THE FARM

Willowford is a small, organic hill farm in north-east Cumbria bisected by Hadrian's Wall and bounded by the River Irthing. 

We believe our role as farmers and stewards of this piece of land is to balance ecosystem restoration with production - this includes food and fibre as well as wood products and medicinal plants and herbs. In practice, this means we're constantly striving to increase diversity and complexity on the farm, in terms of both habitats and produce. This goes against the general trend to simplify landscapes and use machinery to minimise human hours working on the land, but it does, we think, allow the tension between nature and production to resolve in a healthy way while giving us a positive role in the landscape. 

For us, one major plank of our work is integrating trees into the landscape and farm business. This has several benefits for our livestock enterprises (shade, shelter, browse) and market garden (shelter, pollinators, soil health) while also providing potential new wood and medicinal products we can use in the future. In addition, it helps our farm be a part of landscape scale management of water, air and carbon storage. Finally, it creates habitats for wildlife, from flowers and fungi to insects, birds and animals, enriching and nurturing our precious biodiversity. Since we've been here we've planted over 10,000 trees to create woodland and hedges and restored about 20 acres of traditional hay meadows. 

Currently on the farm we have a small sheep flock producing store lambs, a smaller, experimental wool flock for fine fibre, some young dairy cows from a neighbouring organic farm, a laying flock of chickens, 2 horses, 2 pigs and a market garden producing a variety of seasonal vegetables.