Tiphayes Farm

Do you know what really grinds my gears? - when you go to the "About Us" section of a website and all you can find is a load of corporate sh1t !  

So hopefully I can tell you a bit more. I'm Roger Mudditt and I have over 25 years of smallholding experience. I started keeping chickens when my young family moved to a Devon Smallholding in 1984. I had watched too much of Tom and Barbara and read John Seymour from cover to cover so many times the book fell apart.

We were on the trail of "Self Sufficiency" and so we sold our beautiful warm cosy little cottage in Surrey, that I had spent six years renovating to perfection, and moved to a semi-derelict Victorian Farmhouse in the Blackdown Hills. This story will continue if anyone is interested, it could go on and on so be warned.

The very first livestock we bought was half a dozen point of lay hybrids, see pic below. We also eventually had Ducks, Geese, Texel and Sussex Sheep, Pigs and some pure bred chickens as well, Plymouth Rocks and Light Sussex.

I now breed rare breed chickens as a hobby to compliment my business of building chicken houses, allowing me to supply my customers with a complete solution to all their chooky needs.

I hope to develop this website into a good resource for any and all poultry enthusiasts with lots of interesting stuff, but its early days and we have only just started so.....

Can that really be me with my children? - the darling little daughter is 30 this year and the two gorgeous twin boys are both much bigger than me, well taller anyway. The funny thing is that all three of my children have worked in the food industry and are all very discerning and knowlegable about food. Georgina who now teaches English in Perth Australia trained with and was a manager of a very successful restarant for several years and Ben and Jamie both work for Jamie Oliver at the moment, one in 15 in Watergate Bay the other at Jamie's Italian in Bath.

They certainly knew the provenence of their food from an early age, they helped to breed and feed it as well as prepare it for the table.