Sometimes there can be amazing stories right under your nose and occasionally our work with our drone cameras can bring them to light. When we were asked to film at Barfoots Farms for the BBC One Show, I’m ashamed to say we had not ever come across them before. So of course we turned to our friend the internet to let us find out more about the story.
What we discovered was that there is a chap called Peter Barfoot who has really changed our lives in terms of what we serve up onto our dinner table through his work on his farms across the south east and a lot of folk have never heard of him. Courgettes and sweetcorn are considered everyday type of vegetables now but this certainly wasn’t the case until the mid 70’s and Barfoot Farms are the folk that we have to thank for this in large part (as well as for tenderstem broccoli, pumpkins, sweet potatoes and a whole lot more). When Brits started to travel abroad and get an appetite for ‘foreign fruits and vegetables’, Peter saw an opportunity to grow and supply this semi exotic fare here in the UK and so it began, growing to an empire with more than 200 staff today keeping us fed with all the veg that we love. So there we go, I’ll feel differently about my dinner plate now I know a little more about what it took to get it there.
So I’ll spend the day down at Sefter’s Farm down near Bognor Regis, providing aerial cinematography to complement the finished piece and I can’t wait to find out more about the whole story during filming.
You can learn more about Barfoots Farms on thei website hire: www.barfoots.com
Reading Roof Insulation From the Air: Tiles, Loft and a Cold Sky
On most pitched roofs a ventilated loft sits between the tiles and the insulation, so an aerial thermal image of the roof is an indirect view of what lies beneath. This piece explains how cold and warm roofs read differently from the air, why the cold night sky is reflected by and draws heat from every roof surface, and which checks turn a warm patch on a roof into a finding worth investigating further inside the loft.
Before and After: Can a Thermal Survey Show That a Retrofit Worked?
A retrofit is usually justified before it starts and assumed after it finishes. A matched pair of thermal surveys, one before the work and one after, can show whether the building envelope behaves differently, but only if the two are genuinely comparable. This post covers why the baseline has to come first, what has to match between the two surveys, and what the pair can and cannot honestly claim.
Thermal Bridging in Commercial and Industrial Buildings
On a steel framed, clad commercial building, thermal bridging rarely appears as a single fault. It shows as a regular pattern that follows the fixings, panel joints, rooflights and the base of the wall. This article explains why that repeat is the baseline rather than the finding, what a departure from it tends to look like, why heating across large buildings has to be understood first, and why bare metal needs careful handling on an aerial thermal survey.
