Celebrating 50 Years!
Celebrating 50 Years!
Our family-owned Stoke by Nayland Resort, and sister companies Boxford Suffolk Farms and Peake Fruit, are all located in an idyllic corner of East Anglia. The Peake family, now with its third generation working in the business, has been living and farming in the Dedham Vale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty for over 80 years and has always been passionate about conservation and the environment. The long-term strategy has been to operate as a sustainable green enterprise.
The three businesses together (collectively called The Boxford Group) now employ up to 600 staff, and the whole team is proud to have won a number of awards in recognition of our green initiatives.
As farmers and rural business owners, the family believes that they are also custodians of the countryside and have a very important responsibility to look after their environment to ensure that it is healthy and sustainable for future generations.
So over the past few years, our farming and leisure business has invested over £5 million in the creation of renewable and sustainable sources of energy. These include solar and photovoltaic panels, air-source and ground source heat pumps, and biomass boilers.
Central to our investment is the installation of an Anaerobic Digester (AD) Plant on our farm. This utilises local resources and by-products from fruit-growing and the dry pomace bi-product from Copella fruit Juices to produce renewable, green electricity and heat sources for the Copella factory, the farm and our Stoke by Nayland Hotel. We have consequently lowered input costs, recycled food by-products, reduced our carbon footprint and reduced road haulage- all of which benefit the community and lessens our impact on the environment. We even produce enough power to sell some back to the grid.
Additionally, heat by-product from the AD plant is used to dry woodchip for biomass boilers to heat our soft fruit glasshouses, and the digestate from the AD plant is industrially dried on-site and provides rich organic fertiliser for our golf courses and orchards. We also harvest millions of litres of rainwater from our soft fruit glasshouses and feed it back into our reservoirs to be recycled as irrigation water for our fruit and golf courses – a perfect circular economy.
On the golf courses and in the orchards we use many sustainable practices to protect wildlife and the environment, minimize the use of chemicals and conserve water with intelligent irrigation systems. We planted 60,000 trees over the two championship courses. Our innovative, sustainable techniques used in our fruit growing have also resulted in awards for Best Top Fruit Grower, and Best Soft Fruit Grower of the year awards (2015 and last year).
So the business has effectively been mitigating against climate change for over 80 years.
Last summer we won an international AD and Biogas Award, competing with companies in London and abroad. We have also won a Sustainable Tourism award for our Hotel, Golf and Spa resort and one for Best Green Farming Enterprise. We are proud to be an “Anglian Business Green 100 company
Click here to download our Eco-credentials and circular economy illustration
Sustainable golf, working towards long-term ecological and environmental goals.