66-Year Anniversary For Hanbury Park Farm

Mrs Mary Brown became one of our longest-serving Duchy tenants on the Needwood Estate in Staffordshire this month, having been a member of the Duchy family for sixty-six years. She and her husband Cecil Thomas Brown first occupied Hanbury Park Gate Farm in 1957 before moving to her current home, Hanbury Park Farm, in 1987. 

Mary’s husband Cecil sadly passed away in October 2010, but her son Graham, who works for UK crop production and grain marketing company Frontier Agriculture, has been helping out at the holding for several years. Together, Mary and Graham have successfully entered the farm into numerous environmental schemes, establishing extensive bird and wildflower covers as well as wildlife corridors and working with Severn Trent Water to restore a number of ponds across the holding.  Mary’s grandson, Christopher, has also become involved in the business more recently, introducing a flock of sheep to make the farm a more mixed enterprise. 

To mark the occasion, the Duchy Chaplain The Reverend Canon Thomas Woodhouse joined our Rural Surveyors on a visit to Hanbury Park Farm earlier this month. They were given a tour of the  holding by the family, including the 25.5 acres of wild bird covers established here by the Browns to provide habitat and food sources for many species of birds and small animals. The family also spread five tonnes of winter bird food onto the farm tracks each year in order to provide food for farmland birds.

Commenting on the visit, Staffordshire Estate Director Katie Warden said: “Mary, Graham and Christopher are very proud of the good work they have done over the years to improve the health of their soil, increase biodiversity across the holding and introduce regenerative farming practices wherever possible. We were very proud and pleased to be able to mark Mary’s 66^th anniversary as a Duchy tenant while also highlighting to the Chaplain some of the the excellent work carried out to improve the long-term sustainability of the holding.”

“Mary also provided us with an excellent lunch,” added Thomas Woodhouse, “including home-baked pastries and cakes. These were very gratefully received, as were the tales Mary had to tell of the history of the farm and its visitors over the years. Mary celebrated her 88^th birthday in February of this year and is an inspiration in terms of her energy levels and enthusiasm for the farm. We are all very grateful to her and her family for making us so very welcome.”

Hanbury Park Farm is one of the older holdings on the Duchy’s 7,400-acre Needwood estate, whose origins date back to 1775. The estate itself forms part of the ancient inheritance which began the Duchy of Lancaster when Henry III made a gift of lands to his son Edmund Crouchback in 1265.