Life at Lopemede
Lopemede is a working farm and a recovering landscape, side by side.
The farm is home to Shorthorn and Wagyu beef cattle, sheep, bees and chickens, alongside thousands of newly planted woodland trees, 1,020 heritage fruit trees (largest in Buckinghamshire), hundreds of open grown trees planted as wood pasture, and tens of thousands of whips planted as new hedgerows — including one field alone holding 82 different species of oak. A one-acre market garden grows medicinal plants, food, flowers and wild margins for pollinators, among crab apple, wild cherry, hazel, elder, hawthorn and dwarf willow. A further acre grows a heritage population of winter wheat. Forty acres of floodplain meadow, with five newly created scrapes, are forming habitat for winter wading birds — targeting lapwings and curlews. Ten acres of shelter belts and a new woodland copse add further cover and habitat. The River Thame runs along the farm’s southern edge, fed by a stream flowing down from the west. Two recently introduced beehives are helping pollinate the fruit trees and producing the farm’s first honey. The wildlife list reflects what that work is already attracting back: barn owls, little owls, tawney owls, kestrels, buzzards, red kites, cuckoo, song thrushes, dung beetles, hares, stoats, roe deer, muntjac and Chinese water deer — supported by multiple owl and kestrel boxes, abundant forage and cover. This season, two breeding pairs of barn owls nested on the farm. A kilometre of permissive footpath connects Lopemede directly to the public footpath network into Thame — an open invitation for people to walk onto the farm and connect with what’s living there. This is the landscape every visit takes place in.
What
Future Oaks is
Future Oaks is a Community Interest Company (CIC) rooted at Lopemede Farm — a living classroom where nature is the core teacher.
We design and facilitate participant-led, nature-based learning across a working landscape of fields, streams, meadows, orchards and habitats, following the cycles of the seasons.
We weave farming, food and futures together with creativity, wellbeing, belonging and shared stewardship of the land.
Working with schools, communities and organisations across the River Thame catchment and beyond.
What We Tend
Reviving local food cultures.
Nurturing community
and guardianship.
Regenerating soil health.
Stewarding biodiversity.
Funding fair livelihoods
and open access.
Growing relationships with,
for and as nature.
School Visits — Field Days
Half and full-day visits for primary and secondary schools, shaped by the season and the curriculum.
Children explore the health of soil, the seasons and the cycles of life — playing with their senses to discover what calls Lopemede home, and noticing what’s changing on the land.
They plant, harvest, survey, restore and reflect: farming with nature, eating seasonally, doing real work in a place that is genuinely changing because of their presence in it.
Grow Days
Facilitated day experiences for adult groups, teams and organisations.
Each day begins with a walk — an introduction to life at Lopemede and an awakening of the senses — before moving into hands-on stewardship of the land, combined with reflection, regenerative thinking and direct encounter with the living world.
For teams who want to think and work differently.
