Hop and fruit farm | Herefordshire/Worcestershire | 200 visitors

Engag­ing the local community 

As a fam­i­ly busi­ness, we are always look­ing at ways to con­nect with our local com­mu­ni­ty and had been toy­ing with doing Open Farm Sun­day for a few years. One of the chal­lenges we face is that in June, our apples are very tiny and there are no hops to see, so we ques­tioned how we could demon­strate what we do. We’d done an open day for the past three years, but always dur­ing the har­vest in Sep­tem­ber when the farm is at its most dynam­ic. The turn­ing point came with the launch of our on-farm brew­ery so we had a great ​‘farm-to-glass’ sto­ry to tell!

Grow­ing local profile

Our oth­er moti­va­tion for doing Open Farm Sun­day was to put our brew­ery on the local map and increase traf­fic through the door. We already had a rea­son­able pro­file, but were keen to be affil­i­at­ed with LEAF as so much of what they pro­mote around sus­tain­able farm­ing is in line with our own approach. As a busi­ness, align­ing our­selves with LEAF and ben­e­fit­ting from all the pub­lic­i­ty Open Farm Sun­day gen­er­ates was a def­i­nite win-win. 

Our event

Logis­tics were our biggest con­cern for the event itself. We decid­ed to keep it very tight and knew from expe­ri­ence that we had to deliv­er some­thing eas­i­ly under­stand­able. Vis­i­tors were split into three groups of about sev­en­ty peo­ple, but we could eas­i­ly have had more groups. We toured the hop fields, talked about how we farm hops and the chal­lenges around pests, dis­ease and weath­er. Vis­i­tors then went to the hop pick­ing machine and kiln to see how they are processed and dried before being baled for deliv­ery and final­ly into the Uni­ty Brew­house brew­ery where they met our Head Brew­er, Sarah Saleh who showed them dif­fer­ent tanks and talked about mash­ing-in and fer­men­ta­tion. We end­ed the tour with some sam­pling and had bot­tles of beer, apple juice and some of our home­brew hops on sale. We also set up tables out­side the brew­ery with edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als from LEAF, AHDB and the NFU which helped to enter­tain some of the chil­dren who came whilst par­ents sam­pled the beer. 

Car park­ing was anoth­er con­sid­er­a­tion as we don’t have a large car park­ing area, so we utilised the hop yard and parked cars between orchard trees close to the road. We had helpers in high viz vests to ensure there were no acci­dents with vis­i­tors cross­ing the road. A neigh­bour offered his field for any over spill too. 

A help­ing hand

We were unsure on vis­i­tor num­bers so want­ed to make sure we had plen­ty of bod­ies on the ground to help. Eight mem­bers of staff, togeth­er with neigh­bours and rel­a­tives were on hand. We gave them a writ­ten brief which includ­ed top­ics such as health and safe­ty, fire, smok­ing etc. All helpers wore a flu­o­res­cent jack­et to make them eas­i­ly iden­ti­fi­able to vis­i­tors and each of the tour groups had a des­ig­nat­ed lead and a ​‘sweep­er up’ at the back. 

Pro­mo­tion

Pro­mo­tion was pre­dom­i­nant­ly through our entry on the Open Farm Sun­day web­site; we also issued a press release to two local news­pa­pers and put a fly­er in the doctor’s surgery. In the end, we had about 200 vis­i­tors, which was just about right. 

Putting us on the map

There is no doubt that doing Open Farm Sun­day is a fan­tas­tic way to raise your local pro­file. We had lots of young fam­i­lies com­ing along so it was great to con­nect with them and the local pri­ma­ry school raised over £400 at our event. 

We nev­er stop being sur­prised by the reac­tion we get from vis­i­tors when they come to the farm, see what we’re doing, tell them about the super­mar­ket spec­i­fi­ca­tions we have to adhere to and what goes into mak­ing the per­fect pint. For most peo­ple, it comes as a real rev­e­la­tion. Being able to share what we are doing is real­ly reward­ing. We had lots of stim­u­lat­ing dis­cus­sion and ques­tions around val­ues, prices and costs; vis­i­tors gen­uine­ly want­ed to under­stand the farm’s rela­tion­ship with cus­tomers. Open Farm Sun­day pro­vides the per­fect plat­form for farm­ers to show­case the fan­tas­tic work they do.