Jake Eldridge runs Oxton's Organics in Worcestershire, a 12-acre organic farm his parents built over 30 years. He delivers 100 vegetable boxes weekly within five miles and is converting sections to no-dig beds while adding perennial habitats to the land.
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Okay. Welcome to a new episode of Farm Like a Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins. Today I'm here with Jake Elvidge of Oxygens Organics, the farms in Worcestershire in the uk. And it actually featured in a feature length video that I made with Jake back in September 2018 on our channel. And the farm was built up over 30 years ago by Jake's parents, Jane and Julian. And it was one of the first organic box schemes in the uk. The business sells all its produce within a five mile radius, serving local boxes to households as well as to wholesale and distributors. And Jake took my original online training and has had a very interesting journey coming back into the family farm, helping convert the operation to run as no dig. As well as getting into the heart of sales planning and bringing a lot of tree planting to the farm. Ogden's is also featured in our book and I've been working with Jake to offer caterpillar tunnels to UK customers. I'm super excited for this episode and to hear the development since we last met. So Jake, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today.
Pleasure. Happy to be here.
Yeah, awesome. Maybe you could just give us the sort of three minute overview of the farm for people that didn't catch our video. But I really recommend anyone listening to this to go back and watch that video on our YouTube channel first because it will make a lot more sense of this interview. But give us a quick overview of what the farm looks like and what operations are going on there.
Okay, three minutes. All right. So we're mostly. So the business is vegetables. We sell organic veg wholesale and retail. We do all of that off a tiny percentage of our land. We own about 12 acres. And then currently our gardens are around 1 acre, but the bed space is around two thirds of an acre. That was pretty small. And from that we do 100 veg boxes. We do quite a lot of wholesale, especially salads and some other crops like radish. And on the rest of the farm we've got mostly pasture, we've got a small flock of Gotland sheep, but increasingly we're trying to add some more perennial crops and some more habitat zones. Yeah, I mean that's probably less than three minutes, but that's pretty much it, to be honest. I mean. Yeah. And then, oh yeah, the farm is made up of me, my parents, Jane and Julian and then my partner Sam, she came in quite recently and then we have a few trainees and some part time staff as well. So from Milan we have about kind of three full Time roles and a couple of part time roles.
I want to jump straight into more detail stuff because people can go back to that YouTube video and really see a good visual look around the farm. And I've been. I really want to pick up on a few different themes as we chat today that dig into the heart of some matters that I think are going to be really important for many people. Just to clarify the family situation. So you, your parents actually built their own home on the farm and built it up from a bare bit of land over the time and maybe you can just share bit about the process of coming back into the family farm. And just to clarify, you're not living on the farm right now, is that correct?
I am at the moment because I'm renovating my narrowboat which is where I will be living. But I was living on my narrowboat but we had to move off to do some renovations and then I'll be moving back on hopefully in a few months. Yeah, but we, my folks, they bought five acres of land. They met at a local agricultural college and just when Red finished their degrees they saw some land come up. My mum was recently pregnant with my older sister and they just saw some land come up. It was five acres in Flatbury. I think it was about £12,000 or €12,000 roughly, which was pretty a bit of a steal in today's economy. But it's in floodplains so it wasn't exactly like grade A agricultural land. They moved on to here in caravans like we lived in caravans for about the first 13 years of my life and we were quite lucky in that we got managed to get planning permission to build a house here which is now like a three story castle compared to the old caravans. And then around the same time as well we had seven acres of council tenancy farmland which came up on the border to the five acres that we'd originally bought. So that brought us up the whole holding down to 12 acres and they were managing that just as a kind of organic vegetable rotation, using green manures to manage fertility. And mostly, I mean they started off with very little equipment but as the years went on they, you know, they picked up different tractor implements. So we were doing them, you know, mechanized planting and stuff like that. But it was always a small, a small scale affair. You know, they were, I think of them at the max. They were growing on about 8 acres and doing about 120 veg boxes.
