About us
Farming is in our blood here at Hinchliffe’s – after all, we’ve been doing it for almost a century now – and from a small idea, we’ve hatched a great business.
Since Allen Hinchliffe set up a butchers shop In Huddersfield in 1929, four generations of the same family have been committed to field-to-fork food, sustainability and animal welfare.
Our egg business – started as hobby by Allen’s son Charles Hinchliffe in Netherton in 1950 – has grown to sell every size egg and produce up to one million hens a year on 12 farms, supplying everyone from commercial egg producers to families looking for half a dozen chickens for the back garden.
And his decision to diversify into breeding and rearing his own high quality pedigree cattle in the 1970s – and open one of the UK’s first farm shops – now allows us to supply old and new customers with meat from a free-range, grass-fed, and well-loved beef herd, as well as keep the dying art of traditional butchery skills alive by boning out bacon, curing meats and making our own sausages, pies and pasties.
These days, many other families come and enjoy our Open Farm experience; to shop and sample at our Farm Shop and Restaurant; and rely on the Hinchliffe pledge that we’ll always combine the best of modern farming techniques with traditional family values, skills and service.
Hinchliffe's Green Initiative
Did you know that we have our own artesian well water on the farm at Hinchliffe's?
It's pumped out of the ground used to water all our livestock and plants on the farm and for general cleaning purposes and to flush the toilets. This saves precious water - a resource which requires a lot of energy and effort to purify. Although drinkable it's actually quite hard water, which is unusual in an area noted for it's very soft water.
Therefore, we use good old tap water in the Farm Shop, Butcher's and Restaurant to ensure that our customers get Yorkshire's finest.
All our cardboard boxes (and there are a lot!) are flattened into bales for recycling, as is all our plastic.
Green (or Orange?) Cattle Food -
Our Zummo orange machine freshly squeezes oranges on the premises which we bottle and sell in our shop (and the The Old Farmhouse Restaurant). But a lot of oranges are needed to make a litre of juice so there's a lot of waste oranges left over at the end of the day. So we feed them to our cattle - and they love them.
There's a new brewery in the Holme Valley called "Summer Wine Brewery" (www.summerwinebrewery.co.uk) based in Honley, brewing some wonderful new beers. We will be selling them very soon, but in the meantime we have been able to help them out by taking away all their spent Malt and Hops (up to 800kg) and feeding it to our cattle. It's got excellent nutritional value and as all the alcohol gets left behind in the beer - they don't get squiffy! I don't think we'd cope with a herd of drunk cattle. It also saves the brewery having to pay to dispose of it and for the processing of it by waste management companies.
Carrot Boxes to Turkey Boxes
All year round we save our wholesale carrot boxes in preparation for Christmas. Then, rather than use a carrier bag to take home your Turkey in, we pop the bird in the box instead. Just another way we can try to save on packaging.
Bills into bedding?
Well most people would recycle, which we do with our cardboard boxes, but we have found another great use for waste office paper. After shredding the documents, we use the shredded paper as bedding for our chickens. Barn hens like somewhere comfortable to lay their eggs and what better than load of old bills and invoices as a green alternative to bedding.
