After seven years without synthetic inputs, the soil itself has changed.
Regeneratively-grown textiles are often sold as a story. Here's the soil-carbon panel, the earthworm counts, and the clip weights from the farm that's been living with that story since 2018.
Seven years in, what we notice first is the smell. A field coming back to life smells nothing like pasture that's been chemically held in stasis — it's damper, yeastier, more forest-floor than hay-barn. By our fourth year in transition the earthworm count had tripled. By our sixth year, the soil was holding enough carbon that our October lab work began returning the kind of numbers we'd previously only seen in old-growth woodland floor.
"The point isn't that the fibre is better. The point is the field is still there."
None of this affects the wool directly. Shetlands produce more-or-less the same fleece whether their pasture is pristine or pharmaceutical. What it affects is whether, in thirty years, there is still a farm here at all. That is the unromantic bit of the regenerative promise, and the part we can measure.
What follows is a short tour through our 2024 audit data — the soil results, the rotational records, the fibre yields, and the economics. All numbers are published in full at the end of this issue.
The long fibre archive.
What happens when the shearer retires
The UK loses another 200 contract shearers a year. We talk to the last three men within 40 miles of the farm, and ask what it will take to train their replacements.
A dye garden in its second year
Madder, woad, weld and cochineal — the dye garden's 2025 yield and a field-by-field breakdown of the unmordanted colour results on Shetland.
Flax retting, in pictures
Fourteen days of field-retted flax, photographed at dawn through the retting cycle. A visual primer for makers new to hand-spinning linen.
The economics of a 140-acre farm
Published revenue, published costs, published wages. A year of trading read plainly, with pointers to the parts that don't yet balance.
What the woad vat tells you
A winter's work with a fermented woad vat, documented week by week. Includes the recipe we've standardised on since 2022.
Starting a journal on a working farm
Why we decided to publish our data. What we plan to report every quarter. What we won't pretend to know.
Supply chain, in numbers.
Every quarter we publish the audit figures that matter. No rounding, no "ethically sourced" marketing noise — only what the October soil test and fibre log return.
- Soil organic carbon— change since 2019 baseline
- +0.41%
- Earthworm count— average m² core, April
- 148
- Fibre yield— 2024 total, all lines
- 2,844kg
- Dye stock— 2024 total, kiln-dried
- 487kg
- Synthetic inputs— fertiliser + herbicide + pesticide
- 0kg
- Purchased feed— concentrate, 2024
- 0kg
- Native trees planted— since 2018 transition
- 7,420
- Wholesale customers— repeat purchases
- 38
- Average wholesale price— wool worsted, per kg
- £42
What we mean by regenerative.
It's possible the word has now collapsed under its own marketing weight. What we're describing is narrower, older, and not very exciting.
"Regenerative" has spent the last five years doing a job no single word can really do. It's been asked to mean soil carbon, biodiversity, animal welfare, climate reparation, supply-chain transparency, anti-capitalism, and every stripe of nostalgia for a farming style that, in most of these renderings, never quite existed. When I started writing this journal in 2024, I made a note to try not to use the word at all.
I still use it — but narrowly. When I say this farm is regenerative, I mean a single testable thing: the land is measurably more biologically active at the end of a year's trading than it was at the start of it. We track this at the October audit with soil organic carbon, earthworm count, pasture diversity and bird count. If one or more of those numbers is going backwards, we've failed for the year, and we say so in the next issue.
Everything else — the animal welfare work, the tree planting, the published prices — matters for different reasons. They are not what regenerative means; they are how we try to run a decent small farm. The distinction matters because a certifier can tell you a fibre is "regenerative"; they cannot tell you the farmer is a reasonable employer. Those are separate questions and they need separate answers.
Thank you for reading. The next audit numbers land in October; the next issue in December. Walk the hills in the meantime, and, if you can, ask the farmer who grew it.
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