About Us
Edfords is an Organic Farm situated on an 84 acre Norfolk County Council Farm, we keep rare breed sheep and pigs as well as a range of poultry and goats. Edfords is an Alternative Provision offering a safe place to learn for students who struggle in the classroom, we’re not all suited to school so our role is to work with schools to support their students with a different opportunity, our students thrive learning outside and while they benefit from being a part of Edfords this also helps to engage them in education again.
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Edfords is a fully working farm so we are teaching our students about farm to fork principles, the importance of conservation farming and how and why we farm the way we do.
The History of Edfords
Lou Bishop-Howes and Chris Howes created Edfords almost by accident, when Chris was struggling with his mental health we obtained an allotment from the local council we quickly noticed that working with the fruit and vegetable gardens as well as the chickens we kept on the allotment seemed to help Chris and after a couple of years we decided to take this further.
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We knew it was helping but we needed to research this further so we packed our things and moved out of the city to an old farmhouse with ¾ of an acre in rural Norfolk, we started to keep pigs, then sheep and then goats as well as expanding our flock of chickens. After almost three years of research and planning we set up Edfords Care Farm on a small 2 acre site on the North Norfolk Coast in May 2014.
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The concept worked and we soon had a number of regular clients, some coming to us once a week others three times a week. Edfords was growing fast and we started working with sixth formers from a local SEN school, things were going very well and we soon started to outgrow the site we were on so in February 2016 Edfords relocated, we were then situated on a 13 acre site only 10 minutes from our original site.
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Edfords was still growing fast and in April 2019 were successful in applying for a Norfolk County Council Farm based in Mautby, the relocation took place in October 2019 and we are now based on an 84 acre farm giving us the opportunity to expand many elements of the farm and create new opportunities, we now offer an Alternative Provision for students who struggle in the classroom and this is what Edfords does primarily with four days of the week dedicated to these groups.
