Huxhams Cross Farm turned 'miserable' dead soil into a profitable farm feeding 300 homes

When Marina O'Connell took over Huxhams Cross Farm near Dartington, Devon in 2015, the farm contractor called it 'a miserable bit of land': years of chemical farming had left the soil, in her words, essentially dead. The buying trust, the Biodynamic Land Trust, wanted a financially independent regenerative farm. The first two years went into repairing the soil biome — planting legumes and clovers that fix nitrogen, wheeling henhouses across fields, letting two cows act as lawnmowers — with no crops to sell.

The system was designed before it was planted: workflow planning, tree rows across the slope, rainwater harvesting, green manures grazed by animals to rebuild fertility. O'Connell is blunt about the trade-off — yields on fields rested one year in three are lower than synthetic-fuelled industrial farms — and about the timeline: 'It's really a two-year transition phase... If you've got a large farm, you would probably want to make a transition one block at a time.'

Five years in, the audit: the farm's fruit, vegetables, eggs and wheat feed 300 families a week, sold mostly at Totnes farmers' market; production is profitable and self-sufficient, employing six people plus three apprentices, with a wellbeing centre bolstering finances. The farm is carbon-negative, sequestering five tonnes of carbon a year over its own use, with 400% more worms and 30% more bird species than at the start.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine then sent fertiliser costs soaring, and O'Connell says the decade-long transition she expected is suddenly accelerating; she now trains other farmers, including a dairy farmer in his 50s who just switched.

Feeds 300 families weekly; food production profitable and self-sufficient; 9 jobs; carbon-negative (5 tonnes sequestered a year), 400% more worms, 30% more bird species.

It put hard numbers behind regenerative farming's business case: self-sufficiency, profit and jobs on land written off as dead.

The two-year soil-building phase was budgeted as an investment, not treated as lost revenue — the step most converting farms skip.

Closing the input loop (legumes, grazing fowl, rainwater) made the farm immune to the fertiliser and fuel shocks of 2022.

The ecological results — carbon-negative, 400% more worms, 30% more bird species — came as outputs of the same design.

Regeneration is a designed system, not an abstention: legumes, grazing hens and rainwater harvest replace purchased inputs — but plan for a two-year transition block by block, not a switch.

As of June 2022 the farm was in its sixth year, feeding 300 families a week and running farmer-training courses. With nitrogen fertiliser prices surging after the invasion of Ukraine, O'Connell reported the decade-long transition she had expected was compressing as farmers rushed to cut inputs. The material records nothing further.