“Bring on 2017!”

On The Farm with

Jimmy Doherty

Suffolk farmer and retailer

• Is our café a hero or a villain?
• “The battle for optimism and morale in retail”
• “Sustainable confusion”
• “What to do about January?”
• “Is the Christmas boom sustainable?”

2017 has got off to a flying start at Jimmy’s Farm. January started with a bang when New Years’ Day was rung in with a sell-out event in our restaurant following a bumper Christmas season of parties and private functions

Despite the cold spells, the Farm Park remains a destination for families who want to get out and about and run off some energy during the winter months.

The addition of our Woodland Timewalk makes for extra adventure. Lifesize replicas of dinosaurs and extinct ancient creatures who would have roamed the British countryside are dotted around the trail and kids of all ages are loving it!

It doesn’t stop there; we welcomed a new addition to our animal collection – a family of coatis. These raccoon-type creatures are happily living in a brand new enclosure. They’re incredibly friendly and fantastic to watch climbing around the trees, foraging for food we’ve hidden and playing amongst the branches.

The feedback to them has been fantastic and it’s so exciting to know that people are enjoying our hard work as much as we are.

The best part is, we plan to add even more to our collection throughout the year, so we’re constantly adding to our offering.

Being a year-round attraction, we ensure we provide as much as we can for a full visitor experience. After your stomp around the Farm Park, the next natural stop off in the visit is to the restaurant. We attract everyone from families with young children to business lunches.

Our head chef has written a daily changing menu, which not only manages to cater for our broad visitor base but also showcases and is true to our ethos. I started the Farm all those years ago to provide high welfare, high quality free-range meat, whilst conserving rare-breeds.

We still do that and present it in the best possible way. You can sit in our beautifully restored barn having walked around the farm, metres from where your plate of produce is from. Then you can walk through our farm shop and buy our handmade sausages to take home with you.

Stopping off in our newly relaunched Toy & Sweet shop is an added bonus for the younger members of the family. It’s all about providing that end to end experience.

Spring is just weeks away and is always really exciting. We have more big plans for this year and we can’t wait to get stuck in. Bring on 2017!