About Us
Life’s too short not to stop and enjoy the birds, don’t you think?
Hi, I’m Valdine Hogg and I, along with my husband Chris and my son George, run Laverock Hall Farm Bird Food.
We love our business and we enjoy creating amazing, healthy food for our feathered friends up and down the country. Here’s the place we tell you a little bit more about us – just so you know the faces behind the foods, as it were.
The Hogg family has farmed in our gorgeous corner of South Northumberland for over 150 years. We’re proud to be part of incredible farming stock and work hard to make the best of our farm life and the opportunities it offers.
We started the bird food arm of the business around 25 years ago. The project has grown with our family and we work together, with the help of a small team, to feed the birds, develop the farm and look after the environment along the way.
How we look after the environment
Picture it. Laverock Hall Farm, while a fully working business, is a haven for wildlife, flora and fauna. We have gorgeous wildflower margins to encourage wildlife and we’ve planted thousands of trees over the years. Those trees surround a pond which attracts all kinds of wildlife and birdlife to our idyllic corner of Northumberland. And we love that it’s undisturbed so the creatures can flourish.
You can find out more about our efforts to attract all creatures great and small to our farmland on the farm blog, here and here…
We always plant cover crops to reduce the use of commercial fertilisers (read more about that, here) and we sow low-tillage crops where possible to reduce fuel usage during harvesting. Because, well, our planet it worth the effort.
Where it all started
High quality products, a love of wildlife (birds in particular) and a cement mixer. Yes. You read that right. We started out mixing our bird feeds in a (very clean) cement mixer in the yard.
Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then and now have some slightly more technologically advanced processes. But our ‘why’ has never changed. We love birds, we care about the environment and we’re passionate about avoiding waste and making the best use of the by-products from the farm. Our lovely daughter Robyn is a shining example of this – she’s started up a handmade soap company, using more of our farm by-products, while on lockdown furlough – check out Foam-O soaps here!
Where we are now
As a happy little team, we sell our top-quality products from our shop in Northumberland, we supply other shops and garden centres throughout the North East and we also take orders via our website – because we love to be really flexible like that.
We’ve got pigeon corns, wild bird foods, chicken feed and a whole host of seeds and pellets – there’s tonnes of information about that all over the website so please feel free to have a browse.
What more could you need to know? But don’t worry, if you do think of a question you simply must know the answer to, we’d be happy to have a chat and fill you in on all the rest!
Hope to see you soon either at Laverock Hall Farm or virtually via our website. Take care and enjoy feeding the birds!
Valdine, Chris, George and the team.