Elston sits on Crediton red land — soil so good the region once grew swedes for Covent Garden market. The Gray family has farmed in this county for generations. This is the short version of a very long story.
The man is Edgar, a neighbour here at Copplestone. The bullock belonged to Andy's grandfather, who bred it on this farm and sold it to him. Cattle have been leaving Elston's fields for market like this for as long as anyone can remember — the photograph just happened to catch it.
That, in one frame, is what this farm is: good animals, raised on good ground, sold to people we know.
Generation after generation on Devon’s red ground — across more than one farm, through enclosure, war, and every price crash farming has thrown at it.
M C Kelly begins trading — a Devon catering butcher that would grow to supply hundreds of professional kitchens across the South West.
Andy Gray takes on the farm and the meat business. Elston Farm becomes M C Kelly's home.
The regenerative turn begins — two decades of rebuilding soil rather than mining it. The ploughs come out of the ground, minimum tillage replaces decades of arable rotation, and the thinking behind everything that follows is set.
Solar and wind arrive on the farm. Today more than a third of the electricity used here is generated here.
Native British cattle and red deer come onto the permanent pasture. Weeks later, Covid closes 80% of the butchery's trade overnight; the team launches a national meat-box business in under a week and delivers 284,000 meals at cost to the Country Food Trust's appeal.
5,600 trees planted through the grazing in a twelve-year trial with Rothamsted Research. The Observer visits; Countryfile films in the rows that autumn. A neighbour suggests Andy might as well concrete the field over. Andy plants more trees.
Andy is a finalist in the BBC Food & Farming Awards for farming for the future.
Red deer and native cattle graze between the maturing alleys. Volunteers still come to plant hedges. This generation is quietly building the farm the next one will inherit.
“I want scruffier edges – hedges spreading out at the base into tussocky margins that support species from whitethroats to grass snakes.”
Andy Gray — RSPB Fair to Nature