Busy summer sees growing number of farms for sale

Arable and mixed farms are joining the market as the summer shapes up to be a busy one.

Bilshay Farm in Dorset sits on the edge of the Symondsbury Estate, near Bridport, and is being sold to allow its owner to raise investment for diversification. 

The 520-acre land base is mostly in an arable rotation but also has woodland and pasture.

A good range of modern farm buildings supports the arable and livestock enterprises, including an eight-bay steel portal frame livestock shed and grain stores. There are also more traditional-style buildings.

See also: What’s behind the rise in farmland sales in 2024?

Further traditional buildings sit in the courtyard of the Grade II listed farmhouse.

Bilshay Farm is being offered for sale by Carter Jonas at £7.045m for the whole or is available in four separate lots.

West Lothian holding

Woodcockdale Farm, near Linlithgow, West Lothian, is on the market with Galbraith for offers above £3.595m for the whole, but has also been lotted six ways.

Woodcockdale Farm © Galbraith

The farm came into its current ownership in 1961 and has been expanded with the purchase of several neighbouring and outlying areas of land so that it now covers 646 acres.

The farming system was historically mixed dairy and arable with cereals and temporary grass part of the rotation.

A change in farming policy in 2008 replaced the dairy with a predominantly grassland-based system to accommodate the larger beef enterprise and a closed flock of Lleyn-cross ewes.

Dairy buildings were converted to accommodate 180 suckler cows, with followers taken through to finishing, and the farm buildings substantially modernised and extended.

The farm also carries about 640 breeding ewes and 200 ewe hoggs, together with replacements.

There is a modern eight-bedroom farmhouse and the land is mostly Grade 3.1 and 4.1/4.2 arable and pasture, with some smaller areas of Grade 5 and 6.

Amenity woodland covers 85 acres, some of which runs along the banks of the River Avon, and has potential for forestry or natural capital schemes.

Worcestershire with irrigation

In Pershore, Poplars Farm comes to the market with Sunderlands.

The 319-acre farm with mostly Grade 2 arable land is for sale at £4.875m for the whole, or is available in five lots.

Poplars Farm © Sunderlands

The land is split into large, level fields and has been farmed in a conventional arable rotation in recent years, but had previously grown vegetables.

It benefits from a borehole and an Environment Agency licence permitting abstraction from the River Avon for spray irrigation from April to September of up to 355,000 gallons a day.

The Grade II listed, Georgian-style five-bedroom farmhouse is in need of refurbishment, as is a two-bedroom annexe, currently let on an assured shorthold tenancy.

The sale is subject to a 35-year overage clause so that 35% of any uplift in value on the grant of planning consent or the use of permitted development rights for non-agricultural, non-equestrian or forestry use is passed to the vendor.

Two farm cottages may be available separately.

Morpeth bare land block

Also for sale, at a guide price of £1.7m, is a ring-fenced block of arable land of 173 acres near Morpeth.

Grade 3 land at Newton Red House © Galbraith

The Grade 3 land at Newton Red House has soils of the Wighill, Hall and Hallsworth Series.

Will Blair, of selling agent Galbraith, says it is considered capable of producing consistently good yields of a wide range of mixed crops, with potatoes and sugar beet having been grown in the past. 

More recently the vendor has taken a regenerative approach with combinable cropping complemented by legume fallow, beans and fallow, aided by the Countryside Stewardship (CS) scheme.

The land is in five fields and part of a larger holding which is in a CS Mid Tier agreement, however no part of the land being sold is within any permanent option.

The vendor will remove his rotational options from the land after the sale, allowing the buyer to enter into a fresh agreement if wished.