Plenty has been going on across the business since my last update, and I had hoped to share some genuinely good news this time. It has not quite worked out that way. The two biggest frustrations at the moment are entirely outside our control, which makes them harder to take.
The first is the favourite topic of every farmer I know: the weather. The rain has kept us parked up for weeks. Drilling, fertiliser spreading, crop spraying and slurry and digestate applications all remain on hold. The arable and contracting workload is being squeezed into a smaller and smaller portion of the calendar, and we are now relying on an early run at things in March.
This is the sort of season where the calendar-over-conditions approach to organic manure applications really catches farmers out. Autumn applications were not justifiable for us this year, so the pressure is all on spring. If we had been allowed to apply in a dry January and then March came in wet, that conversation would sound very different.
The second issue concerns me more than the weather, and that is the planning system.
Long-time readers of these pieces will remember that we previously applied for planning permission for a small butchery near the farm. That application was refused, and refused again at appeal six months later. During the appeal process, we found and acquired another business, Procters Sausages, which has allowed us to start adding value to what we produce and to cut out some of the middle links in the food supply chain.
Just before December 2025, we submitted a fresh application: a 252 sq m butchery, in place of an existing 550 sq m farm building that already sits on fully concreted ground. The proposed site has a separate road access to the rest of the farm, which would have helped us maintain proper segregation for biosecurity, food safety and visitor management. By any sensible reading, we were proposing to replace a larger, older, more intrusive structure with a smaller, purpose-designed one that supported the farming business and added local jobs.
The application was refused on the grounds of inappropriate development within the Green Belt and insufficient detail on the proposal’s impact on the Epping Forest Special Area of Conservation. The site we proposed is already concreted, sits outside the SAC, and is occupied by a far larger building. I gave a fuller response to our district councillor, but in a word-counted column I will leave it there.
The frustration is not that the system said no. The frustration is that it appears to have stopped reading after Green Belt.
Fourth-generation farmer at Spains Hall, Willingale. Runs the contracting team and writes most of what appears here.