Our journey

This thing started with the idea of developing and sharing skills for living. The real skills you’d need in the event of a breakdown of society. Say as a result of a zombie apocalypse or the rise of dystopian politics.

This was a pretty broad remit, so we narrowed it down to:

growing our own fruit and vegetables
rearing our own livestock
developing survival skills
exploring how technology can help with this
sharing what we learn to encourage others in similar ventures
helping new generations gain a better understanding of where their food comes from.

In 2017 we started a ‘practice’ smallholding, using it as a kind of lab environment for permaculture projects. We got some chickens, built a cob oven, set up an aquaponics system, got into solar energy, and dabbled with automation.

Over the next few years we added a polytunnel, learned about beekeeping, and started growing a variety of crops to see what worked. We fought running battles with slugs, discovered the joys of growing chillies, and had our first proper harvests.

In 2019 we set up Natural Progress Limited. This was in response to interest from the local community for natural food and products with provenance – ethically produced from known, mostly organic sources. We started small, selling though word of mouth and via an online shop, trying out different ideas to see what worked.

It wasn’t long before we outgrew our practice environment, and so began the process of finding ‘somewhere with a few acres’. Unfortunately this coincided with COVID, and a trend in the UK to leave cities, embrace remote working, and move to the countryside. The resultant impact on house prices meant that finding a new place took years rather than months.

But we made it in the end – and in 2024 we moved to more rural setting and are currently designing a 40 acre site in the Chiltern Hills.

The new place is beautiful – but also something of a blank canvas. It was really a house with some fields and woodland rather than a ready-made working farm. So we scaled back the products / shop to give us time to design.

We focused on long term areas first – planting a new mixed fruit orchard, putting in stock fencing to keep the sheep safe and in the right place, planting a new native hedgerow, and adding more trees for silvopasture. All the time we were supported by our fantastic network of volunteers.

Having more space meant that we could however ramp up the egg and honey enterprises and then, in 2025, acquired a flock of sheep. We quickly realised we had a lot to learn, but were supported by some fantastic neighbours who pointed us in the right direction when we got stuck.

In 2026 we set up Natural Progress Impact CIC – a non-profit social enterprise that delivers education programmes, workshops and volunteering opportunities. This helps us connect with communities and individuals and and provide access to nature, environmental awareness, and real life skills – something that’s at the heart of our values.

We learn from failing often, understand ourselves a little bit more, argue a lot, but mostly through bloody minded determination, inch ever closer towards our goals.