The Yarn: James Butterworth's Field Of Dreams

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Summer 2026 edition

(extract from print edition available in store & with all orders)

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Growing on his terms

James Butterworth on leaving academia behind to build Cotswold Market Garden

“I went to bed one night not really questioning what I was doing. When I woke up, I knew without doubt that I was going to do something completely different.”

James Butterworth tells us this while taking a break from the sun, the soil and the two-acre Cotswolds plot that has become the foundation of the organic vegetable business he has spent the past six years building.

Just like that came a complete epiphany. A successful career in academia - one he had devoted almost ten years to pursuing - was suddenly behind him, replaced by a clear and urgent desire to create something tangible from the land: something rooted in community, human connection and meaningful work.

Growing up in semi-rural West Yorkshire, James was surrounded by nature but had no direct connection to farming. His mother worked as a mental health nurse and his father was a drama lecturer. Following his father into academia seemed the natural path, yet he recalls a childhood spent helping his mother in the garden. There is a quiet sense of coming full circle and, as James reflects, “a latent sensitivity to soil and plants” had always been there beneath the surface.

University of Cambridge educated James in music before postgraduate study in London and a further decade pursuing academic life, including postdoctoral fellowships at both Cambridge and the University of Oxford. Yet over time, the realities of building a long-term career within the system began to weigh heavily.

“If I was going to establish a permanent foothold in academia, it was going to involve too many sacrifices,” he explains. “Getting a secure long-term position is like gold dust. I would probably have had to move abroad. At the same time, I was becoming frustrated and falling out of love with universities and the institutional nature of it all.”

So after the night that brought such clarity, where did he begin? With no agricultural background and no land on which to start growing, it really was a blank canvas.

The motivations, however, were simple and deeply felt: first, “to have my own business and be my own boss, outside an institution I was tired of butting against all the time”; and second, a desire to grow vegetables on a small, human scale, with a direct relationship to the local community.

Already living in the Cotswolds, James felt it was the right place to realise that ambition, thanks to a strong appetite for local, organic produce. He also feels fortunate to have found his farming partners, Jonty and Mel Brunyee of Conygree Farm — a 180-acre mixed regenerative farm in Gloucestershire owned by the National Trust.

Perhaps his greatest lessons so far have centred around scale and diversification. While the market garden occupies less than two acres, James has been surprised by how much can be produced from relatively little land.

“So much of modern agriculture is mechanised, but when you bring human labour back into it, it’s amazing how much more you can get out of the land,” he says. “It’s a scale that works for us.”

Diversification, meanwhile, has proved equally essential. “You need diversity to be resilient when operating on a small scale,” he explains. “We grow around 50 different crops, so if a couple fail, it doesn’t matter because there are another 48.”

Today, Cotswold Market Garden supplies local pubs and restaurants - including Publican Pubs, The Old Butchers in Stow-on-the-Wold and Burford Garden Co. - while also delivering around 40 vegetable boxes each week to households within a ten-mile radius.

While leaving behind the constraints of academic life gave James the freedom he craved, it is the sense of collaboration and community that has become the real reward of this next chapter. The business, he believes, is greater than the sum of its parts; the sharing of skills, teamwork and mutual support are what he is proudest to have built.

Asked what advice he would offer to anyone standing at a career crossroads - or considering growing produce themselves - James is characteristically pragmatic.

“A lot of people come into this kind of work without being particularly strategic about building a business,” he says. “That’s the key to making it sustainable, and probably my greatest achievement. It’s not just about learning how to grow vegetables. Anyone can learn that.”

What James has created is more than simply a market garden. From the ground up, he is building a livelihood for his family and team, a genuine collaboration with his farming partners, a meaningful contribution to the local community and, ultimately, a legacy rooted in the land itself.

This & That

City or country - country

Favourite season - autumn

Favourite vegetables to grow - salad, because it’s so quick and the freshness that we’re able to provide is unlike anything else you can get (and a world apart from the sweaty bags you get in the supermarket); and tomatoes - until you’ve had an organic-soil-grown local fresh tomato you don’t even really know what tomatoes taste like

Travel destination - the Italian Dolomites in winter

Comfort food - steak

Happy place - at home on the sofa after a really productive day in the field

A favourite vegetable - Cavalo Nero - the most stunning vegetable to look at and when it’s in season I have it with oil and salt almost daily

Music style - Bon Iver, Matthew Halsall jazz

Sunday pastime - being in the garden with my two kids

Happiest wearing - cargo trousers, because you can never have too many pockets that I buy on Vinted

A favourite item from William Crabtree - The William Crabtree cap is rarely off my head and a roll neck jumper for the cooler months

 

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