About the farm

West End Barns is located on a working farm called West End Farm which alongside Cross Farm, is owned by the Dickinson family and run by father and son team, Will & Fred. Fred is the 7^th generation of Dickinson to run the farm and lives at West End with his wife Vicky.

Both farms are arable farms, which means the land is used to grow crops including wheat, barley, oilseed rape and beans. The farms have also diversified over the years and as well as West End Barns café, they have livery yards where local riders keep their horses.

Fred and Vicky also have a small herd of cattle on the farm which include a mixture of two breeds – Hereford (brown and white) and Aberdeen Angus (black). We have around 50 cattle on the farm, including Tim the bull!

A lot of the work on the farm is done with the aid of tractors and heavy machinery. The farm currently has Massey Ferguson and John Deere tractors, two JCBs and a combine harvester, as well as other equipment such as bailer, sprayer and fertiliser spreader. Both the tractors and the combine can be controlled by GPS and have autosteer – meaning they have the ability to steer themselves!

Recent changes to the farm include a move from using inorganic man-made fertiliser to an organic form of fertiliser. You may have seen a strange round green tank at the end of the Cinder Path – this is the storage tank for the organic fertiliser which called digestate. Digestate is spread on the crops, providing nutrients to help it grow. On this farm our digestate is made from treated McDonald’s food waste.