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Cattows Farm is a major attraction in North West Leicestershire, with fantastic family events running all year round, a great café serving food made with local ingredients and an on-site farm shop selling local produce.
But at the heart of all of it is a working farm which has been run by the Ludlam family for more than a century!
With a focus over the years on cattle farming plus wheat and barley, in the 1980s they started to diversify into fruit production and in 1987 opened a ‘pick your own’ on the site for the local community. This has gone from strength to strength with their ‘pumpkin picking’ Halloween event now transformed into the biggest Halloween event in the UK!
In the winter of 2004/05 they joined the National Forest tender scheme and set about planting 90,000 native tree species over 100 acres as part of the ‘re-greening’ of the formerly industrial landscape of North-West Leicestershire. This formed part of the newly created National Forest.
This woodland is fully open to the public and surrounds Cattows Farm and the nearby village of Heather. The woods and their 80 acres of grassland have become a haven for wildlife and the Farm has done lots of work to encourage this.
They have used a natural spring to form a two acre conservation lake and have also undertaken the digging of small ponds and scrapes in order to create a haven for wildlife to thrive and for the general public to explore and enjoy.
As the farm and their activities for visitors have expanded, the team have continued to find ways of offsetting their carbon emissions, both from the farming side, but also from the fact that they’re off the beaten track, and public transport to the site can be tricky to find. They encourage cycling groups to visit the farm and recently installed cycle racks to securely store around 20 bicycles.
Renewable energy is embraced on the farm and they have found ways to become hugely efficient in neutralising their carbon emissions. There is a large wind turbine on the site and their new restaurant is heated using a ground source heat pump. When it comes to farming, they grow crops using a low input system utilising farmyard manure and weed control is carried out using mechanical camera guided hoes rather than toxic weedkiller.
This focus on sustainability and regeneration has given the business an added dimension. Not only is their woodland a place that customers can visit and enjoy, but it also gives them added confidence that the team behind the farm are working hard to operate in a conscientious and considerate manner that’s sympathetic to their surroundings, as they have done for the past 125 years!
“The creation of woodland at Cattows Farm has provided our business with an environmentally sustainable asset which we look to utilise as a key feature in developing new products and services for customers to enjoy when visiting North West Leicestershire.”
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