Tamarisk Farm
Just occasionally, even after 45 years of journalism, someone will utter something the likes of which one has never heard before in an interview. And I love that as much as I love a fabulous new piece of music or the scent of fresh mown hay.
As I sit here still locked-down looking through my files I recall the day poet James Crowden and I sat in a wonderful garden at the centre of an organic farm on the Dorset coast and a healthy looking woman with rough dirty hands was telling us about the place…
She said: “We have one or two elderly animals like horses that graze out in some of the fields - and sometimes I think the animals here have such a lovely life, they forget to die.”
Not only has no one ever said such a thing to me before, but I drove home thinking just how incredibly rare such a thing probably is. The idea that you could have animals which are so happy they forget to die… Can you imagine that happening anywhere that produces food for a big-chain supermarket?
No. And of course it doesn’t really happen at Tamarisk Farm on the Dorset coast either. But the thing about this extraordinary place - and the people who run it - is that the visitor could almost be led into believing it could.
You can almost imagine an American moviemaker turning up at West Bexington, just along the shore from Abbotsbury at a place where Chesil Beach is getting its act together, and deciding to make a film, say, about an heroic and jolly little pig using the farm as its central location.
Actually, talking of pigs, there will soon be real-life Babe lookalikes romping along beside the sheep in the big wide open fields that slope down to the English Channel hereabouts - because the Pearse family who farm at Tamarisk have learned that the latest scientific research shows grazing pigs alongside sheep can be beneficial when it comes to tape-worms and other nasties.
By now some hard-bitten agriculturalists might be thinking I have taken leave of my senses or was given something odd and organic to drink in my Dorset tea…
But that’s not the very real and down-to-earth impression you get when talking to Josephine and Arthur Pearse, their daughter Ellen and her husband Adam, and their daughter Lila and her partner Ben, as well as Rebecca and Rosie who look after the vegetable side of the business.
The family has been here for well over half a century farming organically. Indeed, Tamarisk was one of the first registered organic farms in the country. And they’ve been so successful at it they’ve grow the business so that it now includes two neighbouring National Trust owned farms as well as their own, and covers a south-facing salty patch of land extending to some 800 acres.
Sitting in the garden talking to members of the Pearse family, it was Josephine who outlined details of some of the early times: “We bought the house in 1958, then we went to work in Nigeria for three years - and then came back because our third child was getting thinner and thinner. We came back and she blossomed.
“Arthur wanted to farm three or four acres for vegetables and we went to ask the farmer if he’d sell a bit of land, but he wouldn’t. As we started to walk away I suddenly had a vision of spreading out over the land and doing things, so I turned and said: ‘Will you sell the whole lot?’ And he said he’d do that.
“We were already thinking about farming organically - in Nigeria we had been growing our own food. Arthur had a lot of experience gardening as a child. As a parson’s son, he spent all of his holidays in the garden. People did use the phrase organic back then,” Josephine recalls. “Chemical free farming, But they didn’t have any standards. We joined the Soil Association in 1961 and our number is seven in the South West, so we were pretty early.
“The first inspectors we had were three other organic farmers - there were very few of them, anywhere. And they came more as peer support and as an exchange of ideas. Nowadays it is an audit against a set of formal standards.”
At this point daughter Ellen took over the story of the early years, even though she was but a child at the time: “We had a set of ideas and understanding. We know the soil is fundamental, we know the soil is extremely complex - and we know that what follows from the soil, if you have that right, then everything is going to be right.
“Science continues to justify this as time goes on. The understanding of the complexities of soil is now immense - so much more than it was back then.
“We had some understanding of the difficulties and dangers of the chemical practices which we didn’t like the look of - but we didn’t have the details. Everything that society thought was safe and marvellous, like DDT for example, did harm both in itself and also to the environment. We didn’t know that for sure, but we sort of guessed it. And now it’s been shown that it’s true.
“DDT was only the first of a series of nasty things which chemicals have been doing - and which they’re still doing.”
Tamarisk Farm house
Ellen and husband Adam came back to live on the farm when they began having children and took the business in a more arable direction. “Adam and I re-established the arable and took on the cattle and sheep - and my parents did the vegetables. Then came a time when it was too much for them, so we brought people in to do the veg. The aim is to have a good mixture - and the reasoning for that is that everything helps everything else. Everything feeds everything else.
“If you think about an arable farmer, he or she is busy at a particular time of the year, then they have times when they are not - so we fill those other times with other things. We set our timings up with lambing and calving, for example, to fit in so we have time for other things. So the farm is a kind of network in the way it all meshes together.”
This interconnection within the farm and its various agricultural systems and output is something the family takes seriously - and it goes beyond timings and the fact that manure from the cattle helps grow the vegetables.
“Our daughter and Ben are looking at ways of increasing that meshing for the benefit of all the farm,” said Ellen. “For example, we will have some pigs coming soon that will run with the sheep - and we are hoping that this will help with parasites. The research has been done that shows this works.”
The farm’s interconnectivity is plain to see, both in the little shop located in a barn at West Bexington and also on the website at http://tamariskfarm.co.uk where you will see a wide range of organic vegetables on sale along with grass fed beef, lamb and mutton, organic whole-grains, pulse and stoneground flour, as well as sheepskins and wool.
It’s not surprising the National Trust invited them to take on the tenancies of the two neighbouring farms. Not only does the family operate in an environmentally friendly way, but they also believe in improving soils - which is exactly what they’ve been doing at the holding to the east, called Labour In Vain Farm.
“A name that is not deserved,” said Ellen. “I used to think it was because of the heavy clay, but there are just three fields that have been influenced by geology and I think the whole farm was named after them. We are putting that right - we have to build up the humous - but once we do that, the soil is going to be fantastic.”
So fantastic, that maybe Rebecca the vegetable gardener - who is a keen contributor to the Land Worker’s Alliance, campaigning for small scale farmers - will one day see ancient animals out at Labour In Vain, living long lives because they’re too happy to die.
