area is that the recent trend towards using more of our land for the growing of crops intended to be grubbed into biofuel has had one problematic knock-on effect being rental costs - 'grass keep' to the insider, have increased considerably over the last few years. Some think this is largely due the profits available in biofuels.
In 2015 there has been a rush of well known figures publicly speaking up for vegetarianism and of course we are aware of argument for a more cereal based agriculture reducing worldwide emissions. Personally we follow vegetarian ethos but of course appreciate that the majority in most societies will not make this change. Economic grazing for our national herd of sheep and cattle is fundamental in the globalised markets to make the head meet the tail ends meet. Simply put, though a great idea, the law of unintended consequences is usually Queen and running our motors on cleaner fuels, causes generations of lamb never to be born. Never mind early slaughter of the ewes that are far more nutritious consumed as elders according to much recent science - mutton meat is being found to have many superior nutrition properties but takes half a dozen years munching that more expensive grass to get to the point where you will nutritionally benefit.
We wish to develop a couple of small specific political policies - our politicians are simply hopeless on agriculture and the environment, and will have politicians visiting and hopefully debating with us over a few glasses of homemade cider, or one day wine, and perhaps we can formulate these ideas in a way they may take them away and actually do something useful for a change.
We would love some local small scale farmers to join us in farming projects and campaigning or at least assist creating some great material we can lobby with. We will be developing a small scale fruitgrowing / farming practices workshop program and this may lead us to be able to offer some small revenues in visits and perhaps b&b we can farm out to local farms.
