‘Doves and food and fun’: the fight to save a farming pioneer
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Wakelyns, a 56-acre agroforestry farm in Suffolk, must raise £1.2m by selling community shares to buy out a co-owner's half and convert into a charitable community benefit society, or face sale on the open market.
- David Wolfe and Amanda Illing, who took over the farm in 2020 after his parents died, run 10 "micro" enterprises on-site including a bakery, a honeybee operation, and a hemp textile business that collaborators say produced "the best hemp crop in the UK" last year.
- Martin and Ann Wolfe founded Wakelyns in 1992 as one of Europe's first agroforestry schemes, turning cereal fields into 56 narrow alleys of organic crops between rows of timber, fruit, and hazel trees; the farm later pioneered the UK's first commercial lentil growing and remains its only commercial black lentil grower.
- The farm's hazel coppice is sold as £1.40 stakes for traditional hedgelayers, with demand outstripping supply, alongside apples, cherries, plums, timber, and rotations of organic wheat, lentils, hemp, and vegetables between the tree rows.
- Wakelyns' agroforestry model is now official UK government policy: the carbon delivery plan aims to convert 10% of arable land to agroforestry by 2050 with financial incentives for farmers, and recent visitors include farmers from the Netherlands and Ireland.
- Natural Habitat charity executive director Carrie Phoenix brings schoolchildren to the farm, while professional ornithologist Harry Read runs nature tours highlighting turtle doves, bullfinches, hobbies, whitethroats, and dragonflies on three restored ponds.
- Contemporary Hempery, run by Claire O'Sullivan and Kitty Wilson Brown, uses Wakelyns' annual hemp crop to revive a natural fabric widely grown in Suffolk in Tudor times for England's naval sails; they pay no rent but Wakelyns earns income from the hemp textiles festival.
Why it matters: Wakelyns is the rare UK farm that has already proved at scale the agroforestry approach the government now wants 10% of arable land to adopt by 2050, making its potential loss a concrete setback to that policy's flagship example. The £1.2m community share offer is the only mechanism standing between perpetuity and fragmentation onto the open market, where the 56-acre model of stacked, biodiversity-rich enterprises would almost certainly dissolve.
