Pitch Up! scheme positions farms as business incubators with new food or rural business start-ups invited to apply for innovative circular economy tenancies
New farm businesses based around a circular economy are being invited to pitch to a match-making service aimed at connecting large landowners with smaller, regenerative food or rural enterprises.
Pitch Up!, which is running for its fourth year, aims to help new entrants access land while also helping larger farms and estates find profitable uses for by-products.
“The Pitch Up! model is based on the principle of sharing resources, risks and rewards – so instead of landlords and tenants, or employers and employees, we’re looking for partners,” said founder of the scheme, and owner of Kingsclere Estates in Hampshire, Tim May.
“Working together and reducing the risk makes way for innovation and growth,” he said.
Previous winners of a Pitch Up! tenancy include a market garden business setting up at Balcaskie estate in Fife, a pastured poultry enterprise connected to livestock farming at Kingsclere, as well as various bakers, brewers and farm education businesses.
It follows a model of so-called ‘enterprise stacking’, a regenerative principle that helps reduce risk, overheads and waste for sustainable rural businessees, while positioning farms as business incubators by sharing knowledge and facilitating access to land.
Host farm of regen farming festival Groundswell, Lannock Manor Farm, is a new partner for the 2025 Pitch Up! round, with host farms located across the country from Cornwall to Scotland.
New businesses benefit from shared running costs, investment in equipment, job shares and marketing opportunities, while host farms gain partners to help them diversify, moving away from a monoculture and restoring the soil.
Each agreement between farm and partner businesses is different and designed to be mutually beneficial, whether via profit share, turnover rent, or longer-term regeneration goals.
Co-founder of Wandering Feathers, a regenerative organic egg business based at Kingsclere Estates, Rodrigo Navarro, said: “Being able to work alongside an established farming business with so much knowledge and experience to tap into has been invaluable to us as. We can share labour, skills and capital, and have great people to bounce ideas around with.”
Interested entrepreneurs and businesses can submit an application form, which closes this weekend (30 November). An expression of interest form is also available all year.
