Adam & Jess

CHRIS Berry talks with Adam Palmer at North Breckenholme Farm .

When you write about farms , as I do , week-in , week-out , it is easy to get sucked into an arable farming cropping list that nearly always put winter wheat as the first crop . It is , after all , the largest crop for many arable farmers , and such as oilseed rape is usually third on any farmer ’ s list after winter barley or a mix of winter and spring barley .

Adam Palmer of North Breckenholme Farm in Thixendale has made his name in the farming world because of oilseed rape , not because he grows any more of it than anybody else , because he doesn ’ t , but because of how he has embraced the market that opened up for pressed rapeseed oil in the mid-noughties and opened his own processing plant on-farm , launching Yorkshire Rapeseed Oil .

What Adam and his wife Jennie have grown since has been a successful range of products that now includes a range of dressings , range of mayonnaises and in 2014 a range of dipping oils that launched their Charlie & Ivy ’ s brand , named after their children .

“ The rapeseed oil business now trades at probably six or seven times what the farm trades at ,” say Adam . “ It ’ s the biggest proportion of what we do and probably takes up 60-70 per cent of my time .”

It all started in 2006 when Adam had seen what had been going on with rapeseed presses .

“ They caught my interest and as it was a crop that we were growing I thought it was a really positive idea . I ’ d started looking at it with the goggles of the biofuel industry on and was looking through that lens for a long time , but that seemed incredibly risky .

“ At that same time there was this emerging market for British Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil and that really piqued my fancy . I spent a couple of years researching it and in 2007 I finally bit the bullet , bought the equipment and converted a shed on the farm to do it . We were pressing by 2008 , by which time there were a few other people that had joined the market as well .

Adam says that his own acreage at North Breckenholme is Yorkshire Rapeseed Oil ’ s smallest supplier .

“ We farm around 400 acres and the way in which crop rotation works we can ’ t grow rape across it all , so we do need to buy in from other farmers within Yorkshire . Our preferred route is within a five mile radius of the farm and we ’ ve got really good growers within that area .

“ The tonnage required depends on the market and what is the demand each year , but we need somewhere between 400-500 tonnes . Up here 1.5 tonnes per acre is the kind of yield we have come to expect , so we ’ re looking at 300 acres of oilseed rape being needed every year . We grow just 25-30 acres of that on our own farm . We ’ ve one that can grow 200-250 acres and we won ’ t take it all but we will take quite a bit from there .

“ We extended our processing in 2020 , when we made the decision to spend a ridiculous amount of money just before Covid , but we had outgrown our original processing unit . Our Charlie & Ivy ’ s brand saw us take a slightly different turn with a movement into a brand without the word Yorkshire , to try and attract a wider audience .

“ The proportion of what we do in bottles of standard rapeseed oil is now quite small . The bottles that come out of the factory now are rapeseed

and other things and we have 55 skews of our own brands as well as making products for other people often to their own bespoke recipes .

“ We have our own marketing team and sales team and I now spend far less time as a practical farmer , and far more time in the office .

Adam says that flea beetle problems for the growing of oilseed rape and the price of fertiliser have not as yet had any impact on their supply .

“ We haven ’ t seen it become more difficult as yet , that ’ s not to say it won ’ t , but because as a whole we are not going to make much of a dent on the world stage we should be okay .

Adam has also developed another business interest , this time with livestock , through a good friend and former college colleague Pete Caley of Smithy Briggs Farm in Burton Constable over in Holderness . It ’ s a pretty unique enterprise called Six Valley Lamb that combines hill farming with lowland farming of sheep .

“ Pete and I started it in 2010 . It was a roundabout conversation between us that came about when Pete rang me for some advice . He had come back to the family ’ s home farm and was looking at sheep because they made a lot of high quality hay and he was looking at how they grazed their sheep .”

“ We found we had synergies because we have a lot of dale land which is alright for summer grazing but which is not much good for winter fattening , and he had the opposite , needing his summer grass for hay and his sheep to be elsewhere , so we looked at how we could develop and formed Six Valley Lamb .”

‘ We ’ ve since taken on some extra sheep and land in and around the county anywhere between me and him . We now have 1500 breeding ewes