From Petersham Nurseries to sustainable farming
Petersham Nurseries was created by a family with strong ethics around food and nature. It’s little wonder their son, Harry Boglione, has become a trailblazer for regenerative farming. We spoke to him about his journey into sustainable farming and why succession is never fluid.
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"I realised I could do pretty much whatever I wanted with my life, and I wanted to do right with that opportunity,” says Harry Boglione. When he bought Haye Farm in Devon in his mid-20s, Harry wasn’t the obvious face of farming. With dreadlocks and two young children, he was called “hairy Harry” by his neighbours. “They thought I was crazy. But now they’re asking: ‘What’s this cover crop thing?’” he laughs.
Over the last decade, he has moulded Haye Farm into an organic, high-welfare mixed farm centred around regenerative, holistic farming. It includes “Gilt and Flint” brewery, a bespoke butchery, charcuterie business and luxury accommodation.
Harry’s love for nature and biodiversity stemmed from his upbringing in Petersham Nurseries. Gael and Francesco Boglione moved their young family from central London to Richmond-upon-Thames in 1997. Their new home, Petersham House, overlooked a local plant nursery, which had been carved out of the grounds of their Queen Anne home in the 1970s. The family turned it into a stunning plant nursery, café and critically acclaimed restaurant that attracts guests from across the globe.
Family values grounded in food and nature
Harry recalls his upbringing as being quite bohemian, with a house full of parties and celebrities. Gael, an Australian model, had strong ethics around food. Harry reminisces about her sending him to school with an organic, homemade packed lunch that he couldn’t trade with anyone.
“When I was getting suspended from school, I was always put to work in the nurseries,” he laughs. “We’ve always been a family with strong connections to nature, valuing and understanding it. I think I carried that forward. That was instilled in me a bit more when I moved to Australia after school. I went through a bit of a hippie stage. I came back desperate to do something good.” He wanted to prove to people that it is possible to farm productively enough to feed the world while also saving and enhancing biodiversity. “That’s been my mission. And, while I’ve been on my mission, the term rewilding has become a big buzzword,” Harry explains.
“Succession is never fluid”
Harry chose not to use the “Petersham” brand at Haye Farm, “because I’m stubborn,” he smiles. “I want to build my own name that’s not connected to Petersham. I wanted to create my own strong brand that had the same clout and power and then pass it on to my children. That’s why I didn’t set up ‘Petersham Farm’.”
It’s not just Harry. One of his three sisters has recently opened a restaurant in Hastings called “Bayte”. “Again, she said: ‘I’m going to do it myself’. Very beautiful and very Petersham-esque, but under her own brand,” he explains.
When it comes to the four children succeeding their parents, Gael and Francesco, Harry admits that succession is never fluid. “There are always conflicting ideas,” he notes.
“There’s much to be taken from the older generation and their experience. But there’s sometimes a certain hesitation to do more because they’ve got to that stage in life where they’re thinking, ‘actually, I just want to relax’. It’s good to have the energy from the younger generation as well.”
Much of the succession planning the family is currently involved in is financial, rather than grappling with any difficulties over family philosophy. “We all do our own things and all also feed back into the Petersham Group,” Harry explains. For Harry, this is Haye Farm which he runs with his partner, Emily Perry.
Harry Boglione and his partner Emily Perry run Haye Farm in Devon.
The Boglione family works together on the wider vision for the Petersham Group, for example, whether they should work with investors on rolling out some of the concepts they have developed, or build things organically as they go.
When asked whether he would like his two children to take over the farm, Harry quickly replied: “My children will do whatever they want.” He adds: “I think it’s very important not to impose. If you impose on the next generation, the most likely outcome is you’re going to scare them off.
“My main objective in my life is to set a foundation for my children that allows them to pursue anything they choose,” says Harry. “Even though there is a lot of work that’s gone into the farm and the development of it: the trees that we’ve planted and lakes we’ve built and watching all those ecosystems and wildlife evolve. I would love it if they continued to be the custodians of that land. But equally, it’s not a jail sentence. My daughter’s very interested. She loves the wildlife and the farm. She walks around picking stuff and eating it. Whereas my son just wants to live in London and skateboard. That is also fine.”
Remodelling agriculture for good
“Regenerative farming, rewilding, sustainable farming — whatever you want to call it. It’s all about trying to mimic what would happen in nature,” he says. “Nature has been present far longer than farmed ecosystems have. Healthy soils, plants and biodiversity are all derived from the natural system.”
He has achieved this on Haye Farm through a multitude of techniques, including mimicking the rotational grazing of migrating animals. Instead of keeping 20 cows in a large field, they are kept in a much smaller area and moved every few days. “This mimics the natural migration of animals being pursued by predators because they never stay in the same spot for too long,” Harry states. “If you do that, it helps to rebuild your soil. It also gives your grass a rest because it’s not constantly under pressure.” Grass’s natural reaction to being grazed is to stop growing for three days to save itself, he explains. “It hunkers down for three days, just waiting for the animals to move on, and then it grows back and puts all its energy into growing. If it’s constantly getting grazed, it is getting weaker and weaker and weaker. As soon as it gets nibbled, that defence mechanism kicks in.”
The most challenging aspect of this type of farming is usually getting the right soil, Harry notes. “When you take agricultural land, it’s usually been farmed chemically. This means the soil is a sterile growing medium. It becomes reliant on chemical inputs, so you need to restimulate the soil microbiology to bring it back to life.”
This is Harry’s main focus on Haye Farm: to have earth that is rich enough to survive being messed up by pigs, and still grow back with a thick carpet of mixed species, “rather than a monoculture of one weed that was very successful”. This can be done through several strategies, including cover cropping — covering the soil in plants to manage soil erosion, fertility and quality, as well as water.
Growth is an opportunity for impact
The farm was 65 acres when Harry and Emily acquired it. They later bought another 14 acres and rent an additional 14. They also manage some of the land at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage a few miles away. “Growth means profitability and growth means a greater opportunity to have a positive impact,” says Harry.
His goal was originally to grow the hands-on farming enterprise. “I did that for a while and then decided to scale back. I couldn’t find the right staff and I was burning out. Now my focus is really on growing the value-add,” he explains. Today, the Haye Farm team is growing the butchery, charcuterie and brewery businesses as a more efficient way of driving profitability. The brewery’s waste is also used to feed the pigs, reducing waste.
“As sad as it is, it’s being a middleman and the avenue to market that makes money, so I’ve focused on that element,” Harry comments. He is also growing a network of farmers with sustainable credentials that feed into his businesses. “Once I’m generating enough income from the value-added businesses, I’ll invest that into primary production and growing the farm again,” he adds.
Much of Harry’s knowledge is self-taught through YouTube, trial and error, and finding “other crazy people doing the same thing”, he says warmly, as when Harry started out in 2014, there was very little public knowledge around sustainable farming. But given what he’s achieved in such a short time at Haye Farm, it’s little wonder Harry’s converting his traditional Devonian neighbours to his way of life — with or without the dreadlocks.
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