Northwood Farm
Death informs our relationship to life. Between 2017 and 2019, Laurence Candy of Northwood Farm in Dorset experienced numerous catastrophic events. It began by the loss of almost the entire dairy herd to bovine tuberculosis. Life-threatening family illnesses followed, and then the tragic loss of his brother-in-law. Seeing his own father in ICU was devastating for Laurence; at that point, an internal shift occurred .
“I remember I had some beef animals to sell, but I couldn’t do it; this was probably the first time I had to fight with my conscience.”
The experience stayed with Laurence and became the starting point in his journey to stock-free farming. In January of 2021, Laurence contacted Farmers For Stock-Free Farming. Laurence Candy will certify Northwood Farm with the Biocyclic Vegan Standard on September 2, 2021. He will be the first BVS certified farmer in the UK.
“The vegan community needs to go to the Government and say, ‘we’ve got an agricultural system that is sustainable, is sequestering carbon, and it works; let’s run with this!’ If we’re going to eat differently it only makes sense to do it veganically. It’s not a niche, hippy system; veganics does tick all the boxes. The more I look into it, the more I learn; it does solve all the problems.”
– Laurence Candy, Dorset, Great Britain
I and my family have been vegetarian for 3 generations but not quite transitioned to vegan.
We still use small amounts of milk, eggs and cheese.
We are from a farming background where one side of the family raised chickens and shot pheasant and rabbits for food, but overall were outnumbered by the vegetarian side.
My teen grandson however is intent on consuming large amounts of animal products, which baffles and disturbs me.
This is such excellent news, we wish you all the best in making this a success and definitely will come for a visit and support your business!
We mill and bake bread ourselves, if we can get our rye and wheat/spelt from you in the future that’d be amazing!
Also, it seems almost impossible to get organic rapeseed oil and even less so fresh flax seed oil in the UK – if you add a small oil press to your business this could become a strong business.