The Lapwing Estate/Pollybell Farm is a family-owned diverse organic farming business. The Brown family has a strong history in farming for the past 120 years and an immense passion for growing healthy, affordable food while enhancing the land and surrounding environment. The family also has a restaurant and private dining business.

The farm covers 5,000 acres crossing the three county borders of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire, producing vegetables on highly fertile lowland peat. Research is being undertaken to measure carbon being released off the peat and the opportunities to stack income streams from private and public sources.

The family is implementing a new model for ‘rethinking peatlands’ to sequester and abate significant amounts of carbon and also produce sustainable food year round. We will see the ‘Reverse Coal’ project that aims to establish biomass crops on rewetted peatland, which is then dried and fed into a pyrolysis plant to produce biochar, electricity and heat.

You will see a floating solar farm on an irrigation reservoir that produces the electricity to run the packing facility, cold stores and farm irrigation. A wind turbine compliments the solar panels. You are likely to see vegetable harvesting, including an automated broccoli harvester and a robot that kills weeds with light.

There are three Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) at the farm and a plethora of bird species.

This visit is by kind permission of the Brown family.

ITINERARY
9.45am Registration and refreshments
10.15am Nottinghamshire Branch AGM, update from a CLA officer, welcome from Lapwing Estate Managing Director James Brown
11.00am Tour of the estate
1.00pm Two course lunch with wine
2.30pm Depart

HOW TO BOOK?

To book a place at this CLA event please click book now.

For more information please call 01638 590429 or email Elaine Molton via elaine.molton@cla.org.uk.