400 acres arable land in mid-Kent for sale at £3.5m

A rare chance to buy a significant chunk of equipped farmland in the Weald of Kent has arrived on the spring market in the form of Reed Court Farm.

Comprising just over 400 acres, the unit is six miles from Maidstone and has been owned by the Tipples family for more than 65 years.

A combinable crop rotation has worked in tandem with Higher Level Stewardship for 20 years.

About two-thirds of the ring-fenced land is Grade 2 arable ground with 100 acres of permanent pasture and 24 acres of woodland.

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An on-floor Scorpion grain store was built in 2013 and provides 700t of storage adjoining another store equipped with a grain dryer and pre-cleaner. Indoor and outdoor bins take the site’s total capacity to 1,500t.

One of the farm’s two cold stores is rented to a fruit grower, and there are further general storage buildings. 

Richard Thomas, director at BTF Partnership which has been instructed to sell the farm, said: “This is a substantial parcel of mainly high-quality farmland in the Weald, which has been extremely well managed.

“We anticipate this land will attract interest from the Kent farming community and from outside the county, as land parcels of this size rarely come to the market in mid-Kent.”

A Higher Tier Countryside Stewardship agreement expires in December 2020, paying a total of £37,250 over the life of the five-year scheme in exchange for a commitment to low-input grassland and some farmland bird and pollinator plots.

Solar panels with a 30kW capacity are installed on the grain stores with surplus electricity sold to the National Grid.

The farm is being sold at a guide price of £3.5m as a whole, or in two lots.