Morghew Park Estate · Tenterden, Kent

A working estate, first and foremost.

A little over two thousand acres of Kentish weald. A thriving trade in potatoes, arable land farmed regeneratively and sustainably. Ancient woodland responsibly managed for habitat, firewood, and game. Cold-pressed oils, small-batch vodka, venison and game from our own shoot. This is where it all comes from.

2200 Acres looked after

10 miles of hedgerows

20+ Employees

1 Family, for generations to come

0 Supermarket middlemen

Farmed for the long term

Morghew is farmed the way we'd want to hand it on — soil built up rather than stripped out, land given time to recover, and decisions made for the next twenty years rather than the next harvest.

The approach

No-till, and no shortcuts

We stopped ploughing years ago. Direct-drilling into standing stubble keeps the soil structure intact, holds carbon where it belongs, and means fewer passes with heavy machinery across the fields with less diesel burnt. Cover crops and herbal leys go in between cash crops, feeding the soil rather than leaving it bare.

Where we can, we spread muck instead of bagged fertiliser — cutting artificial inputs and putting back what the land's already given us. It's all backed by an SFI agreement and a Countryside Stewardship Mid Tier scheme, which reward the things we were already trying to do.

The land

A hundred small fields, not ten big ones

Morghew is farmed across around a hundred fields, most of them small — the kind of patchwork you get when land's been worked the same way for generations rather than squared off for bigger machinery. That shape comes with ten miles of hedgerow stitching it all together, doing the job they've always done: shelter, wildlife corridors, and boundaries nobody quite remembers agreeing to. Beyond the fields sits sixty-five hectares of ancient semi-natural woodland — ground that's been trees, more or less continuously, since before records began. We manage it on its own long timeline: thinning for timber and firewood, leaving deadwood and glades for the wildlife that depends on them, and keeping it healthy enough to still be standing in another few hundred years.

The wildlife

What we left, and what came back

Turtle doves. Red kites. Marsh harriers. All recorded over the old crayfish lagoons, left almost untouched for years and now the richest habitat on the estate. We work with the RSPB on supplementary feeding for the turtle doves, and run cameras and song recorders to see what else turns up.

The people

The same faces, season after season

Some of the people working this land have been doing it for years, through wet harvests and good ones. Two brothers on the team started at fifteen and are still here — between them, the best part of a century. They know which fields flood first, which land drains block up, and where the water sits longest after a storm.