When Mathew, operations manager at Better Food Shed, visited Pollybell farm for a Soil Association event on Agroecology at Field Scale, he discovered something encouraging: evidence that large-scale farming and environmental stewardship needn’t be mutually exclusive.
Spanning 950 hectares of organic crops, 300 hectares of organic dairy, and 600 hectares of conventional arable land in South Yorkshire, Pollybell is vast compared with the small-scale farms supplying our vegetable box scheme, such as Martin's Ripple Farm, Sarah Green's Organics or Wild Country Organics, which span less than 50 hectares. Our Dagenham Farm covers just a quarter of a hectare!
What makes Pollybell interesting is how it's demonstrating a sustainable version of large-scale farming.
Smaller organic farms tend to use people power to tend the soil, to minimise fuel use, pesticide use and mechanisation and create local employment. Pollybell takes a different approach. Owner James Brown has developed CLAWS – a robotic weeder created in collaboration with the European Space Station that can remove 60 weeds per second.
Pollybell powers itself through Lapwing Energy, featuring one of the UK's largest floating solar arrays – panels mounted on platforms over their reservoir. This system generates clean energy while reducing water evaporation and maximising land use.
A wind turbine powers the offices, while a pyrolysis plant converts green waste into fuel, creating a closed-loop system.
The farm's environmental credentials go further. Pollybell hosts the UK's highest population densities of turtle doves and lapwings – species under severe pressure elsewhere. The operation includes a Site of Special Scientific Interest, deliberately flooded each winter to create habitat for wading birds and wildfowl.
This biodiversity is the result of careful management that recognises healthy ecosystems and productive farming as complementary, not competing, objectives.
During the Soil Association visit, participants witnessed Pollybell's strip-planting technique: alternating rows of broccoli and clover. The clover suppresses weeds naturally, enriches soil, and supports underground life, reducing reliance on external fertilisers.
Visitors examined soil structure, discussed earthworm populations, explored cover crop benefits, and saw agroecological principles working at commercial scale.
The technique represents a fundamental shift from conventional monoculture towards integrated systems that work with, rather than against, natural processes.
As climate change and biodiversity loss accelerate, farms like Pollybell show the potential for conventional farms to continue to move from soil-depleting, fertiliser-dependent monoculture towards integrated systems that work with nature. Like the small farms we worth with, who have always put planet and people first, Pollybell shows how larger farms can play their part in producing great food while reversing the damage wrought by decades of industrial farming.
