Presingoll Farm Wins FWAG Conservation Award!

A personal reflection on a special day for our family farm.

We’re incredibly proud to share that Presingoll Farm has won a FWAG (Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group) Farm Conservation Award, recognising 25+ years of hard work balancing food production with sustainability, environmental protection, and wildlife conservation.

It was a huge honour to take the judges around the farm on behalf of my Dad and Uncle, and on behalf of everyone behind the scenes — those who supported them through late-night calvings, midnight accounting, weekend cattle moves, warm dinners at home, childcare and cups of tea in the tough times.

And, of course, Mum, supporting outside the box thinking — like when she helped push the idea of a dog exercise field, which now forms part the farms resilient business strategy.

I'm sure there's plenty of stories of Mark and Anna bringing piglets along to the office across Cornwall over the years or of calls from neighbours of another escaped cow or pig.

Though the visit was meant to be a bit of a semi-surprise, typically, they weren’t around on the day of judging! But I couldn’t be prouder.

Filling out the nomination form for them felt like a bit of a win, especially since the initial poke came from someone we deeply respect at FWAG who nudged us to fill out the form in the first place.

Winning this award feels like recognition for a kind of courage you don’t always publicly see: in a family farm setting, stepping back and saying “we’ll play the long game and reinvest for the next generation” takes grit and vision.

Particularly at a time where it was deemed very much off centre.

That long game has been 25 years of investing in soils, in nature, and in resilience; and it's preserved our farm in a way that now supports something entirely new and exciting.

It’d be easy to gloss over the tough times, but they were real. Like all farm businesses, we’ve had moments that were heartbreaking and exhausting.

But today, I just feel grateful, for everything that’s brought us here.

Here’s to the legacy of the past, and to the next chapter for Generation Four (Mark, Anna, Andy, Sam, Simon, Ali) and us guys as number Generation Five.