About us

History, Sustainability & Provenance

Will & Annabel’s Story

In Will’s trajectory from bomb disposal to country living he, and very much inspired by Annabel his beautiful wife, has become ever-more passionate about sustainability, and finds himself committed to seeking ways to make change.

Will and Annabel very much enjoying working in the food industry and the farm shop gives us an extraordinary platform for the potential to create positive change.

At Grange Farm we are planting 45 fruit and nut trees this Saturday which is our pilot Agroforestry project, and we hope to grow the scheme as we learn. We have asked members of our community and some of Matilda’s school friends to come along and plant a tree. We have taken samples of the soil to establish a baseline and will be scientifically monitoring the changes. This little plot will be open for our customers to walk in and enjoy and hopefully learn and become engaged in their food, and we plan to conduct ongoing ‘events’ based around the orchard such as bug house building and such like, and we also hope to partner with a local school.

We have a working composting system where we compost all the food waste created by the shop including two hot box composters which enable us to compost dairy and meat as well as the more usual fruit and vegetables. We plan to use the finished product either on the orchard or for a cut flower growing project we are developing.

Throughout lockdown we have donated food boxes to the charity Home Start Suffolk and we are now working on a relationship with the Teapot Project so that some of our food waste can go to people in need

We recently held the Grange Farm Extinction challenge judged by Wild East. This was a challenge to the staff of GF to find innovative ways that we as a business could implement to combat the extinction drivers laid out in David Attenborough’s documentary ‘Extinction – The Facts’. There were three winners who came up with ideas such as an electric delivery vehicle powered by solar panels on Grange Farm’s large roof.

The addition of electric vehicle charging points to the site, lobbying our meat suppliers to use more sustainable foods for their livestock feeds, and a suggestion to conduct full materials analysis to stop over consumption and reduce waste. We are now working with Wild East to create an implementation plan for some of these suggestions as a financial investment is required, and we will be looking into ways to generate sponsorship from collaborations with likeminded businesses. Rather than do a materials analysis, we felt it better to create a carbon budget as the yardstick to guide us to becoming zero carbon, Wild East are also helping us with this, and we will be looking to collaborate with academia.

Alongside this we want Grange Farm Shop to be a genuine and happy shopping experience full of the wonderful produce and products Suffolk has to offer, but also to offer a wide range of products from the very best and most passionate foodies in the UK (my wife is from North Wales!)

History of Grange Farm

One of the themes is that GF has supported a thriving business for well over 250 years on this site, and it has adapted to change and is constantly moving forward.

As peoples needs and tastes change, and the farming environment adapts to the pressures of Global warming and the problems with intensive farming; Grange farm has to date managed to stay relevant and keep the local community supported with resources and of course livelihoods. We hope to continue this path and are looking to develop our own sustainable farming project and have already created some interesting developments.

Picking season always brought a vibrant and seductive air about the place. It was a charged atmosphere, like the beginning of a fun party; there was a swing in the air full of jokes and banter and across the ages people would turn up to help, the old timers, the young Mothers and the teenagers all arriving where 2000 tons of apples would be picked from the end of August, during September and into October. Now we struggle to sell 300 bushell boxes in a year, how times and tastes have changed.

Today-

Today the Black barn houses EJArt Creative and the shop is now entering it’s new phase with Nicholas Longe’s son William running the shop.

In 2020 Will, along with public highways of the Suffolk Coastal council opened up a footpath so that you can now walk from Seckford Hall to Grange Farm which enables people if so desired to walk from the train station all the way to Grange Farm! We have a pilot regenerative farming project in the field beyond the farm buildings where we are hoping to monitor data such as Carbon storage and the secret life of soil.

1980-

In 1980 in an average weekend we would sell 5 tons of potatoes Green grocers would have been cross with the farmers selling directly to the public – better the devil you know hey but very sadly the 1980s arrived and with it the Granny Smith and Golden Delicious apples from France. These have been sited as the down fall of the English apple, and many orchards, including Grange Farm just could not survive in this climate with the Supermarkets favouring the foreign varieties. Grange Farm became an arable farm and the shop continued to sell fresh local produce, the black barn was turned into a retail space housing Kings Sadalry, Jenny Dow’s dried flower business arrived on the site in 1989 followed by the Barn Café in 2015 and Richard Rush antiques opened in the old Granary in 2000.

1972-

Will’s father bought the farm from Mrs Tile in 1972. He took on a working apple farm and many people in the local community remember the beautiful Spring blossom and Autumn apple picking. Lots of locals remember being enlisted to help with harvesting the six orchards on the farm. The apple grader dominated the back wall of the shop, and it was a busy bustling environment of mostly ladies working away sorting the apples. When Mr Longe took over the farm it was selling local vegetables and produce and he expanded the range by installing the first chiller where one could buy local meat, I think Musks sausages were one of the first meat products, along with local vegetables bread, eggs and milk and of course apples. Grange Farm has always been the place to get your Christmas Turkey and hand reared lamb, lovingly nurtured by the Longe family on the neighbouring meadows.

1940-

The building that the current shop is in was built in the 1940’s. By then Grange Farm was surrounded by apple orchards and the pack house was primarily used for grading and sorting the apples before distributing around the country. In 1953 it opened as a shop selling apples and vegetables grown on the farm directly to the public, it has been trading in this way continuously for nearly 70 years.

1768-

We know that there were orchards at Grange Farm 300 years ago; the black barn on the right as you drive into GF is dated 1768 built by a quaker family called Salkeled. The farm was the antique shop art workspace on the GF site and the large farm house and outbuildings which is now separate and privately owned by our wonderful neighbour. Various members of the Salkeled family are buried across the road in the old cemetery surrounded by an arable field.

Keeping it local

We believe in supporting small local businesses such as ours.

We believe this for several reasons:

It keeps local economies strong. The pound spent with a local business that is supplied by local businesses stays in the locality and supports employment and the community. The converse is the pound spent with a big chain disappears up the chain and never returns to the area where that chain has its outlet. Or consider the multi national or internet giant where the only hope that the money cycles back is through tax.
Smaller businesses have more love for their ‘craft’. Large businesses work on keeping the bottom line healthy and sacrifice quality in order to maintain profit margins. By working with smaller businesses we can clearly see the quality of the products and know that beyond the cosmetics of the outside that the product is truly good. For example James Foskett’s organic carrots or Piers Poole’s rhubarb or Gerard’s meat.
Working with excellent local businesses build a circle of virtue rather than a spiral of despair. We ask our partners about quality, where the food comes from, how it was grown or made and our business partners know that can’t bluff because we can see the fields where the food is grown and meet the farmers who grow it. Take the British suit making business for example, 99% of British made suits are only ‘assembled’ in Britain; or ‘British’ lawnmowers most of which are coverings on Chinese manufactured engines. In those two sectors the people who would have made the engines and suits have been lost to the dole and their skills gone.
Local suppliers mean short supply chains. Short supply chains result in:
1. the food we present to our customers being as fresh as we can obtain.
2. Less need for complicated packaging and thus less material waste
3. Shorter journey and chiller times resulting in less emissions, and
4. As, implied in 1-3 above closer contact and more transparency between customer and producer

For these reasons and more, where possible we will replace anything made or grown on a large scale with something made close to home where we or our supplier can vouch for the quality. These decisions must of course be made keeping an eye on price, taste and style. If Charlie Tryit’s pies are really not good then we won’t have them despite the fact that they are made in solar powered ovens next door.