About Ebbor
It began with a different question.
What if farming pursued the greatest expression of a plant, rather than the greatest yield?
A Farmer's Instinct
Rich Counsell grew up on his family farm in Somerset.
Farming appeared to have a clear direction: more land, larger machinery and greater output. For years, that was what ambition looked like.
Modern agriculture has become extraordinarily good at producing more from every acre. Rich became interested in a different possibility: choosing a plant for a place, and farming for the quality of what develops within it.
A Nuffield Farming Scholarship took the question further: how soil, climate, altitude, light and water shape a plant's character and its chemistry.
Not simply more fruit, flowers or leaves—but greater character, more distinctive chemistry and exceptional taste.
Ebbor Gorge — Mendip Hills, Somerset
Not far from the farm lies Ebbor Gorge, a deep limestone cleft in the Mendip Hills.
Its cool air, damp woodland and exposed rock support plants quite different from those growing in the surrounding landscape. Within a very small distance, geology and microclimate create another botanical world.
The gorge gave Ebbor its name and its first principle:
Place shapes the plant.
The Lesson from Wine
Years later, working in fine wine with Bill Baker at Reid Wines — supplying some of Britain's most demanding kitchens, including Le Gavroche, Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant, Gravetye Manor and The Dorchester — gave that instinct a model.
Great wine begins by matching a particular variety to a particular place. Soil, climate, weather, cultivation and season become part of what is eventually tasted in the glass.
Its value comes not from how much can be produced, but from how distinctly it expresses where it came from.
Rich began to wonder why plants beyond the vine were rarely approached in the same way.
“I did not choose wellness as a market. I followed an instinct about place to its conclusion.”
— Rich Counsell
A Different Kind of Estate
So he began building one.
Rather than make one Somerset farm ever larger, we are building a collection of small farms and grower relationships in landscapes chosen for the plants that naturally excel there.
We search for exceptional cultivars, study the chemistry each landscape produces and turn the finest harvests into remarkable botanical drinks.
An estate measured in chemistry, not acres.
A plant that is prized is a plant that gets planted. Rarity has never protected anything on its own — value does. When a grower earns more from a hillside of a difficult cultivar than from a field of something ordinary, that cultivar has a future.