Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute, Scotland, is run as a partnership between Adrian and his wife, Elspeth. Day to day the farm is managed by Elspeth’s father, Joe, a sturdy veteran farmer.
A lot of effort has gone into improving the land and buildings at Ascog Farm.
Attempting to harness the average 8m/sec windspeeds, an application for wind turbines at the farm was lodged in 2013.
The whole process was somewhat fraught, failed at planning, and has been detailed at length on Adrian’s Ascog Farm website.
The family now concentrate on sheep-farming operations, including the production of excellent undyed wool and woollen garments.
Earlier, cattle and sheep farming at Ascog led to the partial development of the database-driven HerdManager website, an application that probably could have grown much bigger with more time invested in it.
Further details of the Ascog Farm and HerdManager websites are given below.
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Ascog Farm
Adrian’s family own Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. The farm is one of very few that is not owned by the Mount Stuart Trust, the ‘Bute Estate’ which describes itself as ‘the custodian of 87% of the Isle of Bute.’ At Ascog Farm, a particularly windy spot close to the Eastern coast…
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HerdManager
Not the prettiest of sites, and more of a ‘what might have been’ than anything else, HerdManager was partially developed as a demonstration of the sort of data management that is possible with a ColdFusion-based site, a database and a whole lot of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements. The functionality to add new records to…
Ascog Farm now uses Agriwebb for flock management, in many ways a competing product to our earlier self-built efforts.
Agriwebb raised $14 million in Series A funding so perhaps we should have put more time in to HerdManager!
The farm itself is unlikely ever to make millions but is a beautiful place to spend time, especially if the weather is kind…
