Across the farming and estate sector, every change of government creates a wave of questions. Will planning become easier, or will we lose permitted development rights? Will housing targets increase? Will renewable energy projects be encouraged? Should we accelerate their farm diversification strategy plans, or wait for greater policy certainty? The reality is that most planning […]

Written by Ed Daniell, founder of RuralSpace. Across the rural estates and farms we work with, there’s a quiet but important shift taking place. Income is becoming less predictable. Costs are less forgiving. Assets that once sat comfortably within the business are now under closer scrutiny. The question is no longer whether to diversify, it’s […]

Rural diversification is rarely straightforward. Policy can shift between one local election and the next, and the planning system, particularly in sensitive locations, can feel as though it asks more questions every time you try to move forward. In that environment, most rural businesses know they need options. What is less widely recognised is how […]

On 16 June, Dudley Peverill Associates LLP was delighted to welcome farmers, landowners, and professionals to Squab Hall Farm for our first-of-its-kind Rural Diversification Live event, delivered in partnership with Emlyn Evans, co-owner and director of Squab Hall Farm and his new venture, The Diversified Farmer. With increasing pressures on traditional farming businesses and a growing […]

A recent estate visit offered a useful reminder that mixed farming systems only really work when the human side is thought through as carefully as the agronomy. The estate in question runs a deliberately circular system. Half the land sits in long-term herbal grass leys, focused on building soil health. The other half moves through […]

I spent part of last week with the CLA, both at a rural professionals’ conference and around the table with a local steering group. The conversations were varied, but the underlying concern was consistent. Landowners are not short of ideas.What they are short of is confidence that those ideas will still make sense once grid […]

Written by Dawn Woollam (Dudley Peverill Associates), Kate Russell (Tellus Natural Capital) and Jess Bradley (Nicholsons).   Let us start with something that should be obvious but somehow still gets overlooked: the British countryside is one of the most commercially valuable assets we have. Not just for food production, not just for carbon sequestration or […]

We have achieved another year of growth at DPA, despite the ongoing uncertainty around inheritance tax and the challenging trading environment. That may sound counter-intuitive. But in practice, the uncertainty itself has been a catalyst. We are seeing more open, more honest multi-generational conversations than we have in years, particularly where the next generation is […]

John Deere has been publishing The Furrow since 1895. That is not a typo. For well over a century, one of the world’s biggest machinery brands has understood a simple truth: the people who win long-term are the ones who show up consistently with useful, interesting stories. That opportunity is sitting on thousands of UK […]

Across a range of recent government consultations, from rural tourism and visitor accommodation to the future of rental standards, the same pattern is emerging. The pressure point in rural businesses isn’t always access to land, capital, or demand, but management bandwidth. The Many Happy Returns podcast offered a neat way of describing this: Return on […]