What started as a Dragon’s Den-style callout for farm-based business ideas, is now expanding across the UK to welcome like-minded enterprises at every stage of their journey.
Pitch Up! is a group of organic and regenerative farmers from Scotland to Cornwall, who’ve got together to invite both existing businesses and start-ups with big ambitions to pitch up to them with their ideas this November.
Through its annual callout, Pitch Up! connects holistically-managed estates and regenerative farmers with sustainable food producers and other like-minded businesses.
The aim is to share land, raw materials, retail or production space, by-products, ideas, knowledge, contacts, equipment, costs, and whatever’s needed to help good ideas grow into successful businesses.
Farmer, David Oates, joined because he could no longer bear to see his organic, highly sustainable meat and grain becoming faceless products on a supermarket shelf.
Oates said, “We’re very lucky to have space, land, machinery and generations of experience in running sustainable businesses, and can see so many more opportunities on our land – but we don’t have time to do any more ourselves. That’s why we want to give others the chance to use us to get their ideas off the ground while adding value to all of the amazing products and outputs of the farm, which are currently being under-utilised or wasted. It’s win-win.”
Businesses emerging from previous Pitch Up! seasons include a foraged pet food brand, an insect farm, tallow makers, and a mobile organic meat smoker upcycled from old agricultural machinery parts – The Roaming Smoker.
Chris Saunders, founder of The Roaming Smoker, said, “The Pitch Up! scheme has really enabled my business to become financially viable, with better margins. Using old dairy cows from Kingsclere Estates, where we’re based, makes the business more resilient – as it’s using low value cuts of meat that would otherwise be turned into dog food, or wasted. For me, it’s invaluable to have more people to bounce ideas around with, and the type of farming that the Pitch Up! team does is really entrepreneurial.”
Pitch Up! started in 2021 with just one farm, at founder Tim May’s Kingsclere Estates in Hampshire. Now the Pitch Up! partner farm network of six farms spreads from Cornwall to Scotland, with a combined land area of more than 12,000 acres.
Tim May, Pitch Up! founder and Nuffield scholar says, “Our goal is to have a diverse mix of enterprises all operating off the land – using each other’s by-products or waste, and sharing knowledge, equipment and experience. Nature thrives on diversity; it also fuels economic resilience, helps create a closed-loop system, and builds stronger rural communities. As farmers we have an abundance of land and natural resources – we want to share those resources and bring more people onto the land.”
The Pitch Up! scheme is the first of its kind to connect holistically-minded regenerative and organic farms with sustainable land-based businesses through an annual applications season, which launches on 1 November 2024.
This year the Pitch Up! farms are particularly interested to hear from existing businesses looking to scale or expand elsewhere in the UK, as well as ideas from new start-ups.
Opportunities and raw materials partner farms have available include:
- Bakers and millers
- Mobile market gardens
- Pasture land for mobile livestock or chicken farmers
- Organic milk (e.g. for cheesemaking, ice cream, butter, yoghurt etc)
- Organic oats and grain
- Regen and nose to tail chefs
- Timber and coppiced hazel
- Hedgerows (i.e. for foraging)
- Animal hides, woad and wool (for clothing or textile producers)
- Infrastructure such as retail spaces, studios, barns and agricultural buildings