Telfit Farm

Telfit is Ben’s family farm, a unique, 1,000-acre hill farm in the Yorkshire Dales, farmed by Ian Brown. Middle White pigs, Herdwick sheep and Belted Galloway cattle all call it home. The aim is simple, if not small: to show how regenerative farming principles can produce real, healthy food while restoring natural systems and our planet’s health.

The way forward often means looking back. Many of the methods used at Telfit come from studying how our ancestors farmed, producing food with little to no inputs or technology.

Across the whole farm, Telfit blends regenerative farming with ecological principles, all designed to restore natural systems and capture carbon. Organic inputs and mob grazing are used to mimic the natural cycles of species in the wild. There’s also a rigorous focus on bringing as much diversity as possible to the farm.

Alongside all that, a wide range of habitat restoration projects are under way to reawaken natural systems. Once those systems are up and running, nature does a lot of the heavy lifting, and a huge array of species can flourish. Telfit is already blessed with remarkable levels of natural capital and biodiversity. Curlew, English partridge and cuckoos are all here in significant numbers, along with many other rare species.

The hope is that these methods can be used nationwide to transform farming and our landscape.