OUR PARTNERS

  Founded in 1958 and previously known as The Kent Trust for Nature Conservation, Kent Wildlife Trust is the country’s leading wildlife conservation charity. With over 32,000 members, and ninety sites, visitor centres and nature reserves under management, from our foreshores to the orchards, farms and woodlands of our county, this organisation positively affects the look and ecology of the rural Kentish landscape like no other.

Since our first collaboration with Kent Wildlife’s Otter Group back in 2000 to our current participation in a complex multi-season project radio-tracking Turtledoves, we owe KWT a debt of gratitude for the tireless input from their field officers in driving our own projects forward and facilitating the formation and ongoing development of The Marden Farmer Cluster.

  Founded in 2014, The Felix Project is a London food charity that has grown to the extent that in 2023, 35 million meals derived from food otherwise going to waste were delivered to those suffering food poverty in the heart of our capital city by this unique organisation; this charitable work only seems set to grow. Realising in spring 2023 that the conventional routes to market for our fruit crop were largely broken and unprofitable, we sought a charity partner with the capacity to pick and handle our crop. Multiple meetings in the farmhouse kitchen led to over a hundred tonnes of plums, pears and apples being picked and distributed via the four Felix depots to, amongst others, over 170 London schools.

As a result of Government funding, this model looks to be secured for at least the next five years. 

  When we started our Higher-Tier Stewardship scheme in 2021, it was recognised that we would need to introduce livestock into our grassland management protocol; this became even more evident as we planned further environmentally based land management projects. 

Having no stock of our own, a great deal of head scratching and a chance introduction led to an informal arrangement with a local shepherd. We now consider ourselves supremely fortunate to have an ongoing relationship with Kriss Woodhead and his fiancée Zoe Colville whose flock of ewes and lambs graze our meadows, orchards and arable farmland at mutually agreed times of the year. 

Also part of the plan, significant ongoing fencing work is saving Kriss, Zoe and our own team many hours of laboriously setting up, repairing, taking down and moving miles of electric fencing and ensures that all the fields and orchards are safely and efficiently grazed in a timely and rotational fashion. An unexpected benefit arising from the fact that the sheep are not routinely drenched was a massive influx of dung beetles!

Image Credit: David Charbit

   Our village horticultural society members quietly rear cuttings and seeds taken from our woods, hedgerows and meadows with the intention of reintroducing species with the correct local genetic code onto our farms. Amateur botanists, led by Lou Carpenter of the Marden Farmer Cluster, diligently gather seeds and cuttings from iconic Low Weald species of ancient woodland such as Chequer (Wild Service, Sorbus torminalis) to the more common Viburnum opulus (Guelder Rose). This material is  carefully nurtured, then planted out on suitable farm sites and monitored. Once common meadow and hedgerow plant species requiring re-introduction help such as Dyer's Greenweed, Betony or Devil’s-bit Scabious are reared from collected seed. They are then planted out on selected suitable sites on Cluster farms, including ours. A happy morning spent gathering Yellow Rattle seed from one species rich meadow has saved the Cluster farms a fortune by enabling farmers to re-introduce this parasitic plant, the presence of which is essential to the regeneration of species rich grassland.

Image Credit: Darren Nichols

    Marden Wildlife, set up in early 2020, was the brainchild of retired headteacher and local birder Ray Morris, with another local farmer, Lou Carpenter, and photographer Darren Nicholls. We had been working with Ray, who originally came to us via The RSPB‘s Volunteer and Farmer Alliance scheme, since 2006. This initiative was set up to co-operate with farmers to fix a ‘bird baseline’ and then provide advice and support to improve the overall habitat management on farms, focusing primarily on birds as obvious marker species. Since then, Ray and his volunteers have ringed and recorded over 4,700 individual birds on our farm (and more than 10,000 around the village itself) and advised us on the creation and management of the year-round habitat required to increase both the species diversity and flock size of our resident and migratory farmland and hedgerow birds; this has been a resounding and ongoing success.

Marden Wildlife as a local volunteer group is perfectly positioned to gather, collate and disseminate the blizzard of data from the natural world that is essential to us to help evaluate our progress as we deliver the various government backed environmental schemes, and guide our actions into the future. 

Marden Wildlife is also our interface with the village community when it comes to delivering other benefits of ‘The Great Outdoors’. In 2023, Ray presented a vision to our village GP Practice of the possibilities and practicalities of delivering Nature Prescribing via The Marden Wildlife Group and Marden Farmer Cluster. Not a year later, Marden Wildlife has a website link to help Marden Medical Centre deliver Nature on Prescription. Promoting health and enjoyment of nature, via access to Cluster farms, is a bonus for our whole community.

Xeda International is an Italian company established in 1976, based in the south of France and managed by the Sardo family. The company manufactures and distributes fruit handling machinery, produce labelling machinery and customised individual fruit labels. As experienced fruit growers, and, formerly, packers, we have, in conjunction with our partners at Xeda, been at the forefront of the development of bespoke individual labels for many different items of produce including apples, pears, peaches, avocados, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers

Artwork is prepared to individual customer specifications and can include variety names, bar-codes, data-bars, company logos and PLU numbers to name the most common; we have worked closely with Xeda to pioneer fully compostable produce labels.

  We specialise in flexibility, supplying everything from short promotional runs to the largest commodity lines and are able to rent customers application machinery from the simple pneumatic hand labeller to the most sophisticated computerised automatic systems thus negating the need for significant capital investment.

We have worked closely with Xeda since 1991 and are the UK agents for all their produce labelling products. 

The company is also a global specialist in post-harvest storage technology and has developed a sophisticated thermal fogging system to enable synthetic chemical applications to be replaced with natural plant oils. The first to be launched into the UK is  Biox-M (pure spearmint oil) as a novel anti-sprouting treatment for potatoes; this can be used on both organic and conventionally grown crops and it is distributed by our sister company Juno (Plant Protection) Ltd.