Our journey
Natural Progress > About > Our journey
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. 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 plan and design.
We focused on long term areas first – putting in perimeter stock fencing, planting a new mixed fruit orchard, planting a new native hedgerow, and adding trees for silvopasture systems. And all the time we were supported by our fantastic network of volunteers.
We borrowed a ram from our neighbour, and in the spring of 2026, we had our first experience of lambing! We had our student vet Bilal to guide us through and it was full on for two weeks. It was an amazing time with not a lot of sleep – but we’re really looking forward to next year!
In 2026 we set up Natural Progress Impact CIC – a non-profit social enterprise that will deliver education programmes, workshops and volunteering opportunities. This will help us connect with communities and individuals and provide access to nature, environmental awareness, and real life skills – something that’s at the heart of our values.
So that brings us up to date. As ever we have more projects on the go that we can sensibly deal with – but that’s smallholding life. 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.