Better weather coaxes farms and land to market
Wheelbirks © Savills The supply of land for sale has been invigorated over the past week, with more settled weather allowing holdings to look better for both brochures and visits.
Taking centre stage is a dairy farm in the Tyne Valley with ice cream and accommodation diversifications.
The owners are selling because they plan to retire.
See also: Essex and Devon holdings offer diverse incomes
The Richardson family have been farming the land since 1882 and produce milk from a pedigree Jersey herd on the Wheelbirks Estate, where they also process some for ice cream sold in their on-farm café.
The ice cream venture began in 1998 and 12 years later the café and an ice cream parlour followed.
Wheelbirks is 386 acres near Stocksfield in Northumberland and includes some Grade 3 soils within a ring fence.
It is a mix of permanent pasture, land with arable potential, and mixed-age woodland.
The 110 acres of woodland is subject to an active woodland management policy, including felling and restocking, with two felling licences in place, one expiring in 2029 and the other in 2030, which would allow the buyer to generate income from timber sales.
There is a small shoot with facilities including a shoot room and lunch hut.
The cows are milked in a Westfalia 14:14 parlour installed in 2007, with automatic washdown, automatic cluster removal and a 5,500-litre bulk milk tank.
A cubicle shed with a central feed passage and slatted slurry channels draining into a reception pit has 120 cow places in five rows.
Wheelbirks Parlour, a successful enterprise including the ice cream café, has potential for further growth.
The farm has substantial accommodation, with a seven-bedroom principal farmhouse, a four-bedroom house, and three cottages let on Assured Shorthold Tenancy agreements.
Selling agent Savills has set a guide price of £6.75m for the Wheelbirks Estate.
Devon mixed farm
Buskin Farm © DR Kivell Country Property
In Devon, DR Kivell Country Property is launching Buskin Farm at Exbourne, near Okehampton, at a guide price of £2m. The sale includes single-bank fishing rights on the River Okement.
This 98-acre livestock and arable holding has productive, level and gently sloping red soil land supported by a range of livestock and storage buildings and traditional barns.
The farmhouse, a five-bedroom property, is Grade II listed.
Bare land blocks
Farmers looking for bare land have a good choice of options this week.
Carter Jonas is launching 153 acres of natural chalk downland in Wiltshire, which it describes as having “great agricultural, ecological and historical importance”.
Buskin Farm © DR Kivell
The land at Winkelbury Hill, near Berwick St John, on the Cranborne Chase and in the West Wiltshire Downs National Landscape, is being marketed at a guide price of £1.1m.
Two-thirds of the downland comprises a mixture of level and sloping permanent pasture, and the remainder is in two fields suited to arable and maize cropping.
The land falls within a nitrate vulnerable zone and is in the Winkelbury Hill site of special scientific interest.
Land near Wixoe © Carter Jonas
The same firm is also launching an 88-acre block of productive Grade 2 arable land near Wixoe, Sudbury, Suffolk, at a guide price of £725,000.
Partner Mark Russell believes the sale will appeal to a broad range of purchasers, from established farming businesses to buyers with environmental or habitat‑creation ambitions.
Historically the land has been used for growing cereals.
Land at Huxhill © Kivells
Meanwhile, Kivells is bringing a productive 49-acre block of Devon arable and pastureland to the market at Huxhill, Weare Gifford.
Marketing agent Ben Hancock, who has set a guide price of £550,000, says the land has previously supported strong maize yields and is capable of growing a wide variety of cereal and fodder crops.
It was formerly farmed as part of a dairy operation and is being sold with a 2010-installed slurry lagoon.
A pond provides amenity value and biodiversity interest, complemented by a small strip of woodland.
