Our Story – 1,000 Years of Farming History at Wood Advent, Exmoor

When we talk about Wood Advent, we describe a farm that can trace its history, and its curious name, all the way back to the Anglo Saxon hamlet, Oda, that once occupied this site.

In fact, like many Exmoor farms, it wears that history in its landscapes - from the Neolithic enclosures still visible to the careful eye, to the whispers of the long lost medieval manor, the 18th century cider press still very much in situ, and the WWII bomb craters that pit the rise from the sea to the moor.

The people who have inhabited, owned, rented, worked, raised families in, built and rebuilt Wood Advent over the millennia have dealt with challenges and opportunities ranging from ice ages and basic survival, to civil wars and invasions, the impact of global conflicts to the impact of global pandemics.

In many ways then, it is an extraordinary place. We certainly believe so. But Wood Advent’s story is not unique. It could be the story of any quintessential Exmoor farm, still managed by the same family whose names were listed against it in the 1740s. Like so many farms across the country, Wood Advent’s recent, 20th century, evolution has been heavily influenced by government subsidies and programmes designed to, understandably, fulfil immediate need.

In the 1940s and 50s we worked to ‘feed the nation’, accepting subsidies to scrub out hedgerows and remove ancient orchards, before heralding the so-called Green Revolution to increase yield and boost productivity with chemical inputs with little understanding of their effect on environmental or human health.

By the 1980s, headage payments had helped swell our sheep count alone to more than 1,000 animals, a position whose excessive labour inputs and limited returns was unsustainable.

The farm was in limbo, with some arable and some grass, neither a hill farm nor a grade one operation either.

Once again, our own farming history followed the path of so many of our neighbours and friends, with diversification in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s in hospitality and pheasant shooting - bringing in much needed income and providing financial viability. The farmhouse, which had a rich history of paying guests back to the 1930s, became a renowned B&B and the large granary was converted into a self-catered holiday property whose total guests to date run to more than 20,000.

Meanwhile, our pasture land had been converted into organic status - prompted, once again, by subsidies as well as challenging gradients and rising chemical costs.

By June 2021, not least because global economic circumstances meant our agrichemical bills were rocketing, our arable land was sprayed for the last time.

But this wasn’t the whole story, and when we, the latest generation of Brewers returned to the farm to continue a now centuries’ old process of succession, we saw the wide and mature hedgerows, the ancient oaks, the acres of historic woodland, the hard work and love of the land and community.

We saw banks full of waxcaps and field orchids, heard the drill of woodpeckers and the thrum of insects in the long grass.

We knew the status quo was on borrowed time though – from the soil under our feet to the nature-depleted nation and global climate. We knew that to secure the future of food, of farming and our own family’s place here, we had to make the next evolutionary leap - to create a farming business for the future built on the strong foundations and remarkable efforts of the past.

In fact, as we - an engineer, an environmental journalist and their two small children – began that transition, we were soon informed that many of our ‘new’ ideas were a return to ancient ways of working recollected by the several older members of the family still living on the farm when we moved in.

We now realise that we are instead pursuing a different way of thinking about Wood Advent, the opportunities and responsibilities of modern farming, the privilege of our proximity to the natural world, and the impact of our everyday activities on the wider environment.

 In a bid to deal with the greatest challenge ever faced – dramatic climate change and massive biodiversity loss - we now seek the restoration of a unified, biodiverse ecosystem and a healthy landscape built on healthy soil that permits an equally healthy, profitable and sustainable farming business as an integral part of that system.

Today, generously supported by the generation that came before us, we farm according to four key criteria: soil health, biodiversity recovery, the production of nutritionally rich food and climate change mitigation. Call it what you will – agroecological farming, the much-hijacked regenerative agriculture - our strategy is simple. If an activity doesn’t tick at least one of those boxes, it doesn’t happen at Wood Advent.

 On the ground, that means we’re a mixed farm running a pedigree sucker herd of Red Devons – a breed native to the moors of the South West - heritage and population grains to improve the nutritional value of the food we produce and to avoid acres of monocultures, nut production to provide future income and resilience to climate change, 150 acres of new woodland creation, and that Exmoor stalwart – tourism.

 Agroforestry ties all these together across the whole farm. Lean over the farm gate or come on one of our farm walks and you’ll find alley cropping nut trees with wide strips of wildflowers beneath them, while herbal leys for the cattle to mob graze through on rotation and grains for local milling fill the alleys.

In our permanent pasture, our animals graze all year round, removing the labour, diesel and plastic intensive reliance on silage and reducing stress – ours and the animals! Over wide, mature hedges that haven’t been damaged by hedge trimmers for decades, we’re restoring the traditional orchards according to old tithe maps and planting broadleaf native woodland to connect the pockets of mature woodland on our land and those around us through a series of wide wildlife corridors.

 This all sounds like a ‘nice to have’, like a naïve, rose-tinted view of farming, that we seem to be making more ‘space for nature’ than ‘space for food’ – two ambitions that have been set at odds by the latest debates in the farming industry.

But the undeniable truth is that without nature – beneath our feet, in the water and in the air - there is no food.

With a 300-year-old farming legacy behind us and young children charging around our feet, that’s not happening on our watch.

Reproduced with the kind permission of the Exmoor Review, 2023.