Hallwood Fresh Veg in Devon

Home Grown & Local to You

About Us

We have a relatively small family farm run by husband and wife team Richard and Ruth Kelsey. Richard is a vegetable farmers son and has been growing veg himself for 26 years. The main part of his working life was spent growing vegetables for the large supermarkets, some 5 million cabbage and 15 million spring onions per year! An unease with the imbalance of power in the trading relationship with the supermarkets and the intensive methods of farming necessary led us to look for an alternative market for our wares which lead us to Devon and the birth of our local veg and meat box schemes

We are lucky to have very loyal local people working for us. Ian, our delivery driver spent most of his working years to date, cheffing in his own pubs and there is little that he doesn’t know about food and is always happy to impart his knowledge on the doorstep to our customers. We also have a team of hard working local ladies who come whatever the weather to harvest and pack the vegetables. School holidays brings extra help in the form of our children Beth and James and maybe a few more, all keen to earn a bit of pocket money helping on the farm. Organic? We are not registered ‘organic’ but we adopt many organic growing methods to greatly reduce our reliance on chemicals, we only spray if we absolutely have to – many of our crops receive no sprays at all. All of our meat and approximately 90% of our vegetables for the veg boxes is grown here at Hallwood Farm. We occasionally buy produce from other local farms.

At Hallwood Farm we have 90 acres of gently sloping south facing land on the outskirts of the village of Petrockstowe. We occasionally rent further land from a neighbouring farmer to enable us to ‘rest’ our vegetable fields

We are busy little bees here at Hallwood We have a traditional mixed farm here at Hallwood with our vegetables and Heritage breed pigs, Dorset lamb and Jersey x Ruby Red Devon Beef cattle, see Hallwood Fresh Meat. The different enterprises in the farming business all complement each other. ‘Waste’ vegetables are never wasted as they are fed to the pigs or sheep, valuable dung is used on the veg fields to replace organic matter and sheep are sent in to graze after cattle to improve grassland quality; valuable traditional methods of farm husbandry which unfortunately are sometimes lacking on intensive farms today

All of our meat and approx 90% of the produce is grown at Hallwood Farm with the occasional addition of veg not suited to being grown on our farm. We only ever buy in from other local farmers

We are not registered as organic growers but, like to think we are a sensible ‘half way house’ between organic and conventional farming. We adopt many organic plant Husbandry methods to reduce our reliance on pesticides. For example; with the aid of a sophisticated ‘on farm’ weather station and a technically advanced computer software programme we can predict peaks and troughs of pest populations which largely reduces the need for pesticide application. Many of our crops receive no pesticide at all. To find out more about what we do, see Hallwood Husbandry

We are committed to conservation and the environment, we are registered on the Natural England (DEFRA) agrienvironmental scheme HLS which rewards and encourages us to conserve wildlife, improve public access and education on our farm. We have also achieved Silver on the Devon Wildlife Trust Approved Farm Business award scheme

According to an in depth study by The New Economics Foundation into local rural economy ‘Income into organic food box schemes generates about twice as much for the local economy as supermarkets’ see Plugging the leaks

Phone Richard & Ruth on 01837 811762 ~ 07831 186 269
Email Hallwood Fresh Veg